TC. Sottek | The Verge

ICE are heavily armed killers. They’re also huge losers

2026-07-11T17:48:36-04:00

Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in December 2025. | Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Donald Trump’s Homeland Security regime has been at the center of two critical stories in the past two weeks. In the first, federal agents shot and killed a man and quickly got to work justifying the use of force under the flimsiest of pretenses. In the other, it made house calls to people who said mean things to them online.

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has been telling us that fighting the good fight of white supremacy will make you look cool and noble. The DHS under former Secretary Kristi Noem spent $220 million to help her cosplay as a cowboy and call up ICE recruits as if we’re fighting a new World War, this time against our friends and neighbors. It’s all very embarassing.

The propaganda is cringeworthy. But the immigration crackdown it services has been, undoubtedly, cruel and deadly. In Texas just this Tuesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who lived in the US for 35 years building houses and caring for his family. The agency immediately released a statement justifying lethal force on someone it alleges tried to “weaponize his vehicle.” Videos showing parts of the confrontation already suggest it’s probably another bullshit story like the ones we’ve seen from Minnesota. The feds later admitted they were looking for an entirely different person. Salgado Araujo nonetheless ended up dead.

ICE has proven it can’t handle public confrontation. That’s bad. But it also can’t even handle emails and Instagram posts. It’s demanding a total lack of accountability not only from the law, but from society itself.

Over the past year, DHS has invented its own novel version of “doxxing” — once the domain of angry gamers on the internet — wherein the public now dares to unmask and name federal agents who have been responsible for horrors like the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The government doesn’t want us to talk about the agent accused of shooting her to death (whose name, by the way, is Jonathan Ross). Before being shot to death, Good told agents, “I’m not mad at you.” They killed her anyway, then called her a “fucking bitch.”

The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes. It’s like if Jay and Silent Bob showed up at your house because of an online comment you wrote, except with guns and the force of the federal government. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form.

Minnesota officials had to sue the federal government for access to evidence that would aid in investigating ICE shootings because the feds won’t cooperate. It would be a weird thing for the feds managed by an allegedly pro-cop party to do, except when you consider it’s not really a pro-cop party, what with the January 6th insurrection. The current White House webpage about January 6th calls it “a date which will live in infamy” while moping about cop-killers being unfairly treated and saying Democrats did the real insurrection. Yeah, they’re lying. But also, seriously: weak crybaby stuff.

This of course all ladders up to Trump, whose project for more than a decade has been to accumulate power while eliminating the concept of shame and accountability. The man cannot tolerate a single slight without going off the rails, nor can his subordinates. This posture has trickled down to his army of fellow losers who mirror him in several ways: (1) denying any wrongdoing, (2) blaming others, and (3) intimidating anyone who crosses them. In some really bad cases, (4) obstructing justice. Then there’s also (5), looking really lame while doing it.

These people feign outrage and aggrievement at any opportunity. Almost immediately after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Noem maligned the victims by invoking the language of “domestic terrorism” — a truly malicious thing to do while bodies are still warm and evidence is being gathered. When they were shot to death, Good had just finished dropping off her 6-year-old child at school; Pretti, an ICU nurse, was helping someone prone on the street, like any good nurse would.

Federal incitement reinforces things Americans already reasonably fear about policing. As I wrote for the country’s recent birthday, state and local police are also demonstrably bad at upholding our rights (especially the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments) and routinely conduct themselves like weaklings who can’t handle the slightest criticism. Police are often witnessed struggling to maintain calm at the slightest challenge to their authority. So what happens when they get superpowered by federal intervention? Things like reporters getting allegedly intentionally assaulted by cops.

Policing in America has always been complicated, but the Trump administration has made it a runaway train of abuse fueled by billions of dollars and unapologetic racial animus. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gotten so much money and permission from Trump that it operates its dear leader’s fundamentally racist mission of mass deportation with impunity. ICE agents have kidnapped people, knocked down doors without warrants, assaulted reporters, terrorized the general public (including children and infants), and even shot dead innocent people in broad daylight. And that’s just the brief summary of events.

ICE is a menace to democracy and its murderous conduct should be soberly considered. But we should also recognize that these people are weak and sad and ought to be made fun of. Even for their stupid outfits, which look ripped from a “how to be tacticool” buying guide. And Americans are ridiculing these people. What better way to protest an army of clowns than by showing up as Portland did with a human frog at the front? Cops arrested that frog. Trillions of dollars later, we’ve learned nothing about counter-insurgency, because now there’s a frog legion.

These ICE agents are so small that they wear masks in public like a bunch of cowardly Patriot Front wannabes, who probably got a similar amount of training. You’d think the average DMV worker would have been masked up for years based on the abuse they get, but then again, the average government employee is far braver than these fools.

ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. If you know anything about the actual waste, fraud, and abuse of federal funding for defense, you’ll know this is not something that guarantees quality or competence. This is just Donald Trump’s new private domestic army. I’d call them Stormtroopers except for the fact I’m pretty sure some of them are getting their uniforms and body armor from Temu.

America’s greatest idea is still under threat

2026-07-07T03:52:25-04:00

The Patrouille de France perform a flyover during the Sail4th 250 Tall Ships Parade along the Hudson River in New York on July 4th, 2026. | Photo by John Lamparski/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The United States of America recently turned 250 years old. What a spectacle! The fireworks were amazing, and millions of proud people celebrated across the nation — even around the world. France lit up the Eiffel Tower; Japan had fireworks. French fighter jets flew above New York City with trails of red, white, and blue — our first major ally streaking our shared colors through the sky. Meanwhile, shameful white nationalists paraded through our nation’s capital. This has always been a country of paradoxes.

Our 250th birthday counts back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The declaration was a radical and astonishing document that still serves as America’s soul. But the beating heart of the nation wouldn’t come until more than a decade later, when the Constitution was ratified. That document is why I’m able to write this to you today. And we need you to help protect it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution is so potent that people across the world who live in places untouched by US law often seem to think they have the same rights it establishes. The First Amendment is our day-one theory of what makes a free society. It’s literally the first cure by the framers for a project they knew would be forever imperfect and incomplete — fixable only by way of the right to free expression.

The Verge exists today because of this great project. We believe in it deeply. The First Amendment affords us the knowledge that we’re likely free from imprisonment from expressing our freedom to speak. But journalism and speech are always under assault. It’s one of the reasons why we’ll always need lawyers despite likely having the strongest editorial ethics policy in the industry.

Here’s what the First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is a compelling and beautiful idea. But we’ve had to fight to keep it alive from the beginning.

John Adams, one of the fiercest revolutionaries who railed against British tyranny and helped secure independence, completely fucked up the First Amendment when he became the second US president. Adams’ series of Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 look positively Trumpian in retrospect, railing against foreigners, expanding presidential power to arrest, imprison, or deport people, and perhaps most insidiously, making it a crime for American citizens to print “scandalous and malicious” writings against the government. Adams surely loved the country he created, but nonetheless shrunk before the magnitude of its liberties.

Fast-forward to World War I, when the First Amendment was again under attack, this time by the Supreme Court. The court’s fearful message about free speech still sticks with us. You’ve probably heard the phrase “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” — not actually true. The misquoting and misinterpretation here is darkly funny: Trevor Timm, in The Atlantic, notes the court decision the phrase refers to was actually about whether an American socialist “could be convicted under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft.” It almost sounds ripped from contemporary headlines. (Nearly a century later, the Espionage Act would be used again to target, this time, a New York Times journalist.)

Misunderstandings about the First Amendment still abound. On the front lines we most readily see it in police confrontations where armed agents of the state bungle their constitutional duties with disastrous results.

Cops are routinely so terrible at understanding America’s foundational law that there’s now a cottage industry of streamers and influencers who work as “First Amendment auditors” — people who intentionally flex their right to record in public to bait dummies into abridging their freedom of speech. It’s easy to go down TikTok rabbit holes where you’ll find someone recording an illegal traffic stop from inside their car, or a fully kitted streamer recording harassment on a public sidewalk. When the police inevitably show up to hassle someone for exercising their rights, the stakes are immediately raised.

In a best-case scenario, a higher-ranking cop arrives and dispels their colleagues’ unconstitutional conduct. In other cases, someone ends up getting detained or arrested for completely protected behavior.

It’s even worse than usual in 2026, because we now live under an administration that’s flooding cities with barely trained federal agents who see constitutionally protected behavior as a threat. This has resulted in deaths, assaults on reporters, and an untold broader cost of regular people having to endure the immense burden of confronting the justice system simply for doing things they have the fundamental right to do. The right to speak and assemble is especially valid when it’s in protest of the government. That’s the whole point of this thing! And yet.

The latest assaults on the First Amendment have been encouraged by people all the way up the chain of command. We’re being betrayed by officials who are supposed to protect us, people who swore an oath to the Constitution and ought to know better. The FCC is not supposed to regulate speech but has nonetheless become a nightmare of incompetence and civil rights suppression. Do you miss Stephen Colbert on The Late Show? Thank the Trump administration, which now operates a mob-like patronage system that has cowed the billionaire princes who own America’s broadcast networks. Or ask Jimmy Kimmel, who got kicked off the air after conservatives went nuclear over his tame remarks about Charlie Kirk, a man who spent his time poisoning our national discourse with none of the grace or wit employed by national talk show hosts.

The Trump regime in general has an incredibly disturbing record on free speech, from science to the operations of the largest social networks. Donald Trump rails against anyone who doesn’t bow to him, and the list of his victims is too long to enumerate. But here’s an important one: The president once threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for life. Zuckerberg is far more wealthy and powerful than Trump in many respects, but what did he do? Two years after the threat, Zuckerberg showed up on the White House lawn to celebrate Trump’s insane UFC fight show. He tapped out against a bully.

This is what makes everything really messy. We live in an age dominated by communication platforms that are so wealthy, powerful, and pervasive that they seem practically unrestrained by the US government, but paradoxically must still cozy up to a regime that has no actual respect for them or for their free speech. Trump once threatened to blow up the entire internet because he wanted platforms to censor things to his advantage. The CEOs of those companies still indulge him with flattery and photo ops.

This blurring of public and private interests has fueled a funhouse-mirror idea of “free speech culture” that’s actually designed to crack down on free speech. The loudest people crying about free speech culture do so as if theirs is not the freest ever in history, while simultaneously supporting actual government censorship, like banning books.

I can’t say it better than Ken White has, so just go read him on this point. White explains how “free speech culture” has emboldened the Trump admin and others to engage in real censorship. “When enough people think that all of free speech—including free speech law—is bullshit, then free speech rights won’t be enforced,” he writes.

Our constitutional punchbowl has been spiked by madmen who profit from confusion about our rights and the rule of law. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just remember: The First Amendment is a restraint on the government that prevents it from prohibiting your speech.

Moreover: Actual censorship is government suppression of speech. It’s entirely understandable that we’re confused about what censorship is because of how hard many people have worked to keep us confused. A social media platform moderating your post is not censorship — it’s actually free speech. Yes, that sounds completely counterintuitive, but it’s true. The alternative is a situation where the government forces private citizens to publish things they don’t want to, including hate speech.

Much was unsaid here, including the history of immense pain and suffering that has kept the First Amendment and our broader rights alive. I won’t claim to know what the fix is for our current mess, but I’ll say I really hate when our leaders say things like “this is not who we are” when they talk precisely about the things that define who we are. And part of who we are is a coalition that claims to want free speech in theory while simultaneously suppressing it in practice.

So what can you do? Yes, of course, vote. But there’s much more to do. Write or call your congresspeople (I promise this does matter). Participate in local elections, especially for school boards, which are on the front lines of book banning. And if you’re reading this, thank you for subscribing — but consider also supporting other newsrooms.

Five questions for Dr. Rubin, who’s armed with a mic and a bowtie

2026-07-06T13:17:07-04:00

Dr. Rubin’s feed

Bullshit is cheap but truth is expensive. Anyone with half a brain cell can post wild misinformation that goes mega viral, which wastes the time and expertise of highly trained people who feel an obligation to inform others of the truth. Today I want you to meet one of those highly-trained people, Dr. Zachary Rubin, who works on the front lines against scientific and medical misinformation.

Rubin is a pediatric allergist and immunologist and author of the book All About Allergies. He likely came across my TikTok feed because I crave anti-misinformation content; one of my other favorite people doing this work is Rubin’s colleague Dr. Idrees Mughal, aka Dr. Idz, who fights the good fight against wellness grifters and other miscreants. You can find Rubin on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Rubin knows how to post, often appearing with a small mic in his hand and always with his signature bowtie. His style of speaking invokes authority but never condescension, which is one of the reasons I think he’s a great science communicator.

Rubin has a medical practice, but I asked him five questions about his other job: helping rid the world of junk science and making us all better informed.

The journey to becoming a doctor is long and difficult. Before we get into your work online, please tell me why you embarked on this path.

I’ve always been fascinated by how the human body works. Medicine appealed to me because it combines science, problem-solving, and the privilege of helping people during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. I was fortunate to see these moments early in my life because my dad is a pediatrician. Allergy and immunology was especially compelling because the immune system touches nearly every aspect of health, and many of the conditions I treat can dramatically improve when patients finally receive the right diagnosis and treatment. Becoming a physician has been incredibly challenging, but it’s also one of the most rewarding decisions I’ve ever made.

You’re a great communicator of science and medicine. (Your signature bowtie is a nice touch, by the way.) Your videos demonstrate a rare combination of talents that the world needs, especially as we’re plagued by a firehose of misinformation. You could have just kept quiet at your practice with your patients. Why wade into the muck online?

I realized that misinformation doesn’t stay online; it walks into my exam room every day. Patients deserve access to understandable, evidence-based information before they ever need to see a doctor. Social media allows me to reach millions of people with the same conversations I have in clinic every day. My goal isn’t to tell people what to think. It’s to help them think critically about health claims, understand what the evidence actually shows, and feel empowered to ask better questions.

What’s the number one thing you wish people understood about science and/or medicine?

That uncertainty isn’t a weakness, it’s one of science’s greatest strengths. Science isn’t a collection of immutable facts. It’s a process for getting closer to the truth. Good scientists are willing to change their minds when better evidence emerges. Unfortunately, that can look like inconsistency to the public, when it’s actually how progress happens. Confidence should always be proportional to the quality of the evidence.

What’s your favorite thing about countering misinformation online, and what’s the most challenging?

The most rewarding part is hearing from someone who says, “I changed my mind.” That’s incredibly rare today, and it reminds me that respectful conversations can still make a difference.

The hardest part is that misinformation spreads faster than nuance. A confident but incorrect statement can go viral in minutes, while explaining the evidence often takes far longer. Add in algorithms that reward outrage, and it becomes an uphill battle, but that’s exactly why more physicians and scientists need to be part of the conversation.

America is turning 250 years old. This country has been behind a lot of great science and medicine. What are we doing wrong, and what could we do better?

The United States has an extraordinary history of scientific discovery because we’ve invested in research, encouraged innovation, and welcomed people with diverse ideas and expertise. I hope we continue to value those strengths.

One area where we can improve is scientific literacy. We should spend more time teaching people how to evaluate evidence, not just what to memorize. At the same time, scientists and physicians need to become better communicators. If we don’t explain our work clearly and transparently, someone else will fill that void. Trust isn’t built by having all the answers, it’s built by being honest about what we know, what we don’t know, and how we’re working to find out.

EverQuest Legends is a powerful nostalgia machine

2026-06-25T09:49:37-04:00

Lady Vox, the mighty dragon. (No affiliation with Vox Media.)

I wasn’t surprised when I got the call that my dad was dying, even though we’d been estranged for many years. He’d suffered addiction for decades and eventually ran out of time, which also meant he ran out of time to reconcile with me. About 15 years after we stopped talking, my aunt and uncle held the phone up to his ear — 1,400 miles away, between me in Connecticut and him in Nebraska — to help me say goodbye. I’ll never be sure if he understood my words, but, as I watched waves crash on the shore from the Long Island Sound, I cried and told him I loved him. I forgave him for things he probably never forgave himself for. I hung up, and, soon after, he died. Then I thought about EverQuest.

Dad bought me EQ for my birthday in 2000 when I had just entered high school. He brought it home with a grin on his face. EverQuest was one of the first massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, but at the time, the box just read “fantasy.” Years earlier, we’d explored Sierra Online adventures for MS-DOS. Compared to that, EverQuest was a revelation.

We got hooked on EverQuest immediately. My brother played a Wood-Elf Ranger, my dad played a High-Elf Wizard, and I played a Human Magician. Back in my dad’s small one-bedroom apartment, powered by CompuServe dial-up internet, we had to share EQ. If you know anything about MMOs, you’ll know that sharing one computer is a prickly situation. Taking turns in an MMO is unimaginable these days, the kind of thing you’d only be subjected to if Mr. Beast found a new way to torture people for money. We made it work somehow.

Our home was already primed to appreciate the spectacle of battle. Dad was obsessed with Lord of The Rings. It was the second movie I clearly remember him bringing us to years after the family went to see Titanic in theaters, because fantasy was a big enough deal to warrant the rare movie outing. He’d otherwise source plenty of lessons from cinematic battlegrounds, like this one from Braveheart: “First, learn to use this, then I’ll teach you to use this,” says William Wallace’s fictional movie-uncle Argyle, played by Brian Cox, tapping his noggin before he hoists a broadsword. It was one in a stable of apocryphal tales shared by a man who nearly only let himself cry in public while watching the Notre Dame football movie Rudy. Now I see that these things gave him a permission slip for being vulnerable. I wish he knew they grow permission slips on trees.

EverQuest ended up being one of the most important boxes I ever opened

Thanks to dad’s fateful decision to buy one of the first MMORPGs, EverQuest ended up being one of the most important boxes I ever opened. I went on to spend more than 10,000 hours in EQ and its sequel over the years. Most of those hours had nothing to do with playing the actual game. I formed friendships that could not have existed otherwise, meeting people from all kinds of backgrounds all over the world. You could be anyone you wanted, but EverQuest felt like a rare place online where what people wanted was just to be themselves.

Because of these friendships, I couldn’t put the game down, to the point where my grades at school suffered. This was a difficult thing to explain to parents at the time who justifiably couldn’t appreciate the idea of me spending a month hunting a digital winged horse in South Karana all to collect a Pegasus Feather Cloak for an epic quest that would result in… oh shit, I’m doing it again. Yeah, you can barely even explain this now without sounding like an internet-pilled maniac. Eventually I did capture the legendary Quillmane, but only because I spent weeks befriending a higher-level Ranger who could help me track it down. We kept in touch for a while.

Grades be damned. I ended up learning more from EQ than in a lot of my classrooms, including how to type 120+ words-per-minute by necessity, because you simply had to be able to tell your party as quickly as possible that a mob was on the way to kill everyone. It was an excellent way to avoid taking a typing class.

So it was exciting to learn that the latest owners of EverQuest, which is still going 27 years later, are doing a kind of reboot of the original. Sure, I’ve had problems with the franchise after it was sold off by Sony Online Entertainment and ended up in the hands of Daybreak Game Company. But there’s something rare happening here. Daybreak’s new EverQuest Legends is supported by the developer of an original EQ fan project, Project 1999, which revived the early experience via emulation and custom code for the people who were there from the beginning. It’s not the kind of deal on the scale of Rockstar buying FiveM, the team behind some of the biggest GTA roleplay servers, but it’s just as meaningful.

I’d already played Project 1999 and came away thinking it was one of the greatest digital game preservation projects ever. It’s a largely faithful implementation of the original game with some custom improvements — but forget all of that. Almost as soon as you sign into P99 you’ll be greeted by people who want to shower you with free gear and talk to a person with a similar background. Because, of course, who couldn’t be like-minded if they chose to be in this particular place in history at this particular time in the present. I’ve quietly joked to myself for years that if I make it to a retirement home, I’d be locked into EverQuest reruns, and that actually seems possible now.

Thanks to a closed beta code from the developers, I logged in to EverQuest Legends last week. I have a laundry-list of complaints about Legends, mostly because I don’t think it aims high enough. The “quality of life” improvements are perceptible only to the people who have been most hooked on the game since 1998 — anyone else would open this thing, think it’s an ancient computer virus, and immediately uninstall it. I find myself scratching my head at some decisions and wishcasting for others. But 24 hours of gameplay later, I remember why I kept coming back for years.

Back in 2000, I devoted myself to the adventure and ended up reaching much farther than the other turn-havers in the household. Dad, who was once very smart and ambitious — a former Marine Corps officer — set lowly sights in EQ, and I’ll never know why. At a time when the max level was 60, he resigned himself to forever live a level-12 life camping Orcs on the unofficially named “Orc hill,” just outside the tree city of Kelethin in the Greater Faydark zone. While my brother and I dared explore nearby Crushbone Castle, the Orc stronghold, dad was content to post up outside as if the beachhead had never been won.

For the 90 minutes we allowed him to enjoy the game without hounding him for our turn, he set out to do his best on this hill; dual-wielding a beer and a cigarette in one hand, and the keyboard in the other, harnessing his demons to rid another world of theirs. Occasionally he’d be interrupted by a friendly passerby who forced him to work on his keyboard skills, replying in the best possible haste with single-finger typing, well before the age of voice chat.

I have to imagine Sisyphus was happy on Orc hill

At some point, dad reached the limit of gaining experience from slaying lower-level creatures, which effectively froze him in time within the game. Thanks to getting a philosophy degree instead of joining the armed forces (sorry, dad), I know this is just The Myth of Sisyphus. Dad climbed Orc hill over and over again. He must have known at some point that he wasn’t making any progress. (Addiction, in its many forms, has a similar texture.) I have to imagine Sisyphus was happy on Orc hill. But, then, I think maybe he wasn’t. I never witnessed him doing the one thing really worth doing in EverQuest: making friends. I can barely remember the recipes for quests these days but I will forever remember the late nights I spent talking to strangers who were almost always willing to open up and offer their hearts to the unknown. I wonder if he ever snuck on late at night while I was asleep to do the same.

EverQuest Legends is a lot like Project 1999 in the sense that it’s entirely built around a pretty well-established group of nerds who will keep coming back to this place over and over again until the end of time. Commercially that makes it a quixotic quest for recruiting new video game buyers, but also an endearing one. At a time when the biggest video game companies in the world struggle to make live service games work, EQL is a blessing to those who grew up with the concept at the right time. This place was real for you, and it still can be.

The biggest irony is that EverQuest Legends is actually designed to be more lonely than its parent. It enables extremely powerful solo-playing options that make it possible to plow through much of the game by yourself. Aside from the global chat channel, I’ve noticed that people seem less chatty in general, which should be expected considering you don’t need other people as much as you used to. Smart move for a dwindling player base, but also maybe proof that lightning in a bottle diminishes the more you open it.

I’ve long thought if I got a blank check I’d buy the rights to EQ and reboot it myself — that’s how much this thing means to me. But as I get older, something like EverQuest Legends seems less like an opportunity to make an old video game great and more like a great opportunity to keep an old internet community together. Till death do us part, but at least now without the part where you have to spend hours retrieving your own corpse. Hey! There’s a quality of life improvement.

Even though I rarely thought about dad during the later years, I’d always had in the back of my mind, if we had ever reconnected, that I would have loved to share with him the advancements that came in video games. The mind-blowing graphics, set pieces, and depth — bordering now on what we expect from great movies. Just to see if there was a spark in his eye like I’d had in mine. Maybe to see that grin once more.

Now I just wish I could have gotten to share his favorite place with him again. A small little part of an old game where he would have felt right at home at level 12, guarding the tree city against the forces of Orc hill. It made him happy. And now it’s one of the last places I can visit his memory.

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer

2026-06-12T15:21:40-04:00

Hm! | Photo: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.

This is not a serious person, but his abuse of the world is deadly serious. In the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose mission was a boon to public health around the globe. Musk called the lifesaving agency a “criminal organization” and blithely celebrated spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” It was a good reference if you want everyone to think you’re the killer in Fargo. Mission accomplished, Elon.

In the months that followed, public health models would indicate Musk was a killer, at a far greater scale than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780,000 deaths — mostly of children, many of infants — due to the Trump administration’s early-2025 USAID cuts, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. These deaths were widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable consequence of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the precise number of deaths, but multiple experts working on identifying the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it’s in the hundreds of thousands. Global researchers, publishing in Nature, project that the cuts to USAID could result in 163,500 child deaths yearly. Another publication in The Lancet says there could be millions more to come. Musk showed no sign of caring.

Musk showed no sign of caring

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever. And DOGE’s cleaver to USAID goes well beyond the latest Ebola crisis. According to Enrich, the HIV rate among new babies being born was looking close to zero, until Musk intervened.

You might think Musk’s actions gutting effective global health programs clash with his downright creepy quest to raise birth rates, but not when you consider the guy is also a huge racist. The list is too long to keep score, but a few relevant highlights: He’s stoked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa, spent most of January posting other white supremacist talking points, and most recently has been encouraging race riots in the UK all to gin up anti-immigrant sentiments. Is there any doubt about why this guy had so much fun destroying one of the most successful global health initiatives in history, which saved millions of Black people?

The Trump administration is packed with extremists, but even some of those folks looked at Musk like, “Now this guy is really wild.” Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair that Musk was a “complete solo actor.” She says he “probably knew” that what he was doing “would be horrifying to others,” but did it anyway. (Unfortunately, Wiles also said she was only “initially aghast” at his conduct, which pretty much sums up the Republican response to the party’s own chaos.)

As he addressed SpaceX employees on IPO day, Musk said, “There are always problems on Earth. There are always things we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future.” Sounds good, until you consider one of the recent projects Musk got excited about was killing immunization efforts that save the lives of children from deadly diseases. In fact, “there are always problems on Earth” is the kind of thing you say when you actually don’t care about a lot of those problems.

Guess what, Elon? There are plenty of things about the future that people get excited about when they wake up in the morning. You fired a bunch of them for no good reason, and a lot of bad ones. The stories from fired USAID workers are heartbreaking, like so many similar stories from so many people in the US and abroad who had dedicated their lives to missions that range from protecting the dignity and health of human beings to preserving our natural lands. I’ve met plenty of these folks personally, and unlike the man who fired them, they didn’t enter public service for private benefit.

Musk hijacked the government to destroy these missions

Musk hijacked the government to destroy these missions and dehumanize these people in service of the total lie that it would make the government more efficient. Of course, there’s a big difference between “efficiency” and incompetence. An agency isn’t more efficient if it doesn’t exist; it’s simply been murdered. A fire department with no firefighters looks good on a balance sheet if you can ignore that the city is ablaze.

The intentional destruction of the ability to save lives and reduce suffering is psychopathic behavior — the kind that would prevent any rational, kind person from giving power to anyone capable of it. But here we are. And while there has always been a class of mega-rich menaces, including horrible racists in power who are indifferent to suffering, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon with Musk. Few people in history, if ever, will have accumulated the same combination of wealth, media power, and government influence.

After his reign of terror at DOGE ignobly ended in a fizzle, Musk walked away from government with the same kind of careless indifference that marked his tenure. The math is fuzzy, but it looks like DOGE barely saved the government any money. Even the libertarian Cato Institute says DOGE didn’t reduce spending, only federal employment, by 9 percent in around 10 months. But when you look beyond outlays and consider the fact the operation looted a massive stockpile of expertise and capability from our society, it’s easy to see how Musk’s project is one of the most costly ever.

Musk hasn’t fully moved on from government; he still needs those federal contracts for SpaceX, now more than ever. He might be wearing a different hat now, but little else has changed. X is still a firehose of misery with Musk at the reins, and his AI project is a nightmare of misinformation and AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery. This man shouldn’t just be kept from having all the world’s money; he probably shouldn’t even be let within 500 feet of a school.

Elon Musk proved long ago that he’s the wrong man to save the world. It’s even worse now. The world needs saving from him.

Five questions for the duo behind The Pelley Minutes

2026-06-10T10:06:17-04:00

Scott Pelley, correspondent, 60 Minutes. | Photo by Michele Crowe/CBS News via Getty Images

Websites are so back! Today’s website worth visiting is The Pelley Minutes, a clever project that puts the career of longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley into perspective. The show may only be 60 minutes long, but Pelley racked up nearly 37,000 minutes in his 37-year long career, reporting on almost everything humanity has put on display — from chess battlefields to real-world warzones.

Pelley was fired recently after standing up to the new bosses at CBS, who he has accused of “murdering” the legendary news show. In an interview with The New York Times, he warned of an alarming new world at the network where there’s “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events.”

The Pelley Minutes is a tribute to journalism that helps show the throughline a great reporter can build over decades. I talked to the creators, Mary Adam and George Apfelbach, who created this love letter outside of their normal hours working at the Leo Burnett ad agency. The duo met three years ago and tell me they bonded over their passion for free speech and public media. Their first project together — a parody of Elmo getting laid off — became an instant hit that appeared on the Today show.

We’re gonna talk about your Scott Pelley project, but first I want to know about “Elmo Open To Work.” It’s even more hilarious having appeared on a Today show segment. How did it feel getting that kind of attention?

It was surreal. It was an idea that Mary had staring at her ceiling in the middle of the night, angry at the news PBS’s funding was being cut. So for it to go viral in the way that it did and make it on the Today show was awesome. And it taught us an important lesson: An idea is as big as people are willing to make it. Scale, in the traditional sense, is dead. You can have a single post reach six billion people with absolutely no paid media behind it. It just has to be interesting enough to people. Also, there’s nothing more fun than impersonating the world’s most beloved children’s TV show character. We highly recommend it.

You clearly care about journalism (thank you, we need all the support we can get). What in particular about Scott Pelley inspired you to create this project?

So many things. The first is that CBS News has been the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism, with 60 Minutes being the crème de la crème. And for it to be in such turmoil was very upsetting to us. When Scott Pelley got fired, and news of how all that stuff came to pass was leaked, we just felt like it was a rare moment of someone risking a lot to fight for what was right. Anyone who’s worked in a large corporation has probably had moments in all-hands meetings where they wished they had stood up and said something. Confronted people who were going after a company or institution they really cared about. When we read about him doing that, we wanted to celebrate it, even in a very small way. We wanted to show how much he’d given to 60 Minutes. We wanted to show that 60 Minutes isn’t really about the title. It’s about the work. It’s about the journalists. It’s about the segments they and their teams produce. That’s why we’re counting up the minutes. Because, literally and figuratively, what he and the other journalists have done there amounts to a lot more than 60 Minutes. The work is bigger than 60 Minutes.

If you could have your way, who would be leading 60 Minutes these days? Or, at least, what kind of person?

That’s a tough question. One that we’re not really qualified to answer. We’ll say this though: The person running 60 Minutes should probably be a person who’s dedicated to producing the best broadcast journalism in the world. It should be unbiased, honest, and speak truth to power. We don’t know everything that’s happening at 60 Minutes or CBS News, but judging by the people who have left, and what they’ve said, it doesn’t seem like that’s the goal there anymore.

You’ve told me you have a “passion for free speech and protecting public media.” What else have you seen that really inspires you? What are the institutions you think are worth defending? The real question here is: What brought two creatives like yourselves together to do this kind of work?

Another tough question! The institutions worth defending are the ones the vast majority of us rely upon and benefit from. When we see things like news organizations get bought up and public media get defunded — those are actions that don’t benefit a lot of people. They benefit a few very rich individuals. And we think that most people in this country would agree that that’s just not how it should go. There are certain things we all need to share to build a society that people want to live in, and unfortunately, now we seem to live in an age where we have to fight to keep every good thing we have in society from being sold to the highest bidder. We’re just trying to make these points in simple, creative ways that people will want to get behind.

The Pelley Minutes is a great website. Do you have more plans for it? And what can we expect from you in the future? This is obviously a great collaboration.

Thank you. Our plans right now are to keep tracking the minutes, share at the milestones, and get as many people to donate to independent journalism. The total count up should take around 25 days. We have a little surprise planned for when we hit 36,960 minutes.

As far as our plans, we’re going to keep making stuff. Right now, we’re working on a lot of stuff. We’re based out of Chicago, so we have a few things that center on the city specifically. The main thing sticking in our craw is the Chicago Bears threatening to move to Indiana (just to go along with the theme that billionaires ruin things we all love). So maybe we’ll try to do something about that!

Gone in 60 minutes

2026-06-06T09:34:38-04:00

Scott Pelley, correspondent, 60 Minutes. | Photo by Michele Crowe / CBS News via Getty Images

It should have been the final straw. The new power couple of editorial failure — Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton — had fired legendary 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley. Why? Because he dared to question the fact that CBS had installed sycophants in its top ranks. Instead of standing in solidarity, correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim declared in a joint memo to staff that they’d stay on to save the program. “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die,” they said. The kids in Weekend at Bernie’s held a similar position.

The canary in the media coal mine isn’t just sick, it’s a walking corpse.

The remaining trio of correspondents at 60 Minutes said they were “deeply upset” by recent firings, which you should read in the tone of Maine Sen. Susan Collins saying she’s “deeply concerned” about any given policy fuckery. The correspondents added: “Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships.” Well, there’s something we can agree upon. A good newsroom should lift up its reporters on the good days, and relentlessly defend them on the worst days. Anything less is cowardice and negligence.

A dictatorial newsroom is exactly what Pelley was protesting when he reportedly challenged management in a staff meeting and claimed that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was “murdering 60 Minutes.” Weiss has already proved herself to be a blight on journalism, so it was at least generous of her to let new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton steal some of that spotlight.

Bilton is probably best known for his book Hatching Twitter. He’s worked for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and also as a screenwriter. Traditional broadcast journalism had never appeared on his resume until being recruited by Weiss for 60 Minutes. But that lack of experience can’t even explain the utter embarrassment of his now-public termination letter to Pelley.

You can’t walk into a room with a title and demand respect, but that’s exactly how Bilton is conducting himself. His missive to Pelley is so cloying and desperate that it made me feel secondhand embarrassment just reading it. He whines about decorum like a classic internet sealion while simultaneously looking like a huge dork — claiming to have been “ambushed” by Pelley with “remarkable incivility and contempt.” Bullshit. If you can’t show up to a newsroom prepared for hard questions from the journalists under your care, you have no fucking business being there.

The budding incompetence on the front lines at CBS is definitely a trickle-down situation. If Nick Bilton is a rotten egg, it’s because he ladders up to even bigger ones — like a matryoshka doll of failure whose final form is David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison and CEO of CBS parent Paramount Skydance. (Ellison reportedly signed off on Pelley’s firing.) This family is so bad it makes me wistful about the old-fashioned mendacity of the Murdochs.

Disclosure: James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, just bought half of our parent company, Vox Media. James may be the best boy in the Murdoch lineage, but, like David Ellison, he’s still the son of a billionaire who’s accumulating media power. Which brings me to the real point — we are in big, big trouble if media continues to be consolidated by an extremely small and powerful group of oligarchs. Especially when they cozy up to an administration that favors loyalty and patronage over things like free speech. ABC and Disney are fighting back, for now, but CBS has totally caved. 60 Minutes may currently be on the chopping block, but the network already killed The Late Show, another media institution. There’s no good explanation for why CBS canned Stephen Colbert, who is one of the kindest and most profitable people in television, unless you consider that his bosses are simply sucking up to Donald Trump. By the way, that’s a very stupid long-term strategy, but maybe these guys are only looking at how much loot they can get in the next few years before this empire of incompetence crumbles. Or maybe they just want to get past the Warner Bros. acquisition.

Pelley didn’t mince words in a statement he posted after his firing. He claims the new owner of the network is squandering the legacy of 60 Minutes “apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.” Far more damning: Pelley says management instructed him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” and to “include assertions that are unverified.” Curiously, none of this is addressed in leadership’s memos to CBS staff.

This all comes as broadcast media is on life support nationwide. Even local channels are becoming creepy echo chambers for Trumpian propaganda, especially thanks to the Nexstar-Tegna deal — something that was enabled by an FCC that’s completely lost the plot. You know what’s even worse than corporate media consolidation? Government speech regulation. The FCC is now very happy to regulate speech as long as it’s meant to intimidate speakers who aren’t favored by the Trump administration.

Institutions like The Late Show and 60 Minutes are no longer untouchable. That should frighten every single American. If scale and profit can’t save our most powerful voices, what happens to the rest of us?

As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise

2026-06-03T14:10:40-04:00

This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent — Spark — from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of them explicitly provided this information to Google. But what’s scary to me is how all of this stuff seems geared toward a future of “productivity” that completely misses what needs to be fixed in our world.

“Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on a log, but we ought to see what we’re being sold for what it really is.

Contemporary tasks on computers have a tendency to feel both important and urgent all of the time, even if they’re not. We’re living under the unholy alliance of the “busy” trap and “software brain.” And that makes AI assistance seem super valuable! But that’s because the companies in charge of all this stuff are now trying to solve a lot of problems that they created. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life. This slow march toward ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to disconnect” from work when leaving the office. (Shame my American sensibilities still convince me that’s a bridge too far.)

As I read about Gemini Spark making it easy for my colleagues to color-code calendars and perform other neat tricks on command, I couldn’t help but vividly remember witnessing as a child all of the hours my mom had to spend carefully cutting coupons so we could afford groceries. Sometimes it got to the point where our living room looked like a giant experiment in collage art. All of that time was stolen from her and our family — for what? Maybe having an AI assistant in the ’90s could have helped find and organize the best deals, but it could never fix an economic system that required them in the first place.

Where does the productivity march end? The people making more money than God right now have professed a vision of a postwork future where robots do everything for us so we can enjoy life without toiling away in the mines. (Well, except for the content mines.) If you’ve seen Elon Musk’s failure bot, you’ll know this is all actually less Battlestar Galactica and more John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theater kids.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is posting up his 387-foot yacht in a city where he just laid off a meaningful part of his workforce to offset his investments in AI. At least AI has freed up the time of these fired workers? I’d say good luck to them in Hollywood, especially because they’re trying to replace newly minted theater kids with AI-generated actors.

There’s a sinister tone lurking beneath some of these advancements in productivity, because the response to increased productivity has been one of the biggest scams of the past century. Well before consumer AI entered the scene, productivity exploded while wages failed to keep pace. Nobody is working less, they’re just earning less. And as more AI-related companies reap trillions in valuation, the current US regime is looting the social safety net — the kind that must exist if we’re all going to become out-of-work theater kids. You simply can’t look at these things separately. If the end result of private companies optimizing the workforce means nobody has to work, then we have to live in a society where people can still have a roof and a meal. Is anyone confident that will happen while leaders are cutting SNAP benefits while building taxpayer-funded ballrooms?

What good is an AI assistant that can help you plan a fun day if you can’t actually afford any free time in your life?

There has always been resistance to new advancements — so much so that the term “luddite” is still potent 200 years after English textile workers revolted against automation in their industry. The AI backlash is genuine, well-informed, and well-argued. Nonetheless, some of those new neat tricks are fun and maybe even pretty useful in our personal lives. But I can’t imagine that paying $99 a month to send emails, make calendar appointments, and create spreadsheets is a promising vision of the future or even a good return on investment. Especially if the broader cost is squandering the splendor of our lands while subjecting us to corporate omniscience.

This Ferrari should have been a Volkswagen

2026-06-01T23:13:13-04:00

It may be the NBA playoffs but right now Ferrari is getting dunked on more than anyone. Whether they own a Ferrari or just have a poster of a Testarossa on their wall, fans in the Ferrari-verse are frothy about the Luce, the company’s first all-electric vehicle. According to one highly rated Verge commenter: “looks like a Polestar had a one-night stand with a Prius.”

Whatever. The competition should steal this design.

The Luce looks weird because Ferrari isn’t asking to have its edges sanded off. Its most iconic models, like 1987’s F40, are defined by hard angles. That makes the contrast between Luce and legacy even sharper. But look beyond the Luce’s cover to find a compelling design story on the inside.

There are lots of arguments for and against the everything-is-a-touchscreen modern car. Ferrari’s new design, built with Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s design agency, LoveFrom, is more proof that there can be a happy middle ground — perhaps a Goldilocks zone of car interiors that successfully blends sensory experiences. I can picture Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy looking at this thing and once again uttering: “it’s biodigital jazz, man.”

I’m a huge fan of physical switches over touchscreens because when done right, they’re graceful, efficient, and fun as hell to use. Reducing every tactile input to the same kind of press on a giant touchscreen that dominates the interior of a vehicle feels both tacky and unwieldy. I recently got to see the gigantic 56-inch Mercedes EQS EV “Hyperscreen” and thought I was inside a clown version of the Las Vegas Sphere. There’s something alienating about the Hyperscreen and other offspring in Tesla’s design lineage, as if Grok went back in time to imagine “the perfect future car” and then made that slop real. A screen can be suitable, but a switch has soul.

The Luce is awash in soulful physicality. Just look at this stuff:

Every single physical switch on this thing is begging to be touched. It’s a tactile wonderland, with a mix of rotating knobs, buttons, and toggle switches. There are even variations within each type. And they’re all wrapped in the embrace of an unfussy interior that lets these little details shine.

Humble elegance abounds. The Luce’s rear passenger console has physical inputs and outputs that appear to blend seamlessly with a digital display. And just look at that center-dashboard display with the handlebar. Chef’s kiss.

Elsewhere, the project is dripping with craft. LoveFrom’s custom typeface for the vehicle, “LF Maranello,” is pleasing in its clarity and familiarity, feeling functional instead of fancy. (Not that fancy is always a bad thing; I’m looking at you, classic Porsche Carrera lettering.)

And, yes, of course this isn’t all entirely new territory. There have been lots of great designs and doodads in various cars over the years, including my personal favorite: the toggle switches in my old Mini Cooper. I’d always want to flip them for that satisfying tactile feedback even if I didn’t have a reason to. I can’t even remember what they actually did, but I still remember how they felt.

But there are also a lot of switches that suck. The all-purpose knob in my Mazda CX-5 never felt comfortable or intuitive and actually felt more distracting than if the car’s display had been touchable. Its clunky, unopinionated “click” felt so awkward — like it was stuck in a squicky space between the dueling identities of wheel and button.

Nonstandard buttons, like the ones that open doors in Teslas, are so cursed that they inspired a sketch on Saturday Night Live:

(To be fair, the Luce also has similar buttons for door opening.)

There are also buttons out there that aren’t really buttons — basically blank placeholders in a bunch of cars that forever haunt you, whispering “you didn’t pay for sport mode.” That would seem to make the case for screens over switches: say, for the iPhone’s movable type over the iPod’s clickwheel.

And then there are buttons in purgatory. The now-familiar push-button ignition has waffled between feeling premium and mundane, which is all to say that there’s no perfect formula for a car’s control scheme.

But the Luce makes a good case for its take — enough to convince veteran reviewer Tim Stevens that “it’s among the greatest interiors in the world.” It doesn’t give into excess in either direction. There aren’t too many screens, and there aren’t too many switches. It looks mature and yet playful — an inviting combination. (Caveat emptor: I haven’t actually touched these things, so I’d still need to sit down for a thorough verdict.)

A car that starts at $640,000 is, practically speaking, for almost nobody. And that might be one of the reasons why the overall project looks like a fumble after Ive spent nearly 30 years at Apple making iconic products used by billions of people.

It’s not that Ive should be forever beholden to making things for a mass market (or for making things at all — what a run of a career already!). But it’s a shame that the good ideas in this largely unattainable machine seem like they could have lived in a widely available car. I keep wondering what might have happened if Ive’s firm had helped reboot something like the Volkswagen Beetle, or blessed an entry-level EV with the Luce’s design language. In the meantime, there’s still plenty of eyebrow-raising design work out there, like these concepts from VW Group’s Scout Motors.

Then again, maybe all this attention will work in Ive’s favor. LoveFrom already got a ton of money from Ferrari to put something bold out there that’ll be licensed or copied by others. Everyone’s talking about it. And now I’m eager to see if this rare Ferrari design will be pounced on by competing carmakers — something that would turn a fleeting controversy into a lasting legend.

Kickstarter just killed its new mature content rules

2026-05-19T19:20:03-04:00

Last week, we noted Kickstarter’s new content guidelines, which had some pretty weird new additions, including a prohibition on, among related things, projects whose rewards could provide “sexual pleasure.” The rules exempted “sexual wellness products that are not designed for insertion or penetration and are not marketed primarily for sexual gratification.” Those rules have now been eliminated and the company has restored an earlier version of its guidelines.

In an apology letter issued today from COO Sean Leow, Kickstarter confirmed that the new rules were influenced by the payment processor Stripe:

The updates to the rules were primarily driven by requirements from our payments processor, Stripe. Stripe operates under its own legal and compliance requirements separate from Kickstarter’s own rules. And even Stripe’s rules are dictated by a larger system shaped by financial institutions that govern how money moves globally.

Kickstarter says that it’s seen “a growing number of campaigns” that it approved but then got “suspended by Stripe mid-funding.” The company also says it’s “advocated for those creators directly with Stripe,” because “we believe in the work and because creators deserve to see their campaigns through.”

After the new rules were issued a week ago, we immediately asked Kickstarter for comment, followed up to get an answer, and didn’t receive a full response until today — when the company pointed us toward its public post. We had asked how the company defined the distinction between “sexual wellness” and “sexual gratification,” and when I pushed Kickstarter today to address our original question after its revocation of the rules, here’s what we got, from KS director of comms Nikki Kria:

Given that we’ve reverted to our previous guidelines, the specific rule you’re referencing is no longer in effect. I don’t want to parse language from guidelines we’ve already walked back. The blog post reflects our current position and is the most accurate representation of where we stand.

“Mature” content has been strictly regulated by payment processors for years, so it’s no surprise that Kickstarter felt compelled to comply. In fact, it is Stripe that says businesses can’t sell “sexually explicit materials” that are designed for the purpose of “sexual gratification.” Kickstarter’s blog post points to those rules as an explanation for its own now-rescinded rules and insists that the recent update doesn’t represent its values — including the “f*ck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter.” (But perhaps the establishment is still too strong to say the word “fuck” uncensored.)

Kickstarter says its community let it know “loud and clear” that the new rules were wrong and that it’s “going back to the drawing board.” It also says it’s “continuing to push Stripe for flexibility, clarity, and consistency.” We’ll have to wait and see whether a platform that’s helped fund creators with billions of dollars can stand tall against the ones moving the money. In the meantime, creators on the platform could still get burned from Stripe’s rules, even if Kickstarter stands against them.

Correction, May 19th. An earlier version of this story got it backwards on content that was prohibited vs. exempted. We’ve updated to reflect the actual changes.