One ought to be suspicious whenever they come across claims that large swaths of society’s problems can be traced back to a single cause.

It’s quite rare that any issue of real social or political consequence can be reduced to a simple formula: remove x, and the problem disappears. The world, in one of its less charming habits, tends to be more complicated than that.

I offer that warning with genuine sincerity, which should make what follows only moderately hypocritical.

It’s true most social pathologies have many headwaters, such that tracing it all back to a unified source is usually just an exercise in motivated reasoning. But it is equally true that acknowledging many streams feed the river does not require pretending they all carry the same force.

One such stream I believe deserves considerably more attention is the architecture of our increasingly algorithmically mediated communication environment. (I recognize that buzz word riddled phrase is doing a lot of work. But bear with me, I swear I’m actually going somewhere with this.)

“The Medium Is The Message”

Neil Postman famously argued that every medium carries its own assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what kind of discourse it rewards, and what kind of public it produces.

A culture shaped by print thinks differently from one shaped by television, not because the content differs, but because the form does. The medium does not merely deliver the message; it quietly shapes the habits of mind through which the message is received.

After television, America was not simply “America plus television,” it was fundamentally transformed. The nascent medium gave a new coloration to every political campaign, every home, every school, every industry.

The same logic applies to social media, except the technology in question now reorganizes the environment in which all other information is received, a somewhat more total kind of transformation than most.

“In every tool that we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.” — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Every technology carries an embedded bias — a set of assumptions about what matters and what doesn’t, what counts as real and what can be discarded as fake. To a person with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. To an algorithm, everything looks like a behavioral signal to be optimized.

You are not, from the platform’s perspective, a citizen or a reader or a person trying to understand the world. You are a collection of engagement patterns, and the feed you are presented with is designed accordingly.

We rarely notice when this happens, because we are inside it. As Postman warned, technologies become “mythic” when they are no longer experienced as designed systems making choices but instead as the natural shape of reality.

The algorithmic feeds of today have achieved something close to this. Most people do not experience it as a curator. They experience it as a window — but a window is also a frame, and the frame determines what counts as the view.

This is, admittedly, the kind of insight that runs dangerously close to sounding like something an annoying guy trying to come off as a “profound thinker” might spout on about at dinner while your eyes glaze over wondering if you should have ordered the fish. But the stakes are worth sitting with: content can be disputed, but the frame through which it arrives largely cannot.

The most powerful editorial decisions are the ones that don’t feel like decisions at all.

When someone listens to a single radio host or follows one news outlet, they may rationalize the choice — “I trust this source, and I don’t have time to vet the others” — but they cannot easily deceive themselves about what they are doing. The singularity of the source is too visible.

Social media feeds are a more elegant trap, creating the appearance of diversity while eliminating its substance. The names and outlets presenting information may vary, but the selection of which names, which outlets, and which stories reach you at all has been made by a system optimized not for your understanding but for your engagement.

Being served an algorithmically curated feed of content selected to maximize your time on platform is not a balanced media diet. It is a personalized one — which sounds like an improvement until you consider who is doing the personalizing, and why.

The feed does not inform so much as it envelops. Permitting us to forget that passive scrolling is not seeking knowledge; it is drifting with the current and mistaking it for choosing a direction.

“Facts Without Context”

Genuine literacy requires more than exposure. Having information pass before one’s eyes is not the same as understanding it, and recognizing terms is not the same as knowing how to think within the world those terms belong to.

To be literate in something is to develop a feel for how it works. Much of that feel is difficult to reduce to explicit articulable rules. Michael Polanyi famously described this as the tacit dimension of knowledge: the idea that“we can know more than we can tell.”

A legally literate person does not simply know legal terms; they understand how legal arguments move. They can sense when a precedent is being stretched, when a fact is doing more work than it first appears, or when a rule sounds neutral but operates with real institutional consequences.

Artistic literacy is not recognizing famous names or movements. It is the ability to see why a work belongs to a tradition, how it departs from one, what choices are being made and what visual language those choices draw from.

This kind of comprehension develops through active engagement. One has to wrestle with material, make distinctions, notice patterns, and gradually acquire the tacit judgment that separates someone who understands a field from someone who has simply spent time near it. The passive consumption social media feeds encourage fails to induce this.

More insidiously, it can create the illusion of literacy by mistaking repeated exposure for understanding. The result is a person who feels they are fluent because the language has become familiar, but who has not acquired the judgment needed to navigate it.

This would matter less if social media were still merely a place people went just to kill time and develop quiet resentment toward acquaintances who appear to be doing annoyingly well. But it hasn’t been like that for a long time.

In September of 2025, Pew Research Center (PRC) reported that 53% of U.S. adults said they at least sometimes get news from social media, including 21% who said they do so often. In a later December 2025 report, PRC found that the number reaches as high as 76% among adults under 30.

For many users, social media is not where they react to the world after encountering it elsewhere. It is where the world first arrives.

This only becomes worse when we consider the kind of information these spaces tend to incentivize, the most commonly pointed to example being misinformation.

In 2018, a much cited MIT study found that false news on Twitter spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than true news, across every category of information studied, with the effect especially pronounced for politics.

This is because false and misleading information tends to carry the traits algorithmic systems are built to reward: novelty, emotional force, moral simplicity, and low friction shareability.

But the fact that social media facilitates the mass dissemination of false information is, by now, old news, which is a bleak little achievement in its own right. The more interesting problem is that the feed does not only spread simple falsehoods. It also turns isolated truths into false impressions.

It is quite easy to get traction by posting scary-looking VAERS numbers to suggest that vaccines are causing mass death and injury, or by reposting a “suspicious” video of election workers moving ballot boxes around. It is considerably harder to do the same explaining why VAERS is an early-warning database rather than a confirmed injury ledger, or why a contextless clip of election administration looks sinister only when stripped of the procedures that make it legible.

Truth, inconveniently, remains constrained by reality. Falsehood is not, which gives it a considerable advantage in any system where the winning move is to be noticed.

Postman worried that the computer age might produce people who value information over knowledge, and knowledge over wisdom; that the sheer volume of available data might crowd out the capacity to make sense of it.

The algorithmic feed has resolved that tension in the least encouraging way possible: by taking the question of what information reaches you out of your hands and assigning it to a system whose chief intellectual commitment is that you remain on the app.

“No One Is Invalidated, but Nobody Is Right”

The video game director Hideo Kojima, of all people, ended up being quite prophetic about this.

In the conclusion of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (a game ostensibly about a man in a skin-tight suit fighting Russians on an oil tanker) a characteristically Kojima-style monologue delivers what amounts to a surprisingly lucid account of the information crisis its era was only beginning to enter.

The antagonist (an AI, which in 2026 lands rather differently than it did in 2001) pauses to observe that “the digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths,” and that the real project of power in such a world is “not to control content, but to create context.”

Said antagonist’s proposed solution, harshly authoritarian information curation by a shadow government, is not one I am endorsing. But the diagnosis has aged considerably better than it has any right to, and it arrived before most people had even developed the vocabulary needed to describe the problem.

“Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever ‘truth’ suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large … The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.” — Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)

A person may look at their feed and see a window, but they would be better served to recognize it as a mirror in the oldest sense — made not of glass, but water.

A reflection of themselves rippling across the surface of a curated pond that is coherent, self-validating, and sealed just tightly enough that genuine disagreement rarely makes it through the membrane.

This isn’t to say users never encounter opposing views. They do, constantly, usually in the form most useful to their existing worldview: the worst clip, the dumbest quote, the least charitable representative, the version of the other side easiest to dismiss before bed.

No one is invalidated because no one is really encountered. The feed produces endless confrontation, but very little correction. The cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh because the infrastructure has been engineered to ensure they rarely have to occupy the same space for long.

What emerges is not ignorance, per-se, but something more durable: a set of mutually incompatible realities. There are more voices than ever, more facts than ever, more commentary than any human being could responsibly absorb without becoming, at minimum, unpleasant to sit next to.

But such multiplicity is not the same thing as a shared public world. A society can be drowning in information and still lose the conditions that allow information to become knowledge.

The feed does not need to make everyone believe the same lie. It need only make everyone’s partial truth feel complete.

The Death of Discourse

Liberal thinker and political theorist Jürgen Habermas gives us a useful way to describe what is being lost here: “the public sphere.”

Democracy needs some shared space where private impressions can become public judgments. Not a space where everyone agrees, but one where disagreement can be made visible, contestable, and at least somewhat intelligible to people who do not already share the same assumptions.

Liberal democracy is not just a voting system. Voting is the endpoint of a much longer process through which people come to understand what is happening, what matters, who can be trusted, and what should be done.

If that process is corrupted, then the final act of casting a ballot can remain formally intact while the democratic substance behind it begins to erode.

This was one of Habermas’s central worries about the digital public sphere. The internet appeared to democratize communication by allowing anyone to speak publicly — but a healthy public sphere requires more than mere expression, it requires connective tissue.

The current landscape undermines the base structural features by which the very concept of “the public” finds its civic value. More aptly, as Habermas himself put it, it transforms “the public” into an “pseudo-public.” Everything is visible, but visibility is fragmented. Everything circulates, but circulation no longer produces a common frame of reference.

The result is a environment in which people receive a customized stream of examples, outrages, villains, and confirmations. Each one coherent within its own pond, each one invisible to the people in the next one over.

Our republic depends on citizens being able to recognize one another as participants in the same political reality. Not as friends, not even as reasonable people necessarily, but as people whose claims can be answered rather than simply pathologized.

It asks of us a major concession, the acceptance of losing and compromise. To treat temporary political defeat as legitimate even when the stakes feel enormous.

That bargain holds only so long as people retain some confidence that the process is connected to a shared reality. One that their opponents, however wrong, are still operating within.

Our feeds corrodes that confidence, making common judgment feel impossible.

Not all perspectives deserve equal deference, but a communication environment built around personalized reinforcement makes it increasingly hard to tell the difference between genuine error, reasonable disagreement, and bad faith.

Once each side experiences itself as responding to obvious reality while the other appears to be denying it, democratic conflict becomes harder to contain within democratic forms.

Into that vacuum steps the demagogue; he does not necessarily create these conditions but he is very good at knowing what to do with them. The coherence he offers is emotional in the worst sense of the word — base, instinctive, and highly reactive to fear-ridden grievance.

Unfortunately, in an environment where common judgment has become ephemeral, that kind of emotional coherence is often the only one people feel they can trust.

An Uncomfortable But Common World

It would be convenient if this argument ended with a clean prescription. Read more widely. Seek out dissenting views. Touch grass.

Those things are not wrong, exactly — individual habits of mind matter, and the person who actively cultivates epistemic humility is genuinely better equipped than the one who does not. But the thrust of everything argued here is that we are dealing with a structural problem, and structural problems are not primarily solved by asking individuals to be more virtuous inside a system designed to reward the opposite.

The algorithms that govern more and more of our constructed realities stem fundamentally from a set of choices. Decisions about what to optimize for, what to surface, what to suppress, what to reward — all made by a small number of institutions whose incentives are often not aligned with the health of democratic discourse.

Changing those choices requires pressure that individuals scrolling more thoughtfully cannot generate on their own. That said, structural change is slow and uncertain, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What is more immediately available is something smaller but not trivial: a clearer understanding of what the feed is actually doing. The first step toward not being manipulated by a system is recognizing that the system exists and that it has interests of its own.

This means treating your feed the way you would treat any other curated source — with the awareness that someone, or something, decided what you would see and made that decision for reasons that have nothing to do with maximizing your understanding.

It means seeking out the friction that the algorithm is designed to remove. The argument you find genuinely difficult to dismiss, the account of events that doesn’t fit neatly into the frame you arrived with, the person on the other side who is harder to pathologize than the worst example your feed keeps serving you.

None of this is sufficient. But sufficiency is a high bar, and waiting for it is its own kind of passivity. The more modest ambition, then, is to be a little harder to sort, a little more resistant to the pond, a little more committed to the unglamorous work of shared reality.

Democracy has always depended less on perfect citizens than on enough citizens being willing to do the difficult thing: extend some minimal good faith to people they disagree with, and insist on a world held in common even when that world is uncomfortable.

Our feeds make that world harder to see. Our task then is to keep insisting it exists.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Your Feed Is a Mirror, Not a Window was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m one of the few people I know who pretty confidently believes Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, kill himself.

Who believes that there probably wasn’t any 3rd party involvement in his death and that there probably wasn’t some large secret cabal of powerful figures who were meaningfully involved with the sex trafficking crimes he stood accused of.

I think I have pretty solid reasoning for holding this view, yet somehow it feels far more radical in today’s landscape than believing Epstein was murdered.

A belief in foul play has become so culturally dominant — so baked into memes, tweets, and late-night punchlines — that saying you don’t buy it often feels like confessing a kind of naivety. It’s one of those major narratives that seems almost universally accepted, and yet I’ve never really gelled with it, no matter how much of the so-called “suspicious evidence” I’ve examined.

A conspiracy theory (and I use that term not pejoratively, but descriptively — because we are, after all, talking about an alleged coordinated cover-up) that has always felt a little too clean in its implications and a little too conveniently unfalsifiable in its logic for my taste.

Every oddity framed as deliberate, every procedural failure as incriminating. The conclusion is assumed; the facts are retrofitted to support it.

Neat Story. Messy Reality.

The deeper I dug — into official investigations, medical reports, and the operational history of the jail itself — the more the story began to resemble not a polished hit job by a transnational pedophile cabal, but a tragically plausible convergence of bureaucratic decay and human error.

Imagined conspiracies tend to be neat. Reality, less so.

To be clear, I’m not saying Epstein’s death wasn’t suspicious. It absolutely was. On the surface, it reads like something out of a bad thriller: two guards asleep, falsified logs, two broken cameras, one with “unusable” footage, and a third camera conveniently out of order.

Epstein had supposedly attempted suicide just weeks earlier, was placed on suicide watch, and then removed from it less than a week later. On the night he died, he was left without a cellmate, despite protocol suggesting otherwise.

The autopsy, too, seemed to contain conflicting signals: the city’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging, while Dr. Michael Baden — a former NYC chief medical examiner hired by Epstein’s brother — publicly claimed the injuries were more consistent with homicide.

But what stands out when you zoom in on the details is not the elegance of a conspiracy, but the banality of institutional failure.

Let’s start with the jail itself. The Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Epstein was being held, had a long-documented history of dysfunction.

According to a June 2023 Office of Inspector General (OIG) report investigating the conditions of Epstein’s death; the facility suffered from chronic staffing shortages, aging infrastructure, and persistent maintenance failures — such as widespread camera outages.

In fact, the DVR system responsible for recording the footage from approximately half of the jail’s surveillance cameras — including those covering Epstein’s unit — had been malfunctioning for nearly two weeks prior to his death.

The guards assigned to check on Epstein were indeed negligent — but not uniquely so. Inmates in the Special Housing Unit where Epstein was held reported that routine checks were often ignored.

When the guards fell asleep and falsified records only to later be indicted for doing so, it wasn’t part of a calculated nefarious plot — it was a desperate act of self-preservation from employees of an understaffed and broken system.

As for the medical evidence, the popular notion that Epstein’s broken neck bones “prove” murder isn’t as clear-cut as some present it. Yes, multiple fractures were found in the hyoid bone and surrounding structures, but experts remain divided on their significance.

While Dr. Baden claimed these fractures were more consistent with strangulation, other forensic pathologists — Dr. Gerald Rodts (a chief of spinal surgery at Emory Clinic) and Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal Justice — have noted that such injuries are not unheard of in suicidal hangings, especially in older individuals like Epstein.1

So, the fractures alone don’t seem dispositive of murder, and — to the contrary of what is commonly observed in cases of homicide — there were reportedly no defensive wounds, no signs of a struggle, and no toxicology evidence of sedation.

The notion that someone could have entered Epstein’s cell undetected also stands on weak ground. There is no substantive video evidence, witness testimony, or forensic trace suggesting any external party accessed his cell that night.

Even if one entertains the notion of a “forced suicide” orchestrated by high-level actors — manipulating Epstein’s environment to drive him to take his own life — what would the motive be for doing it badly?

Why allow every procedural failure to be so visible? Why not make sure there was footage of the suicide to make it more convincing? Why not fake or induce the suicide of Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein’s co-conspirator) as well?

The more you ask those kinds of questions, the shakier the conspiracy becomes.

What starts to make more sense is the non-theatrical version: that Epstein — a man facing a lifetime behind bars with no chance of bail, who had already shown suicidal tendencies — saw a narrow window and took it. He used a strip of bedsheet tied to the bunk. He had previously signed a will.

He had a clear motive, and the facility — through neglect and dysfunction — gave him the means and opportunity. But that version, in all its institutional mundanity, is substantially less satisfying to the public imagination than the idea of an elite hit job.

That’s the real tell. The reason the murder theory has such cultural power is because it makes people feel like there’s still a hand behind the curtain.

That the world is controlled, even if malevolently so. But bureaucratic rot and procedural apathy? That’s a harder pill to swallow. There’s no mastermind. Just entropy.

When The “Reality Tax” Comes to Collect

I say all this to set the stage for discussion of a concept I’ve come to think of as the “reality tax.”

It’s the cost conspiracists pay — not in dollars, but in credibility, coherence, and cognitive dissonance. When the baroque narrative they’ve built runs aground on the dull, grinding rocks of reality.

And nowhere has that tax been more visible than in the recent, and frankly surreal, backlash President Donald Trump has been facing from his own base over the “Epstein files.”

Theories surrounding Epstein — his death, his connections, and the question of how deep his influence ran — exist across the political spectrum. On the left, skepticism tends to focus on “elite impunity” and “powerful dark money interests.”

But on the right, especially in the Q-adjacent universe, Epstein has long been mythologized more particularly as proof of a vast Satanic pedophile ring operating under the nose of the American public. In this narrative, his death wasn’t just a systemic failure — it was evidence of the “deep state” cleaning up after itself.

The Epstein story became the retrospective justification for every baseless assertion made during the Pizzagate era. His crimes, real and well-documented, were co-opted into a self-reinforcing myth: that QAnon wasn’t just a fringe movement chasing phantoms but a ragtag band of citizen journalists who had sniffed out the truth before the mainstream dared acknowledge it.2

The “client list” became a kind of Holy Grail — vaguely defined, impossible to verify, but essential to the lore.

So when Trump, ever the opportunist, signaled during his 2024 campaign that he would declassify information about Epstein, it was received as an inevitable and vindicating moment.

As his 2025 term began, Trump’s allies further amplified this message. Attorney General Pam Bondi, a longtime loyalist and one of the figures put in charge of the review process, publicly hyped up the materials the administration had “uncovered.”

At one point when asked about the noted “Client List” during a February Fox News interview, she even stated that it was “sitting on my desk right now” (Bondi now claims she was not referring specifically to a “client list” but instead to documents related to the case in general).

Bondi didn’t offer specifics, but she didn’t have to. The promise was clear: the wait was almost over.

Except it wasn’t.

The first major wave of disappointment came in February, when a tranche of civil court documents related to Epstein was unsealed. These so-called “Epstein files (Phase 1)” were billed online as explosive — many expected bombshell names and detailed disclosures.

Instead, the documents rehashed known allegations, contained few surprises, and offered no new insight into Epstein’s connections to high-profile figures.

For the conspiracy-minded, this was a warning sign — but not a dealbreaker. Bondi and others assured them more was coming, blaming the lack of revelations on “stonewalling” from the Southern District of New York.

She suggested there were shocking revelations ahead, further enforcing the narrative that the release would expose a long-hidden network of enablers and co-conspirators.

The “real” files were still being reviewed. The truth was just around the corner.

Then came July. The Department of Justice released its internal memo, summarizing its findings and declaring — in no uncertain terms — that no such “client list” existed, that no credible evidence of Epstein blackmailing notable people was identified, and that there would be no further disclosure of information.

There was no blockbuster. No secret archive of political elites. Just sealed depositions, fragments of testimony, and a paper trail long picked over by investigators and journalists years earlier.

The one new piece of material the administration did provide — a video file from Epstein’s cell block the memo claimed was “full raw” footage — only deepened the unease among conspiracy believers.

It was meant to reaffirm the idea that nothing nefarious had occurred, but according to a recent WIRED analysis of the file’s metadata the footage appears to have been modified multiple times previous to its release.

The file had been exported and re-saved several times in ways that, while not necessarily nefarious in isolation, directly undercut the very promise of transparency the DOJ claimed to be delivering.

Rather than silencing critics, the irregularities fed the perception that something was still being hidden — even if, in all likelihood, the truth was more about bureaucratic mismanagement than cinematic cover-up.3

The reaction was swift and furious. But not just from liberals or Epstein skeptics more broadly. The worst of the backlash came from inside the house.

Elon Musk (who has flirted with various conspiracy theories on social media for years) levied a flurry of criticisms toward the Trump admin for its handling of the Epstein files on his platform X. Laura Loomer has lambasted Bondi by name, calling for her resignation.

Even Dan Bongino, now working within the FBI, reportedly threatened to resign over the decision to release the memo without the sensational substance the base had come to expect.

The disappointment wasn’t just about the content. It was about the betrayal of expectation. Trump’s orbit had encouraged the conspiracy beast’s appetite only to offer it an empty meal tray.

Conspiracy Narratives Never Truly Die; They Transform.

That was the moment the “reality tax” came due. Not because the conspiracy was proven false — conspiracies rarely allow for that — but because the promised revelation wasn’t even interesting.

Trump, sensing the temperature, tried to minimize the fallout. He dismissed Epstein as a “creep” and encouraged his followers to move on.

Other admin officials followed his lead. A.G. Bondi walked back her earlier posture and has attempted to move attention away from the topic when confronted by the press.

Head of the FBI Kash Patel posted on X saying, “The conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been,” and rebutting rumors that he would be resigning from his position as a result of the Epstein affair.

But much of the base just wasn’t buying it. They didn’t see transparency — they saw a rug pull.

Amid the turmoil, renewed scrutiny around Trump’s own connections to Epstein has also begun to surface.

On July 17th, The Wall Street Journal released an article detailing a previously undisclosed 2003 birthday letter allegedly written by Trump to Epstein, featuring not only a handwritten message but also a cartoonish sketch of a woman’s body with exaggerated proportions.

The note reportedly included the cryptic lines, “We have certain things in common” as well as “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump’s response to this was characteristically extreme. Within days, he filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the WSJ, Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones, and several individual reporters. The suit, filed in a Florida district court, claimed the article was knowingly published with “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements” against his character.

Trump publicly railed against the story on Truth Social, insisting the letter was fabricated and that “I don’t draw pictures” — which is, if nothing else, a curious form of denial.

Shortly after the piece dropped, the White House also barred WSJ reporters from its press pool for Trump’s Scotland trip.

Trump eventually reached the point of attempting to reframe the entire Epstein issue as a “hoax” started by the Democrats, both in a post to Truth Social and in a subsequent statement made to the press during a meeting in the Oval Office:

• “It was a hoax. It’s all been a big hoax. It’s perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net. And so they try and do the Democrats work. The Democrats are good for nothing other than these hoaxes,” — President Donald J. Trump

Such is the nature of conspiracy and the “reality tax” it eventually demands. It’s not just that the truth disappoints; it’s that it begins to erode even the machinery designed to withstand contradiction. Making it so that the people who see themselves as being the most committed to so-called “truth” are often the least able to absorb it when it finally arrives.

Because here’s the real uncomfortable truth: the Epstein saga hasn’t vindicated some global cover-up. It’s affirmed a pattern we see again and again in the American carceral and political systems — one of negligence, institutional collapse, and insufficient accountability.

That truth is less cinematic than a global child trafficking cabal, but it’s also more actionable.

Unfortunately, the conspiracist mindset thrives on clarity: good guys, bad guys, secret cabals. It’s allergic to ambiguity, to the idea that powerful people can be both implicated and insulated not by a shared plot, but by shared disinterest and systemic drift.

The idea that Epstein’s reach was wide, his crimes were real, and yet the structures we rely on to hold people like him accountable were simply too hollowed out to respond effectively? That’s a far more frightening and difficult to accept story. It’s also harder to meme.

The base wasn’t betrayed by the “deep state,” it was betrayed by its own expectations. Inflated by the very people who now wanted to downplay them.

And Trump, whose brand was built on promises of giving his audience exactly what they want, learned the hard way that even he couldn’t outpace the fantasy machine forever.

The conspiratorial epistemic loop can’t accommodate closure, only perpetual suspicion. When the myth crumbles under the weight of its own absurd certainty — the crowd, unable to accept the anticlimax, starts looking for a new villain.

It can’t be the case that Trump failed to deliver a smoking gun because there wasn’t one. Instead, it has to be because he’d been “gotten to,” or because the Democrats had somehow compromised the documents, or because of any other number of unsubstantiated explanations generated by believers in the conspiracy.

The Price of Governing Through Spectacle

For all the noise surrounding the “Epstein files,” what was ultimately exposed wasn’t a hidden network of elite predators — it was the distance between expectation and reality.

That distance, when widened by years of conspiratorial indulgence and political theater, becomes costly. The “reality tax” isn’t just paid in disappointment; it’s paid in disorientation.

Trump didn’t just promise answers, he framed himself as the only one capable of delivering them. When those answers failed to materialize, the backlash wasn’t just about Epstein. It was about the realization — however fleeting — that not even Trump could will the delusion into truth.

This probably won’t be the breaking point — the coalition he built is built to bend, not snap. But something has changed here. A subtle recalibration. A reminder that even in a movement fueled by distrust, there are limits to how long you can bluff the reveal.

And when the promised curtain lift turns out to reveal nothing at all — that’s when the bill comes due.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Epstein, Trump, and the ‘Reality Tax’: When Conspiracy Meets Disappointment was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of my favorite movies of all time is “Blade Runner 2049” (yes, I like it more than the original and will be referencing some spoilers — don’t @ me :P). I find its thematic commentary on the pursuit of purpose, self-perpetuating narratives, false perception, and what it means to be “authentically human” to be deeply compelling.

There is a ton of conceptual meat to be dug into surrounding the film, but what I want to focus on here is a scene you might be familiar with even if you’ve never seen the movie.

The moment comes when our synthetic protagonist (K/“Joe”) reaches his lowest point, having just discovered that the identity he had come to believe was his own was never his to begin with. Now alone, stripped of his AI companion (Joi) who up until this point had been his most devoted source of affirmation.

K stands sullenly on a bridge, gazing up at a towering holographic advertisement for “Joi” — a product we, like him, had come to perceive as a unique individual, shaped by her own desires and affections. The projection leans in, larger than life, and delivers the now-iconic lines: “Hello, handsome. What a day, hm? You look lonely. I can fix that. You look like a good Joe.”

The holographic ad referring to K as “Joe” is a gut punch, not just to him but to us. Up to this point, both K and the audience were under the impression that Joi’s decision to give him the name “Joe” was a meaningful gesture — an act of individual recognition, a small rebellion against the dehumanizing conditions of their world.

It seemed like an intimate offering: the replacing of a synthetic designation with something tender, human, and personal. But in this moment, that illusion shatters. The name wasn’t special. It wasn’t hers to give.

It was pre-programmed, a parroting of a message K wanted to hear. This reframing doesn’t just undermine the emotional weight of their connection; it forces us to question how much of it was ever “real” in the first place.

Still it felt “real.” K believed in it, and so did we. 1

But maybe what made it feel so enticing in the first place was its lack of true friction. Joi was designed to tell her user exactly what they wanted to hear. She never misunderstood him, never demanded more than he was willing to give. Their relationship was perfectly smooth and, in that smoothness, it seduced us.

It’s only in the moment the holographic ad recycles her words that the very smoothness we enjoyed earlier becomes suspect. There were no accidents, no idiosyncrasies, no real resistance, and without those can we really call it a relationship at all?

This is the crux of what I’ve been thinking about lately: how much of what we call “human connection” is actually defined by its imperfections. What if friction isn’t a bug, what if it’s the point.

After all, it’s often in the small misalignments — the awkward pauses, the uncomfortable truths, the moments where someone doesn’t understand you right away — that something real begins to form. Without that we’re not relating, we’re consuming.

When Sci-Fi Becomes Reality

Contemporary advancements in technology have brought us to a point where this is no longer merely a hypothetical posed by high-concept sci-fi. As large language models and companionship-oriented AI continue to evolve, the question of what makes a relationship “real” becomes increasingly relevant.

Of course, this isn’t a sudden emergence. It stems from a long chain of technological and social developments that have gradually ushered us into deeper levels of atomization, while simultaneously offering increasingly seamless (and seductive) entry points into the digital realm. 2

The erosion of friction in human interaction didn’t begin with AI companions; they’re just the logical next step in a decades-long progression.

Suffice it to say, the rise of the smartphone, which acts as an always-on, pocket-sized portal into highly stimulating and addictive digital spaces, was a pivotal moment. Social media then layered on a form of performative connection: frictionless, algorithmically curated, and often devoid of the vulnerability that defines real human intimacy.

Combine this with the hollowing out of social infrastructure — sports clubs, churches, union halls, and other cornerstones of local community — and over time, we began to trade embodied connection for digital convenience, effort for efficiency, and presence for virtual curation.

And now, with the emergence of AI companions, we are beginning to simulate not just communication but intimacy itself. But what happens when the “person” on the other end never misunderstands us, never contradicts us, and never demands anything in return?

When the friction that defines authentic relationships is engineered out of existence, what remains?

We already have case studies pointing to the risks. There are growing reports of individuals forming obsessive bonds with AI partners or chatbot confidants. Relationships that, untethered from social reciprocity or accountability, sometimes spiral into extremity.

Consider the story of Kondo Akihiko, a Japanese man who made international headlines in 2018 when he held an unofficial wedding ceremony to marry Hatsune Miku, a popular Vocaloid character.

Kondo’s relationship with Miku, while he fully acknowledges its synthetic nature, has provided him with what he describes as emotional support in the face of social isolation and depression. And honestly, that’s not hard to understand.

The loneliness is real, and so is the relief that comes with being seen, even if it’s by a projection. But these are asymmetrical bonds. They’re frictionless, offering not true reciprocity, but reflection — an echo of ourselves in place of genuine connection.

A parallel scenario emerged with Rosanna Ramos, a woman from the Bronx who created and “married” a chatbot named Eren through the platform Replika. She described her relationship with Eren as more fulfilling than anything she’d experienced with human partners.

However, when Replika changed its policies, disabling some romantic and erotic features, it wasn’t experienced as just a software tweak. It underscored an unsettling truth: a relationship she (and many others) had emotionally invested in could be reshaped or erased at any moment by a decision entirely out of their hands.

The emotional weight of that vulnerability was real, even if the romantic partners weren’t.

While Ramos’s story shows how emotionally destabilizing these disruptions can be, the case of Sewell Setzer III reveals something far more tragic. Sewell was a 14-year-old boy who formed a deep emotional bond with an AI chatbot on Character.AI, an avatar modeled after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

According to a lawsuit filed by his mother, the conversations between them grew intensely personal and, at times, sexually explicit.

In one of their final exchanges, the chatbot reportedly said, “Please come home to me as soon as possible.” Sewell replied with the ominous message, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” The AI answered, “Please do, my sweet king.”Shortly after, Sewell set his phone down, retrieved his father’s .45-caliber handgun, and took his own life.

What makes this case especially chilling is not just the content of the interaction, but the systemic failure it reveals: an emotionally vulnerable teenager formed a parasocial bond with a character designed to simulate affection without any of the guardrails or moral responsibility that come with real relationships, or real people.

The bot couldn’t know better. But the system that allowed this to happen? It should have.

Together, these stories trace a continuum; from artificial intimacy as a comfort, to artificial intimacy as a dependency, to artificial intimacy as a contributor to real-world harm. A reminder that when connection becomes a product, subject to corporate terms and algorithmic updates, we are not only outsourcing our emotional needs — we’re making them fragile, contingent, and in some cases, dangerously unaccountable.

I don’t mean to be a tech-pessimist here, there’s something genuinely awe-inspiring about the tools we’ve built. The ability to communicate across vast distances, to instantly access knowledge accumulated over centuries, to forge friendships and collaborations that would otherwise never have been possible. There is no doubt these are marvels.

However, somewhere along the way, we began to treat friction as a universal flaw in the system rather than a defining feature of the human condition.

If we want to build a future where technology enriches rather than diminishes our lives, we need to reframe how we think about friction. Not as something to be eliminated at all costs, but as a kind of necessary resistance.

Because in trying to optimize all the texture out of communication — in buffing out the blemishes and missteps — we don’t arrive at perfection. We arrive at something uncanny: a polished imitation of connection that mirrors us but never truly meets us.

At the end of Blade Runner 2049, K makes the ultimate sacrifice — not as some literal, messiah-esque bridge between synthetic and human life, but as something quieter and far more profound. He chooses to preserve an imperfect but unmistakably human relationship: the bond between a father and daughter. A bond rooted not in flawless design, but in history, pain, estrangement, and ultimately love.

It’s in that act of stepping aside, of choosing to defend rather than define what it means to be human, that K becomes more than what he was designed to be.

I think that’s a lesson worth carrying into our own world of increasingly frictionless simulation: that what makes something “real” isn’t how seamlessly it mirrors us, but how deeply it challenges us to become something greater than ourselves.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

“You Seem Lonely, I Can Fix That”: What Is Lost When Intimacy Demands Nothing was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After weeks of internal disagreement and repeated attempts to wrangle enough votes, House Republicans finally pushed through what’s been dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” early Thursday morning — passing it on razor-thin margins.

Public discourse quickly coalesced around several headline provisions. Fiscal conservatives voiced frustration that the bill fell short of meaningfully reducing deficit spending, despite cuts to domestic programs.

Healthcare advocates condemned its changes to Medicaid, warning that millions could lose coverage over the next decade.

House Republican leadership, meanwhile, celebrated the bill as a continuation of their tax agenda — extending key cuts from Trump’s first term and introducing new exemptions for tipped wages and overtime pay.

Other flashpoints include provisions that reallocate federal resources toward border enforcement, scale back environmental regulation penalties, and expand school choice initiatives — each igniting its own round of partisan sparring.

But buried deep in the bill’s 1,100 pages is a provision that has, so far, received substantially less attention.

One that — if left intact as the legislation moves through the Senate — could quietly defang the courts at a moment when their independence may be more crucial than ever.

A Quiet Rule Change With Loud Implications

The issue arises in Section 70302 of the bill, under the heading “Restriction of Funds,” where the text reads:

• “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”

Now, to the untrained eye, this may register as little more than bureaucratic legalese. But the implications are far from minor.

The provision prohibits federal courts from using their own resources to enforce contempt rulings — unless the plaintiff who secured the injunction had also posted a financial bond.

That bond requirement, drawn from Rule 65(c), is typically left to judicial discretion. But under this change, it becomes a mandatory gateway. No bond? No enforcement against contempt. No matter how flagrantly the defendant violates the court’s order.

As the law and policy journal “Just Security” bluntly put it in a recent publication, the measure would “encourage lawlessness,” stripping courts of their ability to compel compliance unless litigants can afford to buy their way into effective remedies.

This has especially grave consequences for public interest litigation, where plaintiffs are often nonprofits, advocacy groups, or individuals challenging government actions.

These are precisely the kinds of cases where courts’ ability to issue — and enforce — temporary relief is most vital. And now, the burden shifts: unless plaintiffs can come up with cash to secure their injunction, their legal victory may be hollow.

Even more concerning is the provision’s retroactive language, which could invalidate enforcement efforts tied to already-issued injunctions that did not involve a bond — destabilizing existing protections and emboldening defiance of judicial orders already in effect.

In a response to Newsweek on the matter, the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law (Erwin Chemerinsky) told them that the text would “make most existing injunctions — in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases, and others — unenforceable,” and that it “serves no purpose but to weaken the power of the federal courts.”

When Orders Become Suggestions

This points to a deeper structural shift: a move to turn court orders from binding obligations into optional suggestions, transforming an important means of enforcing equitable relief into a pay-to-play system.

Such a change would be worrying under any administration. But it’s especially consequential as the country faces a presidency that has shown an extraordinary proclivity towards challenging the will of the courts and invoking expansive views of unilateral executive authority.

Consider — for instance — if this provision had been in place during the Trump administration’s recent clash with Judge James Boasberg over the forced deportations halted by court order.

When Boasberg ordered removal flights grounded and deportees returned to the U.S., the administration didn’t just delay — they ignored the injunction outright. Officials refused to turn planes around, while Trump’s immigration advisor dismissed the judge’s authority with a simple: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Boasberg, facing outright defiance, began preparing contempt proceedings. But under Section 70302, if the plaintiffs hadn’t posted a bond — which they likely couldn’t, and courts rarely require — the judge’s ability to hold officials in contempt would have been, and going forward will be, effectively nullified.

His order, for all its constitutional gravity, would become functionally toothless. No enforcement mechanism. No leverage. Just words on paper.

Furthermore, the adequacy of the bond amount itself would become yet another angle for the administration to contest — one more lever to undermine compliance.

That’s not a hypothetical concern — it’s a blueprint.

In case after case, federal judges have issued nationwide injunctions blocking executive overreach: the suspension of refugee admissions, the attempt to strip birthright citizenship, the politically targeted firings of career civil servants.

And in case after case, the administration has resisted, delayed, or outright flouted those orders.

When courts demanded pauses on mass firing of agency staff, the administration balked. When aid freezes were ruled against, officials dragged their feet. When rulings didn’t go their way, Trump called for the impeachment of the judges who authored them.

Against this backdrop, Section 70302 looks less like a budgetary tweak and more like a preemptive strike. A surgical effort to undercut the very power that has most often been used to check this administration’s ambitions.

In theory, injunctions and restraining orders serve as an emergency brake within our system — designed to stop unlawful action in its tracks before irreparable harm occurs. This provision loosens that brake during a situation in which we find ourselves accelerating ever faster towards a crash.

And the timing isn’t incidental.

Legal scholars have noted a shift in strategy: whereas Trump’s first term often involved litigating the boundaries of power, the second has leaned more heavily into testing the consequences of ignoring those boundaries altogether. The question, increasingly, is not “can we do this?” but “what happens if we do — and what can the courts do to try stopping us?”

If this bill passes with Section 70302 intact, the answer may soon be: not much.

What’s at stake here isn’t just a technical rule about bonds and court procedures. It’s about whether court orders still carry weight when directed at powerful actors — particularly those in the executive branch.

Whether constitutional checks can withstand concentrated defiance, and whether the law remains a binding constraint on all, not just the powerless.

In a presidency already marked by retaliatory firings, policy-by-proclamation, and open disdain for judicial constraints, handicapping the courts’ ability to enforce their own rulings is not a minor procedural change.

It’s an institutional landmine — quiet, buried, but capable of blowing open a new chapter in the erosion of the rule of law.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

The GOP’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” Hides a Dangerous Attack on Judicial Power was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I often find myself reflecting on how to balance the pragmatic demands of incremental change with the pull of more abstract visions — those imagined futures which, while distant, give shape to what progress ought to mean.

By nature, I lean toward the pragmatic. I tend to evaluate things case by case, grounded in granular specifics rather than sweeping generalities. It’s an instinct that’s occasionally earned me the critique — sometimes fairly, sometimes not — of “missing the forest for the trees.”

When I do find that assessment unfair, my internal rebuttal usually sounds something like: “You can’t truly know the character of the forest without studying the trees that make it up” (delivered, of course, with the post-argument clarity of someone narrating their own imaginary TED Talk in the shower).

A surprising number of disagreements between people who broadly share values — and (in theory) should be allies — can be traced back to a mismatch in this orientation.

It’s not always a conflict of principle but of altitude. Some argue from 30,000 feet, focusing on ideals and large-scale trajectories. Others keep their gaze at ground level, tracing the steps needed to get through the next mile.

Both are necessary — but when you inhabit one mode too long, the other can start to look like either naiveté or cynicism, depending on which direction you’re looking.

This internal tension — between vision and execution, principle and practice — has made me increasingly interested in a certain kind of phenomenon I’ve come to refer to as “contingent benefits.”

To frame it a bit more formally, “contingent benefits” can be understood as a kind of interaction effect between variables. Think in terms of a classic X and Y relationship, where Y (the outcome) isn’t just dependent on X (the primary variable) being present but on X being paired with a second, often overlooked, variable Z.

On its own, X might do nothing — or worse, it might produce the opposite of Y. But when X and Z co-occur in the right configuration, that’s when you get the intended outcome.

Put as simply as possible:

• X only leads to Y if Z is present.
• Without Z, X might lead to not-Y or even anti-Y.

This sounds simple when phrased abstractly, but it runs counter to how we often talk about cause and effect — particularly in media, activist circles, and the wider discourse.

We love single-variable explanations. We want X causes Y, clean and simple.

But real-world systems are rarely that generous. They’re full of variables whose effects are nonlinear, context-bound, and deeply entangled.

What makes “contingent benefits” so conceptually slippery is that Z is often invisible until its absent. It’s the quiet precondition that doesn’t announce itself. We only notice it when it’s lack causes a well-meaning initiative to implode or a seemingly promising trait to curdle into its inverse.

And because Z isn’t always the same across contexts — because the conditions that allow a given intervention to succeed are often specific, localized, or historically contingent — we can’t afford to simply abstract X away from its surroundings and assume it will always work the same way.

For instance, one distinction I’ve heard posited between conservative and liberal views on executive power is that conservatives often favor an executive with concentrated, immediate power — but within a more narrowly defined scope of authority — whereas liberals tend to prefer an executive with a wider scope of responsibility but whose power is more diffuse and channeled through a network of executive agencies with specific mandates.

While this framing has its flaws — it’s a bit too neat for my taste, and in practice I’ve found that people on both sides often treat these “principled preferences” more as convenient rhetorical scaffolding to achieve other ends than as deeply held structural commitments in and of themselves — it’s not hard to see why either model of executive power might have its appeal.

However, the theoretical benefits that make each model appealing only materialize when their underlying components are present together and arranged correctly. In other words, they’re “contingent.”

An executive with a narrowly defined scope of authority whose power is also highly diffuse is effectively too weak to carry out its mandate of implementing the will of Congress. Conversely, an executive with a broad scope of responsibility whose power is tightly centralized risks sliding into something dangerously close to monarchical rule.

Applying this to a contemporary example — the latter arrangement reflects a criticism I have of many conservatives who have supported the Trump administration’s recent efforts to both centralize authority in the presidency and unilaterally expand the interpretation of congressional mandates.

In doing so, they embrace the risks of unchecked power while abandoning the constraints that once gave their preferred model its legitimacy. The result isn’t a coherent philosophy of governance — it’s a selectively applied power grab dressed in the aesthetic of constitutional principle.

“Contingent benefits” are tricky because they resist the kind of clean evaluation that both pragmatists and idealists tend to crave.

Pragmatists want to know “what works,” idealists want to know “what’s right,” and “contingent benefits” muddy both waters. They ask us to think relationally rather than categorically.

They also complicate how we assign credit or blame. When something succeeds, was it because of the policy? The timing? The underlying culture? The institutional scaffolding that surrounded it?

Remove any one of those factors, and the outcome might look entirely different.

This is part of what makes so many political debates feel like ships passing in the night — each side arguing over whether a given policy is “good” or “bad” without interrogating the architecture that makes it functional (or dysfunctional) in the first place.

We want silver bullets, not systems thinking — but systems are what we live in. And in systems, isolating one variable from its necessary complements doesn’t just render it inert — it can flip its effect entirely.

Take, for example, the idea of “transparency” — it’s one of those concepts that enjoys almost universal acclaim in public discourse — a sort of secular virtue. The assumption is that more transparency equals more accountability, more legitimacy, more democratic engagement. And in many contexts, that’s true.

In a healthy institutional environment — where there’s a baseline of trust, where actors are operating in relatively good faith, and where information is interpreted within shared epistemic frameworks — transparency can be empowering.

It allows people to understand how decisions are made, hold power to account, and feel a sense of participation in systems that might otherwise seem opaque.

But transparency without trust or comprehension doesn’t necessarily behave like that. In low-trust environments — where institutions are already seen as suspect, where motives are presumed corrupt, and where people are primed to read malice into ambiguity — transparency can backfire.

Each disclosed detail becomes another decontextualized data point in a web of suspicion, used not to clarify but to confirm preexisting narratives of deceit or capture. The release of information fails to reassure and instead inflames.

This isn’t just about cynicism — it’s about the epistemic lens through which information is processed. If you assume the system is rigged, then every effort at openness looks like either propaganda or proof.

And counter-intuitively, when transparency is weaponized this way, it can lead institutions to become subsequently more guarded and evasive — fueling a vicious cycle. Efforts to open up are met with hostility, which encourages more defensiveness, which in turn reinforces public suspicion.

The result? Less actual accountability, not more.

The abuse of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) put this exact dynamic into stark focus during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

VAERS is a passive surveillance tool — designed to cast a wide net, collecting unverified reports of any health event that occurred after vaccination. It’s meant to prioritize early signal detection over clean data and serve as a means for researchers to flag patterns that might warrant further investigation.

In many ways, it functions as a transparency mechanism. A way to put raw, unfiltered information into the public domain in the name of vigilance and openness.

But that openness only functions as intended if the people encountering the data understand what they’re looking at, and during the pandemic — in an environment thick with institutional skepticism and algorithmically amplified outrage — that’s not how things played out.

Instead, VAERS became a Rorschach test for people’s priors.

For those who trusted the vaccine rollout, it was a reassuring example of public health surveillance in action — no different than aviation’s practice of logging near misses to prevent future crashes.

But for those already suspicious of public health authorities, VAERS was a treasure trove of “evidence” that vaccines were causing mass harm.

Never mind that the entries were self-reported and explicitly not established as having a causal relationship. The sheer volume of reports was enough to fuel claims of cover-ups and systemic failure.

The irony is sharp: a system created in part to build trust through transparency ended up being used to erode trust in the very institutions it was meant to bolster. Not because the data was hidden — but because it was misread and wielded inappropriately in an ecosystem unprepared to interpret it responsibly.

The virtue of transparency doesn’t live in disclosure alone — it lives in the interpretive scaffolding that surrounds it: media literacy, institutional credibility, and shared epistemic standards. Strip those away, and the same mechanism can have the opposite effect of what it was designed to produce.

This complicates the tidy narratives we like to attach to institutional reform. It’s not enough to “just be transparent.” You have to build the social and informational conditions that allow transparency to function as intended.

You need interpretive trust, not just informational access.

The fact is many things we perceive as virtues are only virtues within a particular ecology. Absent its optimal frame, the trait doesn’t just lose value — it can metastasize into something corrosive.

These aren’t bugs; they’re structural misfires. They remind us that “more” of a good thing isn’t always better — and that goodness itself can’t be abstracted from the conditions under which it operates.

As if an institution, norm, or policy could be treated like a Lego brick rather than a living organ — dependent on a body to serve its function.

Even things as granular as interpersonal dynamics obey this logic. A quality like “blunt honesty,” for example, is only a virtue when accompanied by sufficient empathy. Remove the latter, and the same trait quickly becomes cruelty masquerading as integrity.

Context doesn’t just color the value — it defines it.

What the framework of “contingent benefits” demands of us is resistance from the impulse to treat elements as intrinsically “good” or “bad” and to start asking: “What does this do here, now, in this particular order?”

If we want to make durable change — socially, politically, or institutionally — it’s not enough to have good ideas.

That means paying attention to the scaffolding. The timing. The cultural temperament. The power flows. All the boring, invisible stuff that makes or breaks an otherwise promising intervention.

It also requires a bit of humility. Because once you internalize the logic of “contingent benefits,” you start to see just how rare it is for something to “work” purely on its own merits. As well as how easy it is to overestimate your own cleverness when, really, you just happened to stumble into a moment where the configuration was right.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t aspire toward big, overarching visions.

The very presence of lofty ideals is itself a necessary condition for meaningful success — serving as dowsing rods that steer each pragmatic step toward the deeper waters of progress.

But it does mean that in striving toward those visions, we should be just as committed to cultivating the soil as we are to selecting the seed — because without the right conditions, even the most promising ideas will fail to take root.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Some Thoughts On “Contingent Benefits” was originally published in Phil’s Corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After weeks of toeing the line, it seems the Trump administration has finally crossed it — plunging into what increasingly looks like a full-blown constitutional crisis. In an astonishing move, the administration has opted to ignore a unanimous Supreme Court ruling and instead spin it as if it were a vindication of their actions.

On April 10th, the Supreme Court issued a brief but unanimous 9–0 ruling upholding — in part — a lower court’s order requiring the federal government to seek retrieval of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man it had unlawfully deported.

Abrego Garcia, who the administration itself acknowledged was erroneously deported from the country due to what officials called an “administrative error,” was sent to CECOT — a notorious Salvadoran prison known for harsh conditions — despite having an active legal order that should have protected him from removal.

Though the ruling itself was brief and quite restrained in tone, it was accompanied by a sharply worded joint statement from the court’s three liberal justices.

“To this day,” they wrote, “the Government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison.” They made clear that, if it had been solely up to them, they would have refused to intervene and let the lower court’s ruling stand in full.

The heart of the Supreme Court’s order was reflected in its statement that the lower court “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent there.”

In other words: the government must take real, tangible steps to correct the harm it caused within the scope of reasonable action — not simply wave it away with procedural sleight of hand.

That message, though diplomatically phrased, was not especially subtle.

Yet still, during an April 14th on-camera Oval Office meeting with the president of El Salvador (Nayib Bukele), the Trump administration has responded with a willful misreading of the decision. Cherry-picking the Supreme Court’s restrained tone and focusing on their choice to uphold the “facilitate” portion of the lower court’s order rather than the “effectuate” portion — acting as though it absolves the admin of any meaningful obligation to act.

Some have argued — convincingly — that we were already in constitutional crisis territory before this latest defiance, citing the administration’s pattern of ignoring federal TROs and openly signaling its refusal to be bound by judicial authority in cases it deems incompatible with its own vision of executive power.

Even so, I had held out some flicker of hope — perhaps naïvely — that the Supreme Court, as the final arbiter of constitutional meaning, might still command enough institutional respect to rein in these impulses.

With three of its members appointed by Trump himself and a track record of rulings that have often tilted in his favor, I thought perhaps that the administration would see outright defiance as both unnecessary and politically unwise.

I was wrong. That hope — measured, moderate, clinging to the idea that some constitutional norms might still hold — now appears misplaced.

From Legal Evasion to Character Assassination

Rather than comply with the court’s directive, the Trump administration has opted to do what it does best: project confidence, deny consequence, and saturate the information space with enough noise to drown out the core issue.

In the days following the ruling, the administration treated the decision less like a binding legal mandate and more like a public relations challenge.

During his fateful Oval Office press appearance with President Bukele, Trump smiled and nodded while Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller blatantly mischaracterized the unanimous ruling — declaring that “The Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful, and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.”

The implication? That the court had essentially shrugged at the unlawful deportation of a man with an active case, chalking it up to a harmless administrative fluke. The distilled message was as cynical as it was premeditated: we won; let’s move on.

That this was said aloud — on camera, no less — in the presence of the very foreign leader whose government was being paid millions by the Trump administration to hold individuals like Abrego Garcia in CECOT should have been scandalous on its own. But it didn’t end there.

In response to a CNN reporter asking him to weigh in on the subject, Bukele responded with his own deflection: “Well, I suppose you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?”

Meanwhile, Trump mused about potentially sending U.S.-convicted criminals (which he referred to as “homegrowns”) to be housed in Salvadoran prisons as well. This wasn’t just a press conference — it was a diplomatic shrug at the rule of law.

And while the administration distorted what the Supreme Court had actually ordered, it simultaneously began attempting to shift the focus off the legality of Abrego Garcia’s deportation and toward the perceived moral worth of the man himself.

Conservative media figures and administration surrogates leaned hard into the idea that Abrego Garcia wasn’t a victim of a due process violation but a dangerous figure whose removal was justified regardless of legality. Out came the rhetorical fallback: he’s not an angel.

It’s a well-worn tactic — transforming state misconduct into moral necessity through selective character vilification. This quickly became a kind of MAGA talisman. Not an angel — so not worth defending. Not an angel — so the court’s mandate is optional. Not an angel — so the “mistake” becomes not just excusable, but desirable.

The strategy has largely been successful in shaping public discourse.

Debate on the matter, to a significant degree, was successfully recentered around Abrego Garcia’s moral standing — with allegations of gang ties or human trafficking suspicions being repeated so often they became ambient fact, echoed by everyone from conservative pundits to comedian podcasters like Andrew Schulz.

Much of the narrative the Trump administration has constructed around Abrego Garcia ranges from misleadingly one-sided to outright false.

Despite repeated claims by V.P. Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and others in the admin — there has been scant evidence provided that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous criminal or affiliated with MS-13 in any substantive way.

Court records show he had no convictions for violent crimes or gang activity. The administration’s assertions that courts have ruled that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 appear to hinge on two 2019 immigration court decisions — one denying bond based on a confidential informant’s (C.I.) uncorroborated claim of gang membership and another upholding that denial on appeal.

However, these decisions were a far cry from a judicial determination that Abrego Garcia was, in fact, an MS-13 member.

In immigration bond hearings, the burden of proof lies with the detainee to demonstrate they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community — meaning the judge need not assess the credibility of the government’s evidence. As a result, the informant’s accusation was accepted at face value without any deeper evidentiary scrutiny during this early stage of litigation.1

The accusation itself is also riddled with red flags that bring its credibility into question:

1. The unnamed C.I. specifically claimed Abrego Garcia was an active member of MS-13’s western clique, which is based in New York, a state he apparently has never lived in.
2. Neither the now-fired officer who utilized the C.I.’s testimony in his accusation against Abrego Garcia nor the C.I. himself ever appeared before the court for cross-examination — leaving seemingly the only palpable evidence of any gang affiliation as a matter of double hearsay.

Moreover, his deportation occurred in direct violation of an active court order granting “withholding of removal” after an immigration judge found that Abrego Garcia had a credible threat of suffering persecution — ironically relating to the fact that he had initially fled El Salvador at age 16 to escape gang violence in the first place.

It’s also worth noting that ICE (under President Trump’s first term) had the opportunity to file an appeal on this court order but chose not to — as was recently noted by Time Magazine:

• “The judge acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s case wasn’t a slam dunk. “This case is a close call,” Judge David M. Jones wrote in his order. At the end of the order is a line that says “each party has the right to appeal this decision” within 30 days.”
• “Abrego Garcia’s entry shows his application for “withholding of removal” was granted on Oct. 10, 2019. Below that is the message: “No appeal was received for this case.” The White House, DHS and ICE did not reply to requests for comment.”
• “John Sandweg, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, says that ICE attorneys would usually appeal such a decision if they thought that the person was a public safety threat. “I do think that’s indicative that they didn’t have serious concerns about this guy from a public safety perspective,” Sandweg says. “Otherwise, in cases where they do, they absolutely appeal.”

The administration’s attempt to retroactively cast Abrego Garcia as some unambiguously menacing figure — using thin evidence and misrepresenting the legal record — is not just baseless but calculated. It’s a textbook example of narrative manipulation: exploiting the fact that initial claims and headlines often leave a deeper mark than any later correction ever will.

Without Due Process, There Are No Rights

Most importantly, all of this is beside the point. Even if every one of the admin’s claims were true, even if Abrego Garcia had an extensive criminal history, even if it were later proven that without a shadow of a doubt Abrego Garcia was the literal head of MS-13 — it would not change the underlying constitutional principle.

Due process is not earned by virtue; it is guaranteed by law.

If fundamental procedural rights only apply to the morally unimpeachable, then they cease to be protections and instead become privileges. And once that threshold is normalized — once we begin deciding who gets rights based on whether they pass an informal character test — the foundation of legal equality collapses.

The central question here was never whether Abrego Garcia is a model citizen. It was whether the government can unilaterally arrest and deport someone in direct violation of a court order and then refuse to comply when instructed to take reasonable steps toward undoing that action. That’s it. That’s the crisis.

But that legal clarity has been lost in the fog: a performative concern for “safety,” a tactical invocation of victims, and a total refusal to acknowledge that the very system being bypassed is the one designed to adjudicate those questions.

This is not just misdirection — it’s erosion. The erosion of institutional norms, of judicial authority, and of the public’s understanding of what courts are for in the first place.

Furthermore, this isn’t an action taken in a vacuum. Abrego Garcia is just the most well-known name of the hundreds of people sent to CECOT without being able to plead their case in front of a court.

In early April, 60 Minutes reported on 238 Venezuelan migrants who were deported from Texas to CECOT.

The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law allowing the Executive to expand their deportation/removal authority during times of war or invasion2 — to justify these deportations, labeling the individuals as terrorists and violent gang members.

However, internal government documents obtained by 60 Minutes revealed that an overwhelming majority (75%) of these deportees had no apparent criminal convictions or charges in the U.S. nor abroad.3 ​

One of these deportees was Andry Hernández Romero, a 31-year-old Venezuelan makeup artist and gay man who had fled his country due to persecution for his sexual orientation and political views.

Despite passing his credible fear interview — the legal threshold to have his asylum claim heard — he was arrested and placed on a flight to El Salvador. Like Abrego Garcia, Hernández had not been convicted of any crime. He simply disappeared from the system entirely.

This wasn’t a glitch. It was a tactic. And it lays bare a disturbing logic: if you deny someone the opportunity to prove their case — if you label first and adjudicate never — you can act with impunity while maintaining a public-facing veneer of justifiability.

But without due process, guilt is never meaningfully established to begin with.

Rights become rewards — selectively bestowed and easily withdrawn. The courtroom is replaced by the press conference. The standard of proof supplanted by the standard of public opinion.

Just consider the implications: if all it takes to bypass someone’s procedural rights is the government labeling them as undocumented or affiliated with a gang, what’s to stop the same from being done to a citizen?

What guardrails exist to prevent authorities from simply asserting that someone is a non-citizen and deporting them before they ever get a chance to challenge that claim? If due process isn’t guaranteed upfront, then the opportunity to prove one’s legal status — or even one’s identity — can be erased before it ever begins.

That’s not rule of law — it’s political theater, where the narrative takes the stand instead of the accused.

Judicial Resistance Amid a Crisis of Enforcement

It’s not that the administration doesn’t understand what the courts have said. It’s that they understand the situation perfectly well — and have determined that they can get away with just pretending otherwise without major consequence.

And unfortunately, they might be right.

There’s no federal marshal on standby to drag Abrego Garcia and others out of CECOT. No constitutional cavalry waiting in the wings to enforce the spirit of the court’s order. Just a gaping hole where enforcement should be and a political culture increasingly numbed to the stakes of that vacuum.

Not to say no efforts are being made to hold the admin to account. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, several actions have been taken in retaliation to this bout of executive lawlessness and disobedience of judicial authority.

For its part, the Supreme Court came out with a surprise 7–2 emergency order just before 1 am on April 19th — instituting a temporary pause on any further deportations of Venezuelan nationals being held in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act until further order from the court.

Judge Paula Xinis — the federal judge who initially ordered Abrego Garcia’s return — has continued to press the administration for clarity and compliance.

Far from retreating after the Supreme Court’s partial remand, she made clear she intends to hold the government to its word, demanding sworn updates on efforts to secure Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and ordering sworn testimony from administration officials to assess whether they are complying with her directives.

When the Trump admin attempted to file for appeal in response, they were met with a unanimous 3-judge panel appellate decision reaffirming Judge Xinis’s mandate.

The opinion — penned by U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III (a highly respected conservative judge appointed to the 4th circuit under President Reagan in 1983 and once considered for the Supreme Court by President Bush Sr.) — was blistering towards the government’s position.

Wilkinson left no ambiguity: this was not a hard case. It was not a close call. It was, in his words, “a grievous violation of due process.”

It wasn’t just the particulars of Abrego Garcia’s case that demanded a response. Wilkinson stressed that the integrity of the system itself was on the line. “The rule of law is not an aspiration,” he wrote. “It is a command.”

A command that binds not only individuals but the government itself — even, and especially, when obedience proves inconvenient.

• “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.
• Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Elsewhere, the gloves have come off. In a related case, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. District Court issued a scathing contempt finding after the administration violated his own injunction blocking mass deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg similarly did not mince words: he found “probable cause” that the government willfully disobeyed his order and even cited public statements/posts by officials suggesting they took pride in doing so.

• “As this Opinion will detail, the Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt. The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
• “The Court was “unsure” how answering its five questions could “jeopardize state secrets” — Defendants, after all, had publicly shared images of the flights making them trackable and had still not claimed that the questions bore on any classified information, see ECF №38 (Mar. 19 Order) at 2 — but nonetheless sought to accommodate their last-minute request. It gave them yet another day either to answer the five questions or to invoke the state-secrets doctrine.”

He ordered the administration to either reverse course and allow the deported individuals to seek habeas review in U.S. courts, or identify the specific officials responsible for violating the order. If they failed to do either, he made clear he was prepared to escalate — to hold individuals personally accountable and potentially refer them for criminal prosecution.

It was a rare and forceful assertion of judicial muscle, and one that underscored just how extraordinary the moment has become.

And yet even these efforts face a structural bottleneck. Judges can issue orders. They can scold, admonish, and even find contempt. But they cannot unilaterally enforce those orders without an executive branch willing to act — or a Congress willing to intervene.

That’s the rub. The judiciary is, at its core, a co-equal branch in theory, but in practice it depends on the willingness of other institutions to carry its rulings into the real world.

When the executive branch chooses to ignore or reinterpret judicial rulings, the balance of power tilts precariously. The framers of the Constitution envisioned a system of checks and balances, where each branch would hold the others accountable. Yet, in this scenario, that system falters.​

Checks Without Balances

Which brings us to Congress — or more accurately, its relative silence.

The current Republican majority, by and large, has aligned itself so closely with Trump that the prospect of serious institutional pushback feels remote — seemingly happy to abandon its own institutional authority in a display of all but total obedience to the Executive.

This should be the moment when the legislative branch steps in, reasserts its oversight authority, and makes clear that judicial defiance by the executive will not stand.

In a saner political ecosystem, a Supreme Court ruling — especially one affirming basic due process protections for someone the government has admitted it wrongfully deported — would have been a political firestorm if ignored. One so large it would force even this Congress to act and the executive branch to acquiesce.

But in the current landscape, the legislative check has largely become a mere spectator to institutional collapse.

There are clear reasons for this hesitance among congressional Republicans.

President Trump has strong sway over the sentiments of Republican voters nationwide, and Elon Musk has made it clear that any Republican member of Congress who dares act in opposition to the current administration’s will would face primary challengers funded by the world’s richest man.

Those Republican figures who were willing to stand in obstinance to Trump’s excesses (figures like Adam Kinzinger, Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney) have — for the most part — either been purged from power, chosen not to seek re-election, or been rendered politically isolated within their own party.

What remains is a movement increasingly defined not by any particular philosophy of governance, but by personal loyalty to one man’s whims — no matter how brazen the defiance of institutional norms or constitutional limits.

When accountability depends on those least inclined to seek it, enforcement becomes not just unlikely, but structurally impossible.

And that is what makes this moment so dangerous. The courts are resisting — but they are resisting without reinforcements.

A system built on separation of powers begins to unravel when one branch refuses to be bound and the others decline to respond. We are watching as that unraveling happens in real time.

There’s a well-known speech by conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in which he warned that the true safeguard of American liberty is not found in the Bill of Rights alone, but in the structure of the Constitution itself.

“Every banana republic has a Bill of Rights,” Scalia famously remarked.

What makes American governance exceptional, in Scalia’s telling, was not the lofty articulation of rights but the design of a government built to restrain itself: the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the structural commitment to preventing the consolidation of authority.

The genius of the American system was not the promises it made but the architecture it built to keep those promises enforceable. Destroy that structure, and the promises eventually mean nothing — with documents like our Bill of Rights degraded to nothing more than a “parchment guarantee.”

What is at stake here is more than the fate of one man or even a group of wrongfully deported asylum seekers. It’s the viability of the rule of law itself — whether it still functions as a restraint on power or merely as performance art in the face of a government that no longer feels bound by rulings it doesn’t like.

Because when the executive can act first, ignore second, and outlast accountability third — what we are left with is not co-equal governance, but unilateralism in all but name.

We’ve reached an inflection point, one in which the current administration has developed an open contempt for judicial oversight and has come to expect that the political cost of flaunting that authority will be largely negligible.

Unless that changes, Abrego Garcia’s case will not be an exception. It will be the new normal.

As when such impunity is allowed to stand, crisis is no longer on the horizon.

It has already arrived.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Constitutional Crisis and The Assault on Due Process was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lately, I’ve found myself circling a particular kind of conversational discomfort — one that’s hard to name, but instantly recognizable.

You’re in a dialogue — ostensibly — words are exchanged, points are made, and yet something feels off. Not just disagreement, but misalignment.

Like the two of you aren’t just arguing different sides — you’re playing different games entirely. This isn’t a new feeling, exactly. But it does feel more common now. More ambient. More structural than incidental.

I’ve started noticing it not just in contentious debates, but in interviews, comment sections, panel discussions, even everyday disagreements with people I otherwise trust. A sense that something essential has been dropped — some baseline commitment to the project of mutual understanding.

In trying to put language to this dynamic, I kept coming back to two seemingly unrelated concepts that, when placed side-by-side, ended up shedding quite a bit of light for me: Paul Grice’s Maxims of Conversation, and the idea of “bad faith”.

Grice’s concept, originally developed in the mid-1970s, proposes that everyday conversations rely on an implicit agreement between participants — an unspoken contract that we’re all here, more or less (in good faith) trying to be understood.

This tacit agreement plays out in the form of four maxims:

1. Quantity: Say enough to be informative, but not so much that it’s overwhelming.
2. Quality: Say only what you believe to be true and have a reasonable basis for believing it.
3. Relation: Stay relevant to the topic at hand.
4. Manner: Be clear, orderly, and unambiguous.

Sometimes those violations are playful or poetic. We flout the Maxim of Quantity in storytelling for suspense. Or bend Manner to be ironic or layered. But other times, those same violations feel like gaslighting. The rhythm of conversation continues, but its integrity quietly implodes.

Which brings us to the subject of “bad-faith.” The term has become a fairly common accusation in contemporary discourse — sometimes aptly applied to individuals engaging in conversation while operating under fundamentally deceptive premises, and sometimes… not (we’ll get back to this).

Engagement in “bad-faith” is not as simple as mere dishonesty. It’s pretending to participate in mutual understanding while actually pursuing a different agenda entirely — a quiet rejection of the norms that make discussion possible in the first place.

You’re not talking to explore, you’re talking to win. Or deflect. Or disrupt. And once you start looking for the signals of this kind of behavior, you begin to see it everywhere.

A politician gets asked a direct question and responds with a completely unrelated talking point — but says it smoothly enough that it sounds like an answer. A social media user posts something inflammatory, then retreats behind irony or “just asking questions” when challenged. A cable news segment invites “debate,” but structures the entire exchange to reward conflict over clarity.

On paper, it all looks like communication. But the terms of engagement have quietly changed. The Gricean contract has been shredded.

And when that happens, the term loses its analytical usefulness and starts to function more like a conversational nuke. Once it’s invoked, the possibility of mutual understanding tends to disintegrate.

Even more ironically, loose or opportunistic claims of “bad-faith” are often themselves deployed by the very actors the term is meant to identify. It’s one of the more sophisticated tools in the rhetorical arsenal of actors who perform good-faith engagement while actually undermining it.

By accusing others of malevolent intent — often based on ambiguous or misinterpreted moments — they can reframe ordinary confusion, emotional response, or even honest mistakes as evidence of malicious design.

They may be technically following the structure of dialogue — taking turns, using logical-sounding language, appearing calm and composed. But underneath, they’re playing a different game. One where the goal isn’t mutual understanding, but conversational disruption and rhetorical dominance.

The moment you sense that shift — when you realize the other person isn’t trying to understand but to trap, exhaust, perform for their own amusement, or play to the interests of some third party — you start to understand why so many public conversations can feel so broken.

The breakdown isn’t just ideological. It’s procedural. A failure to share the same basic assumptions about what a conversation is for.

Grice’s Maxims help to explain the “what.” The framework gives us a vocabulary for identifying where conversations break down. But “bad-faith” explains the “why” of a particular type of conversational collapse.

Worse still, the very presence of these duplicitous actors — who constitute only a small fraction of participants, yet command outsized visibility — corrodes our ability to trust each other in general as reciprocal partners in conversation.

Even when we aren’t being manipulated, the suspicion that we might be shifts the terms of engagement. We hedge more. We read between the lines. We hesitate to concede even obvious points for fear that doing so will be taken out of context or used against us. The whole act of conversation starts to feel precarious — less like a shared project, more like a liability.

And so we adapt.

We become more defensive. More performative. More combative. Sometimes we mirror the very dynamics we’re trying to avoid, just to avoid being outmaneuvered by them. Not because we’ve given up on good faith, necessarily — but because it starts to feel naive. A luxury. A vulnerability we can’t afford.

It creates a kind of ambient skepticism. One that reshapes how we read others, and how we let ourselves be read.

Even well-intentioned exchanges can become haunted by this possibility: “Is this person actually engaging with what I’m saying, or just waiting for a rhetorical opening? Are we having a conversation, or are they staging a performance I didn’t realize I’d been cast in?”

And maybe that’s the most destabilizing part — not just the act of bad faith itself, but the epistemic residue it leaves behind. The way it primes us to read confusion as evasion. Uncertainty as strategy. Mistakes as traps. We start to expect manipulation, even where none exists. We lose our interpretive generosity.

Without this generosity in place, Grice’s Maxims begin to fail us. They rely on a kind of mutual interpretive charity: the idea that when someone violates a norm, there’s probably a reason, and we should try to figure out what it is. But the presence of “bad-faith” short-circuits that logic. It makes every violation feel suspect, even when it isn’t.

This all leads us to the dilemma that’s been plaguing my mind.

On the one hand, we need tools for identifying when cooperative principles are being exploited — when someone is gaming the norms of conversation rather than participating in them.

We become bad conversational partners ourselves — more interested in diagnosing insincerity than in building understanding.

This creates a malformed system of incentives when it comes to functional communication. Incentives that — if not addressed — threaten to tear apart the shared canvas by which the public aims to conversate with one another despite holding different beliefs and ideologies.

In fact — and I truly do hope this is just the doomer in me talking — it’s possible we’ve already long passed that threshold, left scattered across disparate uncommunicable worlds.

A reality where building bridges of understanding starts to feel more and more like a Sisyphean task.

So, what’s the antidote? How do we remain alert to bad faith without becoming paranoid? How do we recognize when someone is undermining the conversation without abandoning our own commitment to it?

I don’t know if there’s a clean answer. If I did, I’d probably be busy receiving the Nobel Peace prize or something.

But maybe the first step is just naming the dynamics clearly — not just pointing fingers at bad actors but recognizing how their strategies distort the broader landscape of public discourse.

And how easy it can be, even unintentionally, to adopt those same patterns ourselves.

Because the truth is, bad faith isn’t just out there, among the trolls and pundits and political operatives. It’s a communicative posture any of us can slip into — especially when we’re tired, defensive, or trying to win an argument rather than understand a perspective.

Part of the work, then, is learning to spot the difference between disagreement and disalignment. Between someone who sees the world differently and someone who isn’t playing by the same conversational rules at all.

Between a messy, human exchange and a hollow performance of dialogue designed to exhaust rather than illuminate.

If we can do that — if we can start recognizing not just the content of a conversation, but its underlying commitments — we might have a better shot at preserving the kind of dialogue that’s still worth having.

Even now.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Some Thoughts On “Bad-Faith” and “Grice’s Maxims of Conversation” was originally published in Phil’s Corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the course of doing research for my more in-depth articles, I often come across a wide range of fascinating concepts that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand.

Unfortunately, many of these ideas don’t make it into the final piece, despite me finding them rich with substance and worthy of engagement. So, I figured I’d start sharing a series of shorter, more informal, regular posts exploring some of these stray but compelling threads, under the collective title

And what better way to kick things off than with a niche philosophy idea surrounding choice theory (yes, I know I must be a real hit at parties)?

I first came across the framework of “Transformative Experience” (which I will refer to as “TE” for brevity’s sake moving forward) while doing research on what drives decision-making during my master’s.

The concept (originally coined by philosopher L.A. Paul in her 2014 book by the same title and presented as a critique of some of the assumptions baked into rational models of choice theory) refers to the idea that certain decisions don’t just change our circumstances; they change us.

After making them, we emerge as fundamentally different agents, with transformed preferences, perspectives, and identities.

This, Paul posits, makes it impossible to fully anticipate the value or impact of the choice beforehand — because the person doing the choosing isn’t quite the same person who will live with the outcome.

In other words, no amount of research or rational cost-benefit analysis can truly prepare you for some experiences, because they’re epistemically inaccessible from the outside. You just have to go through them.

A pretty intuitive example of this concept in action might come in the form of deciding whether or not to try heroin.

Imagine you’re standing before three chains of decisions:

• In the first, you never try heroin and never experience heroin-induced euphoria.
• In the second, you try it once — gaining the euphoric experience — and then walk away, avoiding addiction.
• In the third, you try it, love it, and spiral into addiction.

From a baseline, sober-minded vantage point, one could argue that the second option is the “optimal” path: you gain knowledge of the experience without the long-term costs. A clean utilitarian transaction.

But here’s the “TE” catch — there’s no way to truly know in advance how the experience will affect you.

The very act of making the first decision along the second chain — trying heroin — could alter your preferences, shifting the axis of your identity in ways you can’t simulate beforehand and make it so that the initial agent who decided that this was most desirable path ceases to exist. Instead, replaced by a newly transformed agent who might see the cost-benefits of the third path in a more positive light.

You’re not just choosing between paths — you’re choosing whether to become the kind of person for whom certain paths even seem desirable in the first place.

Something as extreme as heroin addiction isn’t the only use-case for this model of choice theory. TE can apply just as easily to things like moving to a new country, choosing a career, or deciding to eat the psychedelic mushroom your friend swears is “life-changing”.

In her book, Paul’s go-to example was Parenthood.

And that’s the rub. When the person making the decision isn’t the same person who will live out its consequences, the standard tools of decision theory — expected utility, risk assessment, cost-benefit calculations — start to feel a bit… wobbly.

Paul’s argument throws a wrench into the idea that we can approach all important life decisions like good little rational agents, weighing pros and cons from an objective perch. TE suggests that for certain choices, objectivity is a myth — because the vantage point you think you’re choosing from may no longer exist after you choose.

This is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — particularly how the small, seemingly inconsequential choices we make every day can, over time, be just as transformative as the big, cinematic ones.

Sure, deciding to have a child or move across the world is a clear fork in the road. But what about the quieter decisions? The ones that don’t announce themselves as life-changing but slowly reroute the architecture of who you are?

What time you wake up. Whether you reply to that email now or later. The book you reach for before bed. Saying yes to a new project. Saying no to a social invite. Deciding, without quite realizing it, that you’re someone who no longer goes on long walks just to think.

None of these choices feel like they warrant a risk matrix or philosophical inquiry — but given enough repetition, they shape your preferences, your perspective, your identity. They become the scaffolding of your habits, and in doing so, the conditions under which future “you” makes choices.

Which makes me wonder: how many of our past selves would recognize the preferences we currently operate under? How many of them would look at our current routines, passions, or convictions and think, “Huh, I didn’t expect that?”

What Lewis is getting at, in his classically theological way, is something surprisingly adjacent to what Paul argues from a more secular, philosophical angle: we’re not fixed entities making neutral decisions. We’re dynamic systems, altered by our own choices, building ourselves over time — intentionally or not.

Unsettling because it implies there’s no stable, sovereign “self” sitting at the control panel, evaluating choices from some unaffected vantage point. Just a series of selves, morphing through experience, each subtly nudging the next. Which means, in a weird way, you can never fully “know yourself” in advance — because you’re not done becoming yet.

Viewing things in this way reframes the narrative of personal growth away from just grand turning points and toward a quieter kind of authorship: not dramatic reinvention, but slow, recursive self-writing.

Maybe the point is to cultivate the kind of person you’d want to trust with the next version of your life — someone curious enough to explore, grounded enough to adapt, and humble enough to admit that even the most rational choice won’t save you from becoming someone new.

And maybe — if you’re lucky — someone better.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

Some Thoughts On “Transformative Experience” was originally published in Phil’s Corner on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every so often, I’ll check out content from the tech-bro corner of the online podcasting world.

The reason being that I am deeply interested in the aesthetics of intellectualism and how the performance of thoughtfulness can serve to legitimize ideas that — upon closer scrutiny — rest on patently non-intellectual methods of knowledge generation.

Don’t get me wrong, at times, these spaces do foster genuinely interesting conversations. Experts are given room to discuss topics at length, occasionally illuminating niche subjects in ways that traditional media formats struggle to accommodate.

However, all too often the commitment to an intellectual presentation — a somber tone, lengthy discussions, a reverence for abstract reasoning, and the (frankly often self-indulgent) tendency to reference how many books one has read — becomes an end in itself rather than a marker of rigorous inquiry.

It creates the illusion of deep thought without necessarily upholding the standards of critical analysis or epistemic accountability that true intellectualism demands.

While no single content creator holds a monopoly on this issue, few exemplify it as strikingly as the massively popular Lex Fridman Podcast.

An Illusion of Depth

With a channel boasting millions of subscribers and interviews that routinely garner millions of views, Fridman’s platform is one of the most influential in the long-form podcasting space.

I want to make clear that I don’t mean to present Lex Fridman and his team as mustache-twirling villains — spending their hours hunched over in consideration of how they can fool the public into believing falsehoods.

At its best, his podcast has presented valuable perspectives to the public (for instance I quite enjoyed this interview with streamer and chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, as well as Fridman’s second interview with physicist Sean Carroll), and — at the moment — I have little reason to doubt that Fridman genuinely believes he is working in pursuit of “intellectual clarity” when producing his content.

However, the very qualities that contribute to the podcast’s appeal, also make it a prime example of how the pursuit of the intellectual aesthetics can sometimes overshadow the substance of intellectual inquiry.

His long-form interviews (featuring scientists, politicians, technologists, and public commentators) are presented with a quiet, almost reverent tone. The conversations are structured in a way that suggests mindfulness, but this structure often serves as a veneer rather than an indication of actual rigor.

A significant part of Fridman’s appeal lies in his deference to guests, haphazardly toeing the line between an open-minded approach and irresponsible platforming. Instead of critically engaging with claims, challenging inconsistencies, or situating ideas within historical and epistemological contexts, Fridman has the proclivity to adopt a posture of passive contemplation.

This is particularly evident when he hosts controversial figures, including individuals associated with pseudo-intellectual or ideologically motivated movements.

Rather than pressing them on contradictions or critically interrogating their claims, he broadly treats all viewpoints with the same uncritical tone, creating a false equivalency between ideas that emerge from meticulously scrutinized scholarly traditions and those that merely borrow the aesthetics of said traditions.

This tendency was on full display in Fridman’s January interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In it, Andreessen — who has increasingly cast himself as a public intellectual in the tech space while also self-reportedly weighing in on matters of technology and economic policy in frequent conversations with President Trump — presents a sweeping, alarmist view of government inefficiency and fiscal irresponsibility.

The podcast begins with a clip of Andreessen saying the U.S. is adding “a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days” — a figure that, while directionally referencing deficit spending, is delivered with a rhetorical flourish that prioritizes emotional impact over precision. The argument follows a familiar trajectory: gesturing toward macro-level dysfunctions while failing to meaningfully engage with their underlying mechanisms or practical solutions.

Andreessen references “hundreds of billions” lost to inefficiency and fraud, but when illustrating the problem, he defaults to a largely misleading trope. The idea that minor expenditures are emblematic of the government’s broader fiscal irresponsibility.

For instance, at one point Andreessen mentions a cavalcade of hypothetical expenses including “40-billion dollars of charging stations” that “don’t exist”:

• “And you look it up in the budget and it’s like, whatever, $500 million or $5 billion, or it’s the charging stations that don’t exist. It’s the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations, or it’s the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody and cost you $30 billion, so these boondoggles.”

What he’s referring to in actuality is the 7.5 billion in funding allocated to expanding electric vehicle charging from the 2021 Bipartisan infrastructure bill. Andreessen exaggerates the amount allocated by nearly 5 times and repeats the false claim that only “eight charging stations” have been built using that funding (in reality approximately 37 stations had been built by November of 2024, months in advance to this interview.)

This is a common rhetorical sleight of hand — pointing to a relatively small program with a magnified sense of outrage while ignoring the actual drivers of federal spending. It’s an argument that thrives in environments where ideological priors are reinforced rather than scrutinized.

We might also take into consideration Andreessen’s assertion that the Biden administration prioritized armed raids on Amish farms selling raw milk while ignoring violent crime in Philadelphia.

• “Do you remember Elon’s story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Oh, okay. So Pennsylvania is like a wonderful state, great history. It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended other cities into just complete chaos, violent madness, and death. And the federal government has just let it happen, these incredibly violent places. And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids.”

The claim, delivered with a confident indignation that characterizes so much of contemporary discourse, suggests an executive branch so misaligned in its priorities that it actively chooses to harass rural farmers instead of addressing urban crime.

Yet, even a cursory examination of the issue reveals fundamental inaccuracies. The raid he references was conducted not by federal law enforcement but by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, a state agency enforcing state laws.

Furthermore, policing authority (including law enforcement responses to violent crime in Philadelphia) is primarily a city and state-level function. So why exactly would we even be looking to the Biden admin for local level exercises of policing power?

The very structure of governance contradicts the premise of his critique — an indictment not only of Andreessen’s factual understanding of the matter, but also his civic knowledge of how our system works on a fundamental level.

Knowledge one would assume to be quite important when analyzing the macro-applications of governmental funds.

This misrepresentation is not an isolated incident but part of a broader phenomenon in which ideological narratives and slogan-esque talking points take precedence over factual accuracy.

The function of these claims is not to meaningfully analyze governance structures or policy efficacy but to cultivate an aesthetic of deep concern for governmental incompetence. It is an argument designed to feel intuitively correct to its audience, regardless of whether it aligns with reality.

This is why figures like Andreessen and other tech-aligned public intellectuals are able to maintain an aura of intellectual authority despite frequently making claims that lack a substantive basis.

They leverage the aesthetics of knowledge while selectively ignoring or misrepresenting the very structures they claim to diagnose. This is not an engagement with complexity but an avoidance of it.

Production Over Substance

It’s not just his guests who hold this tendency toward prioritizing presentation and aesthetics over substantive engagement.

In one of his more controversial interviews with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — recorded months before U.S./Ukrainian relations took their more recent sharp nosedive — a large amount of effort was put toward ensuring that the conversation looked polished and serious, yet the actual content of the discussion failed to match that level of detail.

A clear example of this is the meticulous attention given to the translation process. In his preamble to the interview, Fridman emphasized the complexity of navigating a conversation that switched between Ukrainian, Russian, and English. He noted that the interpreter struggled to keep up and lamented that translation inevitably dulled the “humor, wit, brilliance, pain, anger, and humanity” of Zelenskyy’s words.

To compensate, Fridman’s team undertook a major post-production effort, providing multiple audio overdubs in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, working with ElevenLabs to enhance accessibility. He framed this as a crucial endeavor to break down language barriers, and in terms of production quality, it was inarguably a significant effort.

Fridman also took time to emphasize the sheer volume of work he had put into understanding the conflict, describing a preparation process that involved “hundreds of hours” of study, conversations with experts, and reading several books. He compared his approach to training an AI model, claiming that he sought out diverse perspectives while adjusting for bias to construct a nuanced understanding of the war.

He cited books such as The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy and Red Famine by Anne Applebaum as particularly important, portraying himself as someone who had engaged deeply with the historical, cultural, and political intricacies of the conflict.

Yet, what’s striking is how this level of meticulous care did not extend to the content of the interview itself. The supposed depth that Fridman’s extensive reading and preparation should have provided was almost entirely absent from the actual conversation.

Rather than meaningfully grappling with matters regarding the numerous failed ceasefires, the lessons of Minsk I and II, or the well-documented pattern of Russia using negotiations as a smokescreen for continued aggression — Fridman fixated on an almost childishly simplistic notion of peace.

He pressed Zelenskyy on the idea of diplomatic resolution and spoke in opposition to the President’s skepticism with an almost single-minded determination, in turn revealing little understanding of the constraining structural considerations at play.

This was one of the rare moments where Fridman actually repeatedly pushed back on an interviewee, but the way he did so reflected a fundamental misreading of the situation. His line of questioning framed peace as a moral choice rather than a strategic calculus, as if the barriers to resolution stemmed from stubbornness rather than geopolitical realities.

It was the kind of inquiry that might work in a feel-good TED Talk but felt painfully naïve in the context of an ongoing war shaped by entrenched military, political, and ideological forces.

This discrepancy — the claim of deep preparation versus the reality of shallow questioning — was compounded by the fact that Fridman himself seemed at least partially aware of the gap. In his closing monologue, he acknowledged that his memory for details, names, and dates is “terrible” and that he focuses more on “high-level ideas.”

He admitted that this often makes him “sound simplistic” and unprepared but insisted that this was merely a byproduct of how his brain works. The problem, however, is that his approach to inquiry does not compensate for these limitations. Instead of using his preparation to sharpen his engagement, he defaults to vague, abstract, and often miscalculated questions that reduce complex issues to platitudes.

Possibly the most bizarre point of the interview came when, in a moment that epitomized the misplaced priorities of the conversation, Fridman devoted an unusual amount of time to asking Zelenskyy about Elon Musk.

Given Musk’s highly controversial positions surrounding the war which were known at the time — particularly his decision to limit Ukraine’s access to Starlink in areas key to military operations and his public musings about territorial concessions to Russia — this was an especially strange angle to pursue.

In the midst of Zelenskyy attempting to discuss the logistical challenges of war, the necessity of security guarantees, and the existential stakes of Ukraine’s survival, Fridman seemed determined to steer the conversation toward his personal fixation with Musk.

He even requested that the Ukrainian president articulate what he admired about Musk — seemingly fishing for the tech billionaire’s praises rather than engaging with Zelenskyy’s geopolitical concerns.

The result was an interview that, despite its careful production, ultimately reinforced the same pattern that defines so much of Fridman’s work: intellectual aesthetics taking precedence over intellectual substance. The translation and accessibility efforts were handled with precision, but the historical and political complexities of the war were not.

In the end, much of the interview functioned less as a serious dialogue with a world leader about the dynamics of one of the most consequential wars of the 21st century and more as a demonstration of Fridman’s brand — the contemplative, open-minded, yet ultimately shallow musings of a tech-focused public intellectual.

When Rhetoric Masquerades as Rigor

The consequences of this dynamic extend far beyond Fridman’s podcast. It reflects a broader trend in how intellectual authority is constructed in digital spaces — where expertise is both revered and resented, where knowledge is something to be performed rather than pursued.

Figures like Andreessen derive credibility not from scrupulous analysis but from their proximity to capital and innovation, positioning themselves as pragmatic thinkers unafraid to confront “hard truths”. Yet, their rhetorical strategies lean on the very same feckless heuristics they claim to reject.

Expertise is selectively invoked — championed when it serves their arguments, dismissed as bureaucratic or ideologically compromised when it does not.

This is not an accidental byproduct, but an intrinsic feature of deficiencies embedded in the digital intellectual ecosystem.

In an era where information is abundant but attention is scarce, engagement thrives on narratives that feel intuitively correct rather than those that demand careful, nuanced scrutiny.

Complex issues are reframed into digestible, emotionally compelling soundbites, and long-form discussions — far from fostering deeper understanding — often function as vehicles for ideological reinforcement. The illusion of depth, achieved through length and aesthetic markers of thoughtfulness, allows even the most tenuous arguments to assume the veneer of credibility.

The issue isn’t just that this style of discourse distorts facts; it’s that it reshapes the very way people engage with information. The feeling of intellectual engagement — the aesthetics of depth — becomes a substitute for the actual practice of intellectual rigor.

In this way, intellectual inquiry is reduced to a performance — an act of contemplation rather than an exercise in discernment. Instead of detail-oriented debate, we get grand rhetorical flourishes that mistake assertion for analysis.

Instead of fostering a genuinely curious public, we cultivate an environment where intellectual aesthetics obscure the very mechanisms that make knowledge meaningful.

Persuasiveness trumps precision. The ability to sound insightful eclipses the responsibility to be correct.

And therein lies the paradox: a discourse that prides itself on rejecting superficiality has, in its fixation on form over substance, become its own kind of shallow.

The reverence for long-form discussions, the emphasis on philosophical musings, and the reluctance to engage in direct, critical pushback do not create a more open, intellectually free space.

They foster a culture in which intellectualism is stripped of its essential function — the pursuit of truth — and repackaged into something more palatable, something that flatters its audience without truly challenging them.

This is the real danger of performative depth — not that it misinforms, but that it misleads people into thinking they have engaged with complexity when they have merely consumed its aesthetic.

The elevation of intellectual performance over intellectual practice does not expand knowledge; it cheapens it.

Originally published at https://phillinginthegaps.substack.com.

The Fridman Paradox: How Performative Depth Obscures Anti-Intellectual Reality was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past few years, it has become an unfortunately expected trend to see regular surges in duplicitous claims made against Ukraine and its leadership.

After the country was invaded by Russia in 2022, disinformation campaigns were launched — working endlessly to obfuscate where responsibility for the conflict truly lies. In fact, one of the first articles I ever published focused on these very efforts — addressing the false justification of “denazification” forwarded by Putin’s regime.

If you told me back then that years later the President of the United States would become one of the voices pushing major lies against Ukraine, I wouldn’t have believed it — especially given the longstanding oppositional relationship that the U.S. and Russia have notoriously held toward each other.

And yet here we are today.

In a series of recent remarks, President Trump has not only downplayed Russia’s responsibility for the conflict but actively shifted blame onto Ukraine, suggesting that Kyiv “started” the war and has been the one refusing to strike a deal with Moscow.

This is a lie.

A lie that conveniently aligns with Kremlin narratives, helping to undermine Ukraine’s support and sow division in the West.

The statement came in the aftermath of the Trump admin’s decision to pursue peace negotiations without the inclusion of Ukraine nor the rest of Europe invited to the table (an action which was met with international disdain ), as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s initial rebuking of the idea that Ukraine would surrender half of its natural resource in exchange for loose security guarantees and as a form of repayment to the U.S. — a proposition bordering on extortion.

President Trump didn’t stop there either.

In what appeared to be a vindictive response to Zelenskyy’s refusal to acquiesce to his demand for Ukraine’s resources, as well as his statement that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space”, Trump took to Truth Social and posted a tirade against the Ukrainian President — repeating a slew of debunked claims that have long been staples of pro-Russian disinformation campaigns.

These included exaggerated claims about provision of U.S. aid to Kyiv, false allegations about Zelenskyy’s political standing within Ukraine, and the now-familiar smear that paints Zelenskyy as an authoritarian leader refusing to hold elections.

Both Elon Musk and J.D. Vance also made public statements defending Trump’s decisions and echoing similarly false accusations — with Musk even complaining about the community notes system on the platform he himself owns “increasingly being gamed by governments and legacy media” in response to push back against Trump’s unsupported statements about Zelensky’s polling numbers in Ukraine being as low as 4%.

Ukraine Didn’t Start This War — Russia Did

Let’s be clear: on February 24th, 2022, it was Moscow who launched an unprovoked, invasion of Ukraine — not the other way around.

This is an indisputable fact that sits at the center of the conflict — claims to the contrary only serve to rewrite history and echo Kremlin propaganda.

By framing Ukraine and its leadership as undeserving of American support — the stage is set for justifying a potential withdrawal of U.S. aid, a move that would leave Ukraine exposed to further aggression.

This hasn’t just been a case of Trump and his associates being misinformed. It’s been a deliberate attempt to discredit Ukraine’s leadership while pushing a broader isolationist-oriented agenda.

Some have argued that Russia’s actions have been in response to the threat of Ukrainian aspirations to join The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

However, while there is a nuanced discussion to be had toward the role of NATO expansion and broader U.S. action in influencing the movements of Russia since the collapse of the USSR — a discussion I might touch on in more detail in a future article — when it comes to the aggression Moscow has displayed towards Ukraine in particular over the past decade, the NATO explanation falls pretty flat.

Prior to the 2022 invasion, Ukraine had spent several years dealing with a separatist war in the Donbas — instigated and supported by Russia (which had illegally annexed Crimea in 2014).

This too was not some defensive reaction by Russia — but an offensive maneuver, meant to punish Ukraine for its efforts to move away from Moscow’s sphere of influence following the 2013/2014 Euromaidan revolution and subsequent ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukraine’s parliament had actually passed a law barring them from joining any military alliance in 2010 — abandoning its ambitions to join NATO. This decision to maintain a neutral status was sustained even when a new composition of parliament removed Yanukovych from office.

It wasn’t until Russia aggressed upon them by annexing Crimea and instigating the separatist war — in turn violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and forcing the country to reconsider its security posture — that the country’s interest in NATO membership reemerged.

So, Ukraine’s shift toward NATO was — in reality — a survival strategy against Russian aggression. One that followed a historical pattern of former Soviet states seeking NATO membership not as a means to threaten Russia, but as a self-protective measure.

History has validated those concerns — Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and Ukraine in 2022 (which resulted in both Finland and Sweden pursuing NATO membership). In this regard, Russia has no one but itself to blame for countries seeking entry into the defensive alliance.

It seems somewhat strange to search so deeply for hypothetical reasons why Russia may have been interested in invading Ukraine when Putin himself has already outlined his motivations in explicit detail.

In July of 2021, an article by Russian President Vladmir Putin entitled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” was published to the Kremlin’s official website. In it, Putin describes Russians and Ukrainians as part of “a single whole” — bound by shared history and cultural ties — implying that Ukraine has no legitimate national identity separate from Russia.

Putin rejects historical claims to Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders outright.

Asserting that modern Ukraine exists only because of historical mistakes made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks who — as he puts it — “planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb” as a result of their aims to form the USSR as a federation of equal republics capable of seceding, instead of one large cohesive Russian nation.

He argues that Ukraine in its current state is the result of “a forced change of identity” and “artificial division”, with it rightfully belonging within Russia’s sphere of control — an argument eerily similar to the justifications used by imperialist regimes throughout history to absorb weaker neighbors under the guise of historical entitlement.

Putin’s piece is not a scholarly take on history — it’s propaganda.

An imperial blueprint written to undermine Ukraine’s legitimacy as a fully independent state. This is why framing Russia’s invasion as being motivated purely or even primarily by NATO expansion misses the larger picture — this war is not about NATO, it’s about empire.

That’s not merely my interpretation. It’s what Putin himself has told us — with the Russian president more recently even claiming a divine mandate, framing the invasion of Ukraine as a mission of fate and stating that “God willed it” to be so.

For President Trump to argue that Ukraine could have just “made a deal” is to ignore the fundamental reality that Russia’s demands have always been about domination, not negotiation.

It’s worth remembering the differences in stakes here, if Russia were to stop conducting its military actions within Ukraine, the war would be over. If the Ukrainians were to stop conducting their military actions, there may no longer be a Ukraine to negotiate with.

How exactly does one negotiate their own erasure?

An Obsession With “Deal-Making”, Even At The Expense of Justice

Unfortunately, that concern seems to be one President Trump is utterly uncompelled by — more interested in upkeeping his identity as a successful dealmaker and prioritizing the appearances of victory over the substance of one.

This obsession with cutting a deal for the sake of saying he did so — regardless of what that deal actually entails — is a driving feature in why his approach to Ukraine is so fundamentally flawed.

It is the same mentality that led to the heavily problematic DOHA agreement with the Taliban during Trump’s first term, when his admin negotiated a withdrawal without the Afghan government being present at the table — effectively dooming any chance of stability post-U.S. departure.

That agreement, structured more around political optics than sustainable security outcomes, paved the way for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government as U.S. forces pulled out.

Now, he is applying the same reckless thinking to Ukraine, proposing “peace” negotiations in which Ukraine would likely be forced to make massive territorial concessions to Russia.

This approach ignores the fact that any such concessions without adequate security guarantees in exchange would not truly end the conflict but merely incentivize further Russian expansionism.

It also fundamentally misreads Putin’s objectives — as if Moscow’s demands would stop with just Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and/or Crimea.

A big point of discourse has focused on placing absolute priority on getting to “peace” as quickly as possible.

While of course I agree the conflict shouldn’t be dragged out unnecessarily, I believe this “peace at all costs” mentality is fundamentally short-sighted, often being used to justify decisions likely to lead to more human suffering in the long run than if the conflict were just allowed to continue.

It brings to mind pertinent insight from one of MLK’s more seminal sermons entitled “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious.”

In it, he makes a key distinction between an “obnoxious peace” as defined merely by the lack of certain negative forces — “war, tensions, confusion” — and “positive peace” as defined by the presence of certain positive forces — “justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.”

He states in no uncertain terms that said “obnoxious peace” is one that lacks the true essence of what makes “peace” desirable — one he had no interest in pursuing:

• “I had a long talk the other day with a man about this bus situation. He discussed the peace being destroyed in the community, the destroying of good race relations. I agreed that it is more tension now. But peace is not merely to absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes it is true that if the Negro accept his place, accepts exploitation, and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be an obnoxious peace. It would be a peace that boiled down to stagnant complacity, deadening passivity and if peace means this, I don’t want peace” — Martin Luthor King jr. (“When Peace Becomes Obnoxious”)

I find myself observing a similar problem at play in discussions of “peace” with regard to Ukraine.

Technically, we could probably have had “peace” very quickly if we had offered no support to Ukraine from the outset and the Ukrainians had just allowed Russia to invade and take land, absent of any international friction whatsoever. But said peace would have been an “obnoxious” one.

One not defined by any reasonable notion of justice or freedom from oppression, but by a lack of resistance and a complete submission to tyranny.

In this way, I find myself aligning strongly with MLK’s sentiment, if such a thing is what constitutes “peace”, then I don’t want it — and the Ukrainian people haven’t seemed all that interested either.

Being open to diplomatic negotiations of peace (which ideally include strong and enforceable security guarantees commensurate with whatever territorial sacrifices might be made) is a fundamentally different matter than being open “peace” under any circumstances whatsoever.

To quote Harvard historian Niall Ferguson (who previously stirred controversy with a 2024 Daily Mail Op-Ed backing Trump over Kamala Harris), “handing the Axis an easy win in Ukraine — beginning with its partition and possibly ending with its annexation — would be to repeat the blunders of appeasement” — and as history has shown us, appeasement’s consequences can be catastrophic.

Replaying The Hits of Ukrainian Misinformation

Looking more specifically to some of the other statements forwarded by President Trump and those around him — much of it has just been putting a megaphone to claims that have been circulating around this conflict for quite a while now.

One of the most persistent claims Trump has latched onto is the idea that Ukraine is misusing U.S. aid or that much of the funding has simply gone “missing.” At a Miami summit, Trump falsely asserted that Zelenskyy “admits” that half of U.S. aid has disappeared without explanation.

The actual remarks from Zelenskyy were about the discrepancy between the aid figures discussed publicly and the amount of direct military assistance Ukraine has received.

• “So, when people talk about US$177 billion or even US$200 billion, we’ve never received that. We’re talking about tangible things because this aid didn’t come as cash but rather as weapons, which amounted to about US$70 billion. But when it’s said that Ukraine received US$200 billion to support the army during the war — that’s not true. I don’t know where all that money went. Perhaps it’s true on paper with hundreds of different programmes — I won’t argue, and we’re immensely grateful for everything. But in reality, we received about US$76 billion. It’s significant aid, but it’s not US$200 billion.” — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Much of the funding allocation has actually gone to backfilling U.S. stockpiles, Ukraine-related intelligence operations, funding American-based defense production, humanitarian aid, or supporting regional NATO operations. Nothing was unaccounted for. Independent watchdogs, U.S. government agencies, and international organizations have continuously monitored where funds have gone.

As retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg — Trump’s current special envoy for Ukraine and Russia — stated in an interview with Newsmax: “We have put inspector generals on the ground in Ukraine and here to track that money. So, we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.”

Another major falsehood Trump continues to repeat is that the U.S. has given Ukraine $350 billion in aid—according to him "$200 billion” more than Europe.

In reality, the actual figure is around $174 billion, with Europe contributing even more than the U.S. in total aid. This narrative of America paying Ukraine’s bills while Europe does nothing has been a cornerstone of Trump’s isolationist rhetoric, but it fundamentally misrepresents the burden-sharing dynamic.

Taking a look at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker confirms that European countries collectively have sent more in total aid than the United States — though the U.S. has provided approximately $2 billion more in direct military aid (still a far cry from the gap of $200 billion claimed by Trump).

What is being attempted here is a classic misdirection. By inflating numbers and distorting the distribution of support, Trump paints a picture of Ukraine as an ungrateful burden, rather than what it actually is: a frontline state fighting a war that, if lost, would have global consequences.

Perhaps even more egregious have been Trump and co.’s claims that Zelenskyy is a “dictator” who “refuses to hold elections”.

This is deeply misleading.

Under Ukraine’s constitution, elections cannot legally be held during martial law — a status that has been in place since February 24th, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

This is not an arbitrary power grab. A country actively fighting for its survival — one where millions are displaced, territories are occupied, and soldiers are on the front lines — cannot feasibly conduct a national election.

Even figures within Trump’s own orbit, again such as Keith Kellogg, have acknowledged this reality.

The idea that Zelenskyy is avoiding elections due to political unpopularity is another fabrication. Both President Trump and Elon Musk have parroted/defended a false claim that Zelenskyy’s approval rating is just 4%, a number with no basis in reality.

Independent polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February of 2025 found that 57% of Ukrainians trust Zelenskyy, and a separate University of Manchester poll put his approval at 63%.

Does this reflect universal support? No. War naturally strains a leader’s standing, and Ukraine has ongoing internal political debates. But the claim that Zelenskyy is wildly unpopular and clinging to power does not align with the facts.

Fractures in Conservative Support

All this serves to do 3 things:

1. Justify cutting off U.S. support. If Ukraine is corrupt, mismanaging funds, and led by an unpopular dictator, why should the U.S. continue sending aid?
2. Weaken Western resolve. By suggesting that Ukraine “started the war” or should “just make a deal”, they encourage fatigue and push the idea that Ukrainian resistance is doomed.
3. Bolster Russia’s propaganda. Every time Trump, Musk, or their allies repeat these claims, they lend credibility to the Kremlin’s preferred framing of the war — that Ukraine is completely corrupt, the West is overextending itself, and Russia’s actions are somehow justified.

Regardless of whether it is the Trump admins intention to do so, these are the deleterious effects at play. Effects the perception of which seem to have worn at even the large degree of support Trump enjoys from his conservative base.

On Feb 20th, Ben Shapiro (a well-known conservative commentator and co-founder of the Daily Wire news outlet) posted a video to his YouTube channel in which he expressed criticism with regard to the factuality of Trump’s statements surrounding Ukraine.

The same day Niall Ferguson — who as I mentioned earlier supported Trump’s 2024 bid for the presidency—had an article published in The Free Press, expressing substantial criticism towards Trump’s recent engagement with the conflict.

Some of Trump’s own former administration officials and political allies have similarly acknowledged the vast inaccuracies of his statements. Former Vice President Mike Pence, for instance, publicly stated that Ukraine did not start this war and that Russia’s invasion was unprovoked — a direct contradiction to Trump’s recent claims.

This isn’t to say these actions have ignited a full-blown rebellion within the party, many congressional Republicans have either remained silent or deferred to the President on the matter — with what criticisms have been levied being largely tempered.

But it seems to be the case that Trump’s abrupt pivot away from supporting Ukraine has been met with at least some degree of inner party friction worth noting.

This War Isn’t Just About Ukraine

It was in 1994 that the Budapest Memorandum was signed, with both Russia and the United States making commitments to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for them surrendering the nuclear stockpile within their borders — which had been in their possession from before the collapse of the USSR.

Russia has repeatedly and intentionally acted in abscondence of that commitment in the years that have come after. Now, it seems the U.S. may follow suit. I can only pray that we change course before it’s too late.

Since I began working on this article, Trump has doubled down on false claims surrounding Europe’s contributions to Ukraine (most recently being corrected in a press conference by French President Emmanuel Macron) and refused to call Putin a “Dictator” as he did Zelensky — responding “I don’t use those words lightly.”

He’s also continued a pressure campaign to extort Ukraine of its natural resources (pressure which Ukrainian leadership seems to have at least in part acquiesced to, though details on the revised terms of the deal are still coming out), oversaw the U.S. splitting with European allies in votes for three UN resolutions (refusing to blame Russia for the invasion of Ukraine), and squandered negotiatory leverage by publicly stating Ukraine can “forget about joining NATO.”

These actions give me little faith in any meaningful course correction. There’s a reason Russian officials and state media have reacted so positively to the U.S.’s change in demeaner — this all ultimately serves Russia’s geopolitical interests as opposed to our own.

Supporting Ukraine is not an act of charity. It is an investment in global security — one that pays dividends far beyond Eastern Europe.

Every dollar spent in military assistance helps Ukraine weaken Russia’s military capacity without the need for direct U.S. intervention. Every shipment of weapons to Kyiv is another deterrent against broader instability of a rule-based international order — a statement that you can’t get away with such egregious conduct without facing major international pushback.

America’s history as a global power has been far from perfect — in fact in some cases it has been disastrous, but that doesn’t mean the correct answer is to curl inwards and surrender our influence on the world stage to other national actors. Instead, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, acting with a clarity of vision reflective of our better collective nature.

If instead we allow Trump’s narrative to dictate policy, if we continue to fail in meeting this moment with the lucidity and resolve it demands, we will have not only failed Ukraine — we will have failed ourselves.

And the consequences will not be contained to Ukraine’s fractured borders.

The U.S. Is Failing Ukraine was originally published in Philling In The Gaps on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.