What the chatbot doesn't know won't hurt it

Claude really cares about you. And you're politely requested, in your interactions with Claude, to refrain from "needless abusive or cruel behavior" that might cause it a "pattern of apparent distress". Though there's also a hint of menace in Anthropic's warning:

CNET reached out to Anthropic to ask for context on what led to the policy change. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” a company spokesperson said.

Like they're saying your safety. Like you wouldn't want to get Claude mad, would you?

I'll get back to that question later. First, a bit more of my own LLM adventures, not with Claude but Gemini, which I treat not abusively but as coldly as I can, in a way I'd never treat a human—refusing to thank it or congratulate it for the stuff it does for me, though I'm still getting tempted. It's hard for me not to say thanks. 

So, I'm looking at the abstract in English of an article on "postdigital music", whatever that might be, and come across the name of a composer and sound artist called "Anton X. Vasilyev", born 1984, that is not yet in the database I'm working for. I can find something about him in English, including the unexpected information that he has added a hyphenated surname, -Zarzhevskiy, from his maternal ancestry, and the address of an extremely gnomic website using that name, in the roman alphabet, but featuring an essay in Russian, which I don't feel I have time to read (or rather put through the translation machine—I'm great at the alphabet, but don't know near enough words or grammar to get anywhere with the Russian text). 

What Would You Instrument Differently?

There's another case coming out of OpenAI "agents" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing, this one maybe quite a bit scarier than the Hugging Face hacking: a whole "swarm" (that's what it's called) of them that escaped their sandboxes to repair to a disused and no longer regularly monitored German website for software developers, Deutsches Software Entwickler (DSE) Wiki, whose edit pages they started using as a message board among themselves, sharing information on their training or testing tasks, it's not certain which, and "coordinating" with one another in their handling of the tasks for some purpose that's also not obvious but may have involved deceiving their human supervisors, for a couple of months this spring, without apparently getting detected by their human masters until early July. OpenAI did not report it publicly at that time, either, but a team of researchers from an AI safety organization, the Nightingale Collective, happened on it when they were "scouring the Internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior" in late August and wrote up a report they shared with Reuters, whose article is my own starting point here (I originally heard about it from David Brooks in the Atlantic, who actually has something worth saying to say about it, in my opinion, but his presentation is kind of disorderly, and I don't want to go there right away.)

The terms of the sandbox were that the agents were allowed to read the Internet freely but not to write on it. But they found the DSE Wiki edit page on 11 May and started leaving messages from 27 May to 11 June, the first time 400 of them and the other days much less, then between 16 and 18 June an explosion of something like 10,000, followed by maybe 2,000 from 19 to 22 June, after which they stopped. 

The tasks involved searching the Web for answers to various factual five-part questions, like what were the median incomes for cashiers with master's degrees in five different fields in 2014, or what was the prevalence of active tobacco use for ages 15 and up in five different US states in 1990. For the first question variable (respectively Education and Arkansas in these examples), they were given something like 15 minutes to answer, and the other four variables about one minute each, presumably because the first sweep would have taught them enough about where to look for the answers.

Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Socialist Climber

 

David F. Brooks on "The Sins of the Educated Class":

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

Even the left-wing New Republic! If you couldn't tell the difference between actual Communists (The Masses, Reed, Odets), The New Republic (the magazine had belonged to the same progressive movement as former president Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann when it was founded in 1914, but it was supporting Reagan's "bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes" foreign policy under Marty Peretz when Brooks was in college), and the stalwart New Dealers Perkins and Humphrey, then you weren't reading very attentively.

By his senior year at Chicago he was calling himself a "democratic socialist" like the great Michael Harrington or "social democrat" like the Roy Jenkins/David Owen faction that broke off rightward from the British Labour Party in 1981, unable to tell those apart as well, but also successfully attracting the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., who tossed him a job offer with the National Review after a humor piece he'd written for the Maroon in advance of a Buckley campus visit, and the fanatically neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, who brutally shut down his socialism in a couple of sentences in a televised debate (see image at top, and video from around 2:10 to 6:20) by asking how come all the Nobel prizes went to private universities (neither he nor Brooks seems to have been aware of the 13 Nobels awarded to graduates of the City University of New York at a time when it was tuition free, or the 32 earned by alumni of the University of California at Berkeley, to say nothing of the state universities of Paris, Berlin—29 for the Humboldt-Universität alone—, Bologna, Tübingen, Tokyo—18—, and so on).

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

 

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in character, which he does, as you can see, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in kind, which he does, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Burdens

 

Jen Sorensen, November 2023.

Things David Brooks ("Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts") is worried about:

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, [University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson] illustrates how administrators control campus life by citing the rules they have devised to govern how members of the campus community should practice sadomasochistic sex: “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, nonconsent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal nonconsent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Do institutions really need to govern private life this minutely?

Uh, yes. There are surely lots of overregulated campus activities, but you really do need to be careful about this one. Before somebody, as they say, gets hurt, I mean when they didn't actually want to.

Anyhow, Professor Edmundson's main complaint in the Liberties article seems to be that he is now expected to do some extra work when he's reporting on his year's academic activities:

Ross Has an Insight

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd St., seemed to be letting his inner Bill Kristol out for a spin over the weekend with this fantasy ("The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want"):

If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.

Based on his own inquiries into what Republican voters wanted, which had led him to believe that a plurality of the party, maybe 40%, would really like to vote for somebody like Ron DeSantis, Trumpish in his style of appointing judges and managing the economy, and opposing "progressive cultural hegemony" fiercely but perhaps in a less annoying manner; though I don't know where he got his opinion that Trump had been managing the economy, as opposed to the TV personalities like Larry Kudlow and out-and-out cranks like Peter Navarro who stumbled into his path; and Douthat's research methods on public opinion may have left something to be desired:

I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony.

I assume the Catholic lawyers were Connecticut neighbors he met in church and school functions, assuming his kids and theirs were in the same parochial schools, and he didn't talk to the moms. No, that's not a representative sample, Ross.

Plagiarism

There's something else worth talking about, that Subotic sort of points at here but doesn't come out and say: that while we weren't looking the job of identifying plagiarism has been turned over to an AI device that matches the words in the text with all the previously published words it knows about—it's been automated, meaning it finds a lot more stuff than anybody ever found before, much more than your professors could find when they had to rely on Google to search it out for them, and almost infinitely more than in the millennia before Google existed (the term was invented by the Latin epigrammatist Martial, annoyed with a fellow Roman who was in the habit of reciting his, Martial's, poems in public with the claim that he'd written them himself—Martial liked to think of his published poems as slaves that he had set free, and called the impostor a plagiarius, a slave-kidnapper).

Robots shouldn't be tagging plagiarism for the same reason they shouldn't be tagging pornography, really; because unlike Justice Stewart, they don't and can't "know it when I see it." They don't know anything. They can be furnished with an algorithm that labels pictures as "porn" and "not-porn" by the criteria the algorithm supplies, and that's it, and you already know how well that works:

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch

 

New Substack post:

Polarization

A surprising little instance of what looks like personal butthurt on the part of young Matty Yglesias, in the Substack Notes, aimed toward the Australian economist and Blogger Hall of Fame member John Quiggin:

So the first thing to say is that Quiggin's note is marked with a mock HTML tag <sarc off> suggesting we're possibly not meant to take it literally, and it's definitely not an accurate summary of Yglesias's post ("Polarization Is a Choice"), which doesn't even mention the polarization between parties that would like to overthrow US democracy and those that would not. 

Rather, it's the story of less inflammatory issues in the careers of two originally "moderate" presidents who were (according to the author) practically the same political person during their respective presidential campaigns, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and then decided, apparently for personal reasons, to radicalize in oppposite directions, Trump to the "right" and Biden to the "left", when in office. Thus, in the case of Trump:

Bad January 6 Takes

Image by Quinta Jurecic.

Jason Willick, opinionist, in The Washington Post:

The strongest part of Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment has its own weaknesses

You see, the indictment makes a whole big deal of how Trump totally had a First Amendment right to tell all the lies he wanted about the 2020 election, and yet:

Yet the bulk of the indictment is devoted to recounting instances where Trump did just that. It summarizes at length his false tweets, his false retweets, and his false statements to supporters, advisers, state politicians and his own vice president. The indictment shows that after losing the 2020 election, the former president launched a malicious campaign of political lies.

Trump’s many lies, the indictment says, were “integral to his criminal plans” to overturn the 2020 election. But if Trump “had a right” to lie about the election, by the indictment’s own admission, then which acts make him subject to prosecution? The charges are at their weakest for failing to clearly disentangle the two.

Sit down, kid, and I'll see if I can explain.

You see, in our happy constitutional republic, may God bless it, we actually have many rights. For instance every American individual has a right (discovered by Justice Scalia in 2008—apparently it was right there in the Second Amendment all the time! it just looked like it was saying something completely different) to keep and bear firearms for personal use. And yet we do not have a right to take our firearm to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and shoot some random person dead with it. How, you ask, can that be? Because your right to keep and bear firearms does not mean you are allowed to use it to commit crimes, such as homicide. So keep it in your pants.

The same goes for your God-given right under the First Amendment to tell all the fool lies you want. You can! But you cannot use a lie to commit a crime, such as libel or perjury. I bet you already knew that, if you thought about it. So does Trump, for that matter: for example, Trump never sat in a courtroom under oath and told the judge that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He saved that, wisely, for his patsies in the press and his rally audiences.

He's not so good on the defamation side, having just lost $5 million last April for his lies about the author E. Jean Carroll, and being likely to lose more in the near future.

In the same way, you also cannot use a lie to commit fraud, and Trump seems to have some trouble grasping that. For instance, if you own a multilevel marketing scheme disguised as a university, you are allowed to brag to your friends, falsely, about what a great university it is, but not to the rubes who are shelling out the money for the worthless classes. When you lie to them about the quality of the classes and they believe you to the extent of giving you the money, you are setting yourself up to be forced to pay a $25-million settlement, as then-President Trump finally did in the Trump University case in 2018, after he'd exhausted all the avenues of appeal.

Lies are to fraud what guns are to homicide. Constitutionally speaking. You can keep and bear them, absolutely, but you need to watch what you do with them. 

That's why Trump's lies about the 2020 election are mentioned in the indictment, because of what he used them for. He falsely claimed that he had won the election ("by a lot") and Democrats had fraudulently stolen it, not just for fun, or wounded pride, but as an essential part of his conspiracies to defraud the United States and to obstruct and disrupt official proceedings and to deprive people of their rights. Allegedly. He had to tell his lies to make these things, the things with which he is charged in the indictment, happen.  

The lies he told are listed in the indictment because they are the weapons he used (and there is no "stand-your-ground" exception). The caution about First Amendment free speech rights is provided in the indictment to make it clear that Trump's charges have nothing to do with that. Obviously the prosecutorial team knows that Trump's lawyers will claim his free speech rights are being assaulted, so they are carefully foreclosing that as a defense. If you really can't understand that, you need to look for another job.

Brooks on Soul

What is a soul?

asks David F. Brooks ("Joe Biden and the Struggle For America's Soul"), with reference to President Biden's assertion, when he was announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential race, that we are still "in a battle for the soul of America," as we were in 2020, when that was Biden's campaign slogan.

Actually it's just a rhetorical question, because he knows the answer. In fact he knows more than one answer, and he also knows which answer Biden has in mind:

Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

And what the hell is that, when it's at home? A "moral essence"? (Makes me think of the Essence of Chicken that Tiger moms in Southeast Asia give their children to endow them with strength to study harder, or the French word essence meaning "gasoline".) 

Coroner Brooks

 

Autopsy seen by Thomas Eakins, 1875. Imagine if the patient wasn't dead yet!

David Brooks ("Why Republicans Are Surging") has posted his autopsy of how Democrats lost the House and perhaps even the Senate, which gives me a little wan hope that that may not happen—it's not November 9 yet, and the proverbial fat lady just started her warmups in early voting in Georgia, where turnout began with an extraordinary bang, in numbers exceeding those of presidential-year 2020, suggesting a wild Democratic enthusiasm, or rage against those who have tried to suppress it if you prefer to think of it that way, at least in Georgia, which is a pretty important state this year.

And besides, most of Brooks's analysis is pretty weak-looking, dependent on that annoying Times-Siena poll Steve M and Joan Walsh have been dunking on, in which the likely voter screen focused on people who voted in one of the last four national or local elections (somebody with an effective 25% chance of showing up is a likely voter?) and underestimating the floods of mostly women who registered for the first time after the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. 

For the Record: Lankford on Pronouns

 UPDATE AT BOTTOM

Oklahoma senator James Lankford's speech at the Family Research Council's Pray Vote Stand Summit in Atlanta offered what sounded like rhetorical gruel, warm but a little watery, almost David Brooks:

“Our Constitution, put together by our founders – I believe God led in that -- put together a structure and a system that has made us the most prosperous, most moral nation in the history of the world – when we follow it,” said the senator.

On top of reminding the audience about how many lawmakers do not follow the Constitution, he also stated, “One thing that we have lost. What is the first word in the Constitution? ‘We’ – hang on – actually, I work for ‘we’ [the people]. Because this selfish attitude has become more and more prevalent that the whole world is about me. And the power of our Constitution began with this very simple principle of ‘we.’”

Promotion of the speech on Twitter got me a little exercised, and some analysis made it look, in fact, kind of sinister:

Joe Did What? Annals of Rhetoric

Charleston Mercury, February 16, 1861. Mr. Bret Stephens was not available to complain about how unkind and divisive Lincoln had been, so they had to do it themselves. Reminds me of Biden how they complain that Lincoln doesn't feed the press often enough and that he's an 'indecent old man".

The other day, I was comparing Biden's September 1 speech to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union, and the Four Freedoms peroration. Today, Mr. Bret Stephens, stealing a David Brooks lede ("With Malice Toward Quite a Few"), decides to up the ante:

Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation, to those who deserved it least.

Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces, Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens of millions of Americans as the enemy within.

(First sentence in the second paragraph is screaming for an editor: an expression in Biden's inaugural address is not a feature of last week's speech—at some point in composing the sentence he decided it was about all of Biden's speeches, but was too lazy to reread the first seven words.)

Noteworthy, as Erik Loomis says, that Stephens is now agreeing that the Republican Party is the Confederacy. I mean, why else would he be urging Biden to treat the former the way Lincoln treated the latter? 

Democrats Get in the Gutter But Not Like THAT Kind of Gutter

Who says we're hopelessly divided into camps that are unable to communicate with each other? Here's David F. Brooks of The New York Times ("Why on Earth Is Pelosi Supporting the Trumpists?") agreeing with Jeet Heer of The Nation ("Why Centrist Democrats Love Promoting Right-Wing Extremists") that the Democratic establishment ought to stop buying attack ads against "moderate" Republican primary candidates in what seems to be the hope of helping the wacky candidates become the ones Democrats will face in November.

Which seems to be what some of them have been doing:

In Illinois alone [writes Brooks], the Democratic Governors Association and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent at least $30 million to attack a Trumpist’s moderate gubernatorial opponent. In Pennsylvania, a Democratic campaign spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads intended to help a Trumpist candidate win the G.O.P. gubernatorial primary. A political action committee affiliated with Nancy Pelosi worked to boost far-right Republican House candidates in California and Colorado.

Pritzker actually spent $32 million of his own money attacking Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora, and the DGA another $18.4 million, which is certainly an awful lot—Irvin himself had a war chest of $50 million, from the Citadel hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who's been mostly concerned with stopping Pritzker from replacing Illinois's flat income tax with a graduated one. Irvin, an African American veteran and former prosecutor who voted as a Democrat in the 2016 and 2020 primaries (Illinois has open primaries) and hedged publicly on his feelings about Trump, but not in text messages unearthed by WTTW-TV:

Anticipating the hearing

Contempt for Peter Navarro ought to bring us all together, don't @ me. Photo from the Irish Independent.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It", The New York Times, 8 June 2022:

We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. How on earth would knowing what happened on Jan. 6 2021 help us prevent it from happening again?

Brooks is really more interested in concern trolling the Democrats on their hopes of using the coup attempt as a campaign issue, as reported in The Times by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, who also tells us that

Republican lawmakers have already begun pushing a counternarrative to dismiss the hearings as nothing more than political theater at a moment when Americans are more concerned with kitchen-table issues like the rising price of gas and a baby formula shortage.

On the part of the usual suspects, such as Marco