Trump rewrites Dec. of Independence in appalling speech

Sunday’s Top Stories:

Trump misquotes key passage of Declaration of Independence to make it more MAGA
During Donald Trump’s combative and wildly inappropriate speech commemorating America’s 250th birthday, the president chose to rewrite one particular passage of the Declaration: “And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that!” That is not what it says. What is DOES say is that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” but seeing as Trump does not see all men as equal nor that we should have unalienable rights, it’s no wonder he decided on a different version that centers his MAGA Christian nationalism. A complete and utter disgrace on what should have been a triumphant occasion for our once-great nation.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: FBI makes insane new announcement ahead of election
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down the stunning news that Kash Patel’s FBI is dedicating serious resources and manpower to hunting for 2020 election fraud evidence…that doesn’t exist.

Trump gets nightmare news as his top impeachment witness launches run for Senate
Alexander Vindman for Senate: Alexander Vindman made history as one of the star witnesses in the first impeachment case against Trump — and now he’s running for Senate so he can hold the wannabe dictator accountable from the halls of Congress. Vindman has vowed to take on “a Republican Party that’s failing to deliver accountability and underwriting chaos and corruption,” but to win in Florida, he’s going to need some help. Can you chip in to help kick-start his run?

Donald Trump Is a treacherous, idolatrous, know-nothing anti-patriot
Michael Tomasky, The Nation: “History—in this case, through the pen of James Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to seek profit from office is abhorrent.

That’s Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

The AI industry is losing
Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At: “In April of last year, I outlined how the failure of one model lab, OpenAI, would have seismic effects down its supply chain, delivering body blow after body blow to NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, and the various Neoclouds that serve its compute. And Oracle, as I’ve noted previously, is a company that, even before the AI bubble, was massively indebted. It just so happens that, as a result of its tryst with OpenAI, Larry Ellison saw fit to twist the debt knob to eleven. Oracle’s spending has already pushed its free cash flow into negative territory — minus $23.7 billion, as of the end of FY 2026 — and at the end of May, it had $129.5 billion in outstanding debt. This doesn’t include its various lease commitments, which add up to nearly $38bn, nor the additional $260bn in lease commitments that have been signed, but haven’t actually started yet.

All of this is to say that Oracle has massively leveraged itself for the benefit of one company, OpenAI, and if that company can’t pay its bills, it’s fucked. Oracle’s existence — and Larry Ellison’s personal wealth — hinges on whether OpenAI can make good on its promise to spend $300bn in compute.

This is both the most-obvious and under-discussed part of the AI bubble — that the trillion-plus dollars of hyperscaler capex [capital expenditure] is feeding a massive semiconductor boom based on, at best, the very small likelihood that large language models will turn into something completely different. I need to state how fucking silly it is that anybody considered said semiconductor boom anything other than a brief chance to fill their boots before a global equity catastrophe so severe that the Futurum Group will be on suicide watch.

There is no cogent or rational argument in favor of continued capital expenditures, at least not one without a tacit acceptance that much of the current spend has been a waste outside of pumping equities and incubating two different large, unprofitable AI labs. Those millions of H100 and B200 and B300 GPUs are not going to usher in a digital God, they are not going to create recursive self-improvement, they are not going to be the fulcrum to adding $600 billion or more in brand new revenue to current services, and the only revenue they’re generating is compute spend from Anthropic and OpenAI, which I estimate makes up 20% or more of cloud revenues for Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Anyone investing in data centers is building speculative capacity for demand that does not exist outside of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Let me put it even simpler: those hundreds of billions of dollars of data centers are being built for no-one, and the only companies that can “afford” to pay for even a fraction of the compute are unprofitable AI companies propped up by hyperscalers.”

Pre-order Brian Tyler Cohen’s new book today!
The Day After: Some exciting news from our friend, Brian Tyler Cohen. His new book, The Day After, is now available for pre-order! The book explores how Republicans have abused power, how Democrats have failed to effectively wield it, and finally, what Democrats must do when they get power back. It’s a blueprint for progressives who are not satisfied with the status quo. Please support independent media by pre-ordering here — and grab tickets to his book tour in NYC, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, or LA.