The News You Need on Friday, July 24, 2026
Election fraud perfected by Putin, American democracy in intensive care, War with the Tech Brothers, in three parts.
Todd Blanche Blinks
Score 1 for New York Times Publisher AG Sulzberger and the First Amendment.
U.S. Withdraws Subpoenas Issued to New York Times Journalists
A federal judge raised questions about the government’s handling of the subpoenas, which The Times called an attempt to intimidate the free press.
Election Fraud Done Right: Putin’s Model
Meduza
Putin addresses the 23rd Party Congress of Edinoy Rossii in the TsSKA Arena in Moscow, June 28, 2026. Photo: Yurii Kochetkov/RIA Novosti
Scott: Donald Trump sees in Putin’s Russia a model for so many things—autocratic rule, suppression of political opponents, waging war for “lethality, not legality,” having a healthy symbiotic relationship with oligarchs and the dark overlords of the fossil fuels industry… and now he can study up close how an autocrat manages elections.
One of the old functions of Soviet intelligence, considerably enhanced by Putin when he assumed the helm of the FSB successor institution, was management of elections. It was critical that elections in Russia appear to be proper in order to provide legitimacy to the regime. But it was also important to manage the outcomes with precision. Similarly, it was essential to undermine elections in genuinely democratic states: this served to destroy the faith of the people in their democratic institutions and to bolster the cynicism of Russians—see, these states have elections that are just as corrupt as our own. Everybody does it. The documents Trump released following his last address to the nation include detailed discussion of how the Russian operations ran (and collect evidence that Trump and senior members of his election team actively and knowingly participated in Russian operations because they benefitted Trump).
How are these arrangements carried out?
At one stage in my career, while I served as counselor to the president of a mid-sized francophone African nation, the Russian ambassador, who enjoyed an excellent relationship, introduced a team to pitch a plan for elections management. I didn’t attend the briefing, but learned in some detail about it right afterwards. The Russians (who were led by GRU officers) had the technical means to produce whatever outcome the president desired in the coming elections, but they cautioned that the results needed to be plausible. They advised heavy presidential campaigning in specific electoral districts that had gone to the opposition in past votes. They would “flip” these districts to show inroads in precisely these districts, giving the president and his party a healthy, plausible, but not greedy majority. I recalled all this on reading this report in Meduza about Putin’s new electoral management plans.
Russia’s Presidential Administration announced in March 2026 that it expected United Russia, the country’s ruling party, to win 55% of the vote in September’s elections, with 50% turnout, according to a public statement.
Meduza’s sources in regional administrations, however, cited a different target: 60% of the vote, with 55% turnout. In June, media outlets loyal to the Russian authorities reported that the Presidential Administration had lowered its expectations for United Russia to as much as 50%, with turnout unchanged. A Meduza source close to the Presidential Administration warned the figure could drop further.
That’s exactly what happened in mid-July. Several officials and United Russia members from the Central, Northwestern, and Far Eastern federal districts, along with a source close to the Presidential Administration, told Meduza the Presidential Administration had lowered the KPI again for a number of regions.
The Kremlin now wants the ruling party to win at least 45% of the vote, down from 50%. The turnout target of 50% remains unchanged. “We’re the middle of the pack,” says an official who oversees the elections in one of the aforementioned federal districts, describing his region. “At first, our minimum KPI for United Russia was 55%, then it dropped to 50%. Now we’re aiming for 45%.”
This is the way. Trump’s SAVE America act is an effort at sweeping centralized federal election management, designed to control who is able to vote and thus to ensure a completely, and precisely, predictable result in Trump’s favor. There’s nothing odd about this. It goes on in democracies all around the world. In democracies that have all the institutions and outward appearance of democracies, but aren’t actually democracies. The German word for this, coined by the sociologist Max Weber at the turn of the century, is Scheindemokratie.
American Democracy In Intensive Care
The Guardian
Charles: Last Thursday most of the media (THKR included) was focused on the president’s televised hallucinations in the evening, about the election he definitely lost in 2020, and the nonexistent noncitizens he said were voting in droves.
But UCLA medical professor Robert B Shpiner wrote convincingly in The Guardian that the big Washington news happened eight hours earlier at the State Department.
The representatives of 60 nations were summoned to the Harry S. Truman building to hear Marco Rubio declare that the counterterrorism architecture of the free world, built to fight jihadist mass murder, must now be redirected at the domestic left. Rubio said the new transnational enemy was defined by hatred of the west, “a revolt of the worst against the best.”
But Rubio was just the warm up pitcher for the spit balls thrown by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who explicitly echoed the words and the cadences of the Nazis–the same people who exterminated many of his relatives.
Miller began by repurposing one of the best-known Nazi tropes–the idea that you can identify your enemies by the way they look. Miller said:
Antifa demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms. Their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred”, and he asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them.” He said that when the leftist protests that his rights are being violated, those appeals “must fall on deaf ears”. He urged the assembled governments to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization” And he described the work already under way in six verbs: “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute”.
Miller called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of civilization.”
The UCLA professor has been practicing medicine for four decades. He continued, “Cancer is my vocabulary, not his.”
And I know what happened the last time a government borrowed it. The Nazi state’s central perversion was the medicalization of killing: the enemy as tumor, as bacillus, the nation as patient, extermination as cure.
Robert Jay Lifton called it the biomedical vision. It recruited my profession first, and my profession answered willingly. When a government describes citizens as a cancer, it has written the first line of a treatment plan. On Thursday, the plan was read aloud, from a state department podium, in six verbs.”
One disclosure belongs in the chart. My family left Russia in 1917. My relatives left Germany in 1933. In both generations, leaving was called excessive; staying was the reasonable position. But an alarm that was right both times it sounded is not overcaution. On Thursday, it sounded a third time.
The morning’s remarks, the ones that declared a class of Americans a cancer and read enmity on their bodies, drew the attention of an ordinary news cycle: straight coverage in the mainstream, horror at the margins, and in a portion of the press, open applause. I have watched teams run to the dramatic patient while the quiet one, the one not crying out, exsanguinates behind a curtain. The most dangerous words spoken in Washington on Thursday were not spoken in primetime. They were spoken before lunch, to more than 60 countries. The official transcript records the applause.
The decedent is survived by the federal courts, still open. By 50 secretaries of state, still certifying. By a general election, still on the calendar, 108 days out. And by an electorate that has not yet been asked the only question that matters, which is whether it will accept a count its president has pre-declared corrupt, counted among citizens its government has pre-declared malignant.
In 40 years of intensive care, I have pronounced death many times. The criteria are strict because the declaration is irreversible, and so we are taught to be certain before we speak. I have also, more than once, seen a rhythm return after the room had gone quiet, when someone refused to stop compressions on schedule. This notice is filed in the knowledge that pronouncements can be premature. It is filed in the fear that this one is not.
H/t: Clara Bingham
War with the Tech Bros I: The EU Strikes Back
Financial Times
Scott: The EU has now imposed its long anticipated near €1 bn fine on Google for systematic violation of EU law governing the corrupt manipulation of cyberspace. The award has to do with commercialization of logarithms so as to steer subscribers unwittingly into the hands of Google and its commercial partners.
But the tech bros have a strategy for fighting back, and it is, essentially corruption. At its essence is the pact the tech bros struck with Trump when they flipped to support his return to the White House in 2024. The core of this bargain was that Trump would ratchet down regulatory oversight of their projects domestically, rolling back enforcement efforts already underway, and would go to bat aggressively against foreign enforcement and oversight efforts, particularly the EU, which the tech bros see as a nemesis largely beyond their influence and reach.
The Google fine presents a prime test of the pact. In the coming days, we can expect Trump to attack the EU through various voices and with various theories. None of them will in any way address the essence of the EU findings, because the tech bros have no plausible response to them… and because the EU is protecting consumers, and doing things that help US consumers as much as those in Europe. So we will be flooded with nonsense about “free speech” and anti-American prejudices, tariffs will be threatened and imposed and other retaliatory measures will be announced. Stand by for the signature Trump blow back.
The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890mn for breaching the bloc’s digital rule book, while threatening to impose daily fines if the search engine company does not abide by its rules.
Brussels on Thursday said Google gave preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in its search engine.
It also said Google prevented app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users in distribution channels of their choice, including third-party app stores. The company was fined €460mn for the search breach and €430mn for the steering issues, and will have 60 days to propose solutions or face potential periodic fines. The new action against Google comes after antitrust regulators fined the company more than €8bn between 2017 and 2019.
“This is serious enforcement,” said EU competition chief Teresa Ribera. “It is quite a strong message to Google.”
War with the Tech Bros II: Space Data Centers Draw Unwelcome Attention
The Guardian
Scott: The tech bros approach to Data Centers is pretty simple—you pursue them using a special vehicle that disguises your control over the project; you quickly and quietly cut a deal with local government authorities (preferably in Texas or some other ruby red state) under which local consumers are forced to subsidize your use of power, water and other resources; you fund a large PR campaign claiming that your project is good for the earth, society and will cure erectile dysfunction. James Talarico recently offered a pretty trenchant discussion of the whole approach and the problems it raised—which of course got negligible attention from the corporate media, now largely in the hands of the tech bros.
Now the space cadet tech bros, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are getting unwanted attention from analysts examining their plans for space data centers. The Guardian reports.
Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.
Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.
Some scientists fear the pollution could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, or help further destabilize the planet during the climate crisis. The pollution could also end up back on Earth, and millions of satellites would create a major source of light pollution.
The petition submitted to the FCC calls for a pause on new licenses for space data center projects, arguing that the plans “violate federal law”.
The datacenter companies “describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms”, the petition states. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Northrop Grumman’s Mission Robotic Vehicle and three Mission Extension Pods spacecraft lifts off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on 21 July. Photograph: Jennifer Briggs/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
The petition was filed by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit, the Earthjustice legal non-profit, and the DarkSky International non-profit, which works to protect the sky from light pollution.
War with the Tech Bros III: Elon Musk Does a Victory Lap—That’s One More British Government Down
The Times
Elon Musk chats with Rishi Sunak at an AI Safety Summit in 2023. Photo: Tolga Akmen/EPA
Scott: As readers of the Epstein files learned, Elon Musk has a passionate hobby which he has pursued with many of his Epstein confrères like Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel and Peter Mandelson—toppling British governments—Tory or Labour, doesn’t matter. He has pursued this in collaboration with local English rabblerousers, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson most prominently.
And his favorite vehicle is racially tinged hysteria and incitement to riot, for which he uses his X.com platform. Now we learn that he hasn’t visited the UK… not since English prosecutors started studying his potential criminal liability for incitement of riots in the summer of 2025 and recently in the arson pogroms in Belfast, in which his words and his social media platform played a central role.
Elon Musk has said there will be a “reckoning” in the UK but admitted he has not been to the country for “a few years”.
When questioned in an interview about previous comments that the UK was heading for a “civil war” due to the rising Muslim population, the founder of SpaceX and the boss of Tesla said: “If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning.”
Musk, who became the world’s first trillionaire after the float of SpaceX in the US last month, said he had been to the UK “literally a hundred times”. Asked when the last time was, he said: “It’s literally a few years ago.”
Asked why he was motivated to make such pronouncements, Musk said: “My partner is half-Indian and I have four children with her. One of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I’m not racist.” Strider, one of Musk and Shivon Zilis’s twin sons, has the middle name Sekhar in tribute to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel laureate.
No one can reasonably state that Elon is a racist or an anti-Semite. Why the very name “Elon” itself is Hebrew. But Elon does believe fervently in the inherent supremacy of the white race; it’s part of his South African upbringing.
The Large Magellanic Cloud
Image Credit & Copyright: Monica Mesa
Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)
Explanation: Have you ever seen another galaxy with your own eyes? The featured image shows the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the closest neighbors of our Milky Way. If you are anywhere south of latitude 20° N (but the further south, the better), you can see it with the unaided eye if you go to a dark sky location, away from big cities and light polution. It is a dwarf irregular galaxy about 163,000 light-years away, and a member of our Local Group of galaxies. Despite being small, with a total mass approximately equivalent to 10% - 20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the LMC is very actively forming stars. This is likely due in part to the gravitational push and pull of tides caused by the Milky Way on the LMC. Some astronomers have predicted that it will collide with the Milky Way in in about 2 billion years.
Your Online Moment of Zen
Le Lit
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
1894, approximately.
Oil on cardboard, mounted on wood, 21.1” x 27.6”
In the 1890’s Toulous-Lautrec often lived in Paris brothels, for weeks or months.
