Today in one sentence: Trump doubled down on his call to “nationalize” voting, saying the federal government should “get involved” in state elections; the Supreme Court allowed California to use its voter-approved congressional map for the 2026 midterms; the Trump administration said it would pull 700 federal immigration officers from Minnesota; the Justice Department removed a Department of Homeland Security attorney in Minneapolis after she told a judge that “this job sucks” and asked to be held in contempt so she “could get 24 hours of sleep”; the man who tried to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf club in 2024 was sentenced to life in prison; the Washington Post laid off about one-third of its staff, calling the elimination of more than 300 newsroom jobs a “strategic reset”; and 37% of voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president.

1/ Trump doubled down on his call to “nationalize” voting, saying the federal government should “get involved” in state elections. The White House claimed he was referring to the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register, however the bill doesn’t federalize elections. It also remains stalled in the Senate after passing the House. And even though the Constitution assigns states to run elections and allows Congress to set the rules, Trump said “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway.” He first floated the idea Monday in a podcast interview with ex–FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, urging Republicans to “take over” voting in “at least 15” places. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, meanwhile, said he was “not in favor of federalizing elections,” while Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called the idea “outlandishly illegal.” (The Hill / New York Times / ABC News / Wall Street Journal / NBC News / CNBC)

• Steve Bannon said ICE would “surround the polls” during the 2026 midterm elections following Trump’s push to “nationalize” voting. Democratic secretaries of state, meanwhile, said they’re running tabletop exercises to prepare for potential federal interference and mapping out their litigation, communications, and administrative responses. (Democracy Docket / Media Matters / New York Times)

2/ The Supreme Court allowed California to use its voter-approved congressional map for the 2026 midterms, rejecting an emergency effort by state Republicans and the Trump administration to block it as a racial gerrymander. The unsigned order noted no dissents and left in place a lower-court ruling that the Proposition 50 lines were redrawn on a partisan basis, not a racial one. The move also mirrors the court’s December decision letting Texas use its Republican-drawn map. The ruling keeps lines Democrats say could flip up to five House seats, potentially offsetting up to five new Republican-leaning seats in Texas. (Associated Press / New York Times / NPR / Politico / NBC News / Bloomberg / CBS News)

3/ The Trump administration said it would pull 700 federal immigration officers from Minnesota, leaving about 2,000 in place as part of the Minneapolis immigration enforcement operation. Border czar Tom Homan said Minnesota county jails were cooperating more with ICE, and he announced a single ICE–CBP chain of command with immediate body-camera deployment for officers in Minneapolis to fix inconsistent use. He added that enforcement would continue at scale, saying mass deportations remain the goal and that people in the country illegally are “not off the table.” Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, meanwhile, called the move a welcome step, but “not de-escalation.” Homan set no timeline to return to the usual force of roughly 150, saying further drawdowns depend on continued local cooperation and reduced attacks on officers. (Politico / Reuters / New York Times / NBC News / Wall Street Journal / Washington Post / The Hill / Axios / Bloomberg)

4/ The Justice Department removed a Department of Homeland Security attorney in Minneapolis after she told a judge that “this job sucks” and asked to be held in contempt so she “could get 24 hours of sleep.” Julie Le had been handling about 90 immigration cases related to Operation Metro Surge, and acknowledged failures to follow court orders, including repeated failures to follow detainee release orders. She told the court that she wasn’t properly trained for the assignment and that “the system sucks.” The judge said workload is no excuse for ignoring orders and demanded an explanation, while weighing contempt for Le and another lawyer. DHS called her conduct “unprofessional” and it’s unclear whether Le has also been fired. (NBC News / CNN / New York Times / Reuters / Associated Press)

5/ The man who tried to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf club in 2024 was sentenced to life in prison. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon imposed life without parole on Ryan Routh after a September jury convicted him on five counts, including attempted assassination and assault on a federal officer. Prosecutors had sought life in prison, citing Routh’s lack of remorse, while the defense had asked for 20 to 27 years. Cannon also added a mandatory seven years for a firearm offense. Before sentencing, Routh began reading a 20-page statement before Cannon cut him off. His attorney said he will appeal. (ABC News / NBC News / CNN / Associated Press / Wall Street Journal)

6/ The Washington Post laid off about one-third of its staff, calling the elimination of more than 300 newsroom jobs a “strategic reset.” The cuts ended the sports section in its current form, closed the Books section, suspended the “Post Reports” podcast, shrank foreign bureaus, and restructured Metro. Executives cited a nearly 50% drop in search traffic over three years and losses of about $77 million in 2023, and roughly $100 million in 2024. Publisher Will Lewis has set a break-even goal by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people with about $260 billion, did not comment as critics, including former editor Marty Baron and the Post Guild argued that the paper’s losses were negligible relative to his fortune. They warned the cuts would hollow a “pillar” of American journalism, and noted that subscribers canceled in mass after Bezos blocked a 2024 Kamala Harris endorsement. (New York Times / Wall Street Journal / Semafor / NBC News / NPR / CNN / Associated Press / The Atlantic / The Guardian)

poll/ 61% of voters say the Trump administration hasn’t given an honest account of the fatal ICE shooting of Alex Pretti. 62% said the Jan. 24 shooting in Minneapolis was not justified, and 80% supported an independent investigation. 58% said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should be removed, and 63% disapprove of how ICE is operating. Trump’s job approval, meanwhile, stands at 37%. (Quinnipiac)

The 2026 midterms are in 272 days; the 2028 presidential election is in 1,007 days.

• Today last year: Day 1477: "The American people can see what’s happening."
• Five years ago today: Day 16: "America is back."
• Six years ago today: Day 1111: An unmitigated disaster.
• Seven years ago today: Day 746: Willful ignorance.
• 9 years ago today: Day 16: Suspended.

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The Solana-based defi portfolio tracker Step Finance lost 261,854 SOL (~$28.7 million) when a thief gained access to treasury and fee wallets. It's not yet clear how the attacker was able to steal the funds, although Step Finance posted to Twitter that the theft occurred via a "well known attack vector". Step wrote that they were working with cybersecurity firms and law enforcement to address the incident.

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Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”

The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—­such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—­to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).

It’s basically an AI-generated honeypot. And AI scraping is a growing problem:

The scale of AI crawling on the web appears substantial, according to Cloudflare’s data that lines up with anecdotal reports we’ve heard from sources. The company says that AI crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to their network daily, amounting to nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process. Many of these crawlers collect website data to train large language models without permission from site owners….

Presumably the crawlers will now have to up both their scraping stealth and their ability to filter out AI-generated content like this. Which means the honeypots will have to get better at detecting scrapers and more stealthy in their fake content. This arms race is likely to go back and forth, wasting a lot of energy in the process.

If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.

Trump’s second presidential term has arrived amidst a new golden age for internet grifters, propagandists, and bad-faith hucksters of all stripes. The contours of this era of untruth have been flashing like neon signs for the past decade, constantly enticing us to engage with its impenetrable nonsense. Whether it’s gaslighting everyone who saw Elon Musk give two Nazi salutes during the inauguration or blaming the Los Angeles wildfires on the racist dog whistle of “DEI,” lies and absurdities now regularly flood our senses, having long outpaced the media’s capacity to filter them.

Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them. 

To that end, the age of corporate social media has been a roaring success.

“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”

Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.

But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”

“Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”

In the days since the inauguration, I’ve watched people on Bluesky and Instagram fall into these same old traps. My timeline is full of reactive hot takes and gotchas by people who still seem to think they can quote-dunk their way out of fascism—or who know they can’t, but simply can’t resist taking the bait. The media is more than willing to work up their appetites. Legacy news outlets cynically chase clicks (and ad dollars) by disseminating whatever sensational nonsense those in power are spewing. 

"For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire"

This in turn fuels yet another round of online outrage, edgy takes, and screenshots exposing the “hypocrisy” of people who never cared about being seen as hypocrites, because that’s not the point. Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spaces—just another pressure release valve to harmlessly dissipate our rage instead of compelling ourselves to organize and act.

This is the opposite of what media, social or otherwise, is supposed to do. Of course it’s important to stay informed, and journalists can still provide the valuable information we need to take action. But this process has been short-circuited by tech platforms and a media environment built around seeking reaction for its own sake. Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing. 

Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way.

It’s no surprise that tech billionaires like Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have rushed to kiss the ring of the twice-ascendent Trump. The marriage of big tech and Trumpworld should make clear that Silicon Valley and authoritarians share the same goal: to crush dissent by keeping their would-be opponents spinning on an endless hamster wheel of reactive anger. And just like in the classic 1983 thriller WarGames, the only winning move is not to play.

That can be a tough pill to swallow when the internet is our main window into the world, and that world seems to be rapidly falling apart. We gaze into our phone-portals, paralyzed by the trance of the doomscroll, reacting and swiping from one news article and hot take to another. Authoritarians issue frightening proclamations that may or may not be legally enforceable, seizing our attention and energy and ensuring that the process will repeat, ad infinitum.

So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?

It isn’t quite as simple as “touch grass,” but it also sort of is.

Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra. 

Here in New York City, in the week since the inauguration, I’ve seen large groups mobilize to defend migrants from anticipated ICE raids and provide warm food and winter clothes for the unhoused after the city closed shelters and abandoned people in sub-freezing temperatures. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago, where ICE reportedly arrested more than 100 people,  and in other cities where ICE has planned or attempted raids, with volunteers assigned to keep watch over key locations where migrants are most vulnerable. 

A few weeks earlier, residents created ad-hoc mutual aid distros in Los Angeles to provide food and essentials for those displaced by the wildfires. The coordinated efforts gave Angelenos a lifeline during the crisis, cutting through the false claims spreading on social media about looting and out-of-state fire trucks being stopped for “emissions testing.” Many mutual aid groups in Los Angeles have not just been helping people affected by the fires but have also focused on distributing information about how to learn about and resist ICE raids in Los Angeles. It is no surprise that some of the largest and most coordinated protests in the early days of Trump’s term have happened in Los Angeles, where thousands of anti-ICE protesters shut down the 101 highway and several streets in downtown Los Angeles Sunday. 

Some of these efforts were coordinated online over Discord and secure messaging apps, but all of them arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers, some of whom have been organizing for decades.

“For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire,” said Cross. “But we didn’t evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.”

It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.

It’s a lesson the Extremely Online Left still hasn’t fully learned, failing where its political enemies succeed. Reactionary right-wing groups like the homophobic and transphobic Moms for Liberty—which seeks to ban books from LGBTQ and BIPOC authors under the guise of “parental rights”—have claimed political victories by seizing power one public school board and small town at a time. Other reactionaries have similarly managed to take their pet grievances about diversity and wokeness to the national level by moving from online outrage to on-the-ground community organizing. 

You can d­iscourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.

We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it.

Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.