Editor’s note: In our excitement to launch Aaron’s new opinion newsletter last week, we hit send too soon. In our haste, we neglected to properly introduce this newsletter as personal reflections from Aaron Kleinman. Can’t get enough of Aaron? Read his opinion and analysis pieces, and be sure to check out the reporting of Rich Eberwein and others at Heartland Signal.
Photo: AP Photo/Steve Karnowski
Hey, remember Twitter, the website where you’d joke with your friends about what you ate for lunch and talk about what was on TV? It’s a Black Mirror episode now.
For weeks, it was allowing users to create floods of child and/or revenge pornography with its integrated AI tool Grok. Twitter has since said it’s halting Grok AI’s ability to create these images, but The Guardian found that it’s still letting users remove women’s clothes.
Unfortunately for all of the victims, the federal government is run by politicians who take big checks from Grok AI’s owner. Their corrupt misrule means the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) almost certainly won’t take any steps to enforce a law passed seven months ago that should ban this exact conduct. But states can step in and try to get justice in order to show Americans that the rule of law is down but not out.
Child pornography is illegal everywhere, and deepfake porn is illegal almost everywhere. That means states can step into the breach and sue Elon Musk for allowing Grok to create this stuff. Already, attorneys general from California, Arizona and Michigan have started investigating whether Grok is violating state law.
Minnesota AG Keith Ellison hasn’t issued a statement on the matter. (He’s understandably occupied on other matters.) But state Sen. Erin Maye Quade, who sponsored the relevant Minnesota law, doesn’t mince words: “Elon Musk’s company is violating Minnesota law every time this happens.”
The problem right now is that Minnesota’s law, like the laws in most other states, is focused on criminal liability for the perpetrators—i.e., individual X users—and not on stopping the platforms that allow for the abuse to proliferate. It means Musk can dither and wait for states to sue him for damages, with lawsuits that could take years to resolve and that won’t make a dent in his net worth.
Which is why a bipartisan bill that Maye Quade is trying to pass in the upcoming session is so critical. A ban on nudification technology would allow states to more aggressively pursue platforms like X, even permitting injunctions against accessing the site in the state as long as it’s violating the law. Banning access to X in Minnesota would do far more to change Musk’s behavior and protect his victims than any damages lawsuit. And if other states want to step up for victims of abuse, then they need to consider laws like this, too.
Though I suppose there are drawbacks. If you limit access to Twitter, then JD Vance will no longer be able to learn from the people he follows whether Hitler was right.
AROUND AMERICA
As ICE’s campaign against the people of the Twin Cities continues we’re coming up on a truly alarming moment — next week there will be two special elections in the area for vacant state legislative seats, including one in the City of Saint Paul. While both seats are safe Democratic holds, we’ll soon see if Trump has turned ICE into an effective voter suppression tool.
Pennsylvania Republicans face a potentially crowded primary for their lieutenant governor nomination (who is voted on separately from their gubernatorial nominee). One of the aspirants, John Ventre, caused a rift in his UFO monitoring group for saying Black people are genetically inferior to white people. Considering their last gubernatorial nominee was Doug Mastriano, I say he has a shot.
Photo: eBay via 21st Century Fox
Congrats to Indiana University, whose football team went on an undefeated run after their state legislature told JD Vance to go away and capped that run with their first ever championship on Monday night.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger took a laudable first step in addressing the scandal around forcing out former UVA President Jim Ryan by replacing board members who might have colluded with the Trump administration to essentially extort him out of office. But this is just scratching the surface of the issue, and the Legislature should conduct hearings on the shady conduct behind the ouster, which might reach all the way up to Spanberger’s predecessor Glenn Youngkin. It also begs for institutional reforms like having board members chosen by faculty and students instead of just the governor.
Photo: Cbaile19 via Wikimedia
As someone who has ridden and enjoyed the PRT, it pains me to read the list of bills that West Virginia will be considering this session. In addition to a lot of anti-vaccine nonsense, they’ll consider bills:
Banning legal immigrants from being realtors. Blood and soil and shiplap?
Allowing people to concealed carry on the grounds of the state Capitol. They think Jan. 6 should’ve had a higher death toll, I suppose.
Allowing the state to intervene in sectarian disputes within churches. Please read C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War before pursuing this, ‘Eers!
Encouraging CO2 levels to rise up to 5 times as high as they are today. I know the state hasn’t had beaches since the 1860s, but this isn’t how you want to get them!
West Virginia is a beautiful state, home to the greatest coach of all time, the Mothman and pepperoni rolls. It deserves better than these bills.
Kansas state Sen. Craig Bowser saw other Republican-controlled states doing favors for crypto firms and decided to make subtext text by proposing a bill that would let candidates accept donations directly in crypto.
Kentucky State Sen. Steve Rawlings offered a bill that would let states nullify federal laws. In general, you don’t want to have a law with an eponymous crisis.
Ron DeSantis hatchetwoman Christina Pushaw was an early model for a Trump 2 apparatchik; be bellicose on Twitter, have shady ties to corrupt special interests and profit big time. Now, it appears that her career may be imploding, as she aligned herself with controversial gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, though she insists that she never had a romantic or sexual relationship with him. So, typical right-wing political career.
Photo: AP Photo/Marta Lavandier
INTERNET STUFF THAT I LIKED
Thank you to my friend Ben, a semi-retired basketblogger, for cluing me into Let’s Paint TV, one of the most insane YouTube channels I’ve ever come across. Host John Kilduff will paint while running on a treadmill, taking calls from listeners, playing pingpong and taking on all sorts of other difficulty multipliers. It’s absolutely mesmerizing and even uplifting.
BOOK CLUB
Photo: Brooklyn Public Library via Vintage International
This week, Donald Trump joined Joseph Goebbels as the only men who were gifted a Nobel Prize from the actual recipient. So I thought it timely to read Goebbels ally Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil and let me tell you, it is well-crafted but dusty libertarian propaganda. So skip it. If you really want to read a Nobel-winner’s story of a hardscrabble Scandinavian trying to eke out a living, check out Independent People by Halldor Laxness instead.
HELP ME OUT
Thanks to everyone who gave me belt ideas — Popov seems like a great operation. Let’s see if they’re up to the task of holding up my pants.
As for this week, I saved the biggest news of the week for last. That’s right, we’re finally getting new episodes of The Rockford Files. But no word yet on who will play the titular Malibu resident. So who should it be? I think Josh Holloway is cool, grizzled and available enough, but I’m trying to keep an open mind here.
