Of all the jarring things I've witnessed on the National Mall, nothing will beat the image of the first thing I saw after I cleared security at the Army festival: a child, sitting at the controls of an M119A3 Howitzer, being instructed by a soldier on how to aim it, as his red-hatted parents took a photo with the Washington Monument in the background.

The primary stated reason for the Grand Military Parade is to celebrate the US Army's 250th birthday. The second stated reason is to use the event for recruiting purposes. Like other military branches, the Army has struggled to meet its enlistment quotas for over the past decade. And according to very defensive Army spokespeople trying to convince skeptics that the parade was not for Donald Trump's birthday, there had always been a festival planned on the National Mall that day, and it had been in the works for over two years, and the parade, tacked on just two months ago, was purely incidental. Assuming that their statement was true, I wasn't quite sure if they had anticipated so many people in blatant MAGA swag in attendance - or how eager they were to bring their children and hand them assault rifles.

There had been kid-frien …

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"I want to make a big announcement," said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn't apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who'd co-chaired Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

"I am super proud to say it on this stage," Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. "We have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort."

My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world's largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world's Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.

No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was "Code and Country": an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom pr …

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The moment the white smoke appeared above the Sistine Chapel, I immediately turned on my television, because I wanted to see who the new pope would be, and then hopped on social media, because I knew that the internet could tell me more about the new pope faster than television could. That, and the memes would be good.

The memes came first, naturally, flying in harder and faster than they ever did with Pope Francis, because the new pope was American. Not just that - Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was from Chicago, with a bio full of cultural touchstones that the American meme economy grasped immediately: Did the pope ever drink Malort? Was the pope a Cubs or a Sox fan? Was God going to intercede on behalf of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs because the pope graduated from Villanova? The next wave of information was, I'd suspected, going to be news and articles about his upbringing, pastoral history and religious stances - things that would tell the world what sort of leader this new pope would be.

And then someone I followed posted a screenshot from an X account with the handle @drprevost: three retweets, over the past three months, that linked to articles harshly cri …

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The power elites have a Signal group chat, too - and the ones that seem to be reshaping the government, according to a recent report, are the ones Marc Andreessen created to bring the American right wing and the technocracy together.

Semafor's Ben Smith published a massive article on Monday detailing an ecosystem of private, disappearing group chats between hundreds of powerful Silicon Valley figures and high-profile right-wing pundits and academics. Though Smith himself was unable to get many of the texts - they were all set to "disappearing" mode - several members of the groups shared details of the nature of the chats, some of them on the record, while other members have described the chats on podcasts and blogs.

The existence of private Signal group chats for extremely powerful people has only become public knowledge after the White House accidentally added a journalist to one, but they have, apparently, existed for years. This particular network, spawned by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen beginning in 2018, has become the backbone of the technocratic right currently gaining dominance in Washington. These chats were known for holding nothing back between its participants: …

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Trump administration senior officials are facing harsh criticism after it was revealed that they had used the personal messaging app Signal to discuss highly classified military intelligence in a group chat. The chat, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out plans for an upcoming military strike in Yemen, inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, as a participant.

Though the rest of the chat’s participants – including national security advisor Michael Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – doubled down on insisting nothing improper had happened. But after details of a second chat emerged, even harsher scrutiny fell upon Hegseth, who was a Fox News anchor prior to Donald Trump appointing him as Defense Secretary.

Further investigations revealed that he had a startlingly accessible digital presence, raising questions over whether he’s left key classified information vulnerable to foreign adversaries.

Read on below our live updates as we track the fallout from the Signal group chat.

• Pete Hegseth reportedly spilled Yemen attack details in another Signal chat
• A beginner’s guide to using Signal
• Here’s what military planning usually looks like — and why it doesn’t include Signal
• Donald Trump explains how he thinks the military strike “call” added Jeffrey Goldberg.
• The Atlantic releases strike group chat messages
• The military strike groupchat scandal isn’t going away.
• Trump officials planned a military strike over Signal – with a magazine editor on the line

A Democrat has entered the manosphere.

Pete Buttigieg, the former Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration and a presidential candidate in 2020, sat for a three-hour appearance on Andrew Schultz's Flagrant on Wednesday to discuss current events, the state of politics, and the culture wars - his latest foray into breaking outside of the Democrats' preferred "echo chamber," as he put it, and his first into the world of online, woke-skeptical bro media.

Sporting a beard, Buttigieg criticized his colleagues in the Democratic Party for shirking podcasts such as Flagrant, which conducted an interview with Donald Trump during the election. According to co-host Akaash Singh, Flagrant, which has drawn controversy for its hosts' willingness to engage with racist content, was unable to get Democrats to agree to come on the show, prompting Buttigieg to call them out for turning down the invitation. "We have to be encountering people who don't think like us and who don't view the world the way we do, both in order to become smarter and better and make better choices and take better positions, and also to persuade," he said.

Calling Buttigieg "the Democrats' secret weapon," S …

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A new report from ProPublica published Thursday showed how the Louisiana government is using TIGER (Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry), a computer program developed by Louisiana State University to prevent recidivism, to approve or deny parole applications based on a score calculating their risk of returning to prison. Though the algorithm was initially designed to be used as a tool to help rehabilitate inmates by taking their background into account, a TIGER score – which uses data from an inmate’s time before prison, such as work history, criminal convictions, and age at first arrest – is now the sole measure of one’s eligibility. 

In interviews, several prisoners revealed that their scheduled parole hearings had been abruptly canceled after their TIGER score determined that they were at “moderate risk” of returning to prison. There is no factor in a TIGER score that takes into account an inmate’s behavior in prison or attempts at rehab – a score that criminal justice activists argue penalizes one’s racial and demographic background. (According to current state Department of Corrections data, half of Louisiana’s prison population of roughly 13,000 would automatically fall in the moderate or high risk categories.)

One included Calvin Alexander, a 70-year-old partially blind man in a wheelchair, who had been in prison for 20 years, but had spent his time in drug rehab, anger management therapy, and professional skills development, and had a clean disciplinary record. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he told ProPublica. 

Parole via algorithm is not just legal in Louisiana, but a deliberate element in Republican Governor Jeff Landry’s crusade against parole. Last year, he signed a law eliminating parole for all prisoners who committed a crime after August 1st, 2024, making Louisiana the first state to eliminate parole in 24 years. A subsequent law decreed that currently-incarcerated prisoners would only be eligible for parole if the algorithm determined they were “low risk”.  

The day before several major tech leaders appeared before Congress, begging for ways to get more energy for the nascent American artificial intelligence industry, Donald Trump signed an executive order offering a solution: increased coal production.

As part of a series of executive orders released Tuesday designed to promote the rapid growth of the coal industry — opening federal lands for mining, designating coal as a critical mineral, and using his emergency authorization powers to relax environmental regulations on coal — Trump signed one explicitly aimed towards powering energy-hungry AI data centers using America’s “beautiful clean coal resources”, as Trump described it. The order directs the Commerce, Energy, and Interior Departments to conduct studies determining “where coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers,” as well as whether it would be economically feasible. 

“You know, we need to do the AI, all of this new technology that’s coming on line,” Trump said on Tuesday during a signing ceremony for all four executive orders. “We need more than double the energy, the electricity, that we currently have.”

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