Racket News

From AI chats to the new AP stylebook to a long list of political crazes, online America is constantly looking for ways to put words in your mouth

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/22/26:

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The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would be dropping subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters over a story about Air Force One, acknowledging these could have swept up private information of reporters’ relatives. “Upon further consideration,” said Sean Buckley, Chief Counsel for the Southern District of New York, “the government is prepared unilaterally to withdraw the subpoenas.”

An embarrassing court exchange came first. District Judge Arun Subramanian announced to Trump lawyers, “Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas.” Subramanian got Buckley to admit the government issued them before exhausting investigative avenues, an “error” that was a “consequence of trying to move too quickly.” The Judge also asked the prosecutor who’d sought a nondisclosure order from another judge, Kevin Sullivan, to get up from the audience and come forward for a dressing down. “Are you going to do this again?” he asked.

“No, Your Honor, absolutely not,” Sullivan said.

The subpoenas fiasco was a concentrated dose of everything that’s gone wrong with the second Trump term. Unlike the Biden administration, whose unethical pursuit of mass speech violations was organized, purposeful, and efficient, Trump keeps dancing on First Amendment principles in haphazard, impulsive, nonsensical episodes. In this latest case involving the New York Times, the big question is — why?

Subpoenas were issued as a response to a story claiming that when Trump earlier this month flew from Ankara to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England, he went in an old Air Force One plane instead of his new, Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as “a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a tweet earlier this week denouncing the story as a leak of “sensitive defense information,” but the Times had already reported on alleged security problems with the new Qatari plane.

Even the Air Force admitted in a late June press release that the new “Bridge” plane was missing security specs, saying “the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver.” It can’t be fun for the White House to have the Times add that the plane “did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model,” but it’s not like the Times published a how-to guide on shooting down presidential aircraft.

Dropping subpoenas on reporter Julian Barnes and his family while they watched Sheep Detectives was guaranteed to create a storm of new media problems, without solving the old ones. Why do it? Why also go the subpoena route against the Wall Street Journal, one of the few papers that doesn’t seem to have a policy of avoiding stories that help Trump? Why resort to gambits like revoking Pentagon credentials and only re-issuing them to reporters who sign a loyalty-oathish document? Forget about whether or not that’s legal, who thought it would improve coverage? The reporters who objected to the Pentagon credentials business, like Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Eric Lipton of the Times, were bylined on the Air Force One stories that annoyed Trump so much later.

The best-case scenario for Trump’s re-election was always that he’d be a highway pileup on speech, stopping heavy traffic in the direction of the full-blown censorship bureaucracies that were being constructed at least in part with the aim of shutting him up. America under a second Trump administration was never going to expand the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or join the EU’s Digital Services Act, nor was he likely to increase funding to the “anti-disinformation” programs growing like weeds in the budgets of organizations like USAID (to say nothing of DHS and the Pentagon). If Trump just didn’t add new speech problems, it would have been a huge accomplishment. He’s been too thin-skinned to manage:

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The 2026 AP stylebook I just received in the mail checks in at nearly 500 pages, ten times as long as the 1951 edition, 200 pages longer than the 1977 guide. The meaning of “style” has expanded massively over the years. Once, the most important part of the book was a “libel guide,” but that’s long gone, replaced by new sections on “inclusive storytelling,” along with enhanced guidance on “race-related coverage,” immigration, AI, and other politically charged topics.

Much of AP style is still good old usage — discreet means prudent, circumspect, while discrete means detached, separate, etc. — but in the 2026 guide, you’ll find a ton of basic descriptive terms shoved into the “avoid” column for questionable reasons, from populist to typical to community to euthanasia (but dying with dignity or medical assistance in dying might be okay). Writers are advised not to use a lot of excellent words like “insane” and “demented” and “crazy” outside of quotes, on the grounds of being “derogatory,” while declaring taboo harmless idioms like “turn a blind eye” and “fall on deaf ears.” Meanwhile, a new “inclusive storytelling” section tells editors not to write about diversity and inclusivity — they say that can imply a false “norm” — but to make silent decisions in favor of stories that shine “a brighter light” on the underrepresented.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but not long ago no one would have thought of folding that concept into a “style” guide, instead leaving those calls up to editors. Now, the fight to standardize even complex political ideas has become an ingrained feature of American politics, compounded by the explosive rise in AI-generated content. Substack CEO Chris Best, with whom I’m speaking at 5:00 PM ET today — just look for us on Chris’ Substack Notes account — describes hearing complaints from readers about a content landscape not only filled with “soulless slop,” but one where readers are lured to AI-generated prose by unscrupulous humans who don’t disclose that they’re reading something “written by no one.”

I’m looking forward to discussing this issue with Chris, so please come by. It’s a tricky topic with more than a few ethical problems. In the meantime, a few thoughts about the additional layer of deception buried in a lot of this content, as a result of a movement toward jargon-loading in journalistic and official “style” guides:

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Substack CEO Chris Best published an article yesterday called, “Against Claudefishing,” in which he announced a new site tool to help editors and users spot potential AI-generated text:

We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.

He added a screenshot, so users will be able to see how it works:

There’s an obvious reason Substack would be the first platform to introduce an option of this type. The company’s business model was always a bet on the appeal of human voice over corporate concoction, which makes the gathering tidal wave of AI-generated content (as Best notes, it constitutes as much as 40% of some platforms already, with roughly one in four social media posts AI-generated) a threat to their bottom line. Substack sites like Racket are “based on trust between people,” but that trust collapses if writers start using machine helpers to feed the content monkey.

I’m going to be on a panel discussion about the issue with other Substack users at 5:00 PM ET tonight. Look at this space, on Notes, or at my Twitter account later for details. A related article is coming out here later.

Greetings, folks. Apologies for the late announcement, but I’m called away today and won’t be able to appear on “Get Lit” this afternoon. Brad Pearce and I will, however, be back next Monday, and there will of course be other content on the site forthcoming.

On Drop Site’s appalling ambush “interview” of Ro Khanna.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/16/26:

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The AI content hurricane is making landfall.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/14/26:

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The exchange below is not an interview, but a struggle session. Interviews are about eliciting information. The interrogation of California congressman and likely presidential candidate Ro Khanna by Ryan Grim, Maysa Mustafa, and Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News was not. It was a histrionic, emotional political performance dressed up as an interview.

It was bad enough that former First Look Media colleague and lead “interviewer” Jeremy Scahill’s first question was just an assertion-laden speech with a little rouge of question added, but watch what happened when he got an answer:

Watching Khanna stay upright made me glad to no longer be talking to these people, but also brought memories of what it was like to be part of this community. The progressive press has developed remarkably poisonous tendencies. It makes its showiest displays of anger, and is at its most humorless and unyielding, with allies. Much of what it does is seek out people in its general circle and demand endorsements of movement verbiage amid threat of denunciation. Those who capitulate in the belief they’re doing the right thing, like California State Senator Scott Wiener or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or (on four or five occasions) Bernie Sanders, generally regret it, finding themselves facing bigger mobs soon after.

Social media has accelerated a seeming love of group interrogation, but don’t be fooled. When you see three journalists of this type doing an interview and fifty more cheering online, it’s a pack of people afraid of one another making nervous shows of solidarity. Each knows how thin the ice is, how quickly a moment of hestitation will send friends racing to pull a Murder on the Orient Express routine with reputations, taking turns with the knife.

The dynamic is designed to move the group up a road of continually escalating rhetoric, and you won’t see a clearer example than this Drop Site dogpile, one of the most appalling things I’ve seen from this era’s reporters. Cue the madness:

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