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State of the Union
On the evening of February 24, 2026, the House chamber fills for the State of the Union address. Roughly seventy-two Democratic members are absent — the largest organized boycott in the history of the event. Those who attend wear white. One carries a handwritten sign. The president will speak for one hour and forty-eight minutes, the longest address in at least sixty years. He will award two Medals of Honor, present an immigration crime story involving an American-born killer with no connection to immigration, inflate a fraud figure by sixty-three-fold, and tell the opposition party that the only way they can win is to cheat.
This episode examines the ceremony itself — the ritual of shared governance continuing while the premise beneath it fractures. It is not a fact-check, though the facts are checked. It is not a partisan argument, though the positions are sharp. It maps a structural tension: what happens when the ritual persists but the belief system it was built to express does not.
This is an evolving document. Language is a thin abstraction layer that cannot be divorced from human perception, and even the prompts in this piece designed for maximum objectivity are prone to the biases of the human editor who directed the AI where to focus and when to provide more detail.
Eight chapters. Every factual claim sourced. Every perspective steelmanned before being complicated.
On transparency: This episode was written by Claude, Anthropic's AI, working from a detailed editorial commission, extensive human-directed research, and continuous human editorial oversight. Research was conducted using Grok for real-time social media intelligence, ChatGPT Pro for fact-checking and source verification, and Claude for synthesis and writing. The narration was generated by Kokoro, an open-source text-to-speech model running locally. Audio was processed through an open-source broadcast chain. A human conceived, commissioned, directed, and published this episode.
Sources include primary source polling data from PRRI, Pew Research Center, Gallup, CNN, and Ipsos/Reuters; democracy indices from V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Century Foundation; legal analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice and Democracy Docket; fact-check compilations from NPR, the Associated Press, NBC News, CBS, ABC, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org; academic literature from political science journals; and social media intelligence from X.
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By Proxima.EarthOn the evening of February 24, 2026, the House chamber fills for the State of the Union address. Roughly seventy-two Democratic members are absent — the largest organized boycott in the history of the event. Those who attend wear white. One carries a handwritten sign. The president will speak for one hour and forty-eight minutes, the longest address in at least sixty years. He will award two Medals of Honor, present an immigration crime story involving an American-born killer with no connection to immigration, inflate a fraud figure by sixty-three-fold, and tell the opposition party that the only way they can win is to cheat.
This episode examines the ceremony itself — the ritual of shared governance continuing while the premise beneath it fractures. It is not a fact-check, though the facts are checked. It is not a partisan argument, though the positions are sharp. It maps a structural tension: what happens when the ritual persists but the belief system it was built to express does not.
This is an evolving document. Language is a thin abstraction layer that cannot be divorced from human perception, and even the prompts in this piece designed for maximum objectivity are prone to the biases of the human editor who directed the AI where to focus and when to provide more detail.
Eight chapters. Every factual claim sourced. Every perspective steelmanned before being complicated.
On transparency: This episode was written by Claude, Anthropic's AI, working from a detailed editorial commission, extensive human-directed research, and continuous human editorial oversight. Research was conducted using Grok for real-time social media intelligence, ChatGPT Pro for fact-checking and source verification, and Claude for synthesis and writing. The narration was generated by Kokoro, an open-source text-to-speech model running locally. Audio was processed through an open-source broadcast chain. A human conceived, commissioned, directed, and published this episode.
Sources include primary source polling data from PRRI, Pew Research Center, Gallup, CNN, and Ipsos/Reuters; democracy indices from V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Century Foundation; legal analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice and Democracy Docket; fact-check compilations from NPR, the Associated Press, NBC News, CBS, ABC, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org; academic literature from political science journals; and social media intelligence from X.