He's a lying convicted felon

 

When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw

 When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw

Dec. 28, 2025

By Brian Groh

Mr. Groh is writing a book about the disappearance of a man in Lawrenceburg, Ind.

Some of the best career advice I’ve received didn’t come from a mentor — or even a human. I told a chatbot that A.I. was swallowing more and more of my work as a copywriter and that I needed a way to survive. The bot paused, processing my situation, and then suggested I buy a chain saw.

This advice would have seemed absurd back when I lived in Washington, D.C., in a dense neighborhood of rowhouses. But for the past 25 years, I’ve lived in Lawrenceburg, Ind., a small, working-class town where my grandparents once ran a bakery.

After my widowed grandmother died, I wanted to be closer to family and to live inexpensively while I wrote a novel. So I moved into her empty farmhouse on a hill overlooking the Ohio River, several smokestacks and the modest grid of downtown. Taxes from a casino help keep our Main Street looking quaint. But beneath that appearance lies a dark, familiar story: After factory jobs disappeared, neighbors without college degrees began dying in disproportionate numbers. In 2017, as opioid deaths reached a record high nationwide, a local radio station, Eagle Country, reported that county residents were “taking their own lives at a startling rate.”

Preoccupied with my challenges and those of the people I cared most about, I rarely gave much thought to this crisis. For most of my adult life, I wrote nonfiction and novels, making ends meet as a freelance copywriter. I assumed I was protected from the outsourcing and automation that had left so many of my neighbors unmoored.

Over time, however, marketing departments began hiring contractors overseas for a small fraction of my rate. Then they turned to artificial intelligence, which could spit out something good enough — or even exceptional — in seconds.

Maybe I should have seen it coming. I had hired a woman in the Philippines to do transcription work, but once A.I. proved just as capable, I began using the transcriptionist less often, then not at all. When my own work was being replaced, though, I felt shocked and ashamed. I was like a factory worker who had watched manufacturing jobs disappear for years yet, after decades on a production line, still couldn’t believe that he, too, was being let go.

A new and disquieting thought confronted me: What if, despite my college degree, I wasn’t more capable than my neighbors but merely capable in a different way? And what if the world was telling me — as it had told them — that my way of being capable, and of contributing, was no longer much valued? Whatever answers I told myself, I was now facing the same reality my working-class neighbors knew well: The world had changed, my work had all but disappeared, and still the bills wouldn’t stop coming.

And so it was that one anxious night, after staring at the due date for my property tax, I asked a chatbot what it thought would be the best work for me, exactly the way — if I’d had more money — I might have sought help from a counselor: I explained my work experience, where I lived and how urgently I needed income.

Of the options it provided, cutting and trimming trees for local homeowners was listed as No. 1.

I asked if that was seriously my best option.

“Yes,” the bot wrote. “Based on your situation, skills and urgent need for income, tree work sales is almost certainly your fastest path to real money.”

It told me what equipment I’d need, where to buy it, which neighborhoods to canvass, what times of day to knock on doors and even the nearest landfills where I could drop off brush.

Never mind the irony of taking career advice from the kind of machine that was replacing me. I felt increasingly hopeful. I love being outdoors, and soon I discovered I loved the clarity of the work. Unlike with copywriting, clients could never ask me to do the job over in a different way. The dead tree they’d wanted gone was now gone. And seeing them happy, handing me money, always made me happy, too.

Every so often, in a client’s eyes, I thought I caught a flicker of condescension — the kind that confuses education with moral virtue and people’s income with their worth. But it didn’t bother me much. I’d been guilty of that perspective myself, and the more I talked with my neighbors, the more deeply I knew it was wrong. On good days, I earned more doing tree work than I ever had writing copy. And after decades of staring at a computer screen, moving only to peck a keyboard, it felt invigorating to cut through logs and wrestle branches, breathing deep lungfuls of open air.

At 52, however, I sometimes found the work challenging. When I began doing it full time last spring, I was often sore for days straight. I told myself that by stretching more in the mornings or perhaps investing in lighter equipment, I could make it sustainable. Gradually, a pain settled in one elbow: a dull ache when I gripped the chain saw.

One afternoon, while I was knocking on doors, a man stepped onto his porch, shirtless, and pointed to the Bradford pears in his yard. “I paid an old friend to cut these trees,” he said. “He did a little, but then he killed himself.”

In that moment, I saw before me — with an inner tremor — the path that too many of my neighbors had taken. Without steady, decently paying employment, they took on physically demanding day labor, got hurt, relied on painkillers and slid into a downward spiral.

My chatbot, with its relentless optimism, had failed to mention this possibility. When the pain in my arm made it impossible to work a full day, I often found myself in my living room, scrolling for jobs on my phone. For years, politicians and pundits had told displaced factory workers to retrain and adapt. I’d done that once already, and now, if I didn’t heal soon, I’d have to try something else. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but at night, kept awake by the throbbing in my arm, I sometimes wondered: What new skill should I spend months — maybe years — learning? And how long before A.I. could do that, too?

My arm still hasn’t healed. And recently while tearing out roots, I badly injured my back. A neighbor offered me prescription painkillers to help me get through the work. And I’m writing this, at least in part, to resist taking more of them. Even when I recover, I’m not sure how long this solution will last. I hope I’ll be able to get back to cutting trees for longer hours. But I suspect I’ll soon face increasing competition, as many people — especially recent college graduates — look for ways to make money that A.I. can’t yet replace.

In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all.

How the Supreme Court’s Judicial Sanewashing Wrecked the Legal System

 

Erin M. Carr/

January 1, 2026

How the Supreme Court’s Judicial Sanewashing Wrecked the Legal System

The Roberts court’s reality distortions have thoroughly disrupted the law, facts, and democracy.

 

Last fall, in the run-up to the presidential election, a new phrase began to circulate. “Sanewashing” emerged as a term to describe the media’s coverage of Donald Trump, which critics claimed made the rambling, often incoherent statements of the then-wannabe second-term president appear more rational than they actually were. Some argued this was contributing to the “erosion of our shared reality and threaten[ing] informed democracy.”

We’ve now been collectively living in a sanewashed political and legal landscape for nearly a year. For that, we have the Roberts court to thank.

While its popular origins lie primarily in politics, the sanewashing phenomenon is by no means limited to the political sphere. Over the past two decades, the Roberts court has pioneered and perfected the practice. Sanewashing—defined as “attempting to minimize or downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public”—has become a prominent, if entirely underappreciated, feature of the Roberts court.

Relying on judicial sanewashing, the Roberts court has eroded due process protections, political accountability, and civil rights, while simultaneously consolidating power for itself, corporations, gun owners, Christian conservatives, and state officials who owe their political influence to heavily gerrymandered districts. All this has been accomplished while the Roberts court has sought to present itself as a neutral, nonpartisan institution, free from corporate interests and policy preferences and guided solely by constitutional and democratic principles. As the Roberts court has transformed into a conservative policymaking body, it has maintained that it is merely fulfilling its constitutional mandate.

The judicially sanewashed opinions of the Roberts court haven’t been limited solely to sanewashing the law; often, they also involve extensive sanewashing of the facts too. For example, in tandem with whitewashing the anti-racist purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments in Shelby County v. Holder, the Roberts court also recast former Confederate states subject to the Voting Rights Act, or VRA, as aggrieved and mistreated, and in need of legal protection by the court.

According to the sanewashed facts in Shelby County, the VRA was no longer necessary because racially discriminatory voting practices were “rare” and the remaining sections of the statute would be sufficient to protect minority voting rights. In the decade since the court offered those tepid reassurances, states formerly subject to the VRA’s preclearance requirements have passed an avalanche of discriminatory voter suppression laws as the Roberts court has simultaneously sought to further weaken the law. The court is now prepared to strike down the remaining vestiges of the statute it promised would remain in place to ensure voting rights remained protected.

Similarly, when sanewashing the First Amendment to recognize new speech rights by corporations to engage in unlimited political spending in Citizens United, the Roberts court tried to assure a skeptical public that dismantling decades of campaign finance regulations would strengthen the integrity of elections and allow voters to hold officials accountable. Fifteen years later, the ruling has unleashed a torrent of unregulated corporate spending in American politics, enabling super PACs to raise limitless funds from corporations and undisclosed donors to exercise an outsized influence on election results. Between 2010 and 2024, political spending by super PACs grew from $62.6 million to $4.1 billion. Americans are so disgusted with dark money in politics that an overwhelming majority supports a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

In recent months, the Roberts court has adopted a new sanewashing strategy—the shadow docket. The Supreme Court, traditionally a court of last review, has increasingly decided significant legal questions on its shadow docket, boldly exercising its discretionary review power and circumventing the typical judicial process. The shadow docket, which is quickly becoming one of the Roberts court’s preferred sanewashing forums, has generated a glut of unexplained rulings, decided without the benefit of hearing the full merits of the case and with enormous practical and legal consequences. On the shadow docket, the Roberts court has inserted itself into high-stakes legal challenges against the Trump administration, sanewashing and mischaracterizing lower court rulings preventing the administration’s lawless conduct as “emergencies” to justify intervening on the president’s behalf.

Notably, the shadow docket has been expanded by the Roberts court for the near-exclusive benefit of the Trump administration, and only the Trump administration. On the sanewashed shadow docket scoreboard, the Trump administration has a stellar batting average. Whereas the court granted only four emergency requests from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations over 16 years, it has already granted 23 emergency requests in the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, and has ruled in the administration’s favor in 86 percent of its recent shadow docket decisions.

The shadow docket is by no means the only evidence of the Roberts court’s systemic sanewashing. Stare decisis—a guiding legal principle requiring courts to honor prior judicial decisions involving the same or similar issues to allow for stability under the law—has been all but abandoned by the Roberts court, except where it proves convenient.

Additionally, justiciability doctrines—judicially created standards for determining when federal court involvement is appropriate—are increasingly treated by the Roberts court as discretionary and malleable.

Likewise, the court’s promised fidelity to separation of powers principles and judicial restraint increasingly present as little more than lip service.

As the Roberts court ignores, deconstructs, or nullifies established judicial norms, it tells us that it is doing no such thing. This, in effect, is judicial sanewashing.

The sanewashing techniques employed by the Roberts court to distort the law have been varied, and often used in conjunction with one another. In some instances, as when the court upended a half a century of constitutional protections for abortion rights, the court has defended overruling precedent by describing earlier decisions as “egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided,” drawing false comparisons to discredited cases with limited parallels.

Meanwhile, other legal doctrines have fallen by the wayside by being deemed by the Roberts court as “discredited,” “unworkable,” or simply needing to end, even though lower federal courts have been capably applying the legal standard for decades and the invalidated laws had been models of success. It was this sanewashed strategy that allowed the court to eviscerate campaign finance laws and eliminate federal courts’ ability to prevent brazen partisan gerrymandering, ushering in today’s redistricting arms race and dark money mania. This sanewashing approach was also used as a basis to end race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.

Often, while excoriating earlier decisions and replacing judicial and legislative judgment with its own personal precedent, the Roberts court has engaged in perhaps the most performative sanewashing practice—claiming to be exercising “judicial humility” that predecessor courts supposedly lacked.

There are real public and private costs to judicial sanewashing. In the last year, judicial sanewashing has led to Supreme Court rulings that have empowered the president to act with impunity, sanctioned the deportation of immigrants without due process to conflict zones where they face torture and death, allowed the president to order the wholesale dismantling of independent federal agencies, authorized roving patrols of armed and masked immigration agents to engage in racial profiling (defended by the court as “common sense”), and denied low-income women and transgender youth access to life-saving medical care.

As the Roberts court has sought to sanewash dubious legal theories, whitewash facts and history, and mansplain health care so as to package its decisions as sound and sensible, sanewashing has arguably become the dominant methodology for constitutional and statutory interpretation by the Roberts court. The Roberts court has legitimized anti-democratic legal theories and advanced a biased, ahistorical interpretation of the Constitution through the sanewashing of law and fact, distorting democratic norms while insisting that it is simply following judicial tradition. The extent and magnitude of the effects of judicial sanewashing are now on full display, threatening to corrupt our democratic system and shared sense of reality.

Erin M. Carr

Erin M. Carr is an assistant professor of law. She teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law and civil rights.

RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA

 

 

The Aftermath of Having a Lolita Complex in the Era of the Epstein Files

Cryn Johannsen Jan 1

Photo by Martin Dalsgaard on Unsplash

[Reader advisory: This essay contains descriptions of rape, sexual abuse, and strong language, which may be triggering to some.]

Unsteady hands with their trembling fingertips take to the keyboard to write out the following essay. Where does this innocent, yet seemingly “torrid” story begin? The story isn’t really about her, although she feels central to her own narrative, to its grim, violent, sexual past, the raging attacks and transgressions that men committed against her body and mind. But she has learned with age and time that she is one of a multitude, some dead and some still living, of aged, forgotten Lolitas. She herself assumed that name in her youthful mind because of unsavory circumstances that arrived too soon, circumstances she neither wanted nor asked for. She didn’t understand at that time, but none of them was a central character, far from it, despite the book they devoured when they, too, saw themselves as the “nymphet” in their own solitary worlds, trapped, like a young butterfly in a net, by a predator they believed loved and cherished them, yet which came with all the oozing ick.

Atomized and isolated, she, like other girls, fashioned herself as special before his eyes, his eyes especially, long before her intellect and adult emotions fully developed, and failed to realize she was entrapped. She wiggled uncomfortably in a small, developing body, hoping to catch his adult male eyes’ attention, and that’s what she did—she alone caught his gaze, thinking she was the Lolita. But like the other girls, once she grew older and told her story to others, ones who cared to listen without judgment, she quickly learned he was nothing more than an old, lascivious creep. However, that awareness still didn’t stop the other male attacks and the blame and shame that came with it.

Others also listened, but with stern reproach and harsh tongues, denouncing her actions, even though she had been a mere girl. Shame covered her body, like a hairshirt, but there was nowhere for her to pay her penance, despite the support around her. Cataclysmic disruption characterized her young life; she had to change institutions, make new friends, cultivate new hobbies, all social circles became unfamiliar to her. And while she knew he was a pedophilic creep, she still, somehow, missed him. The manipulation, his insertion into her life that had yet even to form or mature, had a hold on her even in his absence. Her teenage life was crippled by him.

The longing, the confusion, the shame all had to do with that book and with identifying herself with Humbert’s Lolita over innocent Dolores, the girl we never learn to know, as both Humbert and Nabokov obscure her, burying her with a projection of a girl-cum-slut who didn’t exist, except in their pedophilic eyes and depraved imaginations. Yet how else are young girls to identify with the novel, especially when wrapped up in “affairs” of a similar nature, but with the girl-cum-slut? reed alyy also writes about this painfully in her piece, “Everybody Aboard the Lolita Express.”

She explains:

This runs parallel to my own experience with Lolita. Though I never identified with Jeremy Iron’s Humbert, I first stumbled across the movie as a 14-year-old girl. The age Dolores was depicted as in the 1997 film. At the time, surrounded by adult men’s attention, and experiencing normalization of pedophilia on multiple fronts, I had an internal battle. Aware of just how wrong it was, I found myself identifying as Dolores in both the film and text. No, I found myself identifying as Lolita. Imagining myself to be a nymphet, imagining myself “magnetic” to these adult men, and, just as the patriarchy desires, misapplying blame.

Here, Alyy discusses taking on the blame herself as the purported seductress, which she also did with her own predator. Yet both failed to understand the process of grooming they were undergoing. The blame remains misapplied to this day, as we continue to reckon with patriarchy and capitalism raging on, even if they are perhaps letting out death rattles; the ferocity remains, fiercer than ever, lashing out in every direction possible. After all, look at who was put in the Oval Office, a man who was called Epstein’s “best friend,” a man also at the center of that pedophilic story.

Eventually, the name of the novel, Lolita, would turn into child rapist, billionaire, black bookkeeper Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous “Lolita” Express, a symbol of both exploitative capitalism and crushing patriarchy, all wrapped into one. And everyone who stepped foot on that plane stooped to his level—every single one of them. Alyy offers incisive analysis on what it meant for these people to ride on the Lolita express, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety.

What soon followed after the “Lolita” Express was grounded, after Epstein’s arrest and prison time, along with his death, was an eventual avalanche of evidence—the Epstein files—revealing what the survivors’ voices had already told us all, hundreds, if not thousands, of so-called Lolitas subjected to the hands and sexual violence of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a slew of influential people scattered across the globe. But do we need the files to tell us the stories we already know? Have we once again failed to listen to their voices? Why do we need to gaze at sex toys torture devices to prove the violence he committed against girls?

A victim’s foot and leg with writings from Nabokov’s book, pictured in the back. Photo Source: House Oversight Committee Democrats

Long before the Epstein files were released, she would have her own reckoning with her past, a maturing mind clashing with and absorbing the works of Wollstencraft, de Beauvoir, MacKinnon, Dworkin, Lorde, Federici, and more. She now knew that the survivors of Epstein’s crimes were all Dolores’s, lost in a sea of pedophilic criminality, disposable, like tissue paper, as soon as Maxwell procured the next victim to absorb, abuse, and abandon. Some were used, before being abandoned, pumped full of medication to blot out their pain, nothing but rapeable objects for the taking. Evidence of this was revealed when the House Oversight Committee Democrats released an image of a pill bottle labeled as Phenazopyridine. This medication is used to relieve pain associated with urinary tract infections, another indicator of how the girls were treated with utter dehumanizing disdain. Even when sick, Epstein and others still raped them. Imagine enduring that.

A photo of Phenazopyridine from the Epstein files. Photo Credit: House Oversight Committee Democrats

The girls, perhaps some who are sick and pumped full of Phenazopyridine, surround Epstein in many of the pictures that have been released—timidly, fearfully tending to their abuser, unable to escape his predatory grip, stuck in a miasma of relational pain with him. Hidden in his sexual dungeon of torture, disguised by its golden opulence, either on his private island or tucked away in his massive Manhattan mansion, the pedophilic capitalist is at the top of his game, subjugating those from one of the most vulnerable populations in the system: girls.

These are not lurid images. These are crime scenes of the crimes unfolding, filled with the victims themselves: the girls. We must always go back to them, especially now that they are survivors of this gigantic bastard, who, it turns out, was also a slimy, little, pedophilic man, which makes it “easy” for those who stepped on the “Lolita” Express to say, “But he seemed so nice.” Excuses, excuses, excuses either come out of their mouths or they turn defensive, as people have done in the case of renowned linguist and activist Noam Chomsky. (“How could he have known about Epstein’s crimes?” That’s one of the better ones, considering that Chomsky was a voracious reader of newspapers worldwide when he was still healthy, not to mention that he said that Epstein had a “clean slate” after serving time for raping girls. In sum, it’s clear that Chomsky didn’t give one fig about the victims.)

The capitalist pedophile with his victims. Photo Credit: House Oversight Committee Democrats

Scanning the Epstein pictures again with him surrounded by his victims, she recalls her predator now, but this time, grown up, she’s no longer wearing her hairshirt, and she seeks no penance. He did not have as much power as Epstein did, but that did not mean that when, as people say, “the shit hit the fan,” he was not protected by institutional powers. Once that happened, even though she was still a girl, she learned how power operates within the system we have. It’s simple, really—it protects the one with the most power in the “inappropriate relationship.” She was suddenly the harlot, the seducer, the one to blame. Now she laughs out loud, thinking about how grown-ass adults framed the narrative in this way, but she also knows the millions of innocent victims, like her, who have been hurt by the way they were cast. She now feels a pang of sadness along with anger, recalling how the Epstein victims spoke up on November 18, 2025. Do people understand the level of bravery it took for those survivors to do that, the fear that they had to overcome to speak publicly about sexual violence? Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene stood with them, too.

When Greene returned to her office later that day, she told the New York Times that Donald Trump called her up, angrily yelling at her on speaker phone, so there were witnesses to the words that spilled out of his tainted, orange, shriveled little mouth.

She couldn’t understand his stubbornness. He finally replied, “My friends could get hurt.”

Greene also suggested inviting the victims to the White House. He refused the idea, Greene told the Times, as “they had done nothing to merit the honor.” Greene and Trump have not spoken since that call. Survivors, according to Trump, do not merit the honor of going to the Oval Office. Consider that for a moment—or do we? It seems immediately striking to all of us. We all know that Trump was deeply entangled with Epstein; his own name drenches the files, so, naturally, he would not invite Epstein survivors to the White House. As aptly titled in a recent article that Julie k Brown wrote, “Donald Trump’s Epstein Files,” these files belong to him, too.

But it’s too late for Trump’s threats and demands that the details not be revealed. The survivors are fighting back, as they did on November 18, collectively holding onto one another. They do not need to go to the Oval Office that is currently occupied by a man accused 27 times of sexual crimes of varying degrees, who himself said that when a man is famous, like he is, one doesn’t have to ask, “You just grab ’em by the pussy.” We have also seen the video of him with his best bud, Epstein, ogling girls. We know the misogynistic jokes that they shared. And with Trump’s steep cognitive decline, his hatred and disdain towards women in general are on full display, along with a creepy and inappropriate relationship with his own daughter (Trump once said in 2006 on The View, with Ivanka sitting right next to him, that if she weren’t his daughter that “perhaps I’d be dating her,” and spoke openly about her voluptunouness on The Howard Stern Show that same year.) Recently, when Trump was giving a “speech,” he was stunned to see an apparent Ivanka look-alike, stopping in mid-sentence to compliment her.

This system, in which capitalism and patriarchy go hand-in-hand, needs to be smashed to pieces and burned to the ground simultaneously. Trump, Epstein, and other predators are all symptoms of a rotten economic system where girls, among other vulnerable groups, are central to abuse. When they are girls, they don’t understand these facts, as they are being groomed, mistreated, gravely hurt. If they become survivors, many realize these truths and go on to resist and fight back, as we are now seeing. That space for them must continue to grow. Before Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement, these abuses, even when they happened to women, were only talked about in hushed tones, mere whispers. Not anymore. The #MeToo movement was its own avalanche of evidence against the powerful capitalistic patriarchy; the kaleidoscopic pain written across the various mediums of the internet dispelled myths that sexual abuse was limited (it’s all too common) and annihilated the notion that women, girls, and the abused are to blame. In step with these newfound voices, louder than ever, the march towards liberation must continue in full force. There will come a day when all forms of sexual violence will be fully criminalized, where the notion that a man dating grooming someone 30+ years younger than himself will be considered so taboo that it will no longer occur, that the Epsteins and the Trumps will no longer have power. She longs for that day, as she wraps up this essay, her hands no longer unsteady, her fingers no longer trembling. She can see that day coming, and she wants you to see it coming, too.