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Until re­cently, I re­sisted us­ing the F-word to de­scribe President Trump. For one thing, there were too many el­e­ments of clas­si­cal fas­cism that did­n’t seem to fit. For an­other, the term has been overused to the point of mean­ing­less­ness, es­pe­cially by left-lean­ing types who call you a fas­cist if you op­pose abor­tion or af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion. For yet an­other, the term is hazily de­fined, even by its ad­her­ents. From the be­gin­ning, fas­cism has been an in­co­her­ent doc­trine, and even to­day schol­ars can’t agree on its de­f­i­n­i­tion. Italy’s orig­i­nal ver­sion dif­fered from Germany’s, which dif­fered from Spain’s, which dif­fered from Japan’s.

I ac­cepted President Biden’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the MAGA move­ment as “semi-fascist” be­cause some par­al­lels were glar­ingly ap­par­ent. Trump was def­i­nitely an au­thor­i­tar­ian, and un­ques­tion­ably a pat­ri­mo­ni­al­ist. Beyond that, though, the best de­scrip­tion seemed to be a psy­cho­log­i­cal one pro­pounded by John Bolton, Trump’s first-term na­tional se­cu­rity ad­viser: “He lis­tens to Putin, he lis­tens to Xi, he lis­tens to how they talk about gov­ern­ing un­bur­dened by un­co­op­er­a­tive leg­is­la­tures, un­con­cerned with what the ju­di­ciary may do, and he thinks to him­self, Why can’t I do that? This does­n’t amount to be­ing a fas­cist, in my view, [or] hav­ing a the­ory of how you want to gov­ern. It’s just Why can’t I have the same fun they have?”

Writing a year ago, I ar­gued that Trump’s gov­ern­ing regime is a ver­sion of pat­ri­mo­ni­al­ism, in which the state is treated as the per­sonal prop­erty and fam­ily busi­ness of the leader. That is still true. But, as I also noted then, pat­ri­mo­ni­al­ism is a style of gov­ern­ing, not a for­mal ide­ol­ogy or sys­tem. It can be lay­ered atop all kinds of or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­tures, in­clud­ing not just na­tional gov­ern­ments but also ur­ban po­lit­i­cal ma­chines such as Tammany Hall, crim­i­nal gangs such as the Mafia, and even re­li­gious cults. Because its only firm prin­ci­ple is per­sonal loy­alty to the boss, it has no spe­cific agenda. Fascism, in con­trast, is ide­o­log­i­cal, ag­gres­sive, and, at least in its early stages, rev­o­lu­tion­ary. It seeks to dom­i­nate pol­i­tics, to crush re­sis­tance, and to rewrite the so­cial con­tract.

Over Trump’s past year, what orig­i­nally looked like an ef­fort to make the gov­ern­ment his per­sonal play­thing has drifted dis­tinctly to­ward doc­tri­nal and op­er­a­tional fas­cism. Trump’s ap­petite for leben­sraum, his claim of un­lim­ited power, his sup­port for the global far right, his politi­ciza­tion of the jus­tice sys­tem, his de­ploy­ment of per­for­ma­tive bru­tal­ity, his os­ten­ta­tious vi­o­la­tion of rights, his cre­ation of a na­tional para­mil­i­tary po­lice—all of those de­vel­op­ments be­speak some­thing more pur­pose­ful and sin­is­ter than run-of-the-mill greed or gang­ster­ism.

When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s gov­ern­ing style into sharper fo­cus. Fascist best de­scribes it, and re­luc­tance to use the term has now be­come per­verse. That is not be­cause of any one or two things he and his ad­min­is­tra­tion have done but be­cause of the to­tal­ity. Fascism is not a ter­ri­tory with clearly marked bound­aries but a con­stel­la­tion of char­ac­ter­is­tics. When you view the stars to­gether, the con­stel­la­tion plainly ap­pears.

Demolition of norms. From the be­gin­ning of his first pres­i­den­tial run in 2015, Trump de­lib­er­ately crashed through every bound­ary of ci­vil­ity; he mocked Senator John McCain’s war hero­ism, mocked fel­low can­di­date Carly Fiorina’s face, seem­ingly mocked the Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s men­stru­a­tion, slurred im­mi­grants, and much more. Today he still does it, re­cently mak­ing an ob­scene ges­ture to a fac­tory worker and call­ing a jour­nal­ist “piggy.” This is a fea­ture of the fas­cist gov­ern­ing style, not a bug. Fascists know that what the American Founders called the “republican virtues” im­pede their po­lit­i­cal agenda, and so they glee­fully trash lib­eral pieties such as rea­son and rea­son­able­ness, ci­vil­ity and civic spirit, tol­er­a­tion and for­bear­ance. By mock­ing de­cency and say­ing the un­sayable, they open the way for what William Galston has called the “dark pas­sions” of fear, re­sent­ment, and es­pe­cially dom­i­na­tion—the kind of pol­i­tics that shifts the pub­lic dis­course to ground on which lib­er­als can­not com­pete.

Glorification of vi­o­lence. Every state uses vi­o­lence to en­force its laws, but lib­eral states use it re­luc­tantly, whereas fas­cism em­braces and flaunts it. Trump thus praises a vi­o­lent mob; en­dorses tor­ture; muses fondly about punch­ing, body-slam­ming, and shoot­ing pro­test­ers and jour­nal­ists; and re­port­edly sug­gests shoot­ing pro­test­ers and mi­grants. His re­cruit­ment ads for ICE glam­or­ize mil­i­tary-style raids of homes and neigh­bor­hoods; his pro­pa­ganda takes child­ish de­light in the killing of civil­ians; and we have all seen videos of agents drag­ging peo­ple out of cars and homes—partly be­cause the gov­ern­ment films them. Like the de­mo­li­tion of civic de­cency, the val­oriza­tion of vi­o­lence is not in­ci­den­tal to fas­cism; it is part and par­cel.

Might is right. Also char­ac­ter­is­tic of fas­cism is what George Orwell called “bully-worship”: the prin­ci­ple that, as Thucydides fa­mously put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suf­fer what they must.” This view came across in Trump’s no­to­ri­ous Oval Office meet­ing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump showed open con­tempt for what he re­garded as Ukraine’s weak­ness; it came across ex­plic­itly, and chill­ingly, when Stephen Miller, the pres­i­den­t’s most pow­er­ful aide, told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is gov­erned by strength, that is gov­erned by force, that is gov­erned by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have ex­isted since the be­gin­ning of time.” Those words, though alien to the tra­di­tions of American and Christian moral­ity, could have come from the lips of any fas­cist dic­ta­tor.

Politicized law en­force­ment. Liberals fol­low the law whether they like it or not; fas­cists, only when they like it. Nazism fea­tured a “dual state,” where, at any mo­ment, the pro­tec­tions of or­di­nary law could cease to ap­ply. Trump makes no se­cret of de­spis­ing due process of law; he has de­manded count­less times that his op­po­nents be jailed (“Lock her up!” chants, with his en­dorse­ment, were a promi­nent fea­ture of his 2016 cam­paign), and he has sug­gested the Constitution’s “termination” and said “I don’t know” when asked if he is re­quired to up­hold it. His sin­gle most dan­ger­ous sec­ond-term in­no­va­tion is the re­pur­pos­ing of fed­eral law en­force­ment to per­se­cute his en­e­mies (and shield his friends). No prior pres­i­dent has pro­duced any­thing like Trump’s di­rect and pub­lic or­der for the Justice Department to in­ves­ti­gate two for­mer of­fi­cials, or like his bla­tantly re­tal­ia­tory pros­e­cu­tions of James Comey and Letitia James. “At least 470 peo­ple, or­ga­ni­za­tions and in­sti­tu­tions have been tar­geted for ret­ri­bu­tion since Trump took of­fice—an av­er­age of more than one a day,” Reuters re­ported in November (and to­day one can add oth­ers to the list, be­gin­ning with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell). Had Trump done noth­ing else, his de­mo­li­tion of in­de­pen­dent and apo­lit­i­cal law en­force­ment would still have moved the U. S. gov­ern­ment closer than ever be­fore to a fascis­tic model.

Dehumanization. Fascism draws its le­git­i­macy from its claims of de­fend­ing the peo­ple from en­e­mies who are an­i­mals, crim­i­nals, brutes. Trump char­ac­ter­izes (for in­stance) po­lit­i­cal op­po­nents as “vermin” and im­mi­grants as “garbage” who are “poisoning the blood of our coun­try” (language straight out of the Third Reich). Vice President Vance, as a sen­a­tor, en­dorsed a book called Unhumans (a ti­tle that refers to the left). And who can for­get his false claim that Haitians abduct and eat pet cats and dogs?

Police-state tac­tics. Trump has turned ICE into a sprawl­ing para­mil­i­tary that roves the coun­try at will, searches and de­tains nonci­t­i­zens and cit­i­zens with­out war­rants, uses force os­ten­ta­tiously, op­er­ates be­hind masks, re­ceives skimpy train­ing, lies about its ac­tiv­i­ties, and has been told that it en­joys “absolute im­mu­nity.” He more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s size in 2025, and its bud­get is now larger than those of all other fed­eral law-en­force­ment agen­cies com­bined, and larger than the en­tire mil­i­tary bud­gets of all but 15 coun­tries. “This is go­ing to af­fect every com­mu­nity, every city,” the Cato Institute scholar David Bier re­cently ob­served. “Really al­most every­one in our coun­try is go­ing to come in con­tact with this, one way or the other.” In Minneapolis and else­where, the agency has be­haved provoca­tively, some­times bru­tally, and ar­guably il­le­gally—be­hav­iors that Trump and his staff have en­cour­aged, shielded, and sent cam­era crews to pub­li­cize, per­haps in the hope of elic­it­ing vi­o­lent re­sis­tance that would jus­tify fur­ther crack­downs, a stan­dard fas­cist strat­a­gem. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s re­cent ap­pear­ance with a sign read­ing One of ours, all of yours seemed to nod to­ward an­other fas­cist standby, col­lec­tive pun­ish­ment—as did the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion to flood Minneapolis with thou­sands of of­fi­cers af­ter res­i­dents there be­gan protest­ing fed­eral tac­tics, a pri­or­i­ti­za­tion that was ex­plic­itly ret­ribu­tive.

Undermining elec­tions. Trump’s re­cent mus­ing that there should be no 2026 elec­tion may or may not have been joc­u­lar (as the White House has main­tained), but he and his MAGA sup­port­ers be­lieve they never lose an elec­tion, pe­riod. They went to great lengths to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, as the pros­e­cu­tor Jack Smith’s in­dict­ment of Trump and sub­se­quent re­port de­tail ad nau­seam. Rigging, steal­ing, or out­right can­cel­ing elec­tions is, of course, job one for fas­cists. Although Trump is term-lim­ited, we must not ex­pect that he and his MAGA loy­al­ists will vol­un­tar­ily turn over the White House to a Democrat in 2029, re­gard­less of what the vot­ers say—and the sec­ond in­sur­rec­tion will be far bet­ter or­ga­nized than the first.

What’s pri­vate is pub­lic. Classical fas­cism re­jects the fun­da­men­tal lib­eral dis­tinc­tion be­tween the gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor, per Mussolini’s dic­tum: “No in­di­vid­u­als or groups out­side the State.” Among Trump’s most au­da­cious (if only in­ter­mit­tently suc­cess­ful) ini­tia­tives are his ef­forts to com­man­deer pri­vate en­ti­ties, in­clud­ing law firms, uni­ver­si­ties, and cor­po­ra­tions. One of his first acts as pres­i­dent last year was to brazenly defy a newly en­acted law by tak­ing the own­er­ship of TikTok into his own hands. Bolton un­der­stood this men­tal­ity when he said, “He can’t tell the dif­fer­ence be­tween his own per­sonal in­ter­est and the na­tional in­ter­est, if he even un­der­stands what the na­tional in­ter­est is.”

Attacks on news me­dia. Shortly af­ter tak­ing of­fice in 2017, Trump de­nounced the news me­dia as “the en­emy of the American peo­ple,” a phrase fa­mil­iar from dic­ta­tor­ships abroad. His hos­til­ity never re­lented, but in his sec­ond term, it has reached new heights. Trump has threat­ened broad­cast li­censes, abused his reg­u­la­tory au­thor­ity, ma­nip­u­lated own­er­ship deals, filed ex­or­bi­tant law­suits, played fa­vorites with jour­nal­is­tic ac­cess, searched a re­porter’s home, and vil­i­fied news out­lets and jour­nal­ists. Although Trump can­not dom­i­nate news me­dia in the United States in the way that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, he is run­ning the Orbán play­book. No other pres­i­dent, not even Richard Nixon (no friend of the me­dia), has used such bla­tantly il­lib­eral tac­tics against the press.

Territorial and mil­i­tary ag­gres­sion. One rea­son I held out against iden­ti­fy­ing Trumpism with fas­cism in his first term was Trump’s ap­par­ent lack of in­ter­est in ag­gres­sion against other states; if any­thing, he had seemed shy about us­ing force abroad. Well, that was then. In his sec­ond term, he has used mil­i­tary force promis­cu­ously. Of course, many pres­i­dents have de­ployed force, but Trump’s ex­plic­itly preda­tory use of it to grab Venezuela’s oil and his gang­ster-style threat to take Greenland from Denmark “the easy way” or “the hard way” were 1930s-style au­thor­i­tar­ian moves. The same goes for his con­tempt for in­ter­na­tional law, bind­ing al­liances, and transna­tional or­ga­ni­za­tions such as the European Union—all of which im­pede the state’s un­con­strained ex­er­cise of its will, a cen­tral fas­cist tenet. (Mussolini: “Equally for­eign to the spirit of Fascism … are all in­ter­na­tion­al­is­tic or League su­per­struc­tures which, as his­tory shows, crum­ble to the ground when­ever the heart of na­tions is deeply stirred by sen­ti­men­tal, ide­al­is­tic or prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions.”)

Transnational reach. Like au­thor­i­tar­i­ans gen­er­ally, fas­cists love com­pany; the world is safer for them if there are more of them. In his sec­ond term, Trump has bro­ken with long-stand­ing U. S. pol­icy by di­al­ing back sup­port for hu­man rights while prais­ing and sup­port­ing au­thor­i­tar­ian pop­ulists and il­lib­eral na­tion­al­ists in Serbia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Turkey, El Salvador, and Slovakia, among other places—and by be­ing weirdly def­er­en­tial to the strong­man Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even more strik­ing is his de facto align­ment against America’s lib­eral al­lies and their par­ties in Europe, which he holds in con­tempt.

Blood-and-soil na­tion­al­ism. A fas­cist trade­mark is its in­sis­tence that the coun­try is not just a col­lec­tion of in­di­vid­u­als but a peo­ple, a Volk: a mys­ti­cally de­fined and eth­ni­cally pure group bound to­gether by shared blood, cul­ture, and des­tiny. In keep­ing with that idea, Trump has re­pu­di­ated birthright cit­i­zen­ship, and Vance has called to “redefine the mean­ing of American cit­i­zen­ship in the 21st cen­tury” so that pri­or­ity goes to Americans with longer his­tor­i­cal ties: “the peo­ple whose an­ces­tors fought in the Civil War,” as he put it, or peo­ple whom oth­ers on the MAGA right call “heritage Americans.” In other words, some Americans are more volk­ish than oth­ers.

White and Christian na­tion­al­ism. While Vance, Trump, and MAGA do not pro­pound an ex­plicit ide­ol­ogy of racial hi­er­ar­chy, they make no se­cret of pin­ing for a whiter, more Christian America. Trump has found many ways to com­mu­ni­cate this: for ex­am­ple, by mak­ing clear his dis­dain for “shithole” coun­tries and his pref­er­ence for white Christian im­mi­grants; by point­edly ac­cept­ing white South Africans as po­lit­i­cal refugees (while clos­ing the door to most other asy­lum seek­ers); by re­nam­ing mil­i­tary bases to share the names of Confederate gen­er­als (after Congress or­dered their names re­moved); by say­ing that civil-rights laws led to whites’ be­ing “very badly treated.” In his National Security Strategy, he cas­ti­gates Europe for al­low­ing im­mi­gra­tion to un­der­mine “civilizational self-con­fi­dence” and pro­claims, “We want Europe to re­main European,” a ral­ly­ing cry of white Christian na­tion­al­ists across the con­ti­nent. Taking his cue, the Department of Homeland Security has prop­a­gated unashamedly white-na­tion­al­ist themes, and na­tional parks and mu­se­ums have scrubbed their ex­hibits of ref­er­ences to slav­ery.

Mobs and street thugs. The use of mili­tias and mobs to ha­rass, rough up, and oth­er­wise in­tim­i­date op­po­nents is a stan­dard fas­cist strat­a­gem (the text­book ex­am­ple be­ing Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938). As few will need re­mind­ing, the Trump-MAGA par­al­lel is the mob and mili­tia vi­o­lence against the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump know­ingly laid ground­work for this op­er­a­tion, call­ing on mili­tia forces to “stand back and stand by” in September 2020 and later dog-whistling “Be there, will be wild!” to his sup­port­ers. His par­don of all of the Capitol at­tack­ers—more than 1,500, in­clud­ing the most vi­o­lent—only proved what we knew, which is that they had his bless­ing. While Trump has found state vi­o­lence ad­e­quate to his pur­poses so far in his sec­ond term, street vi­o­lence is self-ev­i­dently in his reper­toire.

Leader ag­gran­dize­ment. Since 2016, when he de­clared that “I alone can fix it” and bragged that his sup­port­ers would re­main loyal if he shot some­one on Fifth Avenue, Trump has cul­ti­vated a per­son­al­ity cult. Although some of his ef­forts at self-ag­gran­dize­ment can seem com­i­cal (the gild­ing of the Oval Office, the re­nam­ing of the Kennedy Center, the pro­posed tri­umphal arch), he un­der­stands the cen­tral­ity of leader wor­ship in a fas­cist-style regime. In sharp con­tradis­tinc­tion to the American pres­i­den­tial tra­di­tion since George Washington, he makes no pre­tense of serv­ing the peo­ple or the Constitution. His mind­set, his sym­bol­ism, and his rhetoric all un­der­score the point he made to The New York Times this month: His own mind and moral­ity are the only lim­its on his global power. This is Fascism 101.

Alternative facts. As Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and prac­ti­cally every other scholar of au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism have em­pha­sized, cre­at­ing a re­al­ity-dis­tor­tion field is the first thing a fascis­tic gov­ern­ment will do, the bet­ter to drive its own twisted nar­ra­tive, con­fuse the cit­i­zenry, de­mor­al­ize po­lit­i­cal op­po­nents, and jus­tify every man­ner of cor­rup­tion and abuse. While other pres­i­dents (including some good ones) have lied, none have come close to Trump’s de­ploy­ment of Russian-style mass dis­in­for­ma­tion, as I de­tail in my book The Constitution of Knowledge. From the start of his first term, Trump has made “alternative facts” a hall­mark of his gov­ern­ing style, is­su­ing lies, ex­ag­ger­a­tions, and half-truths at a rate of 20 a day. Predictably, his sec­ond term has brought more of the same. Following his lead, a MAGA-fied post­mod­ern right glee­fully trashes ob­jec­tiv­ity as elit­ism and truth as a mask for power.

Politics as war. A dis­tinc­tive mark of fas­cism is its con­cep­tion of pol­i­tics, best cap­tured by Carl Schmitt, an early-20th-cen­tury German po­lit­i­cal the­o­rist whose doc­trines le­git­imized Nazism. Schmitt re­jected the Madisonian view of pol­i­tics as a so­cial ne­go­ti­a­tion in which dif­fer­ent fac­tions, in­ter­ests, and ide­ol­ogy come to agree­ment, the core idea of our Constitution. Rather, he saw pol­i­tics as a state of war be­tween en­e­mies, nei­ther of which can un­der­stand the other and both of which feel ex­is­ten­tially threat­ened—and only one of which can win. The aim of Schmittian pol­i­tics is not to share the coun­try but to dom­i­nate or de­stroy the other side. This con­cep­tion has been ev­i­dent in MAGA pol­i­tics since Michael Anton (now a Trump-administration of­fi­cial) pub­lished his fa­mous ar­ti­cle ar­gu­ing that the 2016 elec­tion was a life-and-death bat­tle to save the coun­try from the left (a “Flight 93” elec­tion: “charge the cock­pit or you die”). In the speech given by Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk’s memo­r­ial ser­vice, MAGA’s em­brace of Schmittian to­tal­ism found its apoth­e­o­sis: “We are the storm. And our en­e­mies can­not com­pre­hend our strength, our de­ter­mi­na­tion, our re­solve, our pas­sion … You are noth­ing. You are wicked­ness.”

Governing as rev­o­lu­tion. Although born in rev­o­lu­tion, the American lib­eral tra­di­tion, es­pe­cially its con­ser­v­a­tive branch, prizes con­ti­nu­ity, sta­bil­ity, and in­cre­men­tal change guided by rea­son. Fascism, by con­trast, “is not re­ac­tionary but rev­o­lu­tion­ary,” as Mussolini in­sisted. It seeks to up­root and re­place the old or­der and em­braces bold, ex­hil­a­rat­ing ac­tion un­shack­led to ra­tio­nal de­lib­er­a­tion. MAGA em­braces its own rev­o­lu­tion­ary ethos, what Russell Vought, the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s Office of Management and Budget di­rec­tor and prob­a­bly its most for­mi­da­ble in­tel­lect, has called “radical con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism,” a doc­trine that would vi­ti­ate many checks on pres­i­den­tial power. In pur­suit of this vi­sion, Vought told Tucker Carlson in a November 2024 in­ter­view, “The pres­i­dent has to move ex­ec­u­tively as fast and as ag­gres­sively as pos­si­ble, with a rad­i­cal con­sti­tu­tional per­spec­tive, to be able to dis­man­tle that [federal] bu­reau­cracy and their power cen­ters” be­cause “the bu­reau­cra­cies hate the American peo­ple.” He pre­dicted, “If you have a rad­i­cal con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism, it’s go­ing to be desta­bi­liz­ing … But it’s also ex­hil­a­rat­ing.” He said he would put fed­eral agen­cies “in trauma,” an idea echoed by Christopher Rufo, an ar­chi­tect of Trump’s at­tack on uni­ver­si­ties, which Rufo de­scribed as a “counterrevolution blue­print” to put uni­ver­si­ties “in an ex­is­ten­tial ter­ror.” As Trump shut­tered a con­gres­sion­ally man­dated agency, re­named an in­ter­na­tional body of wa­ter, ar­rested an op-ed writer, de­ported im­mi­grants to a for­eign gu­lag, ter­ror­ized American cities, threat­ened an ally, and more, he showed how it looks when a rad­i­cal­ized state aban­dons ra­tio­nal de­lib­er­a­tion and goes to war against it­self.

One can ob­ject that there are el­e­ments of clas­si­cal European fas­cism that are not found in Trumpism (mass ral­lies and pub­lic rit­u­als, for ex­am­ple)—or that there are ad­di­tional el­e­ments of Trumpism that be­long on the list (MAGA’s hy­per­mas­culin­ity, misog­yny, and co-op­tion of Christianity all re­sem­ble fas­cist pat­terns). The ex­er­cise of com­par­ing fas­cis­m’s var­i­ous forms is not pre­cise. If his­to­ri­ans ob­ject that Trump is not a copy of Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, the re­ply is yes—but so what? Trump is build­ing some­thing new on old prin­ci­ples. He is show­ing us in real time what 21st-century American fas­cism looks like.

If, how­ever, Trump is a fas­cist pres­i­dent, that does not mean that America is a fas­cist coun­try. The courts, the states, and the me­dia re­main in­de­pen­dent of him, and his ef­forts to brow­beat them will likely fail. He may lose his grip on Congress in November. He has not suc­ceeded in mold­ing pub­lic opin­ion, ex­cept against him­self. He has out­run the man­date of his vot­ers, his coali­tion is frac­tur­ing, and he has ne­glected tools that al­low pres­i­dents to make en­dur­ing change. He and his party may defy the Constitution, but they can­not rewrite it, thank good­ness.

Read: How to tell if your pres­i­dent is a dic­ta­tor

So the United States, once the world’s ex­em­plary lib­eral democ­racy, is now a hy­brid state com­bin­ing a fas­cist leader and a lib­eral Constitution; but no, it has not fallen to fas­cism. And it will not.

In which case, is there any point in call­ing Trump a fas­cist, even if true? Doesn’t that alien­ate his vot­ers? Wouldn’t it be bet­ter just to de­scribe his ac­tions with­out la­bel­ing him con­tro­ver­sially?

Until re­cently, I thought so. No longer. The re­sem­blances are too many and too strong to deny. Americans who sup­port lib­eral democ­racy need to rec­og­nize what we’re deal­ing with in or­der to cope with it, and to rec­og­nize some­thing, one must name it. Trump has re­vealed him­self, and we must name what we see.

Most peo­ple’s jour­ney with AI cod­ing starts the same: you give it a sim­ple task. You’re im­pressed. So you give it a large task. You’re even more im­pressed.

You open X and draft up a rant on job dis­place­ment.

If you’ve per­sisted past this point: con­grat­u­la­tions, you un­der­stand AI cod­ing bet­ter than 99% of peo­ple.

Serious en­gi­neers us­ing AI to do real work and not just week­end pro­jects largely also fol­low a pre­dictable de­vel­op­ment arc.

Still amazed at the big task you gave it, you won­der if you can keep giv­ing it big­ger and big­ger tasks. Maybe even that haunt­ing refac­tor no one wants to take on?

But here’s where the cur­tain starts to crin­kle.

On the one hand, you’re amazed at how well it seems to un­der­stand you. On the other hand, it makes frus­trat­ing er­rors and de­ci­sions that clearly go against the shared un­der­stand­ing you’ve de­vel­oped.

You quickly learn that be­ing an­gry at the model serves no pur­pose, so you be­gin to in­ter­nal­ize any un­sat­is­fac­tory out­put.

“It’s me. My prompt sucked. It was un­der-spec­i­fied.”

“If I can spec­ify it, it can build it. The sky’s the limit,” you think.

So you open Obsidian and be­gin draft­ing beefy spec docs that de­scribe the fea­ture in your head with im­pres­sive de­tail. Maybe you’ve put to­gether a full page of a prompt, and spent half an hour do­ing so.

But you find that spec-dri­ven de­vel­op­ment does­n’t work ei­ther. In real life, de­sign docs and specs are liv­ing doc­u­ments that evolve in a volatile man­ner through dis­cov­ery and im­ple­men­ta­tion. Imagine if in a real com­pany you wrote a de­sign doc in 1 hour for a com­plex ar­chi­tec­ture, handed it off to a mid-level en­gi­neer (and told him not to dis­cuss the doc with any­one), and took off on va­ca­tion.

Not only does an agent not have the abil­ity to evolve a spec­i­fi­ca­tion over a multi-week pe­riod as it builds out its lower com­po­nents, it also makes de­ci­sions up­front that it later does­n’t de­vi­ate from. And most agents sim­ply sur­ren­der once they feel the prob­lem and so­lu­tion has got­ten away from them (though this rarely hap­pens any­more, since agents will just force them­selves through the walls of the maze.)

What’s worse is code that agents write looks plau­si­ble and im­pres­sive while it’s be­ing writ­ten and pre­sented to you. It even looks good in pull re­quests (as both you and the agent are well trained in what a “good” pull re­quest looks like).

It’s not un­til I opened up the full code­base and read its lat­est state cover to cover that I be­gan to see what we the­o­rized and hoped was only a di­min­ish­ing ar­ti­fact of ear­lier mod­els: slop.

It was pure, unadul­ter­ated slop. I was be­wil­dered. Had I not re­viewed every line of code be­fore ad­mit­ting it? Where did all this…gunk..come from?

In ret­ro­spect, it made sense. Agents write units of changes that look good in iso­la­tion. They are con­sis­tent with them­selves and your prompt. But re­spect for the whole, there is not. Respect for struc­tural in­tegrity there is not. Respect even for neigh­bor­ing pat­terns there was not.

The AI had sim­ply told me a good story. Like vibewrit­ing a novel, the agent showed me a good cou­ple para­graphs that sure enough made sense and were struc­turally and syn­tac­ti­cally cor­rect. Hell, it even picked up on the idio­syn­crasies of the var­i­ous char­ac­ters. But for what­ever rea­son, when you read the whole chap­ter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the over­all con­text of the book and the pre­ced­ing and pro­ceed­ing chap­ters.

After read­ing months of cu­mu­la­tive highly-spec­i­fied agen­tic code, I said to my­self: I’m not ship­ping this shit. I’m not gonna charge users for this. And I’m not go­ing to promise users to pro­tect their data with this.

I’m not go­ing to lie to my users with this.

So I’m back to writ­ing by hand for most things. Amazingly, I’m faster, more ac­cu­rate, more cre­ative, more pro­duc­tive, and more ef­fi­cient than AI, when you price every­thing in, and not just code to­kens per hour.

You can fol­low me on X @atmoio, where I post a few times a week about agen­tic cod­ing.

You can watch the video coun­ter­part to this es­say on YouTube:

It’s been a while since my boss told me I needed to start hir­ing for my team. While I was at it, I should also han­dle on­board­ing… Since I knew the roadmap, I could take own­er­ship of that… And be­cause I knew the peo­ple, I could coach them in their ca­reers.

I did­n’t re­al­ize at the time, but he was doom­ing me to be an en­gi­neer­ing man­ager.

Since then, I’ve worked across four com­pa­nies as a man­ager, one as a founder, and an­other as a man­ager of man­agers. I will skip the stan­dard ad­vice and lessons on Engineering Management and fo­cus on the non-ob­vi­ous ones.

There is no stan­dard de­f­i­n­i­tion for an Engineering Manager. If you pick two ran­dom man­agers, they can do very dif­fer­ent things, even if they are at the same com­pany.

In every com­pany I’ve worked at, my role has never been the same. The only con­stant is that it’s de­fined by the team’s needs, re­quir­ing you to bal­ance across four pil­lars: Product, Process, People, and Programming.

* Large team? Say good­bye to pro­gram­ming. You’ll fo­cus on build­ing ca­reers, co­or­di­nat­ing ef­forts, and nav­i­gat­ing the or­ga­ni­za­tion to get re­sources for your team.

* Small team? You’ll man­age scope to match re­al­ity, and with less com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­head, you might ac­tu­ally do some cod­ing.

* No PM? You own the prod­uct com­pletely: val­i­dat­ing fea­tures, pri­or­i­tiz­ing the roadmap, and talk­ing to clients. This takes up most of your time be­cause ship­ping fea­tures that don’t of­fer user value makes every­thing else point­less.

* Reporting to the CEO? You’re now the link to sales, op­er­a­tions, and client com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The key is to iden­tify where your team’s bot­tle­neck lies in your soft­ware de­vel­op­ment life­cy­cle. You’ll prob­a­bly shift be­tween pil­lars as cir­cum­stances change, and that’s the point: the role re­quires flex­i­bil­ity.

Tip: Never ask the in­ter­viewer what they ex­pect from a man­ager. Some man­agers as­sume their ex­pe­ri­ence is in­dus­try stan­dard and might find that ques­tion odd. Instead, ask about their daily life and the chal­lenges that take up most of their time.

A few times in my ca­reer as a de­vel­oper, I won­dered, “Who is this fea­ture even for? Who will use it?” No one on my team knew. We were do­ing it be­cause we were told to. Morale was low. We felt we were work­ing on things that did­n’t mat­ter - and we were. Eventually, our team dis­banded, and en­gi­neers scat­tered across other pro­jects.

The most com­mon rea­son com­pa­nies fail is cre­at­ing prod­ucts that don’t de­liver value to users, caus­ing them not to pay.

“Oh, but I have a PM for that,” you might say. But hav­ing a PM is not enough. Everyone needs to care about the prod­uct. Your team is­n’t paid to just de­liver code but to use it to solve prob­lems.

Code is valu­able only when it ben­e­fits the end user. Sometimes, a no-code in­te­gra­tion can out­per­form a cus­tom so­lu­tion. At times, it’s bet­ter not to cre­ate a new fea­ture at all to avoid main­tain­ing a sys­tem. Teams that un­der­stand the prob­lem, not just the spec, can pivot when nec­es­sary.

Every process trades time and at­ten­tion for re­li­a­bil­ity or qual­ity. The prob­lem oc­curs when teams stop ques­tion­ing if the trade is still worth it. Ceremonies be­come rit­u­als. Metrics turn into goals. No one re­mem­bers why we spend an hour of our lives on this meet­ing.

Process bloat creeps in slowly. An en­gi­neer ships a bro­ken UI to pro­duc­tion. Designers com­plain, man­agers panic, and sud­denly every PR re­quires de­signer ap­proval. The whole team bears the cost of a sin­gle iso­lated in­ci­dent.

Good process serves you so you can serve cus­tomers. But if you’re not watch­ful, the process can be­come the thing. You stop look­ing at out­comes and just make sure you’re do­ing the process right. The process is not the thing. It’s al­ways worth ask­ing, do we own the process or does the process own us?

The right process varies based on con­text: team size, ex­pe­ri­ence lev­els, and dead­line pres­sure. What works for a ma­ture team might not work for a new one. Keep ques­tion­ing and it­er­at­ing. If a process is­n’t im­prov­ing de­liv­ery, cut it.

Your di­rect re­ports are the peo­ple who in­ter­act with you the most. They look to you for lead­er­ship and clar­ity, and trust that you’ll tell them what they need to know.

That’s why ly­ing or with­hold­ing in­for­ma­tion that af­fects them causes ir­re­versible dam­age. They might not leave im­me­di­ately, but they will re­sent you.

I have a friend who still re­sents a man­ager for a lie told three years ago. They found an­other com­pany, but they’re still an­gry about it.

“Trust ar­rives on foot and leaves by horse­back.”

I’ve seen some man­agers de­scribe the role as “a shield that blocks every­thing from above,” and I dis­agree. A good man­ager is more like a trans­par­ent um­brella. They pro­tect the team from un­nec­es­sary stress and pres­sure, but don’t hide re­al­ity from them.

Telling the team: “Our users aren’t thrilled so far. We need to find ways to bet­ter serve them. The pro­ject risks can­cel­la­tion if we don’t.” That’s fair game. They de­serve to know.

When you do de­liver hard news, state it clearly and fo­cus on how the team will do about it. If you act scared, they’ll be scared too. Your goal is to get them think­ing about the next steps.

I see man­agers walk into ex­ec­u­tive meet­ings say­ing, “We’re not sure what to do - maybe A, maybe B?” and then leave with or­ders to do Z, which does­n’t ben­e­fit the team or the pro­ject.

Executives can’t think of every pos­si­bil­ity in de­tail - that re­spon­si­bil­ity lies with you and the per­son who owns the prod­uct (which, as we saw, could be you too). When a prob­lem reaches the ex­ec­u­tives, it’s be­cause a de­ci­sion is needed, and they will make one.

People above you have lim­ited time to fo­cus on your spe­cific is­sues. You can’t info dump on them. If they take a mis­guided ac­tion based on what you tell them, it will be your fault.

If you be­lieve in some­thing, clearly state your case, in­clud­ing the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. Don’t ex­pect higher-ups to think for you. It’s okay to bounce rough ideas off your di­rect man­ager, but be­yond that, re­fine your thoughts - no one will think harder about your prob­lems than you and your team.

If you need a guide­line, a doc­u­ment should be: con­text → prob­lem → plan / al­ter­na­tives → what sup­port you need.

Player (10%): Yes, only 10%. You might take on work your team is­n’t ex­cited about, but that mat­ters: CI/CD im­prove­ments, flaky tests, process tool­ing. However, you need to stay off the crit­i­cal path. As soon as you start han­dling es­sen­tial tick­ets, you’ll block your team when man­age­r­ial work pulls you away.

Coach (30%): Your per­for­mance as a man­ager is the sum of your team’s out­put. Coaching in­volves pre­vent­ing prob­lem­atic be­hav­iors from be­com­ing nor­mal­ized, such as tox­i­c­ity, re­peated mis­takes, and con­sis­tent un­der­per­for­mance.

It also means sup­port­ing en­gi­neers’ growth by chal­leng­ing them ap­pro­pri­ately, pro­vid­ing the right feed­back, and help­ing them de­velop skills they’ll carry for­ward.

Cheerleader (60%): Praise peo­ple more than you think you should. Validation is im­por­tant. Most en­gi­neers pre­fer feel­ing ap­pre­ci­ated over hav­ing a ping-pong table.

But give praise gen­uinely, not au­to­mat­i­cally. I once joined a team where ret­ro­spec­tives in­cluded 30 min­utes of mu­tual praise - n-squared com­pli­ments every week. It felt hol­low. Not every week has some­thing ex­tra­or­di­nary, and when praise be­comes ex­pected, it loses its im­pact. The hedonic tread­mill is real.

Make your en­gi­neers’ wins vis­i­ble be­yond your team. Encourage them to pur­sue im­pact out­side the team, and cel­e­brate their achieve­ments when they do.

Every team op­er­ates like a small com­pany within the larger or­ga­ni­za­tion. I find that its morale also ex­ists in­de­pen­dently of the com­pa­ny’s over­all morale.

Most man­agers don’t plan to be­come bot­tle­necks. It hap­pens grad­u­ally. A crit­i­cal tool needs an owner, and you think, “I’ll han­dle this for now.” Someone needs to be the point of con­tact for an­other team, and it’s eas­i­est if it’s you. Technical de­ci­sions keep land­ing on your desk be­cause you’re the one with con­text. Before you know it, work stops with­out you.

If you can’t take a month off and re­turn to a well-func­tion­ing team, you need to work to­ward mak­ing that pos­si­ble.

You’re too busy to be the bot­tle­neck. If peo­ple keep reach­ing out to you for re­cur­ring tasks, del­e­gate by teach­ing some­one else to han­dle them. Point team mem­bers di­rectly to each other or, even bet­ter, cre­ate group chats to fa­cil­i­tate nat­ural dis­cus­sions.

Don’t be­come the bus fac­tor of 1. Train oth­ers so work con­tin­ues smoothly even when you’re over­whelmed or un­avail­able.

Avoid mak­ing peo­ple feel they need your per­mis­sion for small, re­versible de­ci­sions. Empower them with agency. Request to stay in­formed about their de­ci­sions, but let them han­dle the tech­ni­cal side.

The rea­son you will do this is that man­age­r­ial work can, and will, ap­pear at the worst time. If you are the bus fac­tor, you will be screw­ing your team when it hap­pens. There are many en­gi­neers, but only one man­ager. Stay ac­ces­si­ble for tasks that only you can han­dle.

Ask your­self: can you trust every en­gi­neer on your team to do their best with­out you con­stantly watch­ing? If not, some­thing needs to change—ei­ther in you or in them.

Trust is­n’t about just tech­ni­cal skill. If I asked my cur­rent en­gi­neers (mobile and web de­vel­op­ers) to build a Game Boy em­u­la­tor from scratch, they would­n’t know where to be­gin. They’d prob­a­bly take months (some just weeks). But I’m sure they’d try their best to fig­ure out how to run Pokémon Gold.

You need to trust both their abil­i­ties and their hon­esty:

* If you can’t trust their skills at their level of ex­pe­ri­ence, it’s your job to help them get bet­ter.

* If you can’t trust their hon­esty, and you have good rea­sons not to, then you need to part ways.

Even great en­gi­neers get stuck with­out re­al­iz­ing it. Watching progress helps you spot when they need sup­port be­fore oth­ers see them as un­der­per­form­ing.

Processes like sprints and OKRs mainly fo­cus on the “verify” stage (see, your man­ager does this too). They serve as a shared in­ter­face to en­sure work gets done. This is­n’t about lack of trust but ac­count­abil­ity.

Verification in­volves us­ing met­rics and ev­i­dence. There are two types: quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive.

Quantitative is sim­ple: PRs merged, points com­pleted, code re­viewed. You can glance at these, but de­ci­sions should­n’t be based on them alone. If you could gauge en­gi­neer per­for­mance from num­bers, man­agers would­n’t be needed.

Knowing the Qualitative met­rics shows a man­ager’s worth. “This en­gi­neer has fewer PRs, but they’re al­ways watch­ing Slack and hop­ping into calls to help oth­ers.” “This en­gi­neer al­ways dis­cusses tick­ets with prod­uct first - their out­put ends up far bet­ter than our orig­i­nal specs.” “This en­gi­neer ex­plains com­plex con­cepts in ways every­one can un­der­stand and makes other teams use our tool bet­ter.”

These in­sights de­pend on truly know­ing your team. That’s why most “management AI tools” are doomed to fail. They only fo­cus on quan­ti­ta­tive met­rics. They don’t at­tend your standups, don’t con­duct 1:1s for you, and don’t know who’s qui­etly hold­ing the team to­gether. A good man­ager does.

Stop hav­ing pet pro­jects; that’s a Staff Engineer’s do­main. For a man­ager, every pro­ject is cat­tle: it needs to be com­pleted, au­to­mated, del­e­gated, or can­celled.

Managers hold on to pro­jects for many rea­sons. Sometimes it’s com­fort - you know this sys­tem, you built it, and it feels good to stay close to it. Sometimes it’s iden­tity - you want to stay “technical” and not lose your edge. Sometimes it’s fear - you don’t trust it’ll be done right with­out you. None of these is a good rea­son to hold on.

The “I can do it faster my­self” mind­set might be ac­cu­rate, but in the long run, it’s not sus­tain­able. Every time you do it your­self, you rob some­one else from learn­ing and en­sure you’ll be do­ing it for­ever.

Be risk-averse, not risk-para­noid. You can’t ac­count for every vari­able. Some things can’t be an­tic­i­pated, and over­cor­rect­ing may be worse than the orig­i­nal is­sue.

Hiring is where I see this most of­ten. After a bad hire, man­agers start re­quir­ing re­fer­rals, but al­most any­one, no mat­ter how un­skilled or dis­hon­est, can find some­one to vouch for them. Others add more in­ter­view­ers to the panel, think­ing more eyes means bet­ter vet­ting.

The op­po­site hap­pens: each in­ter­viewer be­comes more lax, ex­pect­ing some­one else to be “the bad guy.” Responsibility gets di­luted. Three great in­ter­views beat seven mediocre ones.

Think about sec­ond-or­der ef­fects too: while you’re sched­ul­ing that sev­enth round, good can­di­dates are ac­cept­ing of­fers else­where. The best tal­ent moves quickly. A slow, risk-averse process fil­ters out ex­actly the peo­ple you wanted to hire.

If any of this res­onated, my free on­line work-in-progress book goes deeper. If you’re a man­ager too, I’d love to hear what you’ve learned. Drop it in the com­ments!

Regime in­sid­ers use “white SIM cards” for un­re­stricted ac­cess, while 85 mil­lion cit­i­zens re­main cut off. Irancell’s CEO was fired for de­lay­ing the shut­down.

Iran’s near-to­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions black­out has en­tered its 16th day, but that’s just a live test.

Following a re­pres­sive crack­down on protests, the gov­ern­ment is now build­ing a sys­tem that grants web ac­cess only to se­cu­rity-vet­ted elites, while lock­ing 90 mil­lion cit­i­zens in­side an in­tranet.

Government spokesper­son Fatemeh Mohajerani con­firmed in­ter­na­tional ac­cess will not be re­stored un­til at least late March. Filterwatch, which mon­i­tors Iranian in­ter­net cen­sor­ship from Texas, cited gov­ern­ment sources, in­clud­ing Mohajerani, say­ing ac­cess will “never re­turn to its pre­vi­ous form.”

This is what makes Iran’s at­tempt unique: Other au­thor­i­tar­ian states built walls be­fore their pop­u­la­tions went on­line. Iran is try­ing to seal off a con­nected econ­omy al­ready in freefall.

The sys­tem is called Barracks Internet, ac­cord­ing to con­fi­den­tial plan­ning doc­u­ments ob­tained by Filterwatch. Under this ar­chi­tec­ture, ac­cess to the global web will be granted only through a strict se­cu­rity whitelist.

“The regime is ter­ri­fied of one thing: Iranians be­ing heard telling their own truth and hav­ing crimes doc­u­mented,” Mahsa Alimardani, a dig­i­tal rights re­searcher at U. S.-based Witness, which trains ac­tivists to use video for ad­vo­cacy, told Rest of World. “The ques­tion be­comes: How do we give Iranians an un­break­able voice?”

The idea of tiered in­ter­net ac­cess is not new in Iran. Since at least 2013, the regime has qui­etly is­sued “white SIM cards,” giv­ing un­re­stricted global in­ter­net ac­cess to ap­prox­i­mately 16,000 peo­ple. The sys­tem gained pub­lic at­ten­tion in November 2025 when X’s lo­ca­tion fea­ture re­vealed that cer­tain ac­counts, in­clud­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions min­is­ter, were con­nect­ing di­rectly from in­side Iran, de­spite X be­ing blocked since 2009.

What is dif­fer­ent now is scale and per­ma­nence. The cur­rent black­out tests in­fra­struc­ture de­signed to make two-tier ac­cess the de­fault, not a tem­po­rary crack­down.

Only a hand­ful of na­tions have at­tempted to wall off their cit­i­zens from the global in­ter­net. North Korea’s Kwangmyong in­tranet was built from scratch for a pop­u­la­tion that never had con­nec­tiv­ity. China con­structed its Great Firewall over two decades while nur­tur­ing do­mes­tic al­ter­na­tives such as WeChat and Alibaba. Iran is at­tempt­ing to do both in weeks, with no do­mes­tic al­ter­na­tives.

The eco­nomic costs of the black­out are stag­ger­ing. Iran’s deputy com­mu­ni­ca­tions min­is­ter pegged the daily losses at as much as $4.3 mil­lion. NetBlocks es­ti­mates the true cost ex­ceeds $37 mil­lion daily. More than 10 mil­lion Iranians de­pend di­rectly on dig­i­tal plat­forms for their liveli­hoods.

Tipax, one of Iran’s largest pri­vate de­liv­ery com­pa­nies han­dling about 320,000 daily ship­ments be­fore the protests, now processes fewer than a few hun­dred, ac­cord­ing to Filterwatch. The com­pany op­er­ates a na­tion­wide lo­gis­tics net­work com­pa­ra­ble to FedEx in the U. S. mar­ket.

The gov­ern­ment fired Irancell’s CEO for fail­ing to com­ply with shut­down or­ders. Irancell, the coun­try’s sec­ond-largest mo­bile op­er­a­tor with 66 mil­lion sub­scribers, is partly owned by South Africa’s MTN Group. Alireza Rafiei was re­moved for dis­obey­ing or­ders on “restriction of in­ter­net ac­cess in cri­sis sit­u­a­tions,” ac­cord­ing to Fars news agency.

Foreign tele­com part­ners have left Iran in re­cent days un­der se­cu­rity es­cort, with­out me­dia cov­er­age, ac­cord­ing to Filterwatch. This may sig­nal the end of in­ter­na­tional co­op­er­a­tion in crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, re­placed by the Revolutionary Guard’s con­struc­tion arm or lim­ited co­op­er­a­tion with Huawei.

Technical ex­perts doubt the regime can sus­tain Barracks Internet with­out crip­pling the econ­omy. Georgia Tech’s Internet Intelligence Lab, which has tracked Iran’s shut­downs since the Arab Spring, called the black­out “the most so­phis­ti­cated and most se­vere in Iran’s his­tory.” Its mea­sure­ments show about 3% con­nec­tiv­ity per­sists, likely gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials and state ser­vices.

Kaveh Ranjbar, for­mer chief tech­nol­ogy of­fi­cer at RIPE NCC, the body man­ag­ing European in­ter­net in­fra­struc­ture, calls the plan a “digital air­lock” that can’t fully seal a mod­ern econ­omy. No coun­try has her­met­i­cally sealed a func­tion­ing dig­i­tal econ­omy, he told The New Arab.

Activists have smug­gled an es­ti­mated 50,000 Starlink satel­lite ter­mi­nals into Iran since 2022, when the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion ex­empted the ser­vice from sanc­tions. SpaceX has made the ser­vice free for Iranian users.

The gov­ern­ment claims it cut off 40,000 Starlink con­nec­tions and jammed some ter­mi­nals dur­ing the black­out, though oth­ers re­main op­er­a­tional af­ter firmware up­dates to by­pass gov­ern­ment block­ing. Still, the tech­nol­ogy re­mains vul­ner­a­ble to sig­nal jam­ming, mean­ing the regime holds ul­ti­mate lever­age.

“We need to rev­o­lu­tion­ize ac­cess to the in­ter­net,” said Alimardani. “And move be­yond the lim­it­ing struc­tures and norms of ‘internet sov­er­eignty.’”

Clawdbot is a per­sonal AI as­sis­tant you run on your own de­vices. It an­swers you on the chan­nels you al­ready use (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMes­sage, Microsoft Teams, WebChat), plus ex­ten­sion chan­nels like BlueBubbles, Matrix, Zalo, and Zalo Personal. It can speak and lis­ten on ma­cOS/​iOS/​An­droid, and can ren­der a live Canvas you con­trol. The Gateway is just the con­trol plane — the prod­uct is the as­sis­tant.

If you want a per­sonal, sin­gle-user as­sis­tant that feels lo­cal, fast, and al­ways-on, this is it.

Preferred setup: run the on­board­ing wiz­ard (clawdbot on­board). It walks through gate­way, work­space, chan­nels, and skills. The CLI wiz­ard is the rec­om­mended path and works on ma­cOS, Linux, and Windows (via WSL2; strongly rec­om­mended). Works with npm, pnpm, or bun. New in­stall? Start here: Getting started

Model note: while any model is sup­ported, I strongly rec­om­mend Anthropic Pro/Max (100/200) + Opus 4.5 for long‑con­text strength and bet­ter prompt‑in­jec­tion re­sis­tance. See Onboarding.

npm in­stall -g clawd­bot@lat­est

# or: pnpm add -g clawd­bot@lat­est

clawd­bot on­board –install-daemon

The wiz­ard in­stalls the Gateway dae­mon (launchd/systemd user ser­vice) so it stays run­ning.

clawd­bot on­board –install-daemon

clawd­bot gate­way –port 18789 –verbose

# Send a mes­sage

clawd­bot mes­sage send –to +1234567890 –message “Hello from Clawdbot”

# Talk to the as­sis­tant (optionally de­liver back to any con­nected chan­nel: WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack/Discord/Google Chat/Signal/iMessage/BlueBubbles/Microsoft Teams/Matrix/Zalo/Zalo Personal/WebChat)

clawd­bot agent –message “Ship check­list” –thinking high

Prefer pnpm for builds from source. Bun is op­tional for run­ning TypeScript di­rectly.

git clone https://​github.com/​clawd­bot/​clawd­bot.git

cd clawd­bot

pnpm in­stall

pnpm ui:build # auto-in­stalls UI deps on first run

pnpm build

pnpm clawd­bot on­board –install-daemon

# Dev loop (auto-reload on TS changes)

pnpm gate­way:watch

Note: pnpm clawd­bot … runs TypeScript di­rectly (via tsx). pnpm build pro­duces dist/ for run­ning via Node / the pack­aged clawd­bot bi­nary.

* DM pair­ing (dmPolicy=“pairing” / chan­nels.dis­cord.dm.pol­icy=“pair­ing” / chan­nels.slack.dm.pol­icy=“pair­ing”): un­known senders re­ceive a short pair­ing code and the bot does not process their mes­sage.

* Approve with: clawd­bot pair­ing ap­prove (then the sender is added to a lo­cal al­lowlist store).

* Public in­bound DMs re­quire an ex­plicit opt-in: set dm­Pol­icy=“open” and in­clude “*” in the chan­nel al­lowlist (allowFrom / chan­nels.dis­cord.dm.al­lowFrom / chan­nels.slack.dm.al­lowFrom).

Clawdbot can auto-con­fig­ure Tailscale Serve (tailnet-only) or Funnel (public) while the Gateway stays bound to loop­back. Configure gate­way.tailscale.mode:

* serve: tail­net-only HTTPS via tailscale serve (uses Tailscale iden­tity head­ers by de­fault).

* gate­way.bind must stay loop­back when Serve/Funnel is en­abled (Clawdbot en­forces this).

* Serve can be forced to re­quire a pass­word by set­ting gate­way.auth.mode: “password” or gate­way.auth.al­low­Tailscale: false.

* Funnel re­fuses to start un­less gate­way.auth.mode: “password” is set.

It’s per­fectly fine to run the Gateway on a small Linux in­stance. Clients (macOS app, CLI, WebChat) can con­nect over Tailscale Serve/Funnel or SSH tun­nels, and you can still pair de­vice nodes (macOS/iOS/Android) to ex­e­cute de­vice‑lo­cal ac­tions when needed.

* Gateway host runs the exec tool and chan­nel con­nec­tions by de­fault.

* Device nodes run de­vice‑lo­cal ac­tions (system.run, cam­era, screen record­ing, no­ti­fi­ca­tions) via node.in­voke.

In short: exec runs where the Gateway lives; de­vice ac­tions run where the de­vice lives.

The ma­cOS app can run in node mode and ad­ver­tises its ca­pa­bil­i­ties + per­mis­sion map over the Gateway WebSocket (node.list / node.de­scribe). Clients can then ex­e­cute lo­cal ac­tions via node.in­voke:

* sys­tem.run runs a lo­cal com­mand and re­turns std­out/​stderr/​exit code; set needsS­creen­Record­ing: true to re­quire screen-record­ing per­mis­sion (otherwise you’ll get PERMISSION_MISSING).

* sys­tem.no­tify posts a user no­ti­fi­ca­tion and fails if no­ti­fi­ca­tions are de­nied.

* can­vas.*, cam­era.*, screen.record, and lo­ca­tion.get are also routed via node.in­voke and fol­low TCC per­mis­sion sta­tus.

* Use /elevated on|off to tog­gle per‑ses­sion el­e­vated ac­cess when en­abled + al­lowlisted.

* Gateway per­sists the per‑ses­sion tog­gle via ses­sions.patch (WS method) along­side think­ingLevel, ver­bose­Level, model, send­Pol­icy, and groupActi­va­tion.

* Use these to co­or­di­nate work across ses­sions with­out jump­ing be­tween chat sur­faces.

ClawdHub is a min­i­mal skill reg­istry. With ClawdHub en­abled, the agent can search for skills au­to­mat­i­cally and pull in new ones as needed.

Send these in WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack/Google Chat/Microsoft Teams/WebChat (group com­mands are owner-only):

* /new or /reset — re­set the ses­sion

The Gateway alone de­liv­ers a great ex­pe­ri­ence. All apps are op­tional and add ex­tra fea­tures.

If you plan to build/​run com­pan­ion apps, fol­low the plat­form run­books be­low.

* Menu bar con­trol for the Gateway and health.

Note: signed builds re­quired for ma­cOS per­mis­sions to stick across re­builds (see docs/​mac/​per­mis­sions.md).

* Pairs as a node via the Bridge.

* Pairs via the same Bridge + pair­ing flow as iOS.

agent: {

model: “anthropic/claude-opus-4-5”

* Default: tools run on the host for the main ses­sion, so the agent has full ac­cess when it’s just you.

* Group/channel safety: set agents.de­faults.sand­box.mode: “non-main” to run non‑main ses­sions (groups/channels) in­side per‑ses­sion Docker sand­boxes; bash then runs in Docker for those ses­sions.

* Allowlist who can talk to the as­sis­tant via chan­nels.what­sapp.al­lowFrom.

* If chan­nels.what­sapp.groups is set, it be­comes a group al­lowlist; in­clude “*” to al­low all.

* Optional: set chan­nels.telegram.groups (with chan­nels.telegram.groups.“*”.re­quire­Men­tion); when set, it is a group al­lowlist (include “*” to al­low all). Also chan­nels.telegram.al­lowFrom or chan­nels.telegram.web­hookUrl as needed.

chan­nels: {

telegram: {

bot­To­ken: “123456:ABCDEF”

* Optional: set com­mands.na­tive, com­mands.text, or com­mands.use­Ac­cess­Groups, plus chan­nels.dis­cord.dm.al­lowFrom, chan­nels.dis­cord.guilds, or chan­nels.dis­cord.me­dia­MaxMb as needed.

chan­nels: {

dis­cord: {

to­ken: “1234abcd”

* ma­cOS only; Messages must be signed in.

* If chan­nels.imes­sage.groups is set, it be­comes a group al­lowlist; in­clude “*” to al­low all.

* Allowlist who can talk via msteams.al­lowFrom; group ac­cess via msteams.groupAl­lowFrom or msteams.group­Pol­icy: “open”.

browser: {

en­abled: true,

con­trolUrl: “http://​127.0.0.1:18791”,

color: “#FF4500”

Use these when you’re past the on­board­ing flow and want the deeper ref­er­ence.

Clawdbot was built for Clawd, a space lob­ster AI as­sis­tant. 🦞 by Peter Steinberger and the com­mu­nity.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guide­lines, main­tain­ers, and how to sub­mit PRs. AI/vibe-coded PRs wel­come! 🤖

Special thanks to Mario Zechner for his sup­port and for

pi-mono.

Thanks to all clawtrib­u­tors:

Today we are happy to an­nounce MapLibre Tile (MLT), a new mod­ern and ef­fi­cient vec­tor tile for­mat.

MapLibre Tile (MLT) is a suc­ce­sor to Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT). It has been re­designed from the ground up to ad­dress the chal­lenges of rapidly grow­ing geospa­tial data vol­umes and com­plex next-gen­er­a­tion geospa­tial source for­mats, as well as to lever­age the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of mod­ern hard­ware and APIs.

MLT is specif­i­cally de­signed for mod­ern and next-gen­er­a­tion graph­ics APIs to en­able high-per­for­mance pro­cess­ing and ren­der­ing of large (planet-scale) 2D and 2.5 basemaps. This cur­rent im­ple­men­ta­tion of­fers fea­ture par­ity with MVT1 while de­liv­er­ing on the fol­low­ing:

* Improved com­pres­sion ra­tio: up to 6x on large tiles, based on a col­umn-ori­ented lay­out with re­cur­sively ap­plied (custom)

light­weight en­cod­ings. This leads to re­duced la­tency, stor­age, and egress costs and, in par­tic­u­lar, im­proved cache uti­liza­tion.

* Better de­cod­ing per­for­mance: fast, light­weight en­cod­ings that can be used in com­bi­na­tion with SIMD/vectorization in­struc­tions.

In ad­di­tion, MLT was de­signed to sup­port the fol­low­ing use cases in the fu­ture:

* Improved pro­cess­ing per­for­mance, based on stor­age and in-mem­ory for­mats that are specif­i­cally de­signed for mod­ern graph­ics APIs,

al­low­ing for ef­fi­cient pro­cess­ing on both CPU and GPU. The for­mats are de­signed to be loaded into GPU buffers with lit­tle or no ad­di­tional pro­cess­ing.

* Support for lin­ear ref­er­enc­ing and m-val­ues to ef­fi­ciently sup­port the up­com­ing next-gen­er­a­tion source for­mats such as Overture Maps (GeoParquet).

As with any MapLibre pro­ject, the fu­ture of MLT is de­cided by the needs of the com­mu­nity. There are a lot of ex­cit­ing ideas for other fu­ture ex­ten­sions and we wel­come con­tri­bu­tions to the pro­ject.

For a more in-depth ex­plo­ration of MLT have a look at the fol­low­ing slides, watch

this talk or read this pub­li­ca­tion by MLT in­ven­tor Markus Tremmel.

For the ad­ven­tur­ous, the an­swer is: to­day. Both MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native now sup­port MLT sources. You can use the new en­cod­ing prop­erty on sources in your style JSON with a value of mlt for MLT vec­tor tile sources.

To try out MLT, you have the fol­low­ing op­tions:

* The eas­i­est way to try out MLT is to use the MLT-based de­motiles style.

* You can also try out the en­cod­ing server that con­verts ex­ist­ing (MVT-based) styles and vec­tor tile sources to MLT on the fly. This is mostly a tool for de­vel­op­ment.

* To cre­ate tiles for pro­duc­tion, you could use Planetiler, as the up­com­ing ver­sion will sup­port gen­er­at­ing MLTs.

Refer to this page for a com­plete and up-to-date list of in­te­gra­tions and im­ple­men­ta­tions. If you are an in­te­gra­tor work­ing on sup­port­ing MLT, feel free to add your own pro­ject there.

We would love to hear your ex­pe­ri­ence with us­ing MLT! Join the #maplibre-tile-format chan­nel on our Slack or cre­ate an Issue or Discussion on the tile spec repo.

MapLibre Tile came to be thanks to a multi-year col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween acad­e­mia, open source and en­ter­prise. Thank you to every­one who was in­volved! We are very proud that our com­mu­nity can in­no­vate like this.

Special thanks go to Markus Tremmel for in­vent­ing the for­mat, Yuri Astrakhan for spear­head­ing the pro­ject, Tim Sylvester for the C++ im­ple­men­ta­tion, Harel Mazor, Benedikt Vogl and Niklas Greindl for work­ing on the JavaScript im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Also thanks to Microsoft and AWS for fi­nanc­ing work on MLT.

the browser is the sand­box. Paul Kinlan is a web plat­form de­vel­oper ad­vo­cate at Google and re­cently turned his at­ten­tion to cod­ing agents. He quickly iden­ti­fied the im­por­tance of a ro­bust sand­box for agents to op­er­ate in and put to­gether these de­tailed notes on how the web browser can help:

This got me think­ing about the browser. Over the last 30 years, we have built a sand­box specif­i­cally de­signed to run in­cred­i­bly hos­tile, un­trusted code from any­where on the web, the in­stant a user taps a URL. […]

Could you build some­thing like Cowork in the browser? Maybe. To find out, I built a demo called Co-do that tests this hy­poth­e­sis. In this post I want to dis­cuss the re­search I’ve done to see how far we can get, and de­ter­mine if the browser’s abil­ity to run un­trusted code is use­ful (and good enough) for en­abling soft­ware to do more for us di­rectly on our com­puter.

Paul then de­scribes how the three key as­pects of a sand­box - filesys­tem, net­work ac­cess and safe code ex­e­cu­tion - can be han­dled by browser tech­nolo­gies: the File System Access API (still Chrome-only as far as I can tell), CSP head­ers with and WebAssembly in Web Workers.

Co-do is a very in­ter­est­ing demo that il­lus­trates all of these ideas in a sin­gle ap­pli­ca­tion:

You se­lect a folder full of files and con­fig­ure an LLM provider and set an API key, Co-do then uses CSP-approved API calls to in­ter­act with that provider and pro­vides a chat in­ter­face with tools for in­ter­act­ing with those files. It does in­deed feel sim­i­lar to Claude Cowork but with­out run­ning a multi-GB lo­cal con­tainer to pro­vide the sand­box.

My biggest com­plaint about re­mains how thinly doc­u­mented it is, es­pe­cially across dif­fer­ent browsers. Paul’s post has all sorts of use­ful de­tails on that which I’ve not en­coun­tered else­where, in­clud­ing a com­plex dou­ble-iframe tech­nique to help ap­ply net­work rules to the in­ner of the two frames.

Thanks to this post I also learned about the tag which turns out to work on Firefox, Safari and Chrome and al­lows a browser read-only ac­cess to a full di­rec­tory of files at once. I had Claude knock up a we­bkit­di­rec­tory demo to try it out and I’ll cer­tainly be us­ing it for pro­jects in the fu­ture.

At what point do “you” end and the out­side world be­gins?

It might feel like a weird ques­tion with an ob­vi­ous an­swer, but your brain has to work sur­pris­ingly hard to judge that bound­ary. Now, sci­en­tists have linked a spe­cific set of brain waves in a cer­tain part of the brain to a sense of body own­er­ship.

In a se­ries of new ex­per­i­ments, re­searchers from Sweden and France put 106 par­tic­i­pants through what’s called the rub­ber hand il­lu­sion, mon­i­tor­ing and stim­u­lat­ing their brain ac­tiv­ity to see what ef­fect it had.

Related: Octopuses Fall For The Classic Fake Arm Trick — Just Like We Do

This clas­sic il­lu­sion in­volves hid­ing one of a par­tic­i­pan­t’s hands from their view and re­plac­ing it with a rub­ber one in­stead. When both their real and fake hands are re­peat­edly touched at the same time, it can evoke the eerie sen­sa­tion that the rub­ber hand is part of the per­son’s body.

The tests, which in one ex­per­i­ment in­volved EEG (electroencephalography) read­ings of brain ac­tiv­ity, re­vealed that a sense of body own­er­ship seems to arise from the fre­quency of al­pha waves in the pari­etal cor­tex, a brain re­gion re­spon­si­ble for map­ping the body, pro­cess­ing sen­sory in­put and build­ing a sense of self.

“We have iden­ti­fied a fun­da­men­tal brain process that shapes our con­tin­u­ous ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing em­bod­ied,” says lead au­thor Mariano D’Angelo, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

“The find­ings may pro­vide new in­sights into psy­chi­atric con­di­tions such as schiz­o­phre­nia, where the sense of self is dis­turbed.”

In the first batch of ex­per­i­ments, par­tic­i­pants had a ro­botic arm tap the in­dex fin­ger of their real and fake hands, ei­ther at the ex­act same time or with a de­lay of up to 500 mil­lisec­onds be­tween each tap.

As ex­pected, par­tic­i­pants re­ported feel­ing that the fake hand was part of their body more strongly if the taps were syn­chro­nized, and the feel­ing steadily weak­ened as the gap widened be­tween what they felt and what they saw.

The EEG read­ings from the sec­ond ex­per­i­ment added more de­tail to the story. The fre­quency of al­pha waves in the pari­etal cor­tex seemed to cor­re­late with how well par­tic­i­pants could de­tect the time de­lay be­tween taps.

Those with faster al­pha waves ap­peared to rule out fake hands even with a tiny gap in taps, while those with slower waves were more likely to feel the fake hand as their own, even if the taps were far­ther apart.

Finally, the re­searchers in­ves­ti­gated whether the fre­quency of these brain waves ac­tu­ally con­trols the sen­sa­tion of body own­er­ship, or if they were per­haps both ef­fects of some other fac­tor.

With a third group of par­tic­i­pants, they used a non-in­va­sive tech­nique called tran­scra­nial al­ter­nat­ing cur­rent stim­u­la­tion to speed up or slow down the fre­quency of a per­son’s al­pha waves. And sure enough, this seemed to cor­re­late with how real a fake hand felt.

Speeding up some­one’s al­pha waves gave them a tighter sense of body own­er­ship, mak­ing them more sen­si­tive to small tim­ing dis­crep­an­cies. Slowing down the waves had the op­po­site ef­fect, mak­ing it harder for peo­ple to tell the dif­fer­ence be­tween their own body and the out­side world.

“Our find­ings help ex­plain how the brain solves the chal­lenge of in­te­grat­ing sig­nals from the body to cre­ate a co­her­ent sense of self,” says Henrik Ehrsson, neu­ro­sci­en­tist at Karolinska.

The re­searchers say that the find­ings could lead to new un­der­stand­ing of or treat­ments for con­di­tions where the brain’s body maps have gone askew, such as schiz­o­phre­nia or the sen­sa­tion of ‘phantom limbs’ ex­pe­ri­enced by am­putees.

It could also help make for more re­al­is­tic pros­thetic limbs or even vir­tual re­al­ity tools.

The re­search was pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Communications.