GPT-5, Truth, and History
History is needed so that we can make better decisions now and are reminded of decisions made in the past, both good and poor.
If you’d like these posts delivered directly to you, subscribe to the Decisions newsletter now!
GPT-5 and Truth
The anticipated release of OpenAI’s GPT-5 model came out this week with much fanfare. As is common with Silicon Valley tech companies, the announcements reveal good stuff and a lot of hype.
Gary Marcus, researcher in artificial intelligence and author of Taming Silicon Valley and his newsletter Marcus on AI, posted the unveiling of GPT-5 by OpenAI leader Sam Altman: “Sam Altman was so cocky that in advance of the livestream debut he posted a screen grab from a Star War film, Rogue One: [1][2]
Post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, preceding the release of GPT-5 [2]
Also, from Novara Media’s Michael Walker: [3]
If you are someone who's worried about the safety implications of advanced AI, Sam Alman's tweet marking the launch of Chat GPT5 won't reassure you. Now, that's because the image he chose as his analogy or his metaphor for the new AI bot was the Star Wars Death Star.
GPT-5 is the latest of the AI technologies built on Large Language Models (or LLMs); these are amazing in mimicking how humans interpret language and can reprocess these interpretations in novel ways. LLMs can provide interesting summaries and even do so in character.
Microsoft incorporated OpenAI’s GPT-5 into its consumer and enterprise offerings as well. [4] Here’s an example of a prompt I provided to Microsoft’s Copilot: “Provide me a summary of the latest news from August 8 in the voice of HBO's John Oliver.” [5]
🎙️August 8, 2025 News Recap — John Oliver Style Hello, hello! Let’s dive into the latest headlines with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated meerkat and the skepticism of a British man who’s seen one too many government scandals.
🇮🇱 Israel’s Gaza Gambit Israel has decided to take over Gaza City, which is a bit like saying, “We’ve tried diplomacy, now let’s try bulldozers.” The move has sparked international outrage and UN warnings of “catastrophic consequences,” which is UN-speak for “this is going to be a flaming dumpster fire with geopolitical implications.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be playing Risk with real lives.
🕊️ Trump’s Peace Deadline with Putin President Trump, in his latest episode of “Diplomacy: The Reality Show,” has set a deadline for Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. And where will they meet? Alaska. Because nothing says “global peace talks” like moose, glaciers, and Sarah Palin’s old neighborhood.
💸 Tariffs, Tariffs Everywhere Trump’s new tariffs have kicked in, slapping a 10% duty on most imports and pushing the average rate to 17%—the highest since the Great Depression. So if you thought your avocado toast was expensive before, buckle up. It’s about to become a luxury item rivaling caviar.
🧬 FEMA’s Identity Crisis Natural disasters are testing FEMA’s new role under the Trump administration, which seems to be: “Respond to emergencies, but only if they’re politically convenient.” It’s like giving a firefighter a garden hose and telling him to “just do his best”.
🧑⚖️ Court Blocks Birthright Citizenship Order A fourth federal ruling has blocked Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. That’s four judges saying, “Nope,” which in legal terms is basically a mic drop.
🌌 Hubble’s Cosmic Close-Up In non-political news, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken its sharpest-ever photo of an interstellar comet. So while Earth burns metaphorically and sometimes literally, space continues to be majestic and indifferent.
⚾ Marlins vs. Braves: Baseball Drama And finally, in sports: the Braves rallied to beat the Marlins 8–6, with Drake Baldwin hitting two home runs like he’s auditioning for a Marvel movie called “Slugger: The Reckoning.” Meanwhile, the Marlins are wondering if they should just switch to cricket.
So there you have it: war, tariffs, space comets, and baseball. It’s like someone spun the Wheel of News and landed on “All of the Above.”
Here’s another Copilot summary of my newsletter from last week titled “Feelings Over Facts”; Copilot provided back the following synopsis to me in less than five seconds: [6]
🧠 Central Theme
The newsletter warns that national decision-making is deteriorating due to a growing disregard for facts, replaced by political self-interest and emotional reasoning. It emphasizes the importance of grounding decisions in reality—even when the truth is inconvenient.
🔥 Key Event: Firing of BLS Chief
President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after unfavorable job reports and downward revisions of previous months.
Trump claimed, without evidence, that the data was politically manipulated.
Experts like Don Moynihan and commentators on MSNBC (Ali Velshi, Ben Rhodes, Antonia Hylton, Ron Insana, Natasha Sarin) expressed alarm, calling it a dangerous attack on nonpartisan institutions and a move toward autocracy.
📉 Consequences of Undermining Data
The newsletter outlines how manipulating or dismissing data leads to poor decision-making in areas like:
Public health (e.g., COVID-19 response)
Climate change
Economic policy
National security
It draws parallels to autocratic regimes (e.g., Soviet Union, Turkey, Argentina, China) that falsify statistics to maintain control.
🏛️ Rule of Law & Institutional Integrity
The erosion of trust in institutions like the judiciary, health agencies, and statistical bureaus threatens the foundation of democracy.
The newsletter highlights the removal of Trump’s impeachment references from a Smithsonian exhibit as another example of historical revisionism.
📚 Supporting Examples & Sources
Includes references to academic studies (e.g., Luis Martinez’s satellite-based GDP analysis)
Cites multiple news outlets and expert commentary
Uses historical and international comparisons to underscore the risks of ignoring facts
🗣️ Final Message
Mic Farris urges readers to:
Seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable
Recognize the costs of decisions
Resist the temptation to distort reality for political gain
I will say that the breakdown is pretty good; Copilot manages to boil the newsletter down to its essence, extract the main points accurately, and organize them concisely. (I now wonder if I should just post such a quick hitting overview in the future, but maybe another day…)
The use of LLMs to develop AI make things seem that computers are on the verge of taking over human tasks, especially those that require logic, reasoning, and critical thinking.
Well, we’re not there yet.
Here is Gary Marcus’s view on GPT-5: [7]
GPT-5 may be a moderate quantitative improvement (and it may be cheaper) but it still fails in all the same qualitative ways as its predecessors, on chess, on reasoning, in vision; even sometimes on counting and basic math. Hallucinations linger. Dozens of shots on goal (Grok, Claude, Gemini) etc have invariably faced the same problems.
That’s exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the set of obstacles I described in 2022.
No hypothesis has ever been given more benefit of the doubt, nor more funding.
Pure scaling simply isn’t the path to AGI. Attention was not all we needed.
All I am saying, is give neurosymbolic AI with explicit world models a chance.
Marcus has long been an advocate for what he describes as “symbolic AI,” where artificial intelligence designs which describe high level representations of problems, logic, and reasoning. Based upon others testing GPT-5’s capabilities, there is still need for such improvement.
And there is no more of an important time for all of us to raise our critical thinking skills, both in working with AI technology and with people.
Kieran Healy, a Professor of Sociology at Duke University, posted his testing of GPT-5 via OpenAI’s ChatGPT, asking it a simple counting question - “how many times does the letter b appear in blueberry” [8][9]
GPT-5’s answer: three
In part of Healy’s chat, he responded back to ChatGPT that “’Blueberry’ has only two bs,” and ChatGPT responded: [10]
Post from Kieran Healy, asking GPT-5 how many “b”s are in the word “blueberry” [9]
Nope – blueberry really does have three b’s.
Here it is spaced out:
b l u e b b e r r y
Positions:
1 b – at the start
5 b – in the “blue” part
6 b – right next to it, starting “berry”
That middle double-b is easy to miss if you just glance at the word.
Post from Kieran Healy with a fact-check and follow up [10]
In fact, I tried it myself with Copilot, and unfortunately, GPT-5 tripped up on the same error: [11]
My use of Microsoft Copilot to answer the “blueberry” question [11]
It’s pretty clear that, based on our collective understanding of concepts like, say, letters and counting, we know that GPT-5 is just wrong. More precisely, our assessment that our count of two “b”s in “blueberry” is very much more likely to be correct than GPT-5’s count that there are three.
And since GPT-5 is just a tool to us, there are very minimal consequences to dismissing the chatbot’s answers and sticking with our own. This is how we reach decisions, given the truth of the answers before us and the consequences for deciding that GPT-5 doesn’t reason as well as we do.
Also, from Healy’s test, GPT-5 rebuts the fact-checking with its own version of the double-down, and we see through it easily. The GPT is presenting the information to us and we interpret it as being very confident (by the way, “it” is not confident… we just interpret it that way). This is basically gaslighting; however, because we’re very confident that we’re correct, the gaslighting is ineffective.
Imagine, though, if it were less immediately clear what the facts were – say, when you’re trying to remember the actor who played a key role in a movie, the author of that book you recently read, or details from history. We couldn’t tell so easily in the moment if an answer provided to us was correct or not.
Imagine now if it was your boss or a less-than-reliable friend or a silver-tongued politician providing the information and doubling down with gaslighting. These consequences would not be so easily dismissed if we met with confident disagreement.
The way a chatbot presents its information and engages with us is very much like humans do. The LLMs that underlie these GPT technologies do exactly what the best human talkers around do: they present ideas through language in ways that sound perfectly plausible and sometimes quite compelling to other people. They do the best of what a BS artist would do – weave an impressive and captivating tale that may or may not be tethered to the truth.
With our constant search for facts to help guide our decisions, we risk large groups of people without firm grounding in facts and truth being too easily swayed by inaccurate technologies, much as they would be swayed by a charismatic confidence man.
Imagine if people really started believing that “blueberry” was spelled “bluebberry.”
This is why it’s so important to think critically, fact check, and find other sources, who are independently describing what is happening.
Fundamentally, truth is consistency under repeated and independent examination.
The key to decision making is to understand the facts and get to the root cause of why the data appear the way they do.
The scientific method assumes there is no single source of truth
It is a method to identify what the truth really is
Hypotheses that are consistent over repeated and independent examination become the most likely explanation of the truth
This is the best we can do, since all we have are data, and all we can do is ask questions of the data
We shouldn’t just rely on one source of information – if the information we’re receiving is true, we’d hear similar things when we look at multiple independent sources. If we’re just chatting with one person or one chatbot, we’re not gathering enough independent information.
And I’ve written a bit about the need for critical thinking before. [12] It’s so important for us to be grounded in the search for truth and exercise our freedom to question what we hear to make sure it resonates other historically proven reliable sources.
It’s increasingly hard to fake the truth if you have to fake every piece of independent information to make them all consistent - the truth does this naturally since it’s self-consistent.
The Need for History
History, and the pursuit of truth, helps us make better decisions now. It’s critical that we have freedom to pursue the truth and not have the government, using its power to compel or impose consequences upon us, decide what acceptable history is.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
He recently wrote an essay about the dangers of the Trump administration’s efforts to redefine and reinterpret our past into something that is counter to American history itself.
This week, Professor Blight was interviewed on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Blight raised a challenge to those in the administration. Here’s an excerpt from that interview: [13]
Lawrence O’Donell: [President Trump] has been guided in that thinking by an historian named Kevin Roberts, who is now the head of the Heritage Foundation, which created the Project 2025 guidebook that Donald Trump has been following. Kevin Roberts published a book just after the presidential election with a foreword by J.D. Vance, saying every Ivy League college should be burned.
Our next guest says Donald Trump is following not just Project 2025, but the approach that Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich used to control Germany. In a new article in the New Republic, Yale history professor David Blight lists the eight key factors that the Nazis used to achieve power, as described in Richard J. Evans trilogy on the Third Reich.
One of those factors was “the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities.” Another was “the public manipulating and recrafting of history.”
David Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of the escaped slave Frederick Douglass, who became, among other things, an advisor to President Abraham Lincoln. Many of David Blight's other books, including A Slave No More, include invaluable details about the most cruel period of American history that Kevin Roberts wants to rewrite.
Now, in a way that would soothe Donald Trump's flawless ignorance of American history, it seems that David Blight’s scholarship and Kevin Roberts’s scholarship once overlapped at the turn of the century. In 1999, when Roberts earned his PhD in American history with a dissertation titled “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791 to 1831.
Kevin Roberts’s proclamations now are unhinged from scholarship or law. He now says, “our rights come not from courts or constitutions, but from God.”
David Blight now believes it's time for historians to leave their libraries and their classrooms and publicly, strongly defend history itself.
Professor Blight writes, “These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy.”
David Blight says Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump's history department, and Professor Blight wants to bring Kevin Roberts and Trump's history department out of the shadows. Professor Blight writes, “I respectfully invite him to join a small group of historians in a series of discussions and debates. He can choose his companions and we will choose our participants. I challenge him to a series of civil debates in major television or podcast outlets, or especially a public venue, before the 2026 anniversary of American Independence.”
Joining us now with a preview of such a debate is Yale University's sterling professor of history and Black studies, David Blight.
Professor Blight, thank you very much for joining us here tonight. This is a striking proposal for a professor to say. Let's get out there. Let's get out there and have this discussion publicly. Let's have it in a way that the country can hear it and judge. What brought you to this point and to this idea?
David Blight: Well. Thank you, Lawrence, for having me back on what brought me to this, first of all, was the viciousness of the attacks that Kevin Roberts has made on us, on my profession. On American historians. On the last half to three quarters of a century of revolutions in scholarship of which he was part with. That dissertation you just cited.
But what also brought me to this proposal or invitation to Mr. Roberts is that I don't see what else we can do at this point. This isn't about facts and evidence.
I mean, it is at the end of the day, we hope but it's not about interpretations that may differ. This is a political fight. What President Trump did in the March 27th executive order about restoring sanity to American history, crafted essentially by the Heritage Foundation, was to declare political war on the practice of history, on the teaching of history, on American scholarship. And Mr. Roberts has been very much the vanguard of the far right's attacks on all things liberalism, the liberal mind, liberal politics, the liberal quest for knowledge to use reason to discover new ideas.
And so I thought, why not challenge him to come out, come out of that Heritage Foundation building there in Washington? Come debate us. He can choose the first moderator in the venue. We'll choose the second moderator in the venue, but let's have it out. What is American history? What should it be? What are its dominant narratives and how did they develop?
And why is it that the far right chooses so vigorously and viciously to attack how we understand our past.
Blight’s interview is a good overview of his position, but his piece in The New Republic is worth reading in its entirety (you can read it here…). Here’s an excerpt from the piece, and his detailing of the eight key factors for Hitler’s rise that is referenced in the interview: [14]
The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.
On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.
In the New Republic piece, Blight warns of the path America is heading down compared with specific elements that led to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s, including: [15]
Economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate
Widespread hatred for democracy
The destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities
Ritualistic “dynamism” and propaganda machinery
A cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy
The public manipulating and recrafting of history to fit their present purposes
Identification of groups that were viscerally hated, making them objects of insatiable grievance
Street violence in the form of thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town
Blight also notes that “thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.” [16]
Remembering January 6: Defendant urged crowd to “kill” officers, now a DOJ official
Our continual reminder from our recent history. Those that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, are not patriots. They chose not to abide by a free and fair election; they chose to try and overturn it; they chose not to uphold the Constitution.
From my January 26 newsletter: [17]
Yet, the President, in his first week, pardoned and commuted the sentences for all of the convicted January 6 defendants.
The proclamation stated that the pardons and commutations “end[] a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years…”
To me, this is already a lie.
Regardless of the words from the proclamation, the prosecutions were not unjust, and this will not facilitate a “national reconciliation.” We need to remember the truth of what happened; yes, it was an insurrection.
Yet, we learned from NPR reporting that participants in the January 6 Capitol storming are now part of the Department of Justice, where “[v]ideo shows Department of Justice official urging Jan. 6 rioters to 'kill' cops”: [18]
Less than five years after urging rioters to "kill" police at the Capitol, a former Jan. 6 defendant is working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice, which has been dramatically remade under the second Trump administration.
NPR has obtained police bodycam footage from multiple angles of the former defendant and current administration official, Jared Wise, berating officers and calling them "Nazi" and "Gestapo." NPR located the footage, which has not previously been published, in a review of thousands of court exhibits from Jan. 6 criminal cases, obtained through legal action by a coalition of media organizations. The Department of Justice had introduced the footage as an exhibit in Wise's trial. NPR also obtained the transcript of Wise's testimony, in which he acknowledged that he repeatedly yelled "kill 'em" as officers were being attacked and tried to explain his actions. Wise was not convicted of any crimes related to Jan. 6, due to President Trump's order to end all Capitol riot prosecutions.
Harry Litman, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, was interviewed on All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday and described the January 6 insurrection as “the worst crime in the history of the Republic against the peaceful transfer of power, which is the most important aspect of democracy.” [19][20]
Remembering Munich in Alaska
Another historical parallel worth noting. President Trump announced he is going to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this week to discuss the future of the Russian-Ukraine conflict. From BBC reporting: [21]
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska next Friday to discuss the future of the war in Ukraine.
Trump announced the 15 August meeting on social media and it was later confirmed by a Kremlin spokesperson, who said the location was "quite logical" given Alaska's relative proximity to Russia.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said any solutions must include Ukraine, adding he is ready to work with all partners towards a "lasting peace".
The announcement of the meeting came just hours after Trump had signaled that Ukraine might have to cede territory in order to end the war, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.
[Of course, he’s continuing to find ways to distract from his Jeffrey Epstein issues and “can’t make it disappear.”] [22]
Floating the idea of the invaded giving up its territory to end a conflict initiated by Russian aggression draws eerie parallels to Nazi aggression against Czechoslovakia a century ago: [23]
The Munich Agreement of 1938 was an agreement to recognize the formal annexation of the Sudetenland (then part of Czechoslovakia) by Germany, where three million ethnic Germans lived.
This invasion of Czechoslovakia in September 1938 came after Germany had already absorbed Austria in March of that year.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brokered the Munich deal, which is now seen a failed act of appeasement, and the agreement became “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”
Neville Chamberlain now holds his place in history as the appeaser to Adolf Hitler, which didn’t stop his territorial aspirations and eventually led to World War II. Trump’s potential appeasement of Putin was signaled back in March by Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Robert Kagan writing: [24]
Hitler didn’t want a peace deal, and neither does Putin.
Today the Trump administration is offering Vladimir Putin a Munich-like settlement for Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators have offered Putin almost everything he has publicly asked for without demanding anything in return. They may assume that if they give him everything up front, he will agree to a cease-fire and some kind of deal that will save face for President Donald Trump, allowing him to claim the mantle of peacemaker, just as Chamberlain did, albeit for only a few months.
Will Putin accept? At the moment, thanks to Trump’s anti-Ukraine maneuvers, he has the luxury of watching Washington and Kyiv wrangle over terms while he pummels Ukraine’s population and energy grid and brings the country closer to collapse. But so far, Putin has been clear about the terms he is willing to accept to achieve peace. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, his offer is this: nothing.
No security guarantee; no independent, sovereign Ukraine; perhaps not even a cease-fire. Putin’s goal, as it has been from the beginning, is the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia and the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, language, and culture. He will gladly accept Ukraine’s surrender whenever Kyiv is ready to concede, but short of that he is going to keep the war going until he takes everything.
Also, can we talk a little bit about meeting in Alaska of all places? Here’s a little history of how Alaska came to become part of the United States (synopsis from Wikipedia): [25]
The Alaska Purchase was the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire by the United States for a sum of $7.2 million in 1867 (equivalent to $129 million in 2023). On May 15 of that year, the United States Senate ratified a bilateral treaty that had been signed on March 30, and American sovereignty became legally effective across the territory on October 18.
Originally organized as the Department of Alaska, the area was renamed the District of Alaska in 1884 and the Territory of Alaska in 1912, ultimately becoming the modern-day State of Alaska in 1959.
Scholars are decrying the optics of choosing to meet Putin and doing so in Alaska. From Washington Post reporting: [26]
Sam Greene, professor in Russian politics at King’s College London, said the venue favored Russia.
“The symbolism of holding the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska is horrendous — as though designed to demonstrate that borders can change, land can be bought and sold,” Greene said. “Never mind that mainstream Russian discourse maintains a claim that Alaska should be returned to Russia.”
Russian officials are using this opportunity to resurface long-held claims to return Alaska to Russia - hardly a position of strength for America: [27]
Russian officials have renewed statements about historical claims to Alaska ahead of the planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
…
ISW noted that Russian officials and state media have previously made similar statements. In January 2024, Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev said Russia expected Alaska to be “returned any day.” In 2024, Russian television hosts Vladimir Solovyov and Olga Skabeyeva also stated that the United States should hand over the territory to Russia.
In July 2022, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin warned that Moscow would lay claim to Alaska if Washington froze Russian assets abroad. Earlier, in October 2018, Russian state media outlet RT suggested that Alaska’s “return” should be pursued following the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin arrive for a press conference after the meeting of U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Monday, July 16, 2018. [29]
A reminder of the last time Trump met with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, from BBC News reporting: [28]
US President Donald Trump has defended Russia over claims of interference in the 2016 presidential election.
After face-to-face talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr Trump contradicted US intelligence agencies and said there had been no reason for Russia to meddle in the vote.
Mr Putin reiterated that Russia had never interfered in US affairs.
The two men held nearly two hours of closed-door talks in the Finnish capital Helsinki on Monday.
At a news conference after the summit, President Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to the allegations of meddling in the elections.
"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," he replied.
US intelligence agencies concluded in 2016 that Russia was behind an effort to tip the scale of the US election against Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.
Remembering the Great Depression: OMG The Tariffs
Here’s an indicator on how our economy might fare for the rest of this year. American companies are already losing money because of tariffs we are placing on ourselves, and the full impacts haven’t yet been felt.
Ford Motor Company announced its Q2 earning a couple of weeks ago: [30]
Second-quarter revenue reached a record $50.2 billion; incurred a net loss of $36 million as a result of special items
Adjusted EBIT was $2.1 billion, including $0.8 billion of adverse net tariff-related impacts; operating cash flow was $6.3 billion, adjusted free cash flow was $2.8 billion
Company declares a third quarter regular dividend of 15 cents per share
Reinstated full-year 2025 guidance includes adjusted EBIT of $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion, adjusted free cash flow of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, capital spending of about $9 billion, and a net tariff-related headwind of about $2 billion [emphasis added]
Ford lost money in the second quarter due to $800 million in “adverse net tariff-related impacts.”
A reminder – Ford is an American company that makes cars in America. However, because of the interdependent nature of our global economy, America are imposing taxes on American companies to increase prices on American consumers due to unilateral tariffs that Nobel Prize winning economist points out are “clearly illegal.” [31]
Krugman draws (again) historical parallels with the 1930 Smoot-Holley tariffs that precipitated the Great Depression: [32]
Most of Donald Trump’s tariffs are clearly illegal. There is a special court, the Court of International Trade, which is supposed to have jurisdiction over these issues, and it ruled the tariffs illegal on May 28. However, the ruling was stayed while the administration appealed the decision to the Federal Circuit Court. Those following the deliberations mostly believe that this court will uphold the trade court’s ruling. But then the case will go to the Supreme Court, and almost everyone expects the Supremes to rule that Trump can do whatever he wants.
So high tariffs are probably here to stay. And I mean high tariffs. Trump has reversed 90 years of tariff reductions, achieved via reciprocal trade agreements — we’ll cut our tariffs if you cut yours. Here’s a chart of average U.S. tariffs since 1929, just before the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff:
Post from Paul Krugman showing historical reduction in tariff rates, and the recent increases imposes by the Trump administration [32]
A Little History
Marking the Semiquincentennial of American Independence 250 years ago
July 31, 1775 - Rejection of the Conciliatory Resolution
From Wikipedia: [33]
The Conciliatory Resolution was a resolution proposed by Lord North and passed by the British Parliament in February 1775, in an attempt to reach a peaceful settlement with the Thirteen Colonies about two months prior to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The resolution arrived in the United States after war had broken out in Massachusetts, and was rejected by the Continental Congress.
The resolution was addressed and sent to the individual colonies, and intentionally ignored the extralegal Continental Congress. By doing this, Lord North hoped to divide the colonists amongst themselves and thus weaken any revolution/independence movements (especially those represented by the Continental Congress).
The Continental Congress representing the thirteen colonies rejected the proposal as an infringement on their exclusive right to raise revenue. The Continental Congress did eventually receive the Conciliatory Resolution in the form of a communication from the assembly of New Jersey on May 26, 1775.
On July 31, Congress released a report rejecting the resolution on behalf of the colonies. In the meantime it released its own Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. The committee that wrote both documents consisted of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee.
Narratives
The book I’m reading or movie I’m watching
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (David W. Blight)
This book is still on my booklist, but I felt it was appropriate to detail this book here, given Professor Blight’s recent interview and article about the importance of surfacing all of our American history, not just the government-approved version.
From the Amazon overview: [34]
**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**
“Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.
In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.
GIF Game
Notes and Sources
[1] Gary Marcus, “GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it,” Marcus on AI, August 9, 2025, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-overdue-overhyped-and-underwhelming
[2] Sam Altman [@sama], X, August 6, 2025, https://x.com/sama/status/1953264193890861114
[3] Michael Walker, “Sam Altman Compares GPT 5 To Death Star,” Novara Media, August 9, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3yEUCyPsFo
[4] Elliott Smith, “Microsoft incorporates OpenAI’s GPT-5 into consumer, developer and enterprise offerings,” Microsoft Source, August 7, 2025, https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/openai-gpt-5/
[5] “Provide me a summary of the latest news from August 8 in the voice of HBO's John Oliver.” prompt, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft, retrieved August 9, 2025, https https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/ehtrD7rj4CXLz9NxSevnS
[6] “Provide me a summary of this newsletter” prompt, uploaded file “2025-08-03 – Feelings Over Facts.docx,” Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft, retrieved August 9, 2025, https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/r9KCzUrVAAhH9C91Aiqke
[7] Gary Marcus [@GaryMarcus], X, August 8, 2025, https://x.com/GaryMarcus/status/1953939152594252170
[8] Kieran Healy [@kjhealy.co], Bluesky, August 7, 2025, https://bsky.app/profile/kjhealy.co/post/3lvtxbtexg226
[9] Keiran Healy, “Blueberry Hill,” Keiran Healy, August 7, 2025, https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/08/07/blueberry-hill/
[10] Ibid.
[11] “How many instances of the letter ‘b’ are there in this word: ‘blueberry’,” Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft, retrieved August 9, 2025, https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/r9KCzUrVAAhH9C91Aiqke
[12] Mic Farris, “Critical Thinking,” Decisions with Mic Farris, May 18, 2025, https://www.micfarris.com/articles/critical-thinking
[13] “Yale history professor torches Trump's 'political war' on American history,” The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC, August 7, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRPG-qD25U
[14] David W. Blight, “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?,” The New Republic, August 7, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/article/198354/history-died-sanctioned-ignorance
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Mic Farris, “Unjustice,” Decisions with Mic Farris, January 26, 2025, https://www.micfarris.com/articles/unjustice
[18] Tom Dreisbach, “Video shows Department of Justice official urging Jan. 6 rioters to 'kill' cops,” All Things Considered, NPR, August 7, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/08/07/nx-s1-5493197/doj-trump-jan-6-defendant-jared-wise-capitol-riot
[19] “ICE ramps up recruitment following massive budget raise,” All In with Chris Hayes, August 7, 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ice-ramps-up-recruitment-following-massive-budget-raise/id1314170606?i=1000721217819
[20] “All In with Chris Hayes: MSNBC August 7, 2025, 5:00-6:01 PDT,” Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20250808_000000_All_In_With_Chris_Hayes/start/1740/end/1800
[21] Courtney Subramanian and Ali Abbas Ahmadi, “Trump and Putin to meet in Alaska for Ukraine talks next week,” BBC News, August 9, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dxed639n7o
[22] Alayna Treene, Paula Reid, and Michael Williams, “White House monitors coverage of Epstein controversy and can’t make it disappear,” CNN, August 1, 2025, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/01/politics/epstein-trump-white-house-controversy
[23] “Munich Agreement,” Brittanica, retrieved August 10, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement
[24] Robert Kagan, “Trump Is Offering Putin Another Munich,” The Atlantic, March 7, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/putin-hitler-munich-parallel/681973/
[25] “Alaska Purchase,” Wikipedia, retrieved August 10, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase
[26] Francesca Ebel and Catherine Belton, “Russians cheer Putin’s Alaska invitation, envision no concessions on Ukraine,” Washington Post, August 10, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/10/putin-trump-russia-ukraine-summit/
[27] Ivan Khomenko, “Russia Escalates “Historic” Alaska Claims Ahead of Trump-Putin Meeting,” United24 Media, August 10, 2025, https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-escalates-historic-alaska-claims-ahead-of-trump-putin-meeting-10608
[28] “Trump sides with Russia against FBI at Helsinki summit,” BBC News, July 16, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812
[29] Steve Benen, “Team Trump says another Putin meeting 'makes enormous sense' (but it doesn't),” MSNBC, July 23, 2018, https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/team-trump-says-another-putin-meeting-makes-enormous-sense-it-doesnt-msna1125431
[30] “Ford Reports Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results,” press release, Ford Motor Company, July 30, 2025, https://s205.q4cdn.com/882619693/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/Ford-Q2-2025-Earnings-Press-Release-Update.pdf
[31] Paul Krugman, “The Economics of Smoot Hawley 2.0, Part I,” August 10, 2025, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-smoot-hawley-20-cf7
[32] Ibid.
[33] “Conciliatory Resolution,” Wikipedia, retrieved August 9, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conciliatory_Resolution
[34] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Simon & Schuster, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/Frederick-Douglass-David-W-Blight/dp/1416590315
Decisions with Mic Farris
Seek Truth. Honor Differences.
