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Trump’s Crypto Turnaround Heralds an Economic Nightmare  (David Gerard, Foreign Policy)
Former U.S. President Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian National Convention in May and lent his strong support to cryptocurrency: “I will also stop Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto. … I will ensure that the future of crypto and the future of bitcoin will be made in the USA, not driven overseas. I will support the right to self-custody. To the nation’s 50 million crypto holders, I say this: With your vote, I will keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your bitcoin.”
Trump has continued to court the crypto industry in the months since; he appeared at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference in Nashville this week, alongside independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump’s parting words—“Have a good time with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you’re playing with”—were hardly enthusiastic, but the industry itself remains replete with ardent Trump boosters.
This turnaround came as a surprise given Trump’s previous strong opposition to crypto. When Facebook was floating its libra cryptocurrency in 2019, Trump tweeted: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” Former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, quotes Trump as telling Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: “Don’t be a trade negotiator. Go after Bitcoin [for fraud].” In 2021, Trump told Fox Business that bitcoin “just seems like a scam. … I want the dollar to be the currency of the world.”
Why the change? There don’t appear to be votes in crypto. Trump’s “50 million” figure comes from a badly sampled push poll by crypto exchange Coinbase that claimed 52 million crypto users in the United States as of February 2023. But a survey taken last October by the U.S. Federal Reserve showed that only 7 percent of adults (about 18.3 million people) admitted to holding or using crypto—down from 10 percent in 2022 and 12 percent in 2021. Many of those people are likely bag-holders left high and dry after crypto crashed in 2022—and not necessarily fans anymore.
What Trump wants from the crypto industry is money. The crypto industry has so far collected more than $180 million to throw at the 2024 U.S. elections via its Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, and Protect Progress super PACs.
Fairshake spent $10 million on taking out Rep. Katie Porter in the primary battle for Dianne Feinstein’s California Senate seat, funding Porter’s pro-crypto rival Adam Schiff. It put $2 million into knocking out Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th District in favor of pro-crypto George Latimer. In the Utah Republican Senate primary, Rep. John Curtis beat Trent Staggs with the help of $4.7 million from Defend American Jobs. In Alabama House District 2, the majority of campaign spending has come from the crypto industry.
Many in SiliconValley would like an authoritarian who they think will let them run free with the money—while bailing them out in times of trouble. Indeed, Trump promised Bitcoin 2024 attendees that he would hold all bitcoin that the United States acquires. (Never mind that it’s generally acquired as proceeds of crime.) Silicon Valley explicitly sees regulation of any sort as its greatest enemy. Three a16z manifestos—2023’s “Politics and the Future” and “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and 2024’s “The Little Tech Agenda”—outline co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s demands for technology-fueled capitalism unimpeded by regulation or social consideration. They name “experts,” “bureaucracy,” and “social responsibility” as their “enemies.” Their 2024 statement claims that banks are unfairly cutting off start-ups from the banking system; these would be crypto companies funded by a16z.
Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, started as an ideological project to promote an odd variant of Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism and gold-backed Austrian economics—of the sort we abandoned to escape the Great Depression. Crypto rapidly co-opted the “end the Fed” and “establishment elites” conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins. It’s a way for billionaire capitalists such as Thiel, Andreessen, and Elon Musk to claim they’re not part of the so-called elite.
If a second Trump administration hobbled financial regulators and allowed crypto free rein, it might help further the collapse of the U.S. economy that bitcoin claimed it would avert. But it’s more likely that Trump will be happy to take crypto’s money and run.

How QAnon Destroys American Families  (Leah Feiger, Wired)
Q hasn’t posted anything since 2022. But a staggering number of Americans still buy into QAnon, the conspiracy movement steeped in claims that Satan-worshipping pedophiles run the US government. Today on the show, journalist and author Jesselyn Cook on QAnon’s lasting political ramifications and the relationships it destroys.

Google Cracks Down on Explicit Deepfakes  (Paresh Dave, Wired)
A few weeks ago, a Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” brought up at least seven high-up results that purported to have explicit, AI-generated images of the actress. Now they have vanished.
Google product manager Emma Higham says that new adjustments to how the company ranks results, which have been rolled out this year, have already cut exposure to fake explicit images by over 70 percent on searches seeking that content about a specific person. Where problematic results once may have appeared, Google’s algorithms are aiming to promote news articles and other nonexplicit content. The Aniston search now returns articles such as “How Taylor Swift’s Deepfake AI Porn Represents a Threat” and other links like a Ohio attorney general warning about “deepfake celebrity-endorsement scams” that target consumers.
“With these changes, people can read about the impact deepfakes are having on society, rather than see pages with actual nonconsensual fake Images,” Higham wrote in a company blog post on Wednesday.

Elon Musk Says He Would Recognize a Harris Election Victory  (Damon Beres, The Atlantic)
Yesterday, Elon Musk told me that he will accept the results of the 2024 presidential election. “Of course” he would, he said when I asked him as much by email. Ever the gentleman, he added, in apparent haste, “Don’t be jackass.”
I can imagine why he wanted to get that dig in. In years past, asking someone whether they believe in the basic reality of America’s electoral process would be a little bit like asking them to acknowledge that they have to pay for groceries. But anyone who fears for the stability of American democracy might worry about how Musk—the richest man in the world, a newly vocal supporter of Donald Trump, and the owner of X, one of the most influential social platforms for political discourse—would answer this simple question. He has a tremendous following and control over a website on which (and from which) misinformation and radical messaging can quickly spread. Lately, he has been spreading a lot of misinformation and radical messaging himself.
Musk has become preoccupied with posting conspiracy theories on X, claiming this week, for example, that “the legacy media engages in the mass synchronization of emotion for political purposes” on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, and that “the Biden-Harris Administration is importing vast numbers of voters.” (He has repeated that second claim, which centers on the idea that foreigners are being flown into the United States illegally to commit voter fraud, a few times.) He recently shared a bogus campaign video for Kamala Harris in which a fake version of the candidate’s voice, perhaps AI-generated, says, “I am the ultimate diversity hire,” among other insulting things. Musk’s take: “This is amazing