surprise? Not really. Because if you've had experience with both of those things, you would totally understand why the one would make the other less desirable.

Well, apparently the X platform is going to have a whole new recommendation system in a few weeks, Elon Musk is telling us. So at the moment I have no idea why X shows me what it shows me. I just can't figure it out. It doesn't show me anything I disagree with anymore. So X completely stopped showing me anything from any left-leaning anything. Now maybe they all went to Blue Sky or something, but I don't get anything that's on the other side of my political opinions. Never. So I don't know if that'll change. But what they're trying to do is make sure that awesome small accounts can get recognized, which doesn't happen at the moment. So I guess you'll be able to just talk to Grok and just tell it what to prefer in its algorithm and then it will just do it. That's kind of cool.

But Grok will literally read every post, Elon says, and watch every video, 100 million per day, to match users with content they're most likely to find interesting. Do you think that'll make a difference? I don't know. There have been a lot of changes to algorithms that did not seem to be doing that, but maybe he can pull it off.

Speaking of Elon, he's one of the people who pointed out, I think JD Vance did too, that in New England there are six states that have collectively around 40% of their population vote Republican. Forty percent. So six states, 40% of them are Republican. Guess how many Republican representatives in Congress they have? Forty percent of six states, none. They have zero Republicans, even though 40% of six different states are Republican and they have no representation. Do you feel bad about redistricting now? I don't. I don't.

Well, apparently there's a new Leonardo DiCaprio movie that's called One Battle After Another. And my understanding is that the critics like it and the public are saying, "What kind of Antifa propaganda garbage is this?" Some are saying it's a pro-Antifa movie. Apparently it's on track to lose $100 million, but I think Warner Brothers disputes that. So the public doesn't like it nearly as much as the elites.

Well, as you know, today's the No Kings rally. The No Kings organizers think that they might get more than five million people at 2,500 cities all around the country to march. And I for one am certainly glad that they're marching for keeping the kings away because so far they're doing a great job. Have there been any kings since the last No Kings march? No. No. So if the last one worked that well, it just makes sense to keep doing it because if something works, keep doing it. So no kings so far. And I think this one's going to work too. I'm not feeling any kings emerging. So kind of genius. It's working.

It's funny that we even know the name of the organizers. You know this guy Joel Payne, he's the chief communication officer for MoveOn. It's one of the organizers. So maybe I'm wrong about this, but give me a fact check on this. If you do a protest and there's no violence and no threat of violence, does anything change in the real world? Answer: I don't think so. Because why would anybody do anything differently if there's no risk? It's just people marching around. Why would I change what I'm doing because some people took a walk?

But if a protest looks like it is violent or could be violent, do things change sometimes? Because that would be a signal that whatever they're protesting is so important, just so amazingly important that people are willing to get violent over it. So the No Kings thing is aggressively nonviolent, right? Is there any chance that will make a difference in any way on any topic? I think the answer is no. There's no way it could. There's not even an argument about how these set of actions could have a ripple effect that would cause something good to happen. There's not even a case, right? It's just completely disconnected from anything in the real world. There's just people marching around and getting paid. So I think the organizers get paid. That's why they organize it. Some of the protesters get paid and some of the protesters are going to be probably bad people trying to make bad things happen. So you could have fake protesters and your fake completely useless protests.

Anyway, I asked Grok what would be some of the examples of what the Trump administration is doing that would look like authoritarianism, which would cause the entire country to want to do a No Kings kind of protest. So what exactly are the complaints? Here are the things that Grok said. That doesn't mean it's right. This is just coming from one AI. Firing prosecutors and inspecting generals. Is that authoritarian? Firing prosecutors, doesn't it matter if the prosecutors were doing their job that they were asked to do? If you fired them for no reason, maybe that would be bad. But suppose you fired them because you asked them to do something and they were Democrats, so they decided not to do it. Is that authoritarian to fire somebody for not doing what you asked them to do for their job? Doesn't feel like it.

How about the lawfaring of John Bolton and Comey? Well, as far as we can tell, those are real crimes and at least Comey was trying to overthrow the government allegedly. And Bolton apparently was accusing Trump of all the same things that he was doing at the same time he was accusing him in terms of mishandling of classified information. So is that authoritarian to indict Bolton when the crimes look really sort of obvious like you know maybe as a defense but what we know looks like a crime to me and Comey's the same thing.

Grok also said that part of the authoritarian vibe is that the hyper macho military, the Hegseth and Trump are making the military hyper macho. Is that authoritarian or is that just what a military should be? Shouldn't a military be hyper macho? Even if you have women in the military, shouldn't it still be hyper macho? I don't know.

And then there's the issue of the National Guard in cities because they would be walking on or ignoring the local government's preferences. But correct me if I'm wrong, the National Guard is only guarding federal assets. And if the local people say no, no, we don't need help, then they don't do it. Right? I don't know of any case where the National Guard is doing what the locals said don't do except protecting federal assets as far as I know.

Then there's the lawfaring with the DOJ which I'm totally in favor of as long as they're lawfaring the lawfarers and the insurrectionists which they are. Grok says that Trump is punishing critics. Is he? Well, a lot of people getting fired, but that feels like what happens on both sides. Don't the Democrats fire Republicans when they take power? Sort of ordinary.

And Grok says the authoritarianism included CIA ops in Venezuela. Well, really? I mean, don't we have CIA ops in other countries, especially South America, like all the time, like with every government? Is that some new thing?

Then there's the rhetoric. The rhetoric is macho according to Grok. And Grok also thinks that the administration is misbehaving or disobeying the courts but is doing it by foot dragging and workarounds and nothing illegal but that it's not coordinating and obeying the courts as much as it could.

Now which one of those things seems real? Do any of those feel real to you? They don't feel real to me. It just feels like list persuasion. You know, I've told you about list persuasion. If you don't have a good reason, put a bunch of bad reasons in a list and people will get the impression, well, I don't know about any one of those reasons, but there's so many. I mean, it's a list, so there must be something to it because it's a whole list. Doesn't work that way. List persuasion is persuasive, even if everything on the list is BS. And I can see how they can cobble together a vibe, but no, this doesn't look like anybody's becoming a king to me.

Now compare this to what Democrats believed even a year ago were their most important issues. A year ago most important issues, whatever is happening in Israel and Gaza but now they just are sort of ignoring that. So I guess that's not important now. Climate change. There was an article in Politico saying that the Democrats have backed off from climate change. So it was an existential threat last year and for 20 years before that but suddenly not going to pay much attention to it now. From existential threat, biggest threat in the world, to let's deemphasize this.

Then there was the big issue of anybody questioning our elections was insurrectionist just even questioning but now even Kathy Griffin and some other prominent Democrats are questioning whether the elections are rigged or not. So they went from you cannot even question to questioning, complete reversal from there's no way that these elections are rigged to hey you Republicans are going to rig these elections.

Then there was the open borders which were terribly important to keep open but now they're closed and don't hear a lot about it. There were the COVID shots that were just everybody had to get them but now not so much. And then there was the everything has to be trans and now not so much. So they got rid of all the things that they were worried about. All the big things. All the big things. And I guess you could throw in tariffs. Wasn't that long ago that tariffs were like the big big problem and Elon Musk being in DOGE was the big big problem. Both of them just went away. So Elon started working on Tesla again and they just sort of let go.

Those things that they were trying to sell us as the most important problems in the world were never problems. So what did they do? They have to come up with a whole new imaginary thing to talk about. And it's this whole authoritarian king thing. Everything they do is imaginary. Everything that Trump does is measurable. Is there still a war in Ukraine? Yes, we can measure that. How's the economy doing? We can measure that. So everything Trump does is measurable. Everything that the Democrats are jabbering about seems like conceptual because they don't really have anything real.

Anyway, Antifa is apparently, or did you know that Antifa is a real organization? Not what the Democrats say. They say Antifa is imaginary. So they think that the real stuff is imaginary and the imaginary stuff is real. But Antifa, the parts that are not imaginary, are asking for Antifa people to embed with the No Kings thing to make it a little bit more, let's say, less safe because they want to reinforce the fact that Antifa is not a safe organization, even if the No Kings people are mostly about nonviolence.

So we're going to have this weird situation where you're going to have fake protesters because they're paid protesters. They're going to be possibly, this is pretty funny, so the protesters themselves will be mostl