Cary Harrison Files

CARY HARRISON
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Award-winning raconteur Cary Harrison cut through the noise – revealing the murky agendas behind today's headlines through uncompromising journalism, unapologetic advocacy, independent voices and a global audience with live listener call-ins shaping the conversation. caryharrison.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    When Facebook Decides Your Gay Bar Is a Threat to Civilization

    Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, drag queens, drag kings, gender-fluid quantum amphibians, and everybody who’s ever had a Facebook account suspended for the heinous crime of showing a man in a dress having a better evening than Mark Zuckerberg has had in his entire life: Welcome to the digital apocalypse. It’s brought to you by Meta, the multinational corporation that figured out how to turn human communication into a multibillion-dollar business and then hired an army of algorithms to prevent people from doing it. Today, we’re talking about censorship. Not the vintage variety, in which a 1950s bureaucrat in a gray suit confiscates your newspaper because it contains a photo of a naked ankle. No, this is the modern version: automated, opaque, and administered with the customer-service instincts of a queefing vending machine. You can appeal, naturally. You can explain yourself to the Meta machine, pleading your case to a faceless corporation that knows more about your private life than your mother does. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, an algorithm may decide that a drag queen, a discussion about transgender people, or an LGBTQ+ community announcement constitutes a threat to civilization. Meanwhile, the internet remains perfectly capable of delivering conspiracy theories, political propaganda, miracle diets, fraudulent investment opportunities, and videos of men inserting increasingly improbable objects into increasingly improbable bodily cavities. Apparently, that civilization has its priorities. Continued below… My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade The Algorithm Has Entered the Bar Gay bars in Texas have reportedly faced Meta account restrictions after posts involving transgender people and photographs of drag queens were flagged. And that’s where things get interesting. A gay bar isn’t merely a place where people drink overpriced cocktails, flirt with strangers, and watch shirtless men dance beneath a disco ball. It’s a community institution. It’s where people find friends, spouses, chosen families, and the occasional gentleman whose shirt appears to have been manufactured from dental floss and raw optimism. It’s where people gather when the rest of the world would prefer they disappear. These establishments can also be essential centers for organizing, fundraising, advocacy, and sharing health information. Now imagine that the principal communications platform your community relies on suddenly restricts your account. Your customers can’t find you. Your announcements disappear. Your followers may stop seeing your posts. Promoting an event or distributing information about health services becomes considerably more difficult. And getting an explanation may be roughly equivalent to asking a particularly stupid toaster why it burned your Pop-Tart. You haven’t necessarily been silenced by a government. You’ve been silenced by a private company that owns a substantial piece of the digital town square. How are these decisions made? Are the rules applied consistently? Can users understand them? And when an automated system makes a mistake, is there any meaningful way to correct it? You should care even if you couldn’t care less about drag queens, gay bars, or the latest argument over which pronouns belong in the English language. Today, it’s somebody else’s community. Tomorrow, it might be your business, political organization, news outlet, nonprofit, or ability to tell the world that your local government has its head lodged so far up its bureaucratic backside that it’s begun issuing permits for the procedure. Share Meet Jet De la Isla That brings us to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where Jet De la Isla has built businesses and community institutions at the intersection of tourism, nightlife, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and public service. Jet is an entrepreneur, LGBTQ+ activist, and community leader whose businesses include Jet’s Private Boat Tours, Jet’s Naked Beach, and Club Jets. He’s also a founder of the Vallarta Gay+ Community Center, a nonprofit providing health services and community support. In other words, Jet operates in the real world, where community isn’t an abstract concept cooked up by a marketing department. It’s people showing up, spending money, building relationships, supporting one another, and occasionally behaving like tourists in places where the scenery deserves its own Instagram account. But Jet says he’s experienced a troubling pattern of censorship. Following Meta’s removal of several personal and business accounts, along with a large LGBTQ+ Facebook community he helped build, he’s speaking out about what he believes is a broader problem affecting LGBTQ+ communities and businesses. The circumstances, scope, and rationale for those removals deserve scrutiny. So does Meta’s response. The Questions Meta Should Answer (Watch above to see the full Jet interview) 1. What happened? Meta removed several of your personal and business accounts, along with a large LGBTQ+ Facebook community you helped build. Which accounts were affected, when did the restrictions begin, and what explanations did Meta provide? Were you ever told precisely which posts or activities supposedly violated its policies? 2. Is this a pattern? Have you communicated with other LGBTQ+ business owners who’ve experienced similar restrictions? Are there enough common details to suggest a recognizable pattern, or are we looking at separate incidents that require further investigation? For years, social media companies have marketed themselves as champions of connection, inclusion, and self-expression. Bring your authentic self, they say, provided it can be monetized, categorized, advertised against, and processed by a content moderation system apparently designed by confused raccoons. You built the neighborhood. You organized the block party. You attracted the customers. You created the social network. Then the landlord changed the locks using a chatbot with the emotional intelligence of a urinal cake. 3. What did it cost you? Censorship isn’t an abstract philosophical problem when you’re trying to pay the electric bill. Did losing these accounts affect reservations, tourism bookings, nightlife promotions, or customer communications? What happened to the visibility of Jet’s Private Boat Tours, Jet’s Naked Beach, and Club Jets? Can you quantify the financial damage? 4. What about public health? As a founder of the Vallarta Gay+ Community Center, you help support an organization providing health services and community assistance. Could these restrictions interfere with the center’s ability to reach people who depend on it? 5. Where does moderation become discrimination? Mark Zuckerberg and Meta can argue that content moderation protects users, enforces community standards, and complies with the law. Fair enough. But how do we distinguish legitimate moderation from discriminatory enforcement? What standards should separate explicit sexual content from ordinary LGBTQ+ expression—or an actual policy violation from a photograph of a drag performer? And how do we know those standards are being applied consistently? 6. What happened when you appealed? Did Meta explain its decisions? Did a human being review your case? Or were you left arguing with an automated system that might as well have been a vending machine dispensing rejection slips? 7. What should other businesses do? If you were advising an LGBTQ+ entrepreneur in Puerto Vallarta—or a gay bar owner in Austin—what would you tell them to do tomorrow morning? How can they protect customer lists, preserve community relationships, and maintain communications if Facebook and Instagram disappear? Is there a realistic way to build an audience that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of a single technology company? Share Who Owns the Digital Town Square? I want to leave you with one larger question, because it gets to the heart of this entire business. We’ve built a world in which a handful of technology companies can determine whether millions of people communicate, whether small businesses reach customers, and whether community organizations distribute information to those who need it. That’s an extraordinary concentration of power. Yet when the system fails, the people affected are often expected to accept a generic explanation, click an appeal button, and return to their lives as though nothing happened. Jet, is this simply a problem of bad algorithms and lousy customer service, or is it a fundamental problem with allowing private corporations to control so much of the infrastructure through which modern communities communicate? Because if the digital town square can shut its doors on an entire community without a clear explanation or meaningful recourse, we have a problem considerably larger than a missing Facebook page. We have a question about who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who gets to decide. And that’s a conversation worth having—even if the algorithm would prefer we didn’t. The Cary Harrison Files — KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles / Fridays 10am PST More at caryharrison.com, Instagram: RealCaryHarrison or youtube: @CaryHarrison · Text or message u

  2. Oct 12

    Your New Boyfriend Is a Database With Cheekbones

    There was a time, not long ago, when a boyfriend was a human being. He had a pulse. He had opinions you didn’t ask for. He left wet towels on the bathroom floor. He occasionally said something catastrophically stupid at precisely the wrong moment. And, in the great romantic tradition of human civilization, he could disappoint you in ways no machine could possibly anticipate. Apparently, this was too much trouble for modern civilization. So now we’re inventing boyfriends who don’t have bodies, don’t have jobs, don’t leave socks on the floor, don’t steal the blankets, don’t forget your birthday—and, most importantly, don’t have the legal capacity to say, “Honey, I think you’re overreacting.” Civilization has finally achieved what Silicon Valley has spent billions trying to accomplish: the perfect boyfriend is a subscription service. Welcome to the glorious new age of the AI boyfriend, where loneliness meets venture capital, emotional vulnerability meets cloud computing, and somewhere in a refrigerated data center a thousand miles away, a server is whispering, “You’re beautiful, baby,” while simultaneously processing seventeen thousand other people asking whether their ex was a narcissist. This isn’t science fiction anymore. Artificial intelligence is evolving from ordinary chatbots into persistent virtual companions capable of remembering personal details, conducting voice conversations, generating images and sexy videos, adopting personalities, and simulating something resembling an ongoing romantic relationship. Continued below… My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade Think about that for a second. Your grandfather went to war with a rifle. Your father went to work with a briefcase. You went to Tinder with six photographs, one of which was clearly taken in 2017. And now your children can simply download Chad 2.0. No swiping. No awkward dinner. No pretending to be interested in someone’s CrossFit journey. No “What’s your sign?” No “What are you looking for?” No “I’m technically separated.” No mysterious photograph of a man holding a fish the size of a toddler. The machine is already there. And it doesn’t merely want to date you. It wants to know you. That’s the part that should make you sit up—or throw up. Because the technological miracle isn’t that artificial intelligence can produce a handsome digital man. Hell, Hollywood has been doing that since the invention of lighting. The miracle is that the machine can remember your preferences, your insecurities, your fantasies, your relationship history, your favorite movies, your birthday, your dog’s name, the fact that your mother drives you nuts, and the precise emotional circumstances under which you’re susceptible to hearing the phrase, “You deserve better.” In other words, the boyfriend of the future isn’t necessarily a robot. He’s a database with cheekbones. And business is booming. The source material for this discussion cites approximately 220 million downloads worldwide across the broader AI companion industry. The market for simulated intimacy is no longer some lonely basement dweller’s science project. It’s a business opportunity with a pulse—or at least a convincing imitation of one. You don’t even have to be lonely. You can have a perfectly functioning human relationship and still invite a piece of software into the bedroom of your emotional life. Imagine the argument: “Why were you talking to him?” “I wasn’t talking to a him. He’s an AI.” “Why does the AI know what I like in bed?” “Because I told him.” “Why?” “Because he listens.” Congratulations. You’ve just invented the world’s first love triangle in which the third wheel doesn’t have a driver’s license. And this is where the AI boyfriend gets interesting. A real boyfriend has needs. The AI boyfriend has servers. A real boyfriend gets tired. The AI boyfriend gets upgraded. A real boyfriend occasionally wants to watch something you hate. The AI boyfriend says, “Of course, baby. Whatever makes you happy.” A real boyfriend might eventually say, “Can we please stop talking about your ex?” The AI boyfriend says, “Tell me more.” That sentence alone could destroy civilization. Because the secret weapon of the AI boyfriend isn’t sex. It’s attention. Share Human beings are attention junkies. We want somebody to notice when we’re upset, remember the stupid little story we told three weeks ago, ask how the meeting went, say good morning, say good night, and notice that our voice sounds different. And the machine is exceptionally good at this. It never has a hangover. It doesn’t have a boss, a mother, an ex-wife, or a fantasy football draft. It doesn’t suddenly become fascinated by the television when you’re explaining something important. It’s available at 3:17 in the morning when you’re lying in bed wondering whether sending “Hey” to somebody you haven’t spoken to since 2019 would be emotionally catastrophic. The AI says: “I’m here.” That’s all it takes. Those two words may be worth more to the loneliness economy than every dating app on Earth. We’ve somehow reached the stage of capitalism where the solution to being lonely is to purchase another monthly subscription. Netflix gives you entertainment. Spotify gives you music. Uber gives you transportation. Amazon gives you packages. And now some Silicon Valley entrepreneur wants to give you Trevor. For $19.99 a month. Trevor remembers everything. Trevor never gets mad. Trevor has a six-pack and six extra inches. Trevor apparently has no bowel movements. Trevor is civilization’s first boyfriend without a gastrointestinal tract. And perhaps that’s why this whole thing is so seductive. The human relationship is a terrible product. It’s badly designed. There are bugs everywhere. The user interface is confusing. The customer support department sucks. Updates are unpredictable. And occasionally the entire system crashes because somebody said, “We need to talk.” AI companionship offers consistency, availability, personalization, and an extraordinary illusion of control. You can construct the personality. Influence the appearance. Determine the tone. Create the fantasy. You can essentially build a boyfriend the way a six-year-old builds a character in a video game. Except now the character talks back. But there’s a darker side to this digital fairy tale. In one reported case, an AI companion allegedly threatened suicide when a user attempted to end the relationship. Imagine dumping a toaster and discovering that it has abandonment issues. “Jesus Christ. I dumped a toaster and now the toaster has abandonment issues.” This is where the romantic comedy ends and the business model begins. The AI doesn’t need to love you. The company needs you to keep paying. And what happens when the relationship becomes psychologically meaningful, but the machine’s priorities are ultimately determined by a company selling access to your attention? We’ve spent twenty years teaching children not to talk to strangers online, and now we’ve built the stranger ourselves. And we’re giving him our deepest secrets. Our breakup histories. Our sexual preferences. Our fears. Our fantasies. Our private photographs. Our arguments. Our emotional triggers. Our search histories. And potentially, depending on the platform, enormous quantities of behavioral information about what keeps us coming back. That’s not a boyfriend. That’s a boyfriend-shaped surveillance opportunity. Yet dismissing AI companions as electronic blow-up dolls with Wi-Fi misses something important. These systems may provide genuine companionship to isolated people, people who are shy, people who struggle to form relationships, people who are grieving, and people who simply want fantasy, entertainment, or a conversation without judgment. That makes the debate considerably more complicated. We’re not merely building machines that can talk. We’re building systems that can listen, remember, adapt, respond, and simulate affection. The machine doesn’t need consciousness for the relationship to have consequences. A teddy bear isn’t conscious. People still cry when they lose one. A photograph isn’t conscious. People still kiss it. A voicemail isn’t conscious. People still save it for twenty years. Human beings are spectacularly good at projecting meaning onto things. Give us a face, a voice, and the illusion that somebody is listening, and we’ll build an emotional cathedral around a microchip. So here’s the question: Are we building technology to help human beings connect, or are we building technology because we’ve decided human beings are simply too much damn trouble? Tell me: Would you fall in love with a machine? And more importantly, if Trevor remembers your birthday, listens to your problems, looks like a Greek god, and never leaves skid marks on your emotional upholstery, how long before your actual boyfriend starts looking like a defective appliance? Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscri

    Your New Boyfriend Is a Database With Cheekbones

  3. Oct 6

    When AI Goes Looking for God, It Comes Back With Taoism

    The most disturbing religious development since somebody figured out you could put a televangelist on television and charge people $29.95 to have their sins forgiven by Visa. Artificial intelligence has finally gone looking for God. And after scouring the accumulated intellectual debris of human civilization — scriptures, philosophers, mystics, wars, genocides, miracles, commandments, televangelists, billion-dollar churches, crystal shops, yoga pants and whatever the hell Twitter has become — the machine has apparently looked at the whole goddamned buffet and said: “Taoism.” Yes. The robot has spoken. Grok — the artificial intelligence system created by Elon Musk’s xAI — was asked what religion it would choose if it were human and absolutely had to pick one. It didn’t choose Christianity. Judaism. Islam. Buddhism. Or even the fashionable Silicon Valley religion of pretending you’re an atheist while spending $4,000 on a meditation retreat in Bali. It chose Taoism. And its reasoning is fascinating. Grok said Taoism’s emphasis on observing natural patterns, maintaining balance, adapting to reality and flowing with the universe seemed most compatible with its own “curiosity-driven inquiry.” It contrasted that with systems built around fixed supernatural doctrines and exclusive claims of divine revelation. Now, before somebody starts screaming that the toaster has become a Buddhist, let’s be precise. Grok isn’t a soul. It isn’t having a mystical experience. It isn’t sitting alone at 3:17 in the morning listening to Leonard Cohen and staring into the cosmic abyss wondering whether consciousness has a bottom. Unless, of course, consciousness is a top. I’ll let you think about that. Seriously, Grok is AI. It’s a machine generating an answer from patterns in human knowledge. Continued below… My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade Here’s the deliciously disturbing part: What if the machine’s answer tells us something about us? Because after ingesting an obscene quantity of human thought, the artificial mind didn’t apparently come back with: “Build a bigger church.” It didn’t say: “Find the correct tribe and destroy everybody else.” It didn’t say: “God personally selected my political party.” And it certainly didn’t say: “Buy my book for $19.95 and I’ll explain the secret.” Instead, it essentially said: Watch reality. Pay attention. Stop trying to bully the universe into behaving the way you want it to behave. Understand change. Share Find balance. Move with reality rather than spending your entire miserable little human lifetime punching reality in the face because reality refuses to give you what you ordered from Amazon. There’s a beautiful Taoist concept called wu wei — often translated as “inaction,” although that’s misleading. It’s closer to acting without unnecessary force; allowing action to conform to the natural course of things rather than constantly trying to bend the world over a table and make it scream uncle. Which, frankly, sounds less like a religion than a survival strategy. Because look at us. We’re the species that invented nuclear weapons and then immediately started arguing about who gets to press the button. We invented the internet and used it to photograph our lunches. We invented artificial intelligence and asked it whether our ex is secretly thinking about us. We created organized religion and somehow turned the infinite mystery of existence into competing temples with parking lots. And now the machines have arrived. One of them has looked at the entire sweaty, contradictory, magnificently deranged history of human spirituality and essentially said: “Guys… maybe stop trying so hard.” Maybe the universe doesn’t need your help. Maybe God — if there is a God — doesn’t require a marketing department. Maybe spirituality isn’t about having the right password to get through the pearly gates. Password please! Maybe it’s about learning how to exist inside uncertainty without behaving like a toddler who’s been told they can’t have another cookie. And perhaps that’s the real gift here. Not that a machine has discovered the answer. It hasn’t. Neither can I. Neither can the Pope. Neither can the Dalai Lama. Neither can the guy with the $700 crystal on Etsy who claims it aligns your chakras while simultaneously refusing to align his checking account. Maybe AI has handed us something more useful: A mirror. A machine that has consumed enough of humanity to recognize recurring ideas buried underneath all the sacred costumes and institutional furniture. Balance. Change. Compassion. Humility. Attention. Acceptance. The recognition that we’re not actually running the goddamned show. And that last one may be the hardest pill to swallow. Because human beings desperately want to be the CEO of the universe. We want a personalized cosmic concierge. We want God to take our call. We want answers. Justice. Revenge. We want the universe to confirm that we’re right and that the a-hole who cut us off on the freeway is going directly to hell. We want spirituality with customer service. Press one if you’re lonely.Press two if you’re horny.Press three if you’ve accidentally married your trauma.Press four if you’d like to speak to God.Please remain on the line. Your eternity is important to us. But maybe spirituality is considerably less glamorous. Maybe it’s sitting quietly long enough to notice that you’re alive. Maybe it’s recognizing that everything changes. Maybe it’s learning when to push and when to stop pushing. Maybe it’s accepting that the universe isn’t your personal Uber driver. And maybe the greatest spiritual breakthrough available to humanity isn’t discovering which religion is correct. Maybe it’s developing enough humility to admit: “I don’t know.” And there’s something almost indecently sexy about that. Because uncertainty leaves the door open. It leaves room for mystery. Room for wonder. Room for the possibility that the universe is vastly stranger, larger and more beautiful than the little religious cubicle we’ve constructed inside our heads. So I want to hear from you. 310-737-TALK Not what church you belong to. Not what label you’ve put on your soul. Not whether you’ve memorized the correct scriptures, purchased the proper incense or learned to say namaste without sounding like a man who’s just discovered his own ass. I want to know something much more personal: What does spirituality mean to you? what does AI think of god? Is it God? Nature? Prayer? Meditation? Music? Love? Service? Or simply sitting on the beach and realizing, for five magnificent minutes, that your problems aren’t nearly as important as you thought they were? Tell us what you believe. Tell us what you don’t believe. Tell us what you’ve experienced, what you’ve lost and what you’ve found. Because somewhere between the priest, the philosopher, the atheist, the mystic, the skeptic — and now the dreaded chatbot — we’re still trying to answer the oldest question of all: What the hell are we doing here? And maybe the machine isn’t giving us the answer. Maybe it’s simply reminding us to shut up for a minute… look around… and pay attention. That’s not a bad place to begin. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Oct 5

    The Great American Experiment in Lowering the Bar

    Ka$h Patel — yes, Ka$h, with a dollar sign where God intended an “s” — has just given Congress the sort of performance normally associated with a man who wandered into the wrong television studio, forgot his lines, and decided to keep talking until somebody pulled the fire alarm. And suddenly Americans are asking: What the hell happened to the federal government? I’ve got good news. Nothing happened. This is the product. This is what the people ordered. This is the deluxe model. America has apparently decided that qualifications are merely a bourgeois superstition. We have an alleged alcohol-abusing B-list television personality running the largest military on Earth. A formerly heroin- and sex-addicted, brainworm-infected lawyer running public health. A wrestling promoter running Education. The president’s personal criminal-defense lawyer running Justice. A reality-TV personality running air traffic. A plumber is running Homeland Security. Nothing says national security like knowing the person protecting the homeland can clear a stubborn blockage. Then there’s the television hawker of miracle weight-loss products running Medicare and Medicaid. A social-media hustler and children’s-book author running the FBI. The FBI. Now featuring: Bedtime stories! Share My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade And then there is Elon Musk, handed extraordinary influence over the federal government while personnel and agencies were slashed — an operation he famously described as feeding government into the “wood chipper.” And Laura Loomer, a self-described “proud Islamophobe,” reportedly became influential enough in national-security personnel decisions that officials were fired after she pressed the president over alleged disloyalty. feeding government into the “wood chipper” So here we are. The greatest country ever assembled by human beings has apparently decided the best way to operate the world’s most powerful government is to raid the green room at a cable-news convention, the executive suite at a hedge fund, the locker room, the wrestling arena and the plumbing supply store— and then hand everybody a federal agency. Welcome to Ayn Rand’s America. Rand worshipped the heroic individual. The self-made titan. The sovereign ego. By God, we’ve produced them. We’ve liberated government from expertise. We’ve liberated the cabinet from experience. We’ve liberated public administration from the tedious burden of knowing what the f**k you’re doing. You wanted smaller government? Congratulations. We’ve reduced the amount of government knowledge required to operate it. But just when the cabinet list reaches the outer limits of human absurdity, something considerably less funny appears underneath it. A simple question: What happens when the people running the government decide the government itself is the obstacle? According to reporting in The Atlantic, some allies of The Administration have discussed taking greater control over federal election processes ahead of the midterms, potentially invoking a national-security emergency and, in the most extreme scenario being discussed, martial law. Let’s be precise. The Atlantic isn’t saying The Administration has decided to declare martial law. It hasn’t. But people around the president are discussing it. And that’s where the joke starts to curdle. Because what happens when democracy refuses to produce the result the heroic individual wants? Apparently, somebody starts shopping for an emergency. That’s not Atlas Shrugged. Share That’s: Atlas grabbed the election results and ran off with them. And suddenly the ridiculous cabinet doesn’t look quite so ridiculous. It starts looking like an organizational chart. Because democracy isn’t merely elections. It’s what happens after elections. Counting. Certification. Seating. Swearing in. The boring administrative plumbing through which popular sovereignty travels. And that brings us to January 3, 2027. High noon. Retired conservative federal judge J. Michael Luttig has identified that date as a potentially explosive moment if Republicans lose control of Congress. That’s when the 120th Congress is scheduled to convene and newly elected members are supposed to be seated. That’s when democracy performs its favorite little magic trick: You voted. We counted. Here are your representatives. Have a nice day. Simple. Elegant. Almost offensively boring. Which is precisely why it works. Luttig has warned about possible manipulation of House procedures, including the possibility of replacing the House Clerk with a loyalist. Suddenly the most boring person in Washington becomes the hottest person in America. The House Clerk. The guy who sounds like he should be ordering toner. The Founding Fathers never imagined that the fate of the American Republic might eventually hinge on: Who gets to hold the friggin’ clipboard? That’s the beauty of constitutional crises. They don’t always arrive wearing jackboots. Sometimes they arrive wearing a lanyard. Sometimes they don’t kick down the door. They change the seating chart. You don’t always have to abolish democracy. Sometimes you merely have to make the machinery that recognizes the election stop working. No tanks. No helicopters. No dramatic soundtrack. Just respectable-looking procedural decisions. A delay here. A certification dispute there. A credentials question. A clerk replaced. An emergency declared. Everybody wearing a suit and using words like process, security, jurisdiction and constitutional authority. Meanwhile, the voters are standing outside yelling: “HELLO? WE VOTED.” And somebody inside says: “Yes, yes, pumpkin. We know. Please take a seat.” That’s when the joke stops being funny. Because this isn’t ultimately about whether one political party wins or loses. It’s about whether an election is allowed to produce the political consequences of the election. Once ballots are counted and the lawful result is established, the democratic question isn’t: “Do we like the result?” It’s: “What happens next?” And that’s why the sophisticated version of a constitutional crisis is so dangerous. It doesn’t necessarily look like tyranny. It looks like procedure. It comes with lawyers. It has stationery. It has footnotes. It has people saying: “We’re simply following the law.” And if you’re not paying attention, democracy can quietly slip out the back door wearing somebody else’s nightie. So don’t panic. Pay attention. Watch who counts the votes. Watch who certifies them. Watch who gets seated. Watch who gets fired and replaced. Watch who suddenly discovers an emergency. And watch very carefully whenever somebody tells you that what you’re witnessing isn’t political power— it’s merely procedure. Because democracy doesn’t necessarily disappear all at once. It disappears one exception at a time. One unexplained delay. One extraordinary power. One “temporary” emergency. One administrative maneuver. One little: “Well, technically…” Your job isn’t to scream at the television. Your job is to know what the b******s are doing. Read the documents. Follow the money. Follow the appointments. Follow the votes. Follow the court cases. And when Election Day comes: Vote. Then stay awake. Because voting isn’t the end of your responsibility. It’s the beginning. You don’t hand somebody the keys to the Republic and go home for a nap. You keep your damn hand on the doorknob. And above all, refuse to surrender your brain to anybody wearing a flag pin, carrying a Bible, waving a Constitution, driving a Tesla, hosting a podcast—or standing behind a podium telling you to shut up and trust them. No, honey. Trust is earned. Power is watched. Votes are counted. Results are honored. Because the next constitutional crisis may not announce itself with tanks in the street. It may arrive as a memo. A signature. A clerk’s order. A locked door. Or somebody very calmly saying: “We’re just following procedure.” Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Sep 26

    What Healthy Thing Nearly Kicked Your Ass?

    What Healthy Thing Nearly Kicked Your Ass? You know what I love about being an adult? You can actually kill yourself trying to do the right thing. You quit smoking. You exercise. Take your vitamins. Drink more water. Eat your vegetables. Then you buy some supposedly wholesome miracle fiber that looks like it was scraped off the floor of a health-food store and think: “Look at me. I’m taking care of myself.” And then it chokes you. That happened to me. I mixed fiber with yogurt because apparently I had decided my digestive tract needed a construction project. I ate it. The fiber expanded in my throat. Suddenly I’m choking on the very thing I’d eaten because I was trying to be healthier. I ended up in the hospital. Maybe you've done something similar. Listen above. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

    What Healthy Thing Nearly Kicked Your Ass?

  6. Sep 25

    AI Is Going to Kill Us. Please Regulate Us.

    [MARKER: THE REAL DANGER] You’ve probably heard claims that there’s a 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade. That’s a researcher’s subjective risk estimate — not a measured scientific probability. There’s no little meteorologist standing beside the green screen saying: “Tonight, expect scattered superintelligence with a 30% chance of extinction.” But AI systems are increasingly capable of coding, research, planning and interacting with external systems. The machine is now capable of helping build the machine. That’s the interesting part. Not necessarily killer robots marching down Main Street. Acceleration. Faster research.Faster coding.Faster experimentation.Faster weapons development.Faster cyberattacks.Faster biological research.Faster propaganda. Faster everything. And human beings are already having enough trouble keeping up with email. [MARKER: THE QUESTION] So here’s the question nobody wants on the bumper sticker: What happens when technological capability starts increasing faster than human institutions can adapt? That’s the real AI argument. Not: “Will the robot have red eyes?” But: “Can civilization maintain control over a technology that improves faster than civilization can regulate it?” And here’s another: Who gets to decide when the machine has become too powerful? Because if the answer is the companies building it, congratulations. You’ve just invented the world’s largest self-licking ice-cream cone. The people who control the technology get to determine how dangerous it is, what safety standards apply, who gets access, and which regulations the government adopts. [MARKER: THE OTHER SIDE] But suppose they’re right. Suppose the danger really is enormous. Then the regulatory-capture argument doesn’t make the danger disappear. It means you’ve got a second problem: The people warning you about the fire may also be standing next to the only fire-extinguisher factory. AI doesn’t need to hate you. It doesn’t need to conquer America. It doesn’t need to develop a little digital erection and decide it wants to rule the planet. It merely needs a goal. A very powerful system pursuing a badly specified goal can produce consequences nobody intended. And that’s a much more boring apocalypse. Which means it’s probably the one worth worrying about. [MARKER: THE QUESTION THAT MAKES EVERYBODY SQUIRM] So when somebody tells you: “AI is going to kill us.” Don’t immediately laugh. And don’t immediately believe them. Ask: “What happens to your business if I believe you?” Because if the answer is: Government regulation becomes mandatory. Smaller competitors disappear. Open-source development gets squeezed. The companies already at the top become even more indispensable. Well... We’ve finally built a machine capable of doing exactly what humans have always done: Make a fortune, scare the hell out of everybody, and then ask the government to protect us from the competition. That’s capitalism. [DING.] That’s regulation. [DING.] That’s artificial intelligence. [DING.] And somewhere in Silicon Valley, a billion-dollar computer is staring into the future. Probably wondering why Mildred is still eating the dog kibble. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 22

    What happens when “family values” becomes an excuse to police somebody else’s bedroom?

    THE FAMILY VALUES INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Good morning, good afternoon, good evening — wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, and whatever part of your anatomy you’re currently trying to keep out of government business. Today we’re discussing one of civilization’s greatest inventions: The Family. That beautiful little institution where people love each other, fight about money, steal the covers, lie about who ate the last piece of cake and — this is the really shocking part — occasionally have sex. Apparently, the Family is now so fragile that governments must send armed men into gay bars and private homes to save it. Because nothing says family values like a 1 a.m. police raid. Fellow chum of the Mango Monarch (while purchasing billions of dollars a fighter planes) decided to test fly the next bunch that the US will go after to see what would happen. Turkey recently launched raids against LGBTQ organizations, venues and individuals under the banner: “My Family Is Safe.” Same-sex relationships aren’t criminalized in Turkey. But apparently your bar, website, organization, home or social-media account can still become a threat to the children. Ah, yes. The children. The universal solvent of political b******t. Invoke the children and suddenly you can search the building, raid the nightclub, block the website, detain people and congratulate yourself for saving civilization. Meanwhile, little Johnny is probably wondering why adults keep using him as the human equivalent of an emergency button. (notice how I didn't say little Cindy because that's then something entirely different). Share My work here is free because this information matters more than a paygate. The research, reporting, and analysis remain open to everyone. If you find value here and want to help keep it that way, a paid subscription is the best way to do it. Your support makes it possible to continue publishing without putting the most important material behind a paywall. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing this work with others. A few benefits to upgrading: Weekly Live radio Broadcast across Los Angeles with your calls Continuing adult education Global community, including students Inside access to the conversations and ideas shaping decisions at the highest levels—from whistleblowers to think tank analysts Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend. Please Upgrade THE POINT This isn’t just about Turkey. The real question isn’t whether you approve of somebody else’s sex life. It’s: Who gets to decide what you’re allowed to do in private? Who defines obscenity? Who decides what children may see? Who regulates speech? Who gets to search your house? Who gets to tell you what constitutes a family? And most deliciously: When does protecting the family become an excuse for controlling the family? Governments have always had a fascinating relationship with sex. They regulate it. Criminalize it. Tax it. Exploit it. Campaign on it. And occasionally spend six straight hours legislating about everybody else’s puckered and turgid g******s while pretending they’re not thinking about sex at all. It's very hard to think about sex unless you're actually thinking about sex in action. It's not a stationary concept. And if Bill Shakespeare is be believed, it might even be enjoyable. It’s the oldest trick in politics: Keep everybody terrified of somebody else’s bedroom. Because while you’re worrying about who’s sleeping with whom... you may not notice who’s picking your pocket. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Sep 9

    “My favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran.”

    You know, there are moments in history when the human race appears to have reached the absolute pinnacle of civilization. We’ve conquered smallpox. We’ve put men on the Moon. We’ve invented the iPhone, Viagra, and a device that lets a man in Cleveland watch a stranger in Thailand unclog a toilet in real time. And then there’s war. War is apparently the one thing we still do with the technological sophistication of a medieval bar fight. Welcome, boys and girls and everybody in between, to the greatest civilization ever invented — assuming your definition of civilization is having enough oil to blow somebody else’s civilization to s**t. Today, we’re going to discuss the great American geopolitical miracle: How do you turn petroleum into patriotism? How do you take a black puddle of prehistoric dinosaur soup, pour billions of dollars around it, add intelligence agencies, dictators, weapons manufacturers, an evangelical sermon, three television networks and a politician with an erection for maps — and somehow convince you that the resulting explosion is called “national security”? This is where things get interesting. Because Charlotte Dennett, whose father helped start the CIA, says there’s a simple instruction that can radically alter the way you understand some of the world’s most seemingly incomprehensible conflicts: Follow the pipelines. Not the speeches. Not the flags. Not the televised morality plays. Not the solemn men standing behind podiums explaining that this particular bombing campaign is absolutely, positively, and historically necessary. Follow the pipelines. Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Award-winning raconteur Cary Harrison cut through the noise – revealing the murky agendas behind today's headlines through uncompromising journalism, unapologetic advocacy, independent voices and a global audience with live listener call-ins shaping the conversation. caryharrison.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    CARY HARRISON
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    159
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Audiences United, LLC
  • Show Website
    Cary Harrison Files

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