Rambling Rows

Rage farming

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:03:29 +1000

Rage is a product. Pauline Hanson has been selling it for thirty years, but she is no longer the only one running the operation. The buyers have got bigger, the money is flowing from further away, and the press is helping them do it.

The playbook

The model is simple. Carrick Ryan can walk you through it in a few minutes. His YouTube clip is well worth watching.

First, dial up the anti-immigration rhetoric and stoke the genuine anxieties of people who feel left behind.

Second, package the resulting public momentum - the rallies, the polling, the voting bloc - as a tradeable political commodity.

Third, sell that commodity to billionaire donors and foreign interest groups in exchange for the funding needed to scale the party, grow your power and execute an agenda that has nothing to do with the people whose anger you harvested.

The voters are the raw material. The donors are the customer.

Ryan is a former federal agent turned political commentator, known for analytical work on security, disinformation and the far right. He is not prone to hyperbole. When he describes this as a deliberate extraction operation rather than a political movement, it is worth paying attention. His warning is direct:

“If you choose to empower Hanson, you need to know that you are voting for an Australia that will look like Trump’s America.”

The same machine, running globally

We have watched the same machine run in the United States. Elon Musk - who at various points has claimed Trump owes his election to him - has turned his money, his platform and his appetite for chaos into global political leverage. He has inserted himself into British politics, taken the side of the fascist AfD in Germany and run a sustained campaign against Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. It is not surprising, then, that One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has pledged to abolish that office. Musk, encouraged by others in the same orbit, will turn X/Twitter on Australian politics. X/Twitter is a cesspit, but it still makes news.

The pattern repeats everywhere you look.

In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer - by most accounts doing a competent job of governing a difficult country - is being quietly undermined by a coordinated social media campaign against his leadership. In Canada, the Alberta separatist movement is being supercharged by social media accounts run out of India, Pakistan and Indonesia, as CBC has documented. Many of the people pushing Alberta independence are not Albertans. They are people in other countries who have decided that a fractured Canada serves their interests.

ABC’s Media Watch laid a lot of this out. Their episode on One Nation included this:

We must dispense with any nostalgia for the politics of the past—social media has done it in, along with the default primacy of the professional press which, ironically, only increases the pressure on it to report the story of politics that politicians like Pauline Hanson would rather we not.

We are being systematically manipulated by actors who are often not who they appear to be and who have no stake in our wellbeing. That should be said plainly and often.

The media is not helping

Back home, thirty years around Parliament have not made Hanson better informed or sharper. Her positions on immigration, Indigenous affairs and climate are exactly where they were in 1996, just louder. The operation has been successful precisely because she does not need to be right. She needs to be angry, and anger is a renewable resource.

The Liberal Party is dissolving, and the press is staging a coronation for a fringe candidate - treating One Nation’s polling as though it represents a serious governing alternative rather than a rage extraction machine dressed up as a party. Clive Palmer outspent every other party combined in 2022 and bought himself a single senator. Expect more of that next time, with money flowing in from more directions and through more proxies than any disclosure regime will catch.

“If it bleeds, it leads.” That’s the old press adage. By tradition the mass media should be writing the obituary of the Liberal Party, because that is what is actually happening. Instead they have skipped that part, set about discrediting Labor, and floated the loony idea that Pauline Hanson will be our next Prime Minister.

The preferred-Prime-Minister polling driving these headlines is nonsense. Australians do not elect a Prime Minister. We elect a local member, and the majority in the lower house decides who governs. “Preferred PM” is a meme dressed up as data, a headline-grab from a desperate press.

You can see the effect in the comment threads. “Albanese will be gone by Christmas, Pauline will be PM.” Clueless. But fire up enough people with anti-government rhetoric and the cluelessness stops being harmless. Brexit was that. So was the rise of Trump and the decline that has followed in the US.

What Australia has going for it

The United States had no institutional defence against a man who simply refused to play by the rules. Courts moved slowly. Norms evaporated. The question is whether Australia is any better equipped. The honest answer is: probably not much.

What we have that the Americans arguably didn’t is a compulsory preferential voting system that structurally disadvantages fringe parties, and a broadly functional public broadcaster. Neither is invulnerable. Both are under sustained attack.

Whether the good sense of Australian voters is enough to see through it remains the question that should be keeping us up at night - not who leads in a poll that decides nothing.

Sources:

Carrick Ryan — Who are One Nation? — YouTube
Facebook accounts from India, Pakistan and Indonesia push Alberta separatism — CBC
Operation One Nation - 8 June 2026 — ABC Media Watch

The experts were right, and it cost £200 billion to find out

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:58:39 +1000

You have seen the move a thousand times. Someone lays out clear, well-researched evidence and the reply comes back: “that’s just your opinion.” Vaccine safety, climate data, the economics of a trade decision - the subject barely matters. The move puts a measured finding and a gut feeling on the same shelf, equally weighted, free to be picked up or put down depending on which one feels better that morning.

It looks like a debating trick. It is actually a worldview. And Brexit is the cleanest proof we have of what that worldview costs, because unlike most arguments about science and reason, this one came with a bill you can add up.

Almost ten years ago, a senior British minister looked down the barrel of a television camera and made the move official. Michael Gove, three weeks before the referendum, talking to Sky News' Faisal Islam, who had just run through the economists, institutions and allies warning that leaving the European Union would make Britain poorer.

Reading this in a feed reader? Watch the clip on YouTube.

“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts,” he said. He went on - the full sentence was about experts “from organisations with acronyms” getting things wrong - but the qualifier never mattered. The clip was the clip. A nation was told that careful forecasting and a hopeful feeling deserved the same hearing, and a narrow majority agreed.

A decade on, the experts have their answer. It is more uncomfortable than either side wants to admit.

The immediate predictions were wrong. There was no emergency recession in the months after the vote. The Treasury’s scariest short-term scenarios did not arrive, and Leave campaigners have spent ten years pointing at that empty space. They are not wrong to.

But the immediate forecast was never the one that mattered. The serious claim was that Britain would be permanently poorer outside the EU, and that claim has held up with depressing precision.

You can see it in a single picture. Take UK GDP per head and lay it next to an average of 33 comparable advanced economies. The two track each other almost perfectly until mid-2016, then split at the referendum and never rejoin. The gap that opens up is the no-Brexit Britain that did not happen.

That is the work of Nicholas Bloom and colleagues, published through the National Bureau of Economic Research in late 2025. Their headline: by 2025, UK GDP per head was 6 to 8% lower than it would have been without Brexit, with the central estimate around 8%. What makes it hard to dismiss is the cross-check. They rebuilt the comparison five different ways and then tested it against survey data from thousands of individual UK firms, and the top-down and bottom-up numbers landed in the same place.

Start with the most conservative source. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s own independent forecaster and not a Remain campaign outfit, assumes Brexit knocks 4% off Britain’s long-run productivity, with UK imports and exports both settling around 15% lower than they would have been inside the single market. That is the official number.

Independent estimates run higher. John Springford at the Centre for European Reform builds a statistical “doppelganger” Britain - a weighted basket of comparable economies that tracked the UK closely before 2016 - then measures the gap that opens after the vote. His read: GDP around 5.5% lower, business investment around 11% lower, goods trade around 7% lower.

The chart above sits at the upper end of that range, around 8%, or somewhere between £180 billion and £240 billion over the decade. Goldman Sachs has landed near the same mark. The National Institute puts it at 5 to 6%.

Pick whichever figure you find most credible. They scatter, but they all point the same way, and none of them point at zero. This is what the evidence looked like all along. The experts who predicted an overnight crash were wrong. The experts who predicted a slow, grinding, permanent loss were right. “Enough of experts” flattened those two very different forecasts into one dismissal, and a flattened distinction is exactly what a slow-burn cost needs in order to survive. Nobody riots over a recession that never happens. Everybody shrugs at a few percent of GDP that quietly never arrives.

There is one more thread worth pulling, because the case for Brexit was never purely domestic. In 2020 Britain’s own Intelligence and Security Committee published its long-delayed report on Russia and found that the government had not sought to investigate whether Russia interfered in the 2016 vote. The committee’s charge was not that interference was proven. It was that the question was effectively avoided. A country told to stop trusting experts also chose not to ask who else might have had a hand on the scale.

So here is the point, and it reaches a long way past Brexit. Treating settled evidence as one opinion among many is not open-mindedness. It is not healthy scepticism, and it is not standing up to elites. It is a method for choosing what feels good over what is true, and the method does not care which subject you point it at. Point it at climate science and the cost lands on the next generation. Point it at public health and it lands on the immunocompromised kid in the next classroom. Point it at trade economics and it lands, with a ten-year delay, as several percent of national income that simply never shows up.

That is the receipt Britain is holding. The expert verdict, delivered late and paid in full. The lesson travels right across the globe, and it is not subtle: when reason and evidence get waved away because the alternative feels better, the bill still comes. It just comes for all of us, and often for the people who never got a vote in their future.

Sources:

How the UK economy has changed since the Brexit vote, in charts (theguardian.com)
EU: In or Out? Faisal Islam interview with Michael Gove (skygroup.sky)
Brexit analysis (obr.uk)
Cost of Brexit (cer.eu)
Brexit’s impact on the UK economy (Bloom et al., NBER 2025) (ukandeu.ac.uk)
Brexit hit to UK economy double official estimate, study finds (bloomberg.com)
Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report (en.wikipedia.org)

Wall Street is fine. Main Street is drowning.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:37:57 +1000

I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.

The original tracked the S&P 500 through each president’s first year, indexed to the day before inauguration. Obama up 35%. Trump’s first term up 24%. Biden up 19%. George W. Bush down 16%. Trump’s second term, the red line, finishing year one up 15.7% after a near 17% faceplant during the April tariff panic.

I pushed every line out to 16 months to see who was still standing. Trump’s second term is the only one still climbing. It has now passed +26%, behind Obama and nobody else.

So Wall Street is fine. That is the part everyone can see.

Then there is the part nobody puts on a chart.

The other economy

US consumer debt just hit a record $18.8 trillion. Delinquencies are at 4.8%, the highest since 2017. Subprime auto loans 60 days past due are running at 6.65%, the worst in the 30-plus years anyone has been counting. Auto loans 90 days delinquent sit at a 15-year high. Personal and business bankruptcy filings rose 10.6% in the year to September.

The auto number is the one that should make you sit up. For decades Americans paid the car loan first, before the credit card, before almost anything, because losing the car meant losing the job. That hierarchy has broken. People are now defaulting on the thing they need to get to work. That is not belt-tightening. That is the belt snapping.

Same economy. The S&P at record highs and the repo man at record activity, same country, same month.

Corrupt but uber-capitalist

Here is the take I keep coming back to: the Trump regime is corrupt but uber-capitalist. They are not going to consciously do anything that harms wealth creation. They will damage plenty of other things - institutions, alliances, the rule of law, people - but not pure capitalism. Asset prices are the one scoreboard they actually respect.

You can see it in the behaviour. Every time the market votes no, Trump steps back. The April tariff rout became the April tariff pause. The red line on my chart is the track record of a man who will burn almost anything except the portfolio of the people who own shares.

What makes this stranger is that the US is absorbing genuinely large shocks - tariffs, mass deportations, a scrambled labour market - and still pulling away from its developed peers.

Look at the cars. Volkswagen just shut a German factory for the first time in its 88-year history, the Dresden plant, killed off by Chinese competition and a stalled EV transition. Meanwhile BMW’s single largest plant on the planet is not in Bavaria. It is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, building more than 1,500 vehicles a day and exporting over $10 billion worth a year. A German carmaker’s biggest bet is American soil. That is not an accident of tariffs. That is structural - cheaper energy, deeper capital markets, a flexible workforce and a domestic market that still spends.

The catch is in the last word

A domestic market that still spends.

The affluent who own shares are doing well, and they keep the consumption numbers afloat. The bottom half is funding its slice of that spending with subprime car paper and student loans it cannot service. You can run an economy like that for a while. The question is what happens when the consumer at the bottom finally stops, or gets stopped.

The regime will protect Wall Street on reflex. It has shown it will reverse course the moment the market frowns. Nobody is reversing course for the household 90 days late on a $600 car payment, because that household does not move the index.

The risk was never that these people would consciously crash capitalism. They worship it. The risk is that they break the consumer underneath it through sheer over-reach, and only notice when the damage finally shows up in a chart they care about. By then the red line is doing something very different.

I love a good chart. This one is quietly confronting. It tells you exactly who this economy is being run for, and it is honest enough to leave everyone else off the axis entirely.

Sources:

Household Debt and Credit Report, Q1 2026 (newyorkfed.org)
Car loan delinquencies hit record high (money.com)
Bankruptcy filings increase 10.6 percent (uscourts.gov)
Volkswagen closes a German plant for the first time (bbc.com)
S&P 500 during presidents' first year (axios.com)

The geopolitics of AI

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:04:36 +1000

Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last week. By the weekend, the US government had ordered both suspended for every foreign national on earth.

No advance notice. No specific public explanation. Just a directive citing national security, and Anthropic - with no practical choice - complied. Access to other Claude models remained unaffected. The concern, widely reported, centres on Mythos 5’s ability to detect software vulnerabilities. In the right hands it’s a security tool. In the wrong hands it becomes a cyberweapon. The US government has apparently decided it cannot control whose hands are whose.

This is what AI geopolitics looks like up close.

The policy backdrop is Biden’s AI diffusion framework, which created a three-tier licensing regime governing the export of advanced chips, model weights and access to compute power - the parameters that encode a frontier AI system’s intelligence.

“It seeks to encourage AI development in friendly nations and incentivize businesses around the world to adopt U.S. standards.”

Tier one - eighteen close allies including Australia, UK, Japan and Taiwan - gets essentially unrestricted access. Most of the world faces computing import caps unless they operate within certified, secure environments. Adversaries get blocked entirely. The Fable 5 directive goes further: it effectively treats the entire non-US world as a risk zone, at least for the most capable models.

China is pursuing the same goal - AI sovereignty - through a different set of levers. The US controls access. China controls ownership.

Beijing is happy for the world to use Chinese AI. Qwen, DeepSeek and a growing stable of open-weight models are freely and cheaply available globally. Wide adoption suits Chinese interests. A billion users running on Chinese models is its own kind of leverage. What Beijing will not tolerate is foreigners owning the companies that build them.

In March, that line was made explicit. Beijing effectively killed Meta/Facebook’s planned US$2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese agentic AI startup that had attracted significant US venture capital. Meta is now unwinding the deal. US investors have been paid out. Chinese investors remain. The prevailing expectation is that Manus morphs into a fully Chinese-controlled entity, likely listed in Hong Kong - government direction with a functioning capitalist wrapper intact.

The strategies look different but the intent is the same. Both governments want their nation’s AI to be the infrastructure the world depends on. The US is trying to restrict who gets in. China is ensuring it never loses control of what it has built.

For Meta, the Manus collapse is another expensive dead end. The company remains 98% dependent on advertising revenue despite billions spent chasing AI and the metaverse. It needed a genuine AI acquisition. It got another write-off.

The Fable 5 suspension will likely be temporary. The broader dynamic it represents is not. AI is no longer a technology race between labs. It is an industrial policy race between governments. Both sides understand that whoever controls the infrastructure - the chips, the weights, the companies - controls what comes next.

The era of the globalised, borderless AI industry is closing fast.

Sources: