This cartoon was drawn for The Boca Raton Tribune. A group named Save Boca is trying to save the city from overdevelopment…and MAGA “leadership.”
The Boca Raton Tribune is a client of my syndication, and now they want to commission occasional cartoons from me on local issues. They choose the subjects, and I write and draw them. This is our second, with the first being in early July.
The cranes and buildings under construction were the editor’s suggestion. One thing I love about local cartoons is that you can put in local stuff residents will recognize. I do that with a lot of my local cartoons for the FXBG Advance, which is easier for me because I live here. That’s not the case with Boca Rotan, so it’s very helpful when the editor can mention local stuff. (snip)
I do not like to draw obit cartoons. I especially don’t like them featuring the Pearly Gates. I bet when editors receive an obit cartoon from me, they get slightly excited because I don’t normally do these things. And I bet that excitement drops real quick after they read the cartoon, because even when I do an obit cartoon, it’s not like other cartoonists’ obit cartoons. It’s not often I give you a Betty White.
Terry Bollea died today at 71. Bollea was Hulk Hogan. Hogan, like Ozzy, wasn’t someone who had a huge impact on me, like Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Jeff MacNeely, Prince, David Bowie, John Lennon, George Harrison, or Tom Petty. Notice that they’re mostly musicians. Even at the age of 11, Elvis’ death hit me. But sometimes I will draw an obit cartoon for someone just because of how iconic they were.
Ozzy was iconic. Everyone knew who he was, even if they couldn’t name a song of his. His reality show helped a lot with that. Terry Bollea was iconic, too, in that you don’t have to watch professional wrestling to know who Hulk Hogan is. If there is a Mount Rushmore for wrestlers, many fans would put Hogan in George Washington’s spot.
Hogan made wrestling. When the then-WWF (World Wrestling Federation) went national (wrestling used to be territorial), owner Vince McMahon (who is now in deep trouble for sexual assault) needed a babyface (good guy) hero to be the face of the company. And it worked, Hulkamania ran wild across the nation, as Hulk Hogan defended the World Title year after year against bigger and badder bad guys. One problem was that there weren’t that many bad guys physically larger than Hulk Hogan. There was only one Andre the Giant, and most big guys couldn’t wrestle, even enough to match Hogan’s three-move set. They once hired actor Tommy Lister (Deebo from the Friday movies) to have a feud with Hogan, because Lister was huge and had played the hell (bad guy) in a horrible film with Hogan. I didn’t have to see it to know it was horrible. One problem with hiring an actor to wrestle is that actors are not wrestlers. This makes for bad matches.
At Wrestlemania 2, Hulk faced off against King Kong Bundy, who was paid $50,000 for the match, which was half of what Hogan made for the event. Bundy wasn’t mad. He was happy because wrestlers didn’t usually make those kinds of paydays. Hogan was such a star that wrestlers made more money working with/against him. McMahon would sign new guys, not always by promising them titles (he often lied), but with runs with Hogan. This is an estimation, but a wrestler who usually made $1,000 a week could make $10,000 to $50,000 a week if he was working with Hogan. This information comes from wrestlers, but keep in mind that wrestlers are often liars.
Hogan was the hero. He would make his entrance to the song Real American (it’s catchy and annoying) while waving an American flag. He’d tell the kids to “say your prayers and eat your vitamins.” Hogan, despite never losing and being the champ, was always the underdog. Most of the match consisted of Hogan getting his ass kicked, until he hulked up. The villain’s punches would suddenly become ineffective, Hogan would turn around with an angry expression, take a few more punches, then stand straight up and point his finger at the bad guy, like, “YOU!” Then he’d start punching, whip the bad guy off the rope, perform a bodyslam, whip himself off the ropes, do a legdrop on his opponent, and then it was 1, 2, 3 for the pin, and the fans would go crazy. Find the Hogan/Andre match, and you’ll see. I was shocked to look this up to discover it lasted as long as 12 minutes. I’m trying to remember what they did in that match to make it last so long. It’s very slow. It wasn’t technical wrestling, and Hogan did the same routine for every match, but it was storytelling in the ring. Hulk always won….usually.
Hogan was a real-life cartoon. (snip; yes, there is MORE)
July 26, 1953 In his first move to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, 26-year-old Fidel Castro led 134 other young revolutionaries to unsuccessfully attack the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Castro had concluded that armed struggle was the only way to unseat Batista, who had taken power in a military coup in 1952. The Cuban Revolution is known as the July 26 Movement, and is celebrated annually there. The Moncada Barracks, still showing a few bullet holes and pockmarks from that fateful early morning assault in 1953, is now both a historic site and an elementary school.
July 26, 1967 H. Rap Brown, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was ordered arrested by then-Governor Spiro Agnew, who accused him of inciting a riot through his speech two days earlier at a civil rights rally in Cambridge, Maryland. At the event, Brown declared, “Black folks built America, and if America don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down . . . If Cambridge doesn’t come around, Cambridge got to be burned down.” Shortly after the speech, Brown was hit in the head by buckshot from a policeman’s shotgun. That night the segregated elementary school on the black side of town and 20 businesses burned down (there was no looting), some along Race Street, the racial divide which neither black nor white were expected to cross. H. Rap Brown following the disturbances in Cambridge, Maryland. What happened in Cambridge
July 26, 1990 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. It prohibited discrimination based on disability in employment, in public accommodation (e.g., hotels, restaurants, retail stores, theaters, health care facilities, convention centers), in transportation services, and in all activities of state and local governments. The law did not go into effect until January 26, 1992.
This is long. Even long for a news nerd like me. But it is well worth it if you want to see how the current administration is using the military in ways it was not designed to do and against the laws to make it easier for them to be used in civilian control to enforce the will of tRump should he again refuse to accept the fact he has to leave office or if he wants something a governor / state won’t give him. The article shows how the military is tRump’s big stick to hit anyone who disagrees with him. Hugs
A U.S. Marine with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, attached to Task Force 51, guards a federal area in Los Angeles on July 12, 2025. Photo: Lance Cpl. Andrew Whistler/U.S. Marine Corps/DVIDS
In his first six months in office, President Donald Trump has overseen the deployment of nearly 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon’s public statements.
But the true number of troops deployed may be markedly higher. When asked directly, the Army said it has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed. These federal forces have been operating in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — with more deployments on the horizon, all in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Experts say military involvement in domestic anti-immigrant operations undermines American democracy and has nudged the United States closer to a genuine police state.
“If the president can use the military as a domestic police force entirely under his control, it can be used as a tool of tyranny and oppression.”
“This level of involvement of the military in civilian law enforcement in the interior of the country is unprecedented — and really dangerous,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, who told The Intercept that recent deployments violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America which bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement.
She added: “If the president can use the military as a domestic police force entirely under his control, it can be used as a tool of tyranny and oppression. We’ve seen it all around the world and throughout history.”
The norms surrounding the use of military force within U.S. borders are eroding, and the executive branch is operating with free rein, emboldened by a legislature and judiciary seemingly uninterested in curtailing its actions.
These soldiers have been sent to patrol the border, put down popular protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, participate in ICE raids, and assist in immigration enforcement missions from coast to coast. Here, to the extent of what is known so far, is what they’ve been up to.
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President Donald Trump began the further militarization of America on his first day back in office. “Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics,” Trump announced on January 20, directing the military to “assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining full operational control of the southern border.”
Despite the fact that Trump’s fearmongering was his typical hyperbole, more than 10,000 troops are deploying or have deployed to the southern border, according to U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which oversees U.S. military activity from Mexico’s southern border up to the North Pole.
Under the direction of NORTHCOM, military personnel — including soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Carson in Colorado, one of the Army’s most storied combat units — have deployed under the moniker Joint Task Force-Southern Border, or JTF-SB, since March, bolstering approximately 2,500 service members who were already supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission.
One-third of the U.S. border is now completely militarized due to the creation of four new national defense areas, or NDAs: sprawling extensions of U.S. military bases patrolled by troops who can detain immigrants until they can be handed over to Border Patrol agents.
The Air Force is responsible for the recently created South Texas NDA, which encompasses federal property along 250 miles of the Rio Grande River. The Navy controls the Yuma NDA, which extends along 140 miles of federal property on the U.S.–Mexico border near the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.
The New Mexico NDA, created in April, spans approximately 170 miles of noncontiguous land along that state’s border, serving as an extension of the Army’s Fort Huachuca. Another NDA was created in May in West Texas and covers approximately 63 miles of noncontiguous land between El Paso and Fort Hancock, serving as an extension of the Army’s Fort Bliss.
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Around 8,500 military personnel were assigned to JTF-SB to “enhance US Customs and Border Patrol’s capacity to identify, track and disrupt threats to border security,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said at the beginning of the month. JTF-SB says the current number of personnel deploys stands at 7,600, while NORTHCOM says the current number of federal troops providing border security is closer to 8,600.
No one actually knows how many troops have been involved in border operations this year. “We do not maintain a running total of Service Members who have served with JTF-SB since its inception, so the total number since March is currently unavailable,” Kent Redmond, a spokesperson for JTF-Southern Border told The Intercept. NORTHCOM didn’t have a number on hand either. But more than 10 Task Forces have assisted JTF-SB, including Task Force Mountain Warrior, consisting of soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team; Task Force Castle, made up of soldiers from the 41st Engineer Battalion; 500 Marines and Navy personnel from Task Force Sapper; and 500 Marines and sailors from Task Force Forge. The latter replaced the Task Force Sapper troops and are now conducting patrols in the Yuma NDA.
Since March alone, Parnell said, the JTF-SB has conducted more than 3,500 patrols, including more than 150 “trilateral” patrols with CBP and the Mexican military. There have, however, been only seven temporary detentions by troops within the National Defense Areas, according to Redmond. He said the seven persons were “detained in place” by JTF-SB personnel for less than 10 minutes.
“The amount being spent to have the world’s best fighting force walk around the border to pick up a handful of people is shocking.”
“Setting aside the threats to democracy and liberty, the sheer waste is staggering. The amount being spent to have the world’s best fighting force walk around the border to pick up a handful of people is shocking,” said Goitein, who also noted that the detentions violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
“They may think if they detain people for only 10 minutes it’s not a violation, but that’s not how the law works,” Goitein explained. “They may also say that the Posse Comitatus Act simply doesn’t apply when the purpose is to protect a military base, but here it’s clear that the primary purpose is enforcement of immigration law.”
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The military has even dispatched Navy warships offshore to secure the border. After battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Gulf of Aden earlier this year, for example, the USS Stockdale — a guided-missile destroyer — was deployed to support NORTHCOM’s southern border operations alongside the Coast Guard on the U.S.–Mexico maritime border. That ship took over for the USS Spruance, another guided-missile destroyer drafted into anti-immigrant operations.
“We are dead serious about 100% OPERATIONAL CONTROL of the southern border,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X in March.
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly announced historically low apprehensions along the southern border. “The numbers don’t lie — under President Trump’s leadership, DHS and CBP have shattered records and delivered the most secure border in American history,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month. And as early as April, DHS announced, “Customs and Border Protection now has total control of the border.”
Despite all of this, as well as the huge influx of troops and weapons of war deployed at the border, when The Intercept inquired whether full operational control of the border had been achieved and “if not, why not?” DHS demurred. A senior DHS official, who offered comments on the condition of anonymity for no discernible reason, provided rote talking points and praise of Trump and Noem. The official added that the department was “grateful” for JTF-SB’s “support.”
More than 5,000 troops have also been deployed to Los Angeles since early June.
The National Guard soldiers and Marines operating in Southern California — under the command of the Army’s Task Force 51 — were sent to “protect the safety and security of federal functions, personnel, and property.” In practice, this has mostly meant guarding federal buildings across LA from protests against the ongoing ICE raids sweeping the city.
Since Trump called up the troops on June 7, they have carried out exactly one temporary detainment, a Task Force 51 spokesperson told The Intercept.
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Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson, described this deployment as Task Force 51 supporting “more than 170 missions in over 130 separate locations from nine federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Marshal Service, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security” in a briefing in early July. Task Force 51 failed to provide any other metrics regarding troops’ involvement in raids, arrests, or street patrols in response to questions by The Intercept.
Troops were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In addition to guarding federal buildings, troops have also recently participated in raids alongside camouflage-clad ICE agents. An assault on MacArthur Park, a recreational hub in one of LA’s most immigrant-heavy neighborhoods on July 7, for example, included 90 armed U.S. troops and 17 military Humvees. Its main accomplishment was rousting a summer day camp for children. No arrests were made.
California National Guard soldiers also backed ICE raids on state-licensed marijuana nurseries this month. The troops took part in the military-style assaults on two locations, one in the Santa Barbara County town of Carpinteria, about 90 miles northwest of LA and one in the Ventura County community of Camarillo, about 50 miles from LA. ICE detained more than 200 people, including U.S. citizens, during the joint operations. One man, Jaime Alanís Garcia, died while trying to flee from the raid in Camarillo.
On July 1, Task Force 51 announced that it would release approximately 150 members of the California National Guard from their LA duty. That same day, NORTHCOM said that the Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment were leaving Los Angeles but would be replaced by the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.
Last Tuesday, Trump administration officials announced that about 2,000 more National Guard members deployed to LA would be released from service. On Monday, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing the 700 active-duty Marines from Los Angeles. The withdrawals followed repeated reporting by The Intercept highlighting the failure of the troops to do much of substance.
All told, since the deployments began, around 5,500 troops have been sent to southern California, according to Becky Farmer, a NORTHCOM spokesperson.
On the other side of the country, Marines are being hustled to Florida to aid the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Responding to a DHS request, Hegseth approved a mobilization of up to 700 active, National Guard, and Reserve forces.
The first contingent — approximately 200 Marines from Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina — have been mobilized to support ICE’s “interior immigration enforcement mission” in Florida, NORTHCOM announced earlier this month. The command noted that they were only the “first wave” of ICE assistance. NORTHCOM says additional forces will be deployed to Louisiana and Texas. Hundreds more Guardsmen are expected to be sent to assist in more than a half dozen other states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.
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Some of these same states are also using their own National Guard members in their own anti-immigrant operations. More than 4,200 Texas National Guard soldiers and airmen on state duty are engaged in Operation Lone Star, a border security initiative launched by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in March 2021. Texas’s forces were bolstered, until April, by members of the Indiana National Guard.
Nearly 70 Florida National Guard members are also on state duty, conducting base camp security at the remote migrant detention center in the state’s Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” While Trump insisted that the swamp gulag was reserved for “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet,” it was revealed that hundreds of detainees had committed no offense other than civil immigration violations.
“Governors should be doing everything in their power to avoid their state’s national guard troops being pulled into this lawless, authoritarian power grab, not spending precious resources to help it along,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept.
The Trump administration’s use of military forces in its anti-immigrant crusade has been criticized as a publicity stunt and an authoritarian power play.
The directive signed by Trump calling up the California National Guard, for example, cited “10 U.S.C. 12406,” a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
There was, however, no rebellion. Vice President JD Vance even recently vacationed at Disneyland in Anaheim, about 25 miles from LA.
Still, experts say that the stunt deployments represent a clear danger to American democracy by violating the Posse Comitatus Act; normalizing the use of the military in civilian law enforcement activities; and further transforming the armed forces into a tool of domestic oppression by aiding ICE, which increasingly operates as a masked, secret police force.
“ICE is running a nationwide campaign of violent, racist kidnappings, and Hegseth’s Pentagon is bending over backward to make the military into ICE’s chief sidekicks,” said Haghdoosti. “Troops abetting violence against their own neighbors isn’t tenable for our communities, our democracy, or the troops themselves.”
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
The Trump administration sent five deportees to Eswatini, an African kingdom, saying that their own countries would not take them. But Eswatini says it will send them home.
Mswati III, King of Eswatini, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2023.Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times
The tiny African kingdom of Eswatini announced on Wednesday that it would repatriate the five migrants who had been deported there by the United States, a day after American officials said the migrants’ home countries had refused to accept them.
The migrants came from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, and had been serving time in American prisons for serious offenses, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Their removal was the first so-called third-country deportation from the United States to take place since the Supreme Court ruled this month that the Trump administration could move forward with the practice.
The flight included individuals whose own countries “refused to take them back,” Homeland Security Department Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote on X Tuesday night.
But an Eswatini government spokeswoman, Thabile Mdluli, said in a statement on Wednesday that the governments of her country and the United States, together with the International Organization for Migration, will “facilitate the transit of these inmates to their countries of origin.”
The International Organization for Migration said that it had no involvement in the removal of the migrants from the United States and had not been asked to provide any support with repatriation.
The Trump administration has worked aggressively to broker deals with international partners willing to take deportees. Legal experts have challenged the deportations on the grounds that the migrants could be subject to mistreatment and torture.
Earlier this month the Supreme Court approved the deportation of eight men to South Sudan, only one of whom is from that country. Their families have not heard from them since, according to their legal team. Officials in South Sudan have said the men are “under the care of the relevant authorities,” but have provided no further details.
After the Supreme Court decision, immigration officials acted quickly to implement new regulations that allow the government to carry out third-country deportations in as little as six hours, even without assurances that the migrants will be safe.
Former immigration officials view the deportation efforts as part of the administration’s push to get migrants to self-deport.
“This is another clear example of how the United States is flagrantly violating the law restricting it from deporting people to countries where they will likely be persecuted or tortured,” said Matt Adams, a lawyer for the migrants sent to South Sudan.
The Trump administration used the deportations to Eswatini “simply for political theater,” he said. “Spending millions of dollars to fly five men to the other side of the planet.”
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is tucked between South Africa and Mozambique and has one of Africa’s last ruling monarchies. The kingdom is divided between those who praise its adherence to tradition and those who argue that the lavish lifestyle of King Mswati III stands in painful contrast to the poverty afflicting many of the country’s 1.2 million people.
Some citizens of Eswatini and foreign governments have also raised concerns about the country’s human rights record, accusing the government of using excessive — sometimes lethal — force against people who oppose the king.
Those opposed to the monarchy were quick to condemn the arrival of the deportees.
“This is appalling,” said Lioness Sibande, the secretary general of the Swaziland Peoples Liberation Movement, an opposition group. She described the move as an example of the West’s long history of exploiting African nations. “The West is always disrespecting us as Africans and thinking we are their dumpsite,” she said.
In her statement, Ms. Mdluli, the government spokeswoman, sought to temper the concerns of Eswatini citizens. She said the deportees were being held in isolation units at correctional facilities.
The decision to take migrants from the United States came after months of talks that included “rigorous risk assessments and careful consideration for the safety and security of citizens,” she said. “The nation is assured that these inmates pose no threat to the country or its citizens.”
Ms. Mdluli added that she could not reveal what Eswatini received in return for taking the migrants because the terms of the agreement with the United States remain classified.
A correction was made on
July 16, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to eight men deported to South Sudan by the Trump administration. One of the men is from South Sudan; they are not all from other countries.
GENEVA — The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Monday to renew the mandate of an LGBTQ rights expert, a move welcomed by advocates amid the absence of the United States, a former key supporter that is now rolling back such protections.
Western diplomats had previously voiced concerns about the renewal of the mandate of South African scholar Graeme Reid who helps to boost protections by documenting abuses and through dialogue with countries.
The motion for a three-year renewal passed with 29 votes in favor, 15 against and three abstentions. Supporters included Chile, Germany, Kenya and South Africa while several African nations and Qatar opposed it.
“The renewal of this mandate is a spark of hope in a time when reactionary powers worldwide are trying to dismantle progress that our communities fought so hard to achieve,” said Julia Ehrt, executive director of campaign group ILGA World.
The United States, which has disengaged from the council under President Donald Trump, citing an alleged antisemitic bias, was previously a supporter of the mandate under the Biden administration.
Since taking office in January, Trump has signed executive orders to curb transgender rights and dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the government and private sector.
His administration says such steps restore fairness, but civil rights and LGBTQ advocates say they make marginalized groups more vulnerable.
In negotiations before the vote, Pakistan voiced opposition to the mandate on behalf of Muslim group OIC, calling it a tool to advocate “controversial views.”
This is what I meant when I mentioned that while Google’s AI always volunteers information when I search, which info I do skim before I scroll down for the real search. I can well see people thinking they can depend upon the AI overviews of what they think they’re reading. Here’s the scoop:
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.
Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing.
Essentially, the data shows that Google’s AI Overview feature introduced in 2023 replacing the “10 blue links” format that turned Google into the internet’s de facto traffic controller will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process. Instead, Google will feed people into a faulty AI-powered alternative that is prone to errors it presents with so much confidence, we won’t even be able to tell that they are errors.
Here’s what this looks like from the perspective of someone who makes a living finding, producing, and publishing what I hope is valuable information on the internet. On Monday I published a story about Spotify publishing AI-generated songs from dead artists without permission. I spent most of my day verifying that this was happening, finding examples, contacting Spotify and other companies responsible, and talking to the owner of a record label who was impacted by this. After the story was published, Spotify removed all the tracks I flagged and removed the user who was behind this malicious activity, which resulted in many more offending, AI-generated tracks falsely attributed to human artists being removed from Spotify and other streaming services.
Many thousands of people think this information is interesting or useful, so they read the story, and then we hopefully convert their attention to money via ads, but primarily by convincing them to pay for a subscription. Cynically aiming only to get as much traffic as we can isn’t a viable business strategy because it compromises the very credibility and trustworthiness that we think convinces people to pay for a subscription, but what traffic we do get is valuable because every person who comes to our website gives us the opportunity to make our case.
The Spotify story got decent traffic by our standards, and the number one traffic source for it so far has been Google, followed by Reddit, “direct” traffic (meaning people who come directly to our site), and Bluesky. It’s great that Google sent us a bunch of traffic for that, but we also know that it should have sent us a lot more, and that it did a disservice to its own users by not doing that.
We know it should have sent us more traffic because of what when you search for “AI music spotify” on Google, the first thing I see is a Google Snippet summarizing my article. But that summary isn’t from nor does it link to 404 Media, it’s a summary of and a link to a blog on a website called dig.watch that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The blog doesn’t have a byline and reads like the endless stream of AI-generated summaries we saw when we created a fully automated AI aggregation site of 404 Media. Dig.watch itself links to another music blog, MusicTech, which is an aggregation of my story that links to it in the lede.
When I use Google’s “AI mode,” Google provides a bullet-pointed summary of my story, but instead of linking to it, it links to three other sites that aggregated it: TechRadar, Mixmag, and RouteNote.
Gaming search engine optimization in order to come up as the first result on Google regardless of merit has been a problem for as long as Google has been around. As the Pew research makes clear, AI Overview just ensures people will never click the link where the information they are looking for originates.
We reserve the right to whine about Google rewarding aggregation of our stories instead of sending the traffic to us, but the problem here is not what is happening to 404 Media, which we’ve built with the explicit goal of not living or dying by the whims of any internet platform we can’t control. The problem is that this is happening to every website on the internet, and if the people who actually produce the information that people are looking for are not getting traffic they will no longer be able to produce that information.
Luckily for Google and the untold number of people who are being fed Snippets and AI summaries of our Spotify story, so far that information is at least correct. That is not guaranteed to be the case with other AI summaries. We love to mention that Google’s AI summaries told its users to eat glue whenever this subject comes up because it’s hilarious and perfectly encapsulates the problem, but it’s also an important example because it reveals an inherently faulty technology. More recently, AI Overview insisted that Dave Barry, a journalist who is very much alive, was dead.
The glue situation was viral and embarrassing for Google but the company still dominates search and it’s very hard for people to meaningfully resist its dominance given our limited attention spans and the fact that it is the default search option in most cases. AI overviews are still a problem but it’s impossible to keep this story in the news forever. Eventually Google shoves it down users’ throats and there’s not much they can do about it.
Google AI summaries told users to eat glue because it was pulling on a Reddit post that was telling another user, jokingly, to put glue on their pizza so the cheese doesn’t slide off. Google’s AI didn’t understand the context and served that answer up deadpan. This mechanism doesn’t only result in other similar errors, but is also possibly vulnerable to abuse.
In May, an artist named Eduardo Valdés-Hevia reached out to me when he discovered he accidentally fooled Google’s AI Overview to present a fictional theory he wrote for a creative project as if it was real.
“I work mostly in horror, and my art often plays around with unreality and uses scientific and medical terms I make up to heighten the realism along with the photoshopped images,” Valdés-Hevia told me. “Which makes a lot of people briefly think what I talk about might be real, and will lead some of them to google my made-up terms to make sure.”
In early May, Valdés-Hevia posted a creepy image and short blurb about “The fringe Parasitic Encephalization Theory,” which “claims our nervous system is a parasite that took over the body of the earliest vertebrate ancestor. It captures 20% of the body’s resources, while staying separate from the blood and being considered unique by the immune system.”
Someone who saw Valdés-Hevia post Googled “Parasitic Encephalization” and showed him that AI overview presented it as if it was a real thing.
Valdés-Hevia then decided to check if he could Google AI Overview to similarly present other made-up concepts as if they were real, and found that it was easy and fast. For example, Valdés-Hevia said that only two hours after he and members of his Discord to start posting about “AI Engorgement,” a fake “phenomenon where an AI model absorbs too much misinformation in its training data,” for Google AI Overview to start presenting it uncritically. It still does so at the time of writing, months later.
Other recent examples Valdés-Hevia flagged to me, like the fictional “Seraphim Shark” were at first presented as real by AI Overview, but has since been updated to say they are “likely” fictional. In some cases, Valdés-Hevia even managed to get AI Overview to conflate a real condition—Dracunculiasis, or guinea worm disease—with a fictional condition he invented, Dracunculus graviditatis, “a specialized parasite of the uterus.” Google
Valdés-Hevia told me he wanted to “test out the limits and how exploitable Google search has become. It’s also a natural extension of the message of my art, which is made to convince people briefly that my unreality is real as a vehicle for horror. Except in this case, I was trying to intentionally ‘trick’ the machine. And I thought it would be much, much harder than just some scattered social media posts and a couple hours.”
“Let’s say an antivaxx group organizes to spread some disinformation,” he said. “They just need to create a new term (let’s say a disease name caused by vaccines) that doesn’t have many hits on Google, coordinate to post about it in a few different places using scientific terms to make it feel real, and within a few hours, they could have Google itself laundering this misinformation into a ‘credible’ statement through their AI overview. Then, a good percentage of people looking for the term would come out thinking this is credible information. What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”
I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.
The optimistic take is that Google Search, which has been the undisputed king of search for more than two decades, is now extremely vulnerable to disruption, as people in the tech world love to say. Predictably, most of that competition is now coming from other AI companies that thing they can build better products than AI overview and be the new, default, AI-powered search engine for the AI age. Alternatively, as people get tired of being fed AI-powered trash, perhaps there is room for a human-centered and human-powered search alternative, products that let people filter out AI results or doesn’t have an ads-based business model.
But It is also entirely possible and maybe predictable that we’ll continue to knowingly march towards an internet where drawing the line between what is and isn’t real is not profitable “at scale” and therefore not a consideration for most internet companies and users. Which doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. It is very, very consequential, and we are already knee deep in those consequences.
“People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites,” A Google spokesperson told me in an email. “This [Pew] study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”
Update: This article has been updated with comment from Google. We’ve also updated our description of the Pew study to clarify one percent of Google searches resulted in users clicking the link to the source of the AI summary.
A U.S. Marine with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, attached to Task Force 51, guards a federal area in Los Angeles on July 12, 2025. Photo: Lance Cpl. Andrew Whistler/U.S. Marine Corps/DVIDS
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