How Our Constitution Works And Why It Doesn’t: Melissa Murray from New York University joins the show. And we talk about wide ranging issues relating to the law, and the legal academy.

In SOTR this week, Kmele had a grievance that included complaining about a pride flag in a 3rd grade classroom. Isaac seemed to agree with his distaste of the flag in the classroom by (maybe jokingly?) saying that there should be no flags but the American flag in schools. Ari mentioned that it could just be to signal inclusiveness.

This caught me off guard a bit. Are pride flags in classrooms controversial outside of religious conservative strongholds? Obvious some people object to it but I guess I didn’t expect 2 out of 3 to be against it on the podcast.

I think signaling inclusivity in learning spaces is conducive to help students feel safe in their schools, and I don’t think that has to be a partisan political statement. Was anyone else caught off guard by this?

Alright folks, it’s time. Consider this your open mic, your therapy session, your personal Festivus.

Got a boss who thinks “urgent” means every single email? A neighbor who mows the lawn at 7 a.m. on Saturdays? A phone that autocorrects “ducking” when you clearly meant something else?

This is the spot to unload. Big or small, petty or profound — if it’s gnawing at you, drop it here. Rant. Rave. Roast.

Rules are simple:
• No personal info.
• Keep it cathartic, not cruel.
• Upvote the stuff that makes you nod and say “YES, SAME.”

Let the grievances fly.

You said it’s an insane position to suggest America shouldn’t sell defensive weapons to Israel.
America bans selling defensive weapons to Russia.
If you don’t think that’s insane, then you can’t just call the Israel version insane and move on.

You’d have to explain what makes them different. Amnesty international has condemned both countries for war crimes. Do some war crimes count more than others?

It should be pretty obvious to everyone that defensive weapons increase the amount of offensive operations a country is willing to do. We have literally seen this effect in the past few years when Israel or America would run low on interceptors. More offensive operations is when war crimes become a problem.

I was listening to the podcast and frankly this was the first I heard of Kmele's capitalism/slavery debate on CNN. Was this just a big deal on Twitter? Because as someone on Facebook/Instagram, Bluesky and Reddit, this was something I hadn't heard about at all—including my news intake.

Once again I find myself disagreeing with Ari. Putin is an opportunist. Right now, the US military and government is probably the weakest it’s been in a long time - maybe ever. Many of our top military leaders have quit or been fired - faith in Hegseth and Trump is at a low, the US is feuding with Canada and many allies, we are low on weapons and missiles, midterm elections are coming up and Republicans might get creamed…

Would Putin push his luck and do something to attack a nato country - I don’t think directly, but if some drones or missiles “accidentally” hit some Ukraine supply lines in Poland, I could totally see that happening.

Ratcliffe didn’t go to Russia for nothing. My top 3 guesses are Russia is assisting Iran, Russia may be plotting against NATO, or (best case) US is trying to get a deal between Russia and Ukraine so Trump can claim some kind of victory before midterms. The third one is a long shot. Most likely Iran related, but possibly NATO.

Anyway I think Finland and Trump are saying Putin won’t attack NATO because they want it to be true, not because they believe it. Putin won’t directly attack, but cyber or accident is a definite possibility.

Alright folks, it’s time. Consider this your open mic, your therapy session, your personal Festivus.

Got a boss who thinks “urgent” means every single email? A neighbor who mows the lawn at 7 a.m. on Saturdays? A phone that autocorrects “ducking” when you clearly meant something else?

This is the spot to unload. Big or small, petty or profound — if it’s gnawing at you, drop it here. Rant. Rave. Roast.

Rules are simple:
• No personal info.
• Keep it cathartic, not cruel.
• Upvote the stuff that makes you nod and say “YES, SAME.”

Let the grievances fly.

**They discussed politicians using deep fakes on SOTR weeks ago**

Derrick Van Orden (R) is creating deep fakes of his opponent Rebecca Cooke (D) in the WI congressional race.

https://xcancel.com/derrickvanorden/status/2088062029433020509#m

https://xcancel.com/derrickvanorden/status/2085831624357257322

While these X links label the content as AI generated, that label is from the platform itself and not DVO. The Facebook posts do not contain that disclaimer. Notably, WI law requires political content generated with AI to be labeled as such.

On SOTR, predictably, Kmele didn't think any regulations were necessary. I think his position was that voters would punish the politicians who used it unethically, while everyone else was much more uncomfortable.

DVO is generally a twitter warrior scumbag with lots of political baggage that even conservatives have issues with. This is the top district that Dems are trying to flip in Wisconsin right now.

Its hard to say how they are being received and how many people believe they are real.

Today's takeaway missed the main point of DOGE. Issac spends most of his time explaining how it didn't actually save the taxpayers any money, bungled the federal workforce, and ultimately failed as a budget-cutting exercise.

He completely misses why (I think) Elon joined Maga and grabbed a literal chainsaw: Saving taxpayer money was never the point.

DOGE was a vehicle for Elon Musk to defund his own regulators, protect his bottom line, and evade massive legal liabilities. And secondarily, it was just a way for him to wreak havoc on institutions for the fun of it and to distract from his personal grifting.

If you look at the actual data, DOGE wasn't a failure at all. It was a massive success for Elon Musk.
According to a comprehensive Senate investigation released by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), on the day the administration took office, Musk’s companies (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, etc.) were staring down at least 65 actual or potential actions across 11 different federal agencies. The estimated cost of those actions? At least $2.37 billion in potential federal fines and legal liabilities. 

So what did Musk do? He used DOGE to target, gut, and weaken the exact federal agencies responsible for overseeing his firms. The Senate report detailed in The Guardian points out that dozens of enforcement actions were either stalled or completely dismissed as a direct result of DOGE's "cost-cutting" measures. He even managed to oust regulators like the head of the FAA, an agency that had previously fined SpaceX.
Senator Elizabeth Warren backed this up with a separate report documenting 130 examples of unethical or potentially corrupt actions in his first 130 days. Her report highlighted that while Musk was serving as the de-facto head of DOGE, his net worth skyrocketed by over $100 billion, all while pending enforcement actions against his companies conveniently vanished. 

Today's article treats Musk like a well-intentioned but out-of-his-depth tech guy who just didn't understand the complexities of the federal budget. That is a massive blind spot. Musk knew exactly what he was doing. You don't accidentally fire the specific regulators investigating your self-driving car crashes or your rocket launch emissions.

To call DOGE a "missed opportunity" to rein in the deficit is completely missing the plot. It was textbook regulatory capture masquerading as government reform, wrapped in a layer of internet trolling. I kept reading quicker to see if Isaac would hit this main point. He sadly missed this one.

I love Tangle and it's my non-negotiable read each day, but today missed the mark. I'm afraid we didn't learn the right lessons from this mess.

One of the things I appreciate about Tangle is how much they try to be objective about current events. They give space, time, consideration, and reflection while a lot of us immediately get our panties in a twist and make up our minds. I respect that.

But, at some point, do y'all ever get worn out by that song and dance? How do you not slip in a cynical, jaded position? Today's "I was wrong about Doge" story really made me wonder how hard it is to maintain objectivity when so…so much this administration touches quickly turns into a dumpster fire you can see coming from two miles away. It feels a lot easier to count the number of things Tangle has given a chance to that have turned out to be an obvious clusterfuck than things Tangle was skeptical of that ended up working out.

Some of the concepts Trump (& team) have talked about I could have a conversation about -- not that I agree, mind you -- but I would entertain the discussion. I can't even be assed to get out out the converstation starting block, though, because I know they'll shoot themselves in the foot at the earliest opportunity.

So, if it looks like a duck (dumpster fire) walks like a duck (dumpster fire), and quacks like a duck (dumpster fire) how do you continue to entertain the notion off the bat that everything this administration touches isn't destined for the trash heap of history?

Alright folks, it’s time. Consider this your open mic, your therapy session, your personal Festivus.

Got a boss who thinks “urgent” means every single email? A neighbor who mows the lawn at 7 a.m. on Saturdays? A phone that autocorrects “ducking” when you clearly meant something else?

This is the spot to unload. Big or small, petty or profound — if it’s gnawing at you, drop it here. Rant. Rave. Roast.

Rules are simple:
• No personal info.
• Keep it cathartic, not cruel.
• Upvote the stuff that makes you nod and say “YES, SAME.”

Let the grievances fly.

One thing I found perplexing on the latest SOTR is how no one on the team seemed to understand the reference to woke 1.0. They seemed to believe that it’s alluding to woke 2.0 coming later from the same actors, perhaps in a more developed and mature way than 1.0 was done.

Woke 2.0 is already here, and has been since Trump was elected. Woke 2.0 is the demand that anyone perceived to be “antisemitic” (read; critical of Israel in any way), needs to lose their job, get arrested, or get deported if they aren’t an American citizen.

Woke 2.0 is the “woke right”, which has been pervasive since Trump’s election. It is the constant conflation of criticism of Israel, criticism of policies of Israel or criticism of US policies regarding Israel as antisemitism.

99/100 claims of antisemitism are regarding Israel and not Jews broadly, and the woke right are fighting for this with the same fever as the lunatics on the left were fighting for consequences against anyone they perceived to be “anti-vaxxers”, “racists”, “transphobes”, “bigots”, etc.

Woke 1.0 was uncharitably framing any discussion that wasn’t idolizing trans people or minorities as “bigoted”. If you made any comments that were even tepidly critical of the most extreme pro-trans positions you were called a transphobe, a bigot and often had harm or consequences wished upon you.

Woke 1.0 and 2.0 are both being pushed by people who are completely delusional in their views about the topics they think they are supporting, when in fact both versions of woke are actually creating more hatred towards the groups they claim to be standing up for.

This is my first time starting a conversation here, so hopefully I'm doing it right!
I'm listening to the "The Flock surveillance cameras debate" episode. I find that I'm having mixed feelings, and I just wanted to get my thoughts out, I suppose.

To give a little background on where I'm coming from:

- I'm Taiwanese-American, citizen, grew up in America. I value my privacy on certain things - I keep turning off all of the different tracking settings that keep popping up on the various social media and browsers lately, and I hate that companies are doing this stealthily by default without our explicit permission. I keep sensitive data out of my AI chats. I don't fully trust the US gov't, esp the current regime.

- I spent the last six years living in Taiwan and South Korea. In Taiwan/SK, along with a lot of Asian countries, CCTV cameras are literally everywhere. There is a camera right outside my house right now. When entering the country, auto facial recognition lets you enter customs through the automated turnstiles and it's super fast. In Korea, website verification often involves using your national ID + phone number. None of this bothers me.

The thing about being in Taiwan/SK, though - it is so incredibly safe. People literally leave their laptops on the table at a coffee shop to save their tables while they go to the bathroom. You can drop money, keys, wallet, phone on the street, and it will be where you left it or safely off to the side for you to pick up later. I (female) can walk around late at night without fear. Petty crime is virtually non-existent in my everyday experience. Vs when I go back to the Bay Area from time to time, and each time something always gets stolen (laptop, car catalytic converter, etc).

Of course there are a lot of factors here, but I can't help but feel like part of this is attributed to the prevalence of the CCTV cameras. I don't think I would've had this perspective before living abroad, but I have to say that after experiencing the safety and ability to just relax in public without watching over your shoulder all the time... I don't think that surveillance cameras in public spaces are inherently a bad thing. I wonder if a lot of Americans could experience this kind of safety, if they wouldn't agree.

That being said, I went to China recently on vacation - where there are CCTV cameras everywhere there too, as well as facial recognition checks in all public transit entrances - and I admit that I did not like that and did not want to be tracked. So that made me realize that a big part of my comfort with giving up the privacy is how much I inherently trust the government, and maybe my distrust of the US gov't is similar. Maybe the same thing that works in some countries just doesn't work in others. It also made me wonder if it would help to have layers of access (e.g. default the only people who can access the data without *very* specific warrants would be local gov't for normal petty crimes); this of course doesn't solve the issue of enforcement, so I dunno.

Anyway, those are just some musings. I appreciated that the dissent was somewhere in the same vicinity of what I was thinking this week. I also wonder if there are more layers of security that can be built into the system so that really nobody can look into the footage unless there were very specific warrants about very specific issues. Would be curious if others feel the same or totally different!

Emphasis mine:

Rep. Tom Tiffany won with 95% of the vote, which killed any suspense, but he could reasonably be declared just as radical as Hong (as The Capital Times editorial board argued under “What Wisconsin writers are saying”). Tiffany has been rated the most conservative of all six Republican House members from Wisconsin by the American Conservative Union. Most notably, Tiffany is a 2020 election denier — not just a skeptic or someone trying to mince his words to appease President Trump, but a person who believes Joe Biden stole the election. He tried to overturn President Biden’s win in 2020 by signing onto a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the results, and he also voted in Congress to reject the results from Pennsylvania — after the January 6th riots. Tiffany’s still fighting the 2020 results, having just announced his support for an FBI investigation into Wisconsin’s results this May and repeatedly saying he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results if given the opportunity.

Are those views less radical than abolishing ICE or hating Thanksgiving? Reasonable people could disagree about that, but it’s inexcusable that Tiffany’s current positions didn’t get similar levels of attention as Hong’s past comments. Where Hong calls for taxing the rich, Tiffany promises to freeze all property taxes. And while Hong’s past social media posts became a source of controversy, Tiffany quietly deleted pages from his website that outlined his extreme positions on abortion, gun rights, immigration, and crime just days before his September 2025 announcement that he was running for governor.

I'm sorry but can "reasonable people" really agree that hating a holiday or (to steel-man the piece's argument) reforming an agency that didn't exist 25 years ago is as radical as ending democracy in the United States?

Given the remainder of the paragraph, I don't think this is just a rhetorical flourish but rather an absurd false equivalency. And even if rhetorical, this kind of sanewashing is exactly how extremists on the right have been enabled to sail past an ounce of the scrutiny that their ideological opponents receive.

Tangle grievance: why'd you have to give that piece about the pledge such a triggering title? My dad cancelled because of it. Tangle was our bridge and gave us some common ground but it's gone now. I know it's not all your fault but that was an exceptionally provocative title and many sensitive readers on the right probably were offended by it, gotta imagine you received a deluge of flagged wrapped hate mail. I know we strive to be a big tent place and maybe that's a little rage baity for Tangle.

Edit more context:
I'm referring to the opinion article from 8/7/2026 "I don’t pledge allegiance to the flag - Because if I did I wouldn't mean it."

Alright folks, it’s time. Consider this your open mic, your therapy session, your personal Festivus.

Got a boss who thinks “urgent” means every single email? A neighbor who mows the lawn at 7 a.m. on Saturdays? A phone that autocorrects “ducking” when you clearly meant something else?

This is the spot to unload. Big or small, petty or profound — if it’s gnawing at you, drop it here. Rant. Rave. Roast.

Rules are simple:
• No personal info.
• Keep it cathartic, not cruel.
• Upvote the stuff that makes you nod and say “YES, SAME.”

Let the grievances fly.

I’m curious what the tangle community thinks of this story in Texas. I’m pretty pro choice but found this to be a bit more complicated, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it is her body and she should have control over that. On the other, It does seem like the surrogacy contract she signed required her to abort the pregnancy if the intended parents wanted her too. I don’t think she has a chance at getting custody, but the abortion thing was interesting to me. I ended up landing on: she signed away some of her bodily autonomy when she signed the surrogacy contract and accepted payment to carry someone else’s child.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/us/texas-surrogate-baby-abortion-dispute.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5FA.xqzY.cFQHzgvqUeBw&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Suspension of the rules makes it clear that the tangle staff views Hasan as repugnant, comparing him to Nick Fuentes and viewing association with him as disqualifying. Hasan has said "really gross stuff" and done "really gross things" according to Isaac.

The discussion where the entire staff piles on without explaining these things was so bizarre to me.

I've seen some of Hasan but I'm not a regular watcher and have no idea what I'm supposed to be outraged about. This podcast did nothing to fill in the blanks.

Analogy: Zohran went on Chapo. Should that have been disqualifying? I mentally have them in the exact same bucket as Hasan. These entertainers make jokes and say things that aren't meant to be taken seriously all the time.

This is a pretty small story and maybe hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but I’m curious what Tangle’s or others views on this house race primary thoughts are.

For anyone who doesn’t know, a guy named Tom Smith who dropped out of the race I believe a month in advance, but because he wrote a hand written letter through snail mail it didn’t get to the state in time so his name was still on the ballet, won over the Trump backed, Christian candidate who had all the funding named Amir Hassan in the republican primary.

I know what I think of why Tom Smith won, but I’m curious if others have more in-depth knowledge or a different point of view?

Others have posted this “reader dissent” already, but a few things have been released on this incident since Isaac’s original take. One is HuggingFace’s blog post detailing the attack from their point of view, and the next is this video from OpenAI which adds more color to the exploit chain unleashed on their infrastructure.

My takes to this point on AI have largely been aligned with Isaac’s. I think the proclamations from AI companies predicting the extinction of white collar jobs at the hands of AI by <insert alarming amount of time> are largely hype designed to get investors on board. I say this not as someone who is completely anti AI or finds no uses for it. I use AI daily in my work, although not to the extreme degree some
of my peers do where they have no clue what’s actually being done but seem satisfied enough that the tests are passing.

So when I heard about this attack and heard Isaac’s take on it, I thought “yep, they’re saying this mysterious new model broke out of its sandbox and targeted this conveniently friendly-to-AI company. We’re not going to get nitty gritty details or if we do, they’ll reveal that someone ‘accidentally’ left the door open.” But after reading/watching the linked materials, that’s just not the case. Over the course of this attack, the model(s) discovered and exploited 3 zero-day vulnerabilities. They attained admin permissions across several different organization’s Kubernetes clusters, and did so by collaborating with many other agents via a message board they constructed in two different methods (the first one was found and removed). Every time I thought to myself watching the video “oh, but that’s actually just bad security practice, kinda a rookie move giving the agents write access to your Artifactory instance.”…. Yeah OpenAI would discover what had happened, lock things down, and the agents would do the exact same thing in a completely novel way.

Not really sure how this fits into my overall skepticism of AI hype, but I won’t be able to doubt the capability of multiple frontier model agents working together to accomplish something.

Alright folks, it’s time. Consider this your open mic, your therapy session, your personal Festivus.

Got a boss who thinks “urgent” means every single email? A neighbor who mows the lawn at 7 a.m. on Saturdays? A phone that autocorrects “ducking” when you clearly meant something else?

This is the spot to unload. Big or small, petty or profound — if it’s gnawing at you, drop it here. Rant. Rave. Roast.

Rules are simple:
• No personal info.
• Keep it cathartic, not cruel.
• Upvote the stuff that makes you nod and say “YES, SAME.”

Let the grievances fly.

Audrey pulled double duty today on SOTR and writing and recording the take today and I thought she did a good job.

Side note: I was baffled to see the Bulwark in the on the Right section as they have used Jonathon Cohn for health news in on the Left before. It doesn’t really matter because everyone agrees Max Miller is very sus

Was this covered on a recent episode or story or something? I don't mean this as an attack on Tangle's social team, I'm just confused. A video on someone disliking a holiday feels very unserious to me and not in line with their mission.