BS of the Month (March 2025): "Bullshitters Prove Their Own Guilt" Edition

Sometimes bullshitters do the work for us: dumping the evidence right in our laps and revealing themselves in ways so obvious that they’re impossible to ignore.

2^nd Runner Up: Jeff Bezos & The Washington Post Editorial Board (redux), for Their Bullshit MAGA Pandering

Last month, we awarded Jeff Bezos the Golden Dookie for his democracy-killing cynicism, after he MAGA-fied the op-ed page of his pet newspaper project The Washington Post. Media watchers wondered what he meant by a “100% commitment” to “liberty” and “free markets,” and what that would look like in practice.

Well, now we know. On March 11, the newly programmed Editorial Board at the storied news publication came out with the following ridiculous headline (and sub-head).

Ridiculous because in the conflict with the U.S., Canada was only responding to unprovoked threats from the president of the United States—to make Canada a U.S. state and impose eye-watering tariffs on our largest trading partner. The conflict was solely Trump’s doing, with Canada only defending itself from America’s aggression. Yet, the liberty and free-market loving Editorial Board positioned the conflict as a spat in which both Trump and Carney were equally to blame, and equally responsible for lowering the temperature.

This steaming pile of bullshit is exactly the kind of kowtowing, split-the-baby, both-sides nonsense that establishment media has been rightly criticized for. This piece not only fails to explicate the cause and effect of the conflict, it tacitly validates and sanewashes the narrative of the administration and its spinners in right-wing media.

It’s a failure of basic journalistic values, and coming just weeks after the op-ed makeover at The Post, is proof positive that Jeff’s MAGA turn will neuter his op-ed page, rather than empowering it to speak truth to power. (As if we didn’t have enough evidence already.)

So, the next time Bezos prattles on about ideals and values, we’ll know exactly what he’s doing: bullshitting.

1^st Runner Up: Sam Altman & the A.I. Cabal, for Proving Their Own Talking Points on Copyright are Bullshit

There is so much bullshitty bullshit coming out of the A.I. tech lords that it’s hard to pick just one item. But they are now proving their own guilt in the biggest way possible, on the biggest issue roiling the A.I. business in all its dimensions (political, business, and economic).

That issue is copyright protections for creators and the tech lords’ insistence that they need a loophole that lets them steal whatever they want because figuring out how to pay for stuff is just way too hard… waaaaa.

From an article in ARS Technica:

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race

OpenAI dropped the rhetorical nuclear bomb of “freedom” to argue their right to scrape copyrighted content in order to beat back the dastardly Chinese. Sam Altman argues that:

If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.

So, the government must give A.I. companies a right to steal content, in order to win the war against other thieves.

How do we know this is bullshit? By their own behavior: they are actually buying content from big media and news establishments, including the Authors Guild—e.g., OpenAI is paying publisher HarperCollins $5K per title for three years of access.

A terrific article by Bruce Barcott in TechPolicy.press outlines the deals A.I. businesses are making with all kinds of content providers to actually PAY them for access to their data.

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, went to London and openly admitted to the UK Parliament that its business model couldn’t succeed without stealing the property of others…

One year later, the emergence of a robust market for AI training data has all but smashed those arguments. It turns out that [paying for content] is not “impracticable” after all.

Today, the AI-media dealmaking landscape is so jammed with familiar names that tally keepers are running out of space. Ezra Eeman, head of strategy and innovation at the Dutch broadcaster NPO, recently published the most up-to-date visualization of the major players and known deals:

A.I. businesses are attacking copyright all over the world, especially in the UK and Europe (for consistently excellent coverage of the political and regulatory angles subscribe to ChartingGenAI here on Substack).

But all the while, those same businesses are proving that they CAN pay for data because they ARE paying for data.

Their data usage contracts with big names like HarperCollins, The Financial Times, Axios, Associated Press, Shutterstock, and others, undercut all their arguments against strict copyright enforcement and reveal all their hornswoggling for what it is: A MULTI BILLION DOLLAR BULLSHIT EXTORTION RING.

BS of the Month Award: The Small but Mighty Bullshit of an Idaho School District, for Proving They Hate Inclusion

According to the Idaho Statesman, a middle school teacher in Idaho, who teaches 6^th grade World Civilization, was told to remove signs posted in her classroom—which had been hanging there for FOUR YEARS—because the school district now believes the signs “inadvertently create division or controversy.”

Administrators told the teacher that her signs “don’t allow people to express differing opinions, that it is controversial in today’s political environment.”

One of the offending signs (above) simply says that “Everyone is welcome here.” According to the Statesman:

In emails shared by the district with the Idaho Statesman, Marcus Myers, the district’s chief academic officer, told Inama to remove the signs because they violated Idaho’s Dignity and Nondiscrimination in Public Education Act, as well as school policy, which requires signs to be “content neutral and conducive to a positive learning environment.”

Apparently affirming messages and acceptance are a violation of the state’s dignity law. Truly a WTF moment, made even worse by two of the key issues the district had with the signs:

1. The same school had other “everyone is welcome here” signs posted, but this teacher’s sign raised issues because of the “specific visual representation” of the hands-of-many-colors.

2. According to what the teacher told local TV station KTVB, higher-ups told her that “Everyone is welcome here” is “not something everybody believes,” making it a banned personal opinion, not just basic common sense in a classroom. (Quote here pulled from the appropriately snarky write-up in Wonkette.)

Idaho is a “MAGA lab” according to an op-ed writer just over the border in Washington state, with Idaho going pretty much mad-scientist level crazy in terms of its embrace of ultra-right policies and ideas. What this mighty little example shows is that MAGA world—despite conservatives’ call for unity and empty protests against the divisiveness of “woke” culture—is all-in on exclusion and bigotry.

Active efforts at inclusion are verboten. In fact, it’s the depiction of actual inclusion, represented by hands with brown skin in one sign, and rainbow colors in the other sign, that sent them around the bend.

Passive rhetorical flourishes, without specificity or context, are the most that MAGA will stand for. Because in practice everyone is NOT welcome, and they explicitly told this teacher that people in their community do NOT agree with the statement that “everyone is welcome.”

This is life in the “real America.” This is their “family values.” This is their values in action. So, when MAGA boosters fake-cry about the divisiveness of “woke” culture and that the left needs to stop dividing people, one only need point to mighty little Idaho to call bullshit.

For that reason, for their divisive, anti-inclusive, mad-scientist experiment in hypocrisy and their self-righteous, moral-bullshittery, we award the Golden Dookie and the BS of the Month Award to the state of Idaho, and the West Ada School District. Congratulations! Well done!