This film presents a synthesis of my father’s book The Doomsday Machine. His book depicts the evil murderousness of nuclear war plans, and the particular dangers posed by ICBMS, with their first strike capability, intended to be launched on warning.

He believed that with these weapons both the U.S. and the USSR/now Russia had constructed Doomsday Machines, capable of destroying most life on earth — machines that are particularly dangerous because neither side acknowledges this reality but continue to proceed as if there were some circumstances in which it was possible to win a nuclear war.

The epigraph from Dad’s book is from Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

And I am very glad that this film expands on that particular theme with the title: “Ordinary Insanity” — ordinary, as he says, because it is so widely shared.

And that points to a theme that underlies his most recent, posthumous book, Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. These reflections, drawn from notes he wrote for himself over fifty years, reflect his deep meditation on what kind of flaw in the human species makes us vulnerable to this kind of insanity.

In other words, we have to face, on the one hand, the particular danger posed by the weapons we have created and the strategies that dictate their function and use. But we also have to contend with the kind of danger posed by human beings — all of us capable of participating in projects that are evil, participating in the widest sense through our silence.

If we are to dismantle the Doomsday Machine, it will require widespread and concerted efforts to awaken from the spell of this ordinary insanity. In other words, we need to cultivate an ordinary sanity.

One of the ways of promoting that is through educational efforts such as this film, which may alert the public to the dangers we are facing. But it will also require widespread conscientious action, a kind of pandemic of courage, wisdom, enlightenment, and dedication to the survival of our planet.

Only when such sanity becomes ordinary will we have a chance of surviving the nuclear era.

My dad said that until his last breath he would continue to do everything he could to avert this peril. I am happy that through this film, even after his last breath, he may continue to plant seeds of sanity and hope.

      An Ordinary Insanity is free for viewing on the film’s website or on YouTube.

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

Last fall, Alphabet’s subsidiary YouTube agreed to a $24.5 million settlement in a lawsuit stemming from the platform’s suspension of Trump’s YouTube channel. The majority of the settlement will go toward Trump’s now-infamous White House ballroom. Meta, similarly, agreed to a $25 million settlement in 2025. $22 million of that sum was designated to go to Trump’s presidential library.

Meta, like Google, has long been making moves that have severely destabilized the news industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided in 2018 that the platform would prioritize showing Facebook users posts made by their friends and dramatically reduce their ability to see posts made by news organizations that they had chosen to follow. In other words, due to a single algorithm change, the more than 758,000 people who had at the time eagerly signed up to receive links to all of Truthout’s articles in their Facebook feeds suddenly stopped seeing the majority of our posts. This caused a major drop in traffic across the board to news sites, many of which had been persistently encouraged by Facebook to grow their brands on the platform. At Truthout, over 90 percent of our traffic from Facebook disappeared, which decreased our overall traffic by 40 percent and, consequently, the donations we rely on to survive.

Chaotic changes at Twitter also played a role in destabilizing the journalism ecosystem. In 2022, when Elon Musk finalized his takeover of that platform, the move quickly turned the social media site into a cesspool of far right trolls, disinformation, and bot-generated content. This toxicity and disinformation spiral forced many people on the left to leave X, which decreased traffic to progressive websites from the platform.

Over the course of these changes, news organizations like ours have struggled to respond to corresponding significant declines in readership and revenue, along with our readers’ understandable loss of trust in the social media platforms and search engines that initially allowed us to grow. Sudden algorithmic changes, news deprioritization, and increased implementation of AI summaries are shaking the economic foundation of journalism itself. Meanwhile, publishers are being sold the idea that they can cut costs by replacing staff with AI.

The connections to the Trump agenda aren’t hard to see. Trump has been an outspoken critic of news organizations, particularly those that are left-leaning and critical of his administration. Facebook and Google are suppressing journalism on their platforms and weakening news organizations’ ability to hold Trump to account, while also donating to Trump and settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits in his favor.

Whether Facebook and Google are capitulating to Trump due to fear of economic retribution, shared politics, or a desire to increase their stock prices or keep up with technology, the impact is devastating for journalism and democracy.

AI is eroding journalism — and obscuring truth

We’ve already seen some corporate publishers try to jump on the AI bandwagon, arguing that AI will come for our costly but necessary industry one way or another. They frame AI as a way to solve journalism’s most intractable problem: the cost of reporting. But in reality, they’re proposing a vision of journalism resembling content without the journalists — just regurgitated slop of varying accuracy.

Take one high-profile example from last year: Just two months after the Chicago Sun-Times laid off 20 percent of its staff, the paper issued an AI-generated summer reading list sourced from a third-party company. One key problem: Several of the books on the list didn’t actually exist. Some outlets are going so far as to create AI-generated “writers,” complete with fake names and photos, to author their AI-generated articles. And in one notable case, an AI news initiative meant to provide more information in areas with limited access to local news was scrapped after it repeatedly plagiarized the local journalists actually doing that work.

The irony is that the misinformation and deepfakes created by AI make the need for journalists more urgent than ever. For example, during the height of the war on Iran, we watched AI-generated fakery wreak havoc on the sphere of public information. And it should come as no surprise that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot most known for spewing racist hate and distributing child sexual abuse material, further spread inaccuracies when users called upon it for help with fact checking. Right now, those of us who are real human journalists are still able to act as a bulwark against AI-introduced errors. What happens when we’re taken out of the mix?

These inaccuracies are perhaps one of the reasons why people are reluctant to get their news from AI chatbots in the first place. Make no mistake — these changes are being forced upon an unwilling public. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans say they prefer getting their news from chatbots, compared to other news sources, a recent Pew Research survey found. For people who do use chatbots for news, roughly a third of them say they have a hard time determining what’s actually true, and about half say they see news from chatbots that they think is inaccurate.

They are right to be skeptical. A recent study from the AI research company Forum AI found that the answers that top AI chatbots provided on questions about elections were riddled with errors; more than one-third of responses included fact errors of some type. Oftentimes those errors sounded incredibly precise, the research found, giving an undeserved air of confidence to factual inaccuracies. Those chatbots also regularly pulled from commercial sources in their summaries — even using websites like firearm retailer Ammo.com to answer questions about gun control, the researchers discovered.

Trusted news outlets have policies for issuing corrections and clarifications. Publications like ours maintain policies and avenues for offering such corrections and feedback. Who can a reader hold accountable if a Google AI summary is incorrect? Matched with the likelihood of factual errors, the lack of accountability has terrifying implications.

On a deeper level, the hyperindividualization of chatbots also poses some bleak questions about the escalating fragmentation of our shared sense of reality. For years, we’ve heard media critics sound the alarm about how social media has helped false information travel far further at much quicker speeds. Additionally, Big Tech companies, understanding that their bottom line requires eyeballs to stay on their platforms as long as possible, designed the algorithms that feed us information to be as addictive as possible by sticking us in echo chambers.

Now AI could atomize us all even further. Study after study has shown that AI chatbots are sycophantic, offering users excessive praise and telling them what they want to hear. And the timing — ahead of a high-stakes election, at a moment when trust in media is at new lows, and in a period where the future of journalism itself is at risk — could not be worse.

An existential threat to journalism

As the Google Search changes take their toll, we will very likely see a new round of cost-saving measures at longstanding newsrooms. These steps will likely include massive layoffs and downsizing, more aggressively invasive revenue generation tactics, mergers, consolidation and closures. It will be harder for existing news sites to continue publishing and nearly impossible for new newsrooms to reach a large enough audience to become financially viable.

Organizations like Truthout — ones that depend on community-building and audience growth to sustain their work — will be among the most impacted.

For 25 years, Truthout has survived by publishing impactful investigative journalism and analysis; distributing full editions 365 days a year; and building a community of readers who support us with small, hard-earned donations.

Eighty percent of our $3 million yearly budget comes from small donors alone. Of those, 8,000 readers support us with monthly donations. Back in 2018, when Facebook decided to suppress the circulation of posts made by organizations, thereby cutting readers off from seeing many articles shared by the news organizations they had intentionally decided to follow, Truthout’s total traffic declined by 40 percent, as nearly all of our traffic from that platform disappeared.

The consequences of the impending changes to Google’s search engine promise to be even more explosive. Google Search is our single largest source of traffic; it’s the route by which 27 percent of our readers find us. And visitors who find us via Google Search are more likely to stay for longer, engage with our work, and donate than those who find us through social media.

If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.

Truthout is just one example; journalism organizations across the field will be devastatingly affected by Google’s new move, just as they were impacted by Meta’s abrupt algorithmic shift. The entire journalism ecosystem will shoulder this blow, particularly independent publishers and news sites that depend on traffic and aren’t bankrolled by large corporations.

How do we resist?

The sudden shift in Google Search presents us with a pointed question, not only about journalism, but about the future of humanity: How much of our autonomy will we cede to AI? To what extent will we adopt an “oh well!” mentality? Or will we seek creative ways to resist, even when it may feel impossible to confront the largest corporations on the planet?

We cannot allow ourselves to become mired in the trap of inevitability-based thinking.

When grappling with questions around the future of AI, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of how the people — yes, actual humans — are relating to all this. The truth is, most people in the United States are concerned about AI. In fact, in a deeply divided country, AI is something of a uniting cause. A significant majority of Americans rate the “societal risks” of AI as high, with majorities worried that AI will disrupt human connection and inhibit creativity. People in this country are overwhelmingly more worried than excited about how AI has become enmeshed in everyday life. Meanwhile, across political lines, most people in the U.S. oppose the building of data centers in their communities. This is a mobilizable base.

Why should an entirely AI-driven future be inevitable, when most people don’t really want one? Instead of assuming the die is cast, let’s imagine a world in which the onslaught of AI threats is fuel for a broad-based movement.

This movement isn’t just aspirational: It’s already begun. Some of the most hopeful organizing in recent years can be seen in local fights against data centers. Communities are pushing back against corporate giants like Blackstone, BlackRock, and xAI. And from Arizona to New York to Wisconsin and beyond, they’re often winning. According to Data Center Watch, in 2025, local opposition efforts prevented or stalled dozens of data centers, totaling around $156 billion in investment funds.

Meanwhile, we can all respond to Google’s shift toward AI with concrete steps to support independent media and reject the “inevitability” assumption.

Instead of jumping to social media or a search engine for our news, let’s return to visiting news websites directly. Each of us can maintain a list of trusted publications to visit each day. Bookmark your favorites, and return to them. Sign up for email newsletters from your trusted publications, and create filters so that those newsletters arrive in your primary inbox instead of in spam or “promotions.” Subscribe to print publications. Commit to simply reading the news.

Double down on media literacy, practicing discernment and critical thinking as you read and watch the news. In a time when mammoth corporations are attempting to literally tell us what to believe, these commitments are acts of rebellion.

Additionally, since Google Search’s overwhelming prioritization of AI will severely impact revenue for many publications, it’s time to support independent journalism with your money as well as your readership. If you can afford to give, do so, at any level. Without material support from readers and viewers, many independent journalism organizations will fall by the wayside amid the AI onslaught.

For foundations and major donors, there’s a clear mandate here: It’s time to fund our journalism organizations while we experiment and determine new ways of expanding our audiences and driving traffic. We need room to try things — to test out strategies to map an online world beyond Google.

Funding these experiments doesn’t just help one organization or even one sector: As journalism organizations figure out new methods to reach readers, we can share those strategies with other groups, expanding the potential for grassroots groups, unions, and more to connect with human beings in a manner not dictated by the whims of giant corporations’ platforms.

Truthful journalism is an essential public good, and as Google and Meta wage algorithmic warfare against it, it’s essential to protect it. Foundations, donors, and folks connected with money should prioritize journalism alongside other urgent issues, recognizing that trustworthy information is a bulwark against rising fascism.

Finally, we must all adopt a resistance mindset in relation to AI’s slippery slope. Each day, we have an opportunity to choose another way. Resist inevitability. Resist inertia.

Our ability to access facts — and to discern truth from disinformation — is at stake. How will we fight back?

The Trump administration has emphasized in recent days that the New World screwworm infection found in a calf in Texas did not pose a threat to the United States’ larger cattle herd, which is at its lowest point in 75 years due largely to drought conditions—but the US Department of Agriculture is now acknowledging that cases of the parasite have been found outside the Texas containment zone and as far away as in New Mexico, as Republican officials attempt to blame the Biden administration for the outbreak.

While Democratic lawmakers are among those connecting the arrival of screwworm—a flesh-eating bug that feeds off the living tissue of warm-blooded animals and had been eradicated in the US in 1966—to cuts by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that specifically targeted screwworm monitoring programs, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down on claims that an “open border policy” under the Biden administration was to blame.

“This does trace back to the last administration and the open border policy, and the movement of millions of people and their animals up from South America through Central America,” said Rollins with certainty on Monday.

As David Dayen explained at The American Prospect Tuesday, former President Joe Biden placed a ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico in 2024, which Trump lifted in February 2025. At the same time, DOGE, under the leadership of Trump megadonor and tech billionaire Elon Musk, cut screwworm monitoring efforts and animal disease control and prevention efforts, slashing 1,300 employees from USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Rollins did reinstate the live import ban last May as screwworm cases were rising in Mexico and began funding prevention programs in Texas. But a $600 million facility for breeding sterile screwworm flies—a key component of successful eradication efforts—is not scheduled to be completed until late next year, and sterile flies that have been dispersed from a facility that opened in February at Moore Air Force Base in South Texas only amount to “about one one-hundredth of what it would take each week to eradicate the pest,” Dayen wrote.

He also noted that Rollins has attempted to blame Biden—who has not been in office since January 2025—despite the fact that the total average lifespan of a screwworm fly is 21 days.

“The more likely explanation is that an administration with an antipathy to government ignored government’s purpose until it was too late,” wrote Dayen.

The USDA established a 12-mile quarantine area around the affected area last week when the case was detected in South Texas, but on Monday the agency said another case had been found in Gillespie County, over 100 miles from where the initial case was reported.

A dog was also found to be infested in Lea County, New Mexico, more than 400 miles away.

UPDATE: New World Screwworm is no longer contained to Texas.

USDA says that the infested dog announced earlier today lives in Lea County, New Mexico and will be reclassified as the first detection in that state.

And now a goat in Gillespie County, TX, has also been confirmed. pic.twitter.com/KkEYGPTTZZ

— Jonathan Richie (@JRichieTX) June 8, 2026

The parasite is not expected to affect food safety, as it feeds on living tissue, but the outbreak raises concerns about rising beef prices, which are already high due to the low volume of cattle in the US. The high prices of fertilizer and fuel due to the war in Iran, and of equipment and repairs due to Trump’s tariff policy, have also put a strain on the cattle industry.

“The cattle producer in the US has already been under extreme financial stress,” Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, told The American Prospect. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”

In response to Rollins’ claims, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Tuesday: “Let’s be clear about what happened: DOGE cut the programs and staff that tracked dangerous outbreaks like screwworm.”

“So this has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” she said, “but Trump and DOGE definitely screwed our cattle industry.”