Yes

 

Hmmmm......

 

Good

Harvard faculty votes to make it more difficult for undergrads to earn A’s

By Associated Press

At Harvard University, earning straight A’s is about to get harder.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday that it would limit the number of A grades awarded to undergraduates, adopting one of the most ambitious efforts by a major university to curb grade inflation. The decision was made by faculty vote earlier this month.

The move comes after top grades became so common that some Harvard faculty argued they no longer reliably distinguished exceptional work. More than 60% of all grades awarded to undergraduates in recent years were in the A range, according to university data cited by faculty members who supported the measure.

Harvard is not the first elite university to confront grade inflation. Princeton University adopted a policy in 2004 to limit A-range grades to 35% of those awarded, though it abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission.

Nationally, grade-point averages at four-year public and nonprofit colleges rose more than 16% between 1990 and 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“The Harvard faculty voted to make their grades mean what they say they mean,” members of the faculty subcommittee that proposed the changes said in a statement.

They said the reform would ensure that “a Harvard A grade will now tell students, as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved.”

Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, called grade inflation a “complex and thorny issue” and a “problem that many people have recognized, but no one has solved” in a statement Wednesday.

Beginning in fall 2027, instructors in letter-graded courses at Harvard College will be allowed to award A grades to no more than 20% of students in a class, plus four additional students. Other letter grades, including A-minus, will not be subject to a limit.

Faculty also approved a proposal to use average percentile rank rather than grade-point average when comparing students for honors, prizes and awards.

A separate proposal that would have allowed courses to opt out of the A-grade cap by switching to a satisfactory/unsatisfactory system with a new SAT+ designation for exceptional performance failed.

The new policies will be reviewed after three years. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is Harvard’s largest school, comprising 40 academic departments. It is the home of Harvard College, Harvard’s undergraduate program, and all of Harvard’s Ph.D. programs.

Flashing a warning sign

The bond market is flashing a warning sign for the global economy

Analysis by Allison Morrow

Take it from President Donald Trump himself: Stocks and commodities can throw easily ignored tantrums, but when the bond market gets “yippy,” you pay attention.

Ultimately, it took a sharp bond market selloff in April of 2025 to get Trump to pump the brakes on his sweeping “reciprocal” tariff agenda.

Once again, the bond traders are barking. But this time, it’s not clear whether Trump can do much to calm the market anytime soon.

“The bond market is basically reacting to the uncertainty created by oil prices, and (Trump) seems not to know how to get out of the problem he’s put us in,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at investing firm Westwood Capital, in an interview.

Put another way: Bond traders are starting to think that the recent inflation spike — largely a result of the war shutting off oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz — may not be as “short-term” as Trump has claimed. And that will likely depress bond prices even more.

That’s a problem for all of us, investors and normies alike. My colleague David Goldman has a useful analogy: Think of the bond market like an old-timey balance scale, with prices on one side and yields (the interest a bond pays) on the other.

Right now, bond prices are getting weighed down by a bunch of economic concerns, including:

• Rising inflation
• National debt outpacing economic growth
• Consumer debt
• The cost of the Iran war
• Potential rate hikes
• The cost of financing AI

The more bond prices go down, the more yields go up. Investors are basically telling governments “hey if you want to hold onto my money, you’re going to have to pay me more for it.”

That means it’ll cost the government (read: taxpayers) more to finance the national debt, leaving less for social services. And because mortgage rates, auto loans and credit cards are all pegged to the 10-year Treasury yield, consumers end up paying more to finance those necessities. This can slow economic growth and potentially trigger a recession (although we don’t appear to be anywhere close to that just yet).

The bond market anxiety was so acute Tuesday — the 30-year US Treasury yield just hit 5.2%, its highest level since 2007 — it even managed to pierce the euphoria around tech stocks that’s driven the market to multiple record highs in recent weeks. The S&P 500 fell for its third straight session.

And while stock and commodity markets are quick to react to pronouncements from Trump and other world leaders, the bond market is a different beast.

Since the war in Iran started nearly three months ago, Trump has insisted several times that the war was “very close to being over.” Almost always, those statements have sent stocks higher and oil prices lower in a quintessential Lucy-and-Charlie-Brown-with-the-football moment.

On Monday, Trump said he was calling off an attack on Iran while “serious negotiations” take place. Stocks pared most of their losses, and a rally in oil prices lost steam. It didn’t faze bond markets, though, which continued to sell off around the globe.

That’s partly because investors aren’t just worried about war and oil-related inflation. They’re seeing a confluence of factors that signal pain on the horizon.

“The story right now is simple and uncomfortable,” Ajay Rajadhyaksha, global chairman of research at Barclays, said in a note Monday. “The developed world has too much debt, too little fiscal discipline, and no political appetite for fixing either… The global energy shock is the cherry on the cake.”

Faces the question

Thomas Massie faces the question confronting other Republicans who crossed Trump: What now?

By Jeff Zeleny

For the next seven months, Rep. Thomas Massie will hold something that even President Donald Trump can’t take away: His seat in Congress.

The question is what comes next.

As Massie becomes the latest Republican added to Trump’s growing list of revenge and retribution, his concession speech Tuesday night here in Kentucky sounded like anything but. He delivered a forward-looking message to supporters, who seemed more energized than crestfallen.

“What started out as an election turned into a movement,” Massie said. “We stirred up something. There is a yearning in this country for someone who will vote for principles over party.”

The message of optimism – and defiance – sets the stage for the next chapter of Massie’s political life. His congressional term ends in January. His loyal fans made clear they have bigger things in mind.

As someone in the crowd shouted, “Massie for president!” his supporters erupted in booming applause. For his part, Massie smiled and laughed on stage and kept delivering a speech that was interrupted again and again with loud chants of “2028!”

It’s far too early, of course, for Massie to credibly sell the idea of a presidential campaign. Such a notion stirs so many questions, perhaps starting with: In what party would he run after suffering such a convincing defeat Tuesday in his congressional primary against Ed Gallrein?

Trump heard loud and clear on Capitol Hill

Massie’s loss is the latest in a series of setbacks for Republicans who have challenged Trump.

Just this month, five Indiana state senators were unseated in primaries after refusing to redraw their state’s US House map, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy failed to make a GOP runoff five years after voting to convict Trump during his second impeachment, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn lost a Trump endorsement to longtime rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a move that all but seals his defeat in next week’s primary runoff.

GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said Tuesday’s results showed Trump is sending a clear message: “He will beat you.”

Another lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Kentucky outcome freely, suggested Massie “found out the hard way” that Trump is still the party’s “kingmaker.”

“You can’t fight the President tooth and nail to try to raise your profile and get TV hits, and then slap on a red hat and cheer him on when it’s convenient for you,” the lawmaker said.

Rep. Mike Lawler just last week was confronted by GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s son at a Capitol Hill bar. According to Lawler, William Paul, who is 33, approached him and said if Massie lost his primary, it would be because “of my people,” later confirming that Paul thought he was Jewish. Lawler is Irish-Italian Catholic.

“My people have spoken,” Lawler posted on X Tuesday night. “Shalom @RepThomasMassie.”

Rand Paul, who endorsed Massie and campaign alongside him, declined to comment when approached by a reporter at the White House’s congressional picnic after the race was called in Kentucky.

‘I don’t know what I will do’

Even in defeat, Massie built a new roster of donors and energized an army of young supporters. As he ticked through a few achievements in Congress, the release of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files drew resounding applause as he cited name after name who has fallen because of the work his law has done.

Yet a loss is a loss. And Massie returns to Washington as one of the latest political victims of Trump, who has a long practice of returning again and again to his favorite punching bags.

After the Congressional term ends in early January, Massie faces the first moment in 14 years without a certain path. At 55, he is a relatively young figure with a following.

“We have to figure out what was the purpose of having the biggest fight ever – the biggest fight ever!” Massie said of his race that became the most expensive House primary on record, with more than $30 million spent on advertising alone. “Why did it converge on one of 435 congressional seats? What was God’s purpose? What was he showing us tonight?”

One thing Massie won’t do is mount an independent candidacy for his congressional seat as some incumbents do when they lose a primary.

“Kentucky has sore loser laws, so you couldn’t run as an independent here in Kentucky,” Massie told CNN on the eve of the election. “I think that’s probably a good thing. If you fight the fight and you win the primary, then you shouldn’t have to fight the same person again.”

Looking to the future, he added: “I don’t know what I will do.”

Takeaways

Trump ousts Massie, and other takeaways from Tuesday’s primary elections

By Eric Bradner, Arit John

President Donald Trump’s retribution campaign steamrolled another Republican rival on Tuesday, with a Trump-backed challenger ousting one of the president’s leading intra-party antagonists, Rep. Thomas Massie, in a Kentucky primary.

Former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein’s win over Massie continued a May political payback tour that has seen Trump take down five Indiana state senators who voted against his redistricting push two weeks ago, and two-term Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, on Saturday.

It was one of two key races on Kentucky’s primary ballots in which Trump demonstrated his lasting influence with Republican voters.

Kentucky’s polls were the most closely watched on a day in which Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Oregon and Pennsylvania were also holding primaries.

Here are takeaways from Tuesday’s contests:

Trump topples ‘terrible’ Massie

Trump has vowed retribution against a number of Republicans over slights real and perceived. But years of battles over spending, the Jeffrey Epstein files, the United States’ support for Israel and more led the president to take Massie’s primary particularly personally.

“Thomas Massie is a terrible congressman. He’s been a terrible congressman from day one. Dealing with him is just horrible. I don’t think he’s a Republican. I think he’s actually, I think he’s actually a Democrat,” Trump said Tuesday.

The president personally visited Kentucky in March, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a highly unusual trip to the district on Monday to campaign alongside Gallrein and urge voters to send Trump “reinforcements” in Congress, where the GOP is seeking to hold onto its narrow majority in November’s midterm elections.

In Kentucky’s 4th District, which has routinely elected Massie by about 30 percentage points, voters took Trump’s side on Tuesday.

Massie’s loss is a reminder for Republicans in Washington and statehouses across the country that even with Trump’s approval rating slipping into the mid-30s and one of his most reliable demographics turning on the president, he is the party’s leader, he holds the power to force those who don’t follow him to pay a steep political price and he is eager to wield it.

The race was one of the most expensive primaries in history, with $19 million being spent on advertising supporting Gallrein and $14 million on pro-Massie ads.

How Trump lifted Barr to nomination for McConnell’s seat

Retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell was once a political titan — the most powerful Republican in the nation and long a dominant force in Kentucky politics. But Trump soured on him when McConnell refused to parrot Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and on Tuesday, McConnell’s reign ended with a whimper.

In the Republican primary to replace McConnell, Trump’s pick, Rep. Andy Barr, defeated former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron — who was once seen as McConnell’s political protege and rising star within the party, though that star shined less brightly after Cameron lost the 2023 governor’s race to Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear.

Trump didn’t just endorse Barr. He further cleared his path to the nomination by convincing another top contender, businessman Nate Morris, to drop his campaign and accept an ambassadorship.

All three candidates got their start in politics interning for McConnell. But the primary showed just how much McConnell’s influence has faded in recent years. Cameron had turned on McConnell and fully embraced Trump during the primary. And McConnell, in turn, had not endorsed a candidate.

Barr’s nomination positions him as the overwhelming favorite to become Kentucky’s next senator. And if he wins, it will mark the replacement of a powerful voice that has at times broken from Trump with a staunch presidential ally on Capitol Hill next year.

In November, Barr will face Democratic former state lawmaker Charles Booker. He won the nomination over former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath. It was a rematch of 2020, when McGrath narrowly edged Booker in the primary on her way to a loss to McConnell.

Georgia GOP governor primary heads to runoff

The GOP race to replace term-limited Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is headed to a June 16 runoff after no candidate cleared the 50% threshold on Tuesday.

Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones will take on businessman Rick Jackson in the head-to-head.

The two topped a pair of statewide elected officials: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose national profile rose after he refused to back Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election, and Attorney General Chris Carr.

The winner will face Democratic former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in November.

The Republican primary to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is also going into overtime — with Rep. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley, the former football coach endorsed by Kemp, advancing to the June 16 contest.

The winner will face a tall test in November: Ossoff’s campaign already has $32 million in the bank.

Cornyn next?

Another chance for Trump to flex his influence — and reshape the GOP’s Senate majority in his image — looms in Texas, where Trump on Tuesday endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton in his May 26 Senate primary runoff against four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, a controversial figure with a long history of scandals who has aligned himself with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, comes despite warnings from prominent Republicans that doing so could put the party at risk of losing the race to Democratic nominee James Talarico in November.

Cornyn responded to Trump’s endorsement of Paxton by noting on social media he had voted with the president 99% of the time.

But he partnered with Democrats in 2022 to pass gun safety legislation, and was slow to get in line behind Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Paxton, meanwhile, rushed to court in 2020 to contest the presidential election. And Trump made clear that he was looked for personal loyalty.

In his Truth Social post endorsing Paxton, Trump called the attorney general “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.”

He said Cornyn is a “good man,” but added that he “was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

An early glimpse at Shapiro’s potential 2028 message

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is up for reelection this year. But his primary night speech in Bucks County sure sounded like it contained the bones of a stump speech he could deliver often in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

Shapiro repeatedly contrasted his accomplishments in the marquee presidential swing state with the “chaos, cruelty, and corruption” he said is coming from Trump and his administration.

He criticized Trump’s Medicaid spending cuts. He attacked Trump over the war with Iran, which he said Trump “was wrong to get into, and has no idea how to get out of” and has sent gas prices soaring. He said Trump’s tariffs “have made everything cost more.”

“Instead of bringing down costs as he promised, Trump and his enablers are pinching the middle class and then saying he doesn’t care ‘even a little bit,’” he said, referring to Trump’s comments last week when the president was asked whether Americans’ financial situations are motivating his negotiations with Iran. “That’s cruel — and we experience his cruelty here in Pennsylvania every day.”

Shapiro also accused Trump of “unmatched corruption,” and said his administration’s “entire goal” is to enrich Trump’s allies and “shield them all from paying the price for his conduct.”

And he painted Pennsylvania as “the antidote” to Trump’s graft. Shapiro argued that four Republican-held US House seats that Democrats are targeting in November could be the key to swapping “a Congress of weak sycophants” now led by Republicans for a Democratic majority that he said would “bring some accountability back to our nation’s capital.”

Democrats get their candidates in four key races

Pennsylvania Democrats hope that the path to winning back the US House runs through the Keystone State. Now they have their candidates.

Bob Brooks, the president of the Pennsylvania Professional Firefighters Association, built a broad coalition of state and national-level supporters ahead of Tuesday’s primary. He ran as an everyman, arguing he was best suited to win back working-class voters in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District.

But he still faced a crowded primary field that included former Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell and energy engineer Carol Obando-Derstine, who was recruited into the race by the district’s former Democratic Rep. Susan Wild.

Brooks will face freshman GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in November.

The retired firefighter is one of four candidates endorsed by Shapiro, who campaigned with Brooks in the district earlier this week. The governor is also supporting Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie in Pennsylvania’s 1st District, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti in the 8th District, and former television news anchor Janelle Stelson in the 10th District. Harvie and Stelson won less competitive primaries while Cognetti ran unopposed.

Alabama gets a rematch

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach, won the Republican primary for governor on Tuesday — making him the heavy favorite in November against Democratic former Sen. Doug Jones.

It’ll be the second time the two have faced each other. In his first run for political office, Tuberville defeated Jones by more than 20 percentage points in the state’s 2020 Senate race. The two are competing to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Kay Ivey.

Both parties’ Senate primaries to replace Tuberville, meanwhile, are headed for runoffs on June 16. In the GOP contest — which will determine the prohibitive favorite in deep-red Alabama in November — Trump-endorsed Rep. Barry Moore led the way Tuesday, but couldn’t eclipse 50% of the vote. He’ll face either Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall or former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson; the two were neck-and-neck late Tuesday night as results were being tallied. Democrats Everett Wess, an attorney, and Dakarai Larriett, a pet care business owner, will also meet in a runoff.

Dark Wolf Nebula

A dark wolf lies in gum. No, this isn’t a riddle! Today's image features the Dark Wolf Nebula (Sandqvist–Lindroos 17), a spooky dust cloud embedded within the Gum 55 (RCW 113) Nebula in the Scorpius constellation. While dust is a pest to us, it serves a vital role in creating the necessary conditions for stars to be born. The Dark Wolf absorbs the intense ultraviolet and visible light emitted by young stars in Gum 55 and re-emits it at longer, mainly infrared, wavelengths. This prevents the higher energy light from heating up the gas in the region. When a region of gas is cool enough, gravity takes over and causes the gas to collapse into a star. Not only does dust act as an interstellar thermostat, but it is also the meet-cute for single hydrogen atoms forming molecular hydrogen, the building block for stars. The seemingly sinister Dark Wolf is actually a harbinger of cosmic life.

This is actually true....

 

It is a scam... You will get screwed...

Before You Invest in Crypto, Watch This Film

A new documentary from onetime “The O.C.” star Ben McKenzie scorches the cult of cryptocurrency.

David Corn

Not too sure what to make of cryptocurrency? Don’t really understand it but kind of think it’s a scam? That was Ben McKenzie’s attitude when an old buddy during the Covid pandemic suggested he invest in Bitcoin. His pal had given him a bum investment tip years earlier, so McKenzie was wary. But since he was shut in, with time on his hands, he decided to use that stretch to dig deep into crypto—real deep—and came to the realization: It’s a con. Thus, he was launched on a second career as a crypto critic.

McKenzie’s first career was a pretty good one. He’s a Hollywood star. He played Ryan Atwood, the bad boy with a good heart, on The O.C., the popular teen drama of the 2000s. He was also police detective Jim Gordon in Gotham, the dark and moody Batman prequel. But now he took on a much different role. Armed only with his undergraduate economics degree from University of Virginia and a sense of skepticism, he fired up his laptop and mounted a one-man investigation of crypto that resulted in the 2023 book (co-written with journalist Jacob Silverman), Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. The title is a giveaway for where his inquiry landed.

Last month, the 47-year-old McKenzie released a documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which, appropriately for a denizen of a superhero world, is an origin story. It chronicles how this former teen heartthrob became one of the leading antagonists of the crypto industry. It also serves up a 90-minute-long entertaining primer on crypto, explaining its rise, its scamminess, and the threat it poses to the financial sector—and you and me. It’s not quite the same as watching Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explain subprime loans, but McKenzie has deftly crafted an enjoyable but troubling ride through the murky world of digital currency.

McKenzie began his crypto journey with a simple principle: You should not invest in something you don’t understand. After the financial crash of 2007, people were right to be pissed off at Big Finance, a system rigged by Wall Street predators for the wealthy. The promise that cryptocurrency could decentralize and democratize finance was appealing. But the specific promise of Bitcoin sounded like a “free lunch” to him. Especially given how Matt Damon and other celebs, paid by the industry, were promoting crypto as an adventure for the bold and exploiting FOMO. “What does Matt Damon know about crypto?” McKenzie asks in the film. “Nothing.”

McKenzie trekked to crypto conventions and talked to crypto disciples (including one cryptocurrency founder who ended up in prison for fraud). He traveled to El Salvador, where the nation’s authoritarian leader embraced crypto and promised to build a “Bitcoin City” powered by geothermal energy from a volcano. (Spoiler alert: There’s no such city yet.) In July 2022, he interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, who fast became a billionaire by creating the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and who had a hard time explaining to McKenzie what crypto was good for besides speculation and criminal operations. “There needs to be more oversight,” SBF told him. (Four months later FTX would collapse and Bankman-Fried would be arrested for fraud and money-laundering.)

In London, McKenzie chatted with Dan Davies, an economist and author of Lying for Money, and asked him, “All of crypto can’t be a scam, right?” Davies replied, “I don’t like that word ‘can’t.’” McKenzie testified before Congress and called the crypto industry “the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” warning it could infect the entire financial system if not regulated properly. In perhaps the most disturbing scene, he talked to everyday folks who still believed in the power and dream of crypto—even after being fleeced in a crypto scheme that crashed.

The film has been playing in several theaters nationwide, often with McKenzie doing Q&As. He hopes it will be on a streaming service soon. We recently talked about the movie and the current state of crypto.

Let’s start with the end of the documentary. You’re talking with your wife, and you say that you didn’t think that your anti-crypto efforts up to that point had much impact—your congressional testimony, your advocacy, your book. Have you seen more impact from the film?

I have. I go to screenings as often as I can and do a Q&A afterwards. I can see the audience really responding to the film. They have a lot of questions, a lot of anger—directed at not just crypto, but also prediction markets and AI. I’ve had incredible conversations with strangers, and personally that makes me feel good. Like I’m not crazy. And maybe this is part of the start of a change in the way we view all these things. A lot of folks have concerns similar to those with crypto about AI data centers and their effect on local communities. And who’s in charge of it? I feel inspired by that. And more people are going to see a 90-minute comedy that they can watch at home than are ever going to read a 300-page book on economics. I get that. I made the movie to be entertaining. So hopefully it is.

You don’t address AI in the film. But my guess is that in many people’s mind crypto and AI merge together as part of the whole issue with Big Tech and the dislocation it is causing.  

There’s a number of areas of overlap. There’s disruption to communities and the costs that come from having these data centers and crypto mining operations in these places. They use an enormous amount of electricity, which can cause people’s prices to go up. They are incredibly loud, some of them very disruptive. And are you familiar with the term “the grift shift”? That’s the idea that grifters shift from one grift to another. So there’s a grift shift between the last crypto crash and the current AI boom. Companies that were mining Bitcoin suddenly decided they were going to be data centers. That’s somewhat telling. The difference, of course, is that AI is a real technology, whereas blockchain used for crypto is quite old and isn’t used for much of anything outside of cryptocurrency.

I think the concern that I and many other people have is, who’s in control of the technology and what are their motives? I read the profile of Sam Altman, the OpenAI head, in The New Yorker, and I saw this quote from an unnamed Microsoft executive who said, “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

I’m not nearly qualified to make grandiose statements, but it does feel like we’re running into problems that the current version of capitalism we’re practicing doesn’t solve. In fact, it only reinforces some of the negative dynamics. We’re talking about the accrual of extraordinary wealth in the hands of few and the costs to the broader public—and the sense that the system is rigged. These things seem to be getting worse—obviously embodied by our con-man-in-chief president. How do we address it? Democracy is not working. There’s a bad crypto bill going through Congress, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act [which would set up a regulatory regimen with less stringent rules for crypto]. We know why Republicans are voting for it, but the reason that some Democratic members may vote for it is that they’re afraid of the crypto lobby, which has a lot of money.

In the movie, you show that when you came became a public crypto critic, you got a lot of hate mail and harassment online from crypto fans who claimed you didn’t know what you’re talking about. Has that happened with this film as well?

Not that I’m aware of. I’m sure I have. But I’m not on X anymore. After Elon Musk took it over, my account got hacked, and I couldn’t recover it because there was no customer service at X anymore. I haven’t been able to access my X account for years. I’m blissfully unaware of what’s happening on that platform, and I’m sure I’m getting some hatred over there. In person, at the screenings, it’s been either completely lovely or some very, quite frankly, reasonable questions from a guy in the audience who’s pushing back politely and trying to have a reasonable conversation.

It’s harder to be an asshole in real life than it is online.

Absolutely. Online it’s almost like the algorithm is telling you to be an asshole so that you get the clicks and the engagement. The cliché is the internet is not real life, but crypto exists exclusively on the internet. There is no there there. And most of these crypto “communities” aren’t really communities. They are people trying to sell you this or that type of thing, people hiding behind a pseudonym. In the real world, 80-plus percent of the country has never bought cryptocurrency. And when I ask them what they think of it, they almost always say some version of this: It seems complicated, but also scammy, and maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand it.

I made the movie to say, “No, you are. You know it sounds too good to be true. It is.” I don’t think I can convince the 5 to 6 percent of the population that’s really into crypto. They’re sort of members of a cult. And then there’s maybe 10 percent that are playing around with it. It’s really wild that 5 to 6 percent of the population can dictate policy on Capitol Hill, isn’t it? Talk about a minority view and overrunning the democratic processes.

When you were making the movie, you noted that Bitcoin was worth about $44,000. Today it’s $80,960. Why is it still holding so much value?

In the fall of 2021, it was $60,000. So it’s a little bit above that. It’s recovered from 2022 when all these companies went bust, and several people went to jail. The market was really in the tank. Now it’s very simple: Donald Trump is most of the answer. The market was slowly recovering, but not in any spectacular way. Then in summer of 2024 Trump suddenly embraced Bitcoin. After calling Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021, he suddenly saw an angle. Perhaps as a way to make money, perhaps as a way to appeal to a certain constituency of young men.

People rationally made a calculation. If this thing is really based on no underlying asset, you’re basically putting money in because you hope that someone else will buy it from you. For econ guys like me, that’s the greater fool theory. But if you think that other people are going to buy it because Trump has a 50-50 shot at being president and he can do a lot to push the price higher, then it’s rational to bet on it. So the price started going up then. Sure enough, he was elected. And the price kept going up. And by the time he got in office, it was $100,000 a coin.

He and his administration have done an incredible amount to take apart what safeguards and accountability there was—not just by pardoning  Changpeng Zhao (a.k.a. “CZ”), the founder of Binance, but also ripping apart the Justice Department cryptocurrency task force, and passing this bad bill called the Genius Act, which allows corporations to issue their own form of crypto. It was absurd any Democrat voted for it, but 100 Democrats did. So Donald Trump and people associated with him, including Howard Lutnick, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk, have been incredibly effective in getting crypto into our system and taking apart the rules, regulations, and law enforcement apparatuses that were trying to keep it in check.

With Trump now in the crypto business—albeit in a major conflict of interest and in a corrupt manner—do you think that’s given crypto a political status?

Definitely. To have the most powerful person in the world go all in is an incredible advantage. It’s deeply ironic, though. Crypto was supposed to be this reaction to the excesses of tyrannical government. This was supposed to be money that exists outside the government. And now you have the president of the United States issuing his own versions of these “currencies.” And he’s now being accused of fraud by one of his top investors. This certainly lays bare the lie that crypto is the decentralized, democratized future of money—when you’re talking about regulatory capture and corruption, and all the things that Trump embodies.

When you interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried for the film—just a few months before he was arrested—did you have a sense that he was blowing smoke up your ass about crypto?

Yeah. He clearly had trouble answering some basic questions. The simple question was, what good does crypto do? Give me one example. And he mentioned remittances—the payments workers here send to relatives in their home countries. But I had just come from El Salvador, where I saw crypto was not being used for this, and I politely said bullshit. Here’s supposedly the head of the industry, and he can’t tell me one good thing that this trillion-dollar industry actually does.

The most alarming moment in our interview is when I asked him about the donations he made to politicians, and he has a hard time answering. He can’t look me in the eye. He can’t tell me how much money he was giving to them, which I thought at the time was quite strange because he was so openly supportive of the Democrats. You could have looked this up. It was public. He gave $40 million or whatever to the Democrats. Why is he lying to me or having a hard time with this question. We learned later he was allegedly running a $100 million straw-donors game. He was giving to the Democrats publicly, but he was secretly giving to the Republicans via cutouts.

I felt good about the interview from a journalistic standpoint. But on a personal level, I had this sinking feeling that if this is the guy in charge, something bad was going to happen. And sure enough, it did.

One of the more poignant parts of the movie is when you’re talking to everyday, retail investors who lost money in a big crypto bust-up and they say they still believe in crypto.

That was pretty powerful. Even I was a little surprised by it. This is how I make sense of it. We’re talking about the dynamics of the cult. We are way outside of what would be a “rational investment” where if you lose money, you’d be like either “That sucks” and/or “I got scammed.” These guys are twisting themselves in knots to say, “Well, I got scammed here in this one crypto thing. But the bigger idea still works, even if I’ve still lost money in it.” That requires a lot of rationalizations. It’s almost the more you lose, the more you have to believe. To acknowledge that you were duped and this is all a scam would be very painful.

I also can’t help but reflect on the gender dynamic, which I think is really sort of fascinating. It’s quite sad to say—as a man and as a father of boys—that men are better marks. They have a harder time talking about their feelings, admitting that they’ve been duped. They have a lot of pride. And the crypto industry’s sort of genius is getting them to blame themselves for it.

There’s this whole culture in crypto of DYOR—do your own research—meaning, if you lose the money, it’s your fault. That benefits the fraudsters and the insiders who are making money, but also keeps the big population of outsiders, the regular guys, in the game. They think they have to keep going. HODL—hold on for dear life. You can’t sell your Bitcoin, no matter what.

There’s a chilling moment in the film when you ask Dan Davies, the economist and fraud expert, whether all of crypto is a scam, and he does not challenge that idea. It that your bottom-line belief? It’s just a con and eventually there will be a reckoning?

Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. There’s the bubble idea that the price could, over time, keep going up, as new people flock to crypto as the story continues to spread. And then crime gives it a use case, a reason to be valuable.

In my congressional testimony, I described as a Ponzi scheme. What is Trump’s thing, if not a Ponzi scheme, right? His meme coin is down 96 percent. It’s all a penny stock, a pump-and-dump, a Ponzi scheme—pick your metaphor. It’s not a legitimate investment. That’s 99 percent of it. Then there’s crime on top of it. And what’s most troubling is that if crypto gets further into our regulated system, as it’s threatening to do this with the Genius Act that passed and the proposed Clarity Act, then the repercussions could be huge. Because if it does crash again—and I will remind people that crypto has crashed many times in its brief but sordid history—it could contribute to the next version of a subprime crisis. That would be incredibly ironic, given the crypto was supposedly a reaction to that crisis.

Have you heard from Matt Damon, whom you roast in the film for being a pitchman for crypto?

I try to keep my head down in our weekly celebrity meetings when we all get together and chat about the industry. No, I don’t know Matt. I actually don’t know anyone personally who has sold crypto. I don’t think I’ll be getting a Matt Damon movie anytime soon.

Pumping Them

Trump Has Been Investing in Companies and Then Pumping Them in His Speeches

Yet another extraordinary example of a president milking his office for personal profit.

Judd Legum

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own US manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock—and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit—has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions—many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor.

“President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document.

An “unsolicited” trade is one that is initiated by the customer, not recommended by a broker. If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust. Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.

There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets. But it’s a whopper of an ethical conflict. “When we say Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, it’s because of conduct like this,” says Meghan Faulkner, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which has been involved in several lawsuits involving Trump and his administration. “It could not be clearer that he views the presidency as a get-rich-quick scheme, and that’s a slap in the face to countless Americans struggling financially thanks to Trump administration policies.” 

Thermo Fisher was not the only company featured in Trump’s official remarks and his investment portfolio that day.

After touring the Thermo Fisher facility in Ohio, Trump traveled to Kentucky and delivered a speech that afternoon. During his remarks, Trump singled out Apple and CEO Tim Cook for praise. “Apple, a great company, $2.5 billion to manufacture 100 percent of the glass for iPhones and Apple Watches right here in Kentucky factories,” Trump declared. “Apple [is] spending $650 billion on new plants all over the United States. Think of that. Who the hell else could have done this, nobody else. Nobody else. I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding. Nobody else could…He’s done a good job, Tim Cook.”

The same day, March 11, Trump purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of Apple stock. The entry on the disclosure form is also marked unsolicited.

Trump had purchased between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 of Apple stock in an unsolicited purchase on March 2. In total, Trump purchased between $2 million and $7.2 million in Apple stock during the month of March 2026, including five unsolicited purchases. (He sold smaller amounts of Apple stock on March 6 and March 27.)

During the speech, Trump also worked in another plug for Thermo Fisher. “I just came from Thermo Fisher Scientific in Reading, Ohio, right across the way, the great American company that’s investing $2 billion in domestic manufacturing,” Trump told the crowd.

On March 25, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock. The transaction was marked unsolicited.

The next day, Trump called in to Fox News’ popular talk show, “The Five.” In the interview, he said he had recently met with Micron’s top executive and talked up the company’s prospects. “I just left the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies,” Trump said.

Overall, Trump purchased between $217,000 and $530,000 in Micron from March 2 to March 25, including four unsolicited transactions. The fact that Trump touted Micron after building up a large position in its stock has not been previously reported.

There was also overlap between Trump’s public remarks and his investment in Dell Technologies. On February 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

During an economic speech in Georgia nine days later, Trump told the audience to “go out and buy a Dell computer,” adding the company made “phenomenal products.” Trump also praised Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife for financially supporting “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The proximity of Trump’s February 19 speech to his purchase of at least $1 million in Dell stock has not been previously reported.

Trump also purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Dell stock on March 2 and again on March 11. Both transactions were marked unsolicited. He made a final purchase of Dell stock, valued between $1,000 and $15,000 on March 23.

Trump also continued to encourage people to buy Dell computers. He pitched Dell products on February 27, March 9, April 16, and May 8. The May 8 remarks, delivered at a Mother’s Day event, helped propel Dell’s stock to an all-time high.

Trump’s buy-and-pump routine, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said in a statement, underscores the importance of legislation such as the bipartisan bill he co-introduced with hard-right Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy that would ban stock trading by members of Congress, and another bill he cosponsored that also addresses trading by the president and vice president.

Trump’s trades, Magaziner noted, “show that he continues to put his own self-enrichment ahead of the interests of the American people,” and outlawing such behavior “is a necessary step to cleaning up the corruption that has plagued Washington for too long.”

Trump’s “financial self-dealing is a profound betrayal of the citizens he is supposed to serve. This is about trust. Elected officials—especially the president—shouldn’t be trading stocks,” added Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who coauthored a Senate companion to the Magaziner-Roy bill.

Other Trump stock purchases appear well timed to take advantage of Trump administration policies. For example, NOTUS reported that Trump “purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.” Similarly, NOTUS found that Trump, on January 6, purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another chipmaker that was approved to do business with China on January 13.

By law, Trump was required to report all of these trades within 45 days. He missed that deadline for many of his trades. As a result, he was fined $200.