History, Poetry, Security

The Not So Secret Origin of Bowser in Super Mario Brothers

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For forty years, gamers have treated Bowser’s name origin as if an unsolved mystery.

The official line from Nintendo is that it’s “unconfirmed.” Wikipedia likes to rest on “multiple competing theories.” The gaming press periodically revisits the question, shrugs, and moves on.

They’ve all been looking in the wrong direction.

Instead, in plain sight, the name has been confirmed not by Nintendo but by the people who actively avoided the name.

Hating on Korea

Mario’s nemesis in Japanese has always been called Kuppa, named by Shigeru Miyamoto after gukbap, a Korean rice soup dish. Miyamoto reportedly also considered naming him after yukhoe (raw beef) and bibimbap. The man liked references to Korean food as villainous.

When Super Mario Bros. was localized for the American market in 1985, someone at Nintendo of America decided that slights directed at Korea like “Kuppa” wouldn’t work for Americans. They needed another name for a villain, the fire-breathing turtle-dragon.

They chose “Bowser.”

Apparently, nobody wrote down why. Nobody filed a memo we can cite. The decision was made by a small team. Nintendo of America had roughly 35 employees at the time, no formal localization department, and was operating out of Redmond, Washington while frantically trying to launch the NES into a market still traumatized by the 1983 video game crash.

The Obvious Pop Villain

In 1985, if you were an American in your twenties working in entertainment-adjacent industries, there was a very specific cultural reference sitting in your mental inventory for “tough guy with a funny name.”

Bowzer.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman was the breakout star of Sha Na Na, the nostalgia doo-wop group that had been inescapable in American pop culture:

  • Woodstock, 1969 (immortalized in the documentary)
  • The movie Grease, 1978 (massive hit)
  • The Sha Na Na TV variety show, 1977-1981 (syndicated for years after)

Bowzer’s whole act was a villain persona with the muscle shirt, the slicked-back hair, the theatrical sneer. The comedy he created was in the contrast: an intimidating figure performing sincere 1950s love ballads. The tough guy who sings love songs. The cruel kindness jokes, like saying he was told by his manager he’s not very nice, so he’s trying to prove him wrong by asking everyone to send get well cards to his hospital room.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman

The spelling difference is notable. Localization teams routinely adjust spellings to avoid trademark issues or to make names feel more “natural” in the target language. Bowzer becomes Bowser.

The Negative Proof

Here’s where it gets interesting.

In 1993, Hollywood produced the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros. movie. Dennis Hopper played the villain. But in the film, he’s called “President Koopa” and never Bowser.

Why?

In an interview, screenwriter Parker Bennett explained the decision. They didn’t use “Bowser” because, and this is the key clue, it immediately brought to mind “the ’50s Sha Na Na guy.”

Boom.

This wasn’t research. This wasn’t something they had to look up. The association was reflexive. Instant. Obvious.

The filmmakers in 1993 knew exactly where the name came from. It was so obvious to them that they actively avoided it, worried the comedic association would undermine their (inexplicably serious) film.

Bowser no longer was cool, no longer was pop. A generation had passed.

If it was obvious to Hollywood screenwriters in 1993, it was obvious to Nintendo of America in 1985. The difference is that in 1985, someone saw the connection as a feature rather than a bug. A tough villain name with existing cultural resonance? Perfect. Ship it.

The Dismissal

I see some historians dismissed the Sha Na Na theory partly because “the trend of naming Mario characters after musicians hadn’t started yet.” This is terrible reasoning.

Conventions don’t emerge from nowhere. They start with individual decisions that later become patterns.

We know exactly how Nintendo of America’s localization worked in this era because we have documented cases from just a few years later. When Super Mario Bros. 3 was localized in 1990, a product analyst named Dayvv Brooks was tasked with naming Bowser’s seven children, the Koopalings.
Brooks, a former Tower Records employee and DJ, immediately reached for musicians:

  • Ludwig von Koopa (Beethoven)
  • Roy Koopa (Roy Orbison)
  • Wendy O. Koopa (Wendy O. Williams)
  • Iggy Koopa (Iggy Pop)
  • Lemmy Koopa (Lemmy Kilmister)
  • Morton Koopa Jr. (Morton Downey Jr.)

We only know this because someone tracked Brooks down in 2015 and asked him. He didn’t file a memo in 1990. There was no documentation. The knowledge existed only in his memory until a journalist finally thought to ask the right question.

Brooks wasn’t at Nintendo in 1985. But the method he used of reaching for pop culture references that “just fit”, clearly was part of how NoA approached localization. The Koopalings weren’t an innovation. They were a continuation.

Who Are You Going to Call?

The leading candidate is Howard Phillips.

Phillips was NoA’s fifth employee, starting in 1981 as a warehouse manager. By 1985, he had evolved into the company’s key liaison between Japanese developers and the American market. His job was explicitly to advise on what would resonate with US audiences — including, according to documented sources, advising on “the renaming of characters.”

Phillips was born in 1958. In 1985, he was 27 years old — exactly the demographic for whom Sha Na Na’s Bowzer would have been a vivid cultural reference. He was also, by all accounts, deeply immersed in pop culture and an avid consumer of entertainment media.

Has anyone ever directly asked Howard Phillips: “Did you name Bowser? Were you thinking of Sha Na Na?”

Phillips is still active. He does interviews about Nintendo history. He’s been asked about the NES launch, about Nintendo Power, about his role in rejecting the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 as too difficult for American audiences. He’s been asked about almost everything.

So? Bowser?

The Bowser is Bowzer

Here’s the most beautiful part.

Over forty years, Bowser evolved from a one-dimensional fire-breathing villain into the comedy shtick of a 1970s Bowzer:

  • The bumbling dad who genuinely loves kids
  • The hopeless romantic pining for his girl
  • The adversary who holds grudging respect
  • The antagonist whose menace is increasingly played for comedy

And in 2023, the apotheosis: Jack Black voicing Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. movie, sitting at a piano, singing a power ballad called “Peaches” about his unrequited love.

It’s as Bowzer as Bowser can get.

The tough guy who sings love songs.

Whether or not anyone at Nintendo in 1985 consciously intended the reference, the character arc rhymes perfectly with its namesake. Bowser became Bowzer. The archetype was encoded in the name from the beginning.

If anyone reading this has contact with Howard Phillips, please ask:

“Did you name Bowser after Sha Na Na?”

The answer might finally close a forty-year-old case that was never actually mysterious. We just forgot to ask the right people the right question, to stop believing it is unknowable.

Energy, History, Security

The Base Case: Russian Assets Burned San Francisco Power Grid

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December 3rd, Rinaldo Nazzaro—founder of The Base, ex-Pentagon contractor, current St. Petersburg resident, alleged Russian intelligence asset—released an audio message calling for “acceleration teams” to conduct “targeted attacks on essential infrastructure” in the United States.

December 20-21, a fire at PG&E’s Mission Street substation knocked out power to 130,000 San Francisco customers. One of the largest urban blackouts San Francisco has experienced.

The Base, fundamentally a Nazi group, is a designated terrorist organization in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.

The Base, a Nazi terror group banned in most countries but not the USA, marches through Columbus, Ohio. Source: USA Today

It is not designated in the United States.

The FBI under President Trump, as a matter of historical fact, is acting today like how President Wilson did 100 years ago. Director Patel has expressly refused to investigate foreign assets and domestic terrorists threatening Americans:

…openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists.

The following is an analytical case that San Francisco just experienced a Russian-directed domestic (insider) infrastructure attack.

Context

The Bay Area has been hit by sophisticated infrastructure attacks for sixteen years. None of the major incidents have been solved:

  • 2009: Coordinated fiber optic cuts at four locations. 52,000 customers affected, 911 knocked out across three counties. Required specialized tools, heavy equipment, knowledge of underground vault locations. $250,000 reward. Never solved.
  • 2013: Metcalf substation. Fiber cables cut first, then 100+ rifle rounds fired at 17 transformers over 19 minutes. $15 million in damage. DHS assessed “likely an insider.” $250,000 reward. Never solved.
  • 2014-2015: Eleven to fourteen fiber optic cuts over 14 months. Attackers dressed as telecom workers. FBI insisted attacks were “not linked” to Metcalf despite identical methods. Never solved.
  • 2022: Moore County, North Carolina. Two substations hit with rifle fire. 45,000 without power for five days. One woman died when her oxygen machine failed. DHS had issued a warning three days prior. $100,000 reward. Never solved.

The attacks that have been solved share a common feature: amateur tradecraft.

Peter Karasev googled “explosive materials” and “infrastructure attacks” before bombing two PG&E transformers—and got ten years. The Washington Christmas attack was an ATM robbery scheme. Brandon Russell recruited a co-conspirator who turned out to be an informant.

Professional operations with insider knowledge remain ghosts.

Europe Knows

Europe is experiencing identical attacks. The difference: they’re investigating.

Russian sabotage operations in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Targets include energy infrastructure, communications cables, defense manufacturing, and transportation systems.

The operational signature matches: low-tech, high-impact, plausible deniability, locally recruited perpetrators, communications cut before primary attacks.

The institutional response differs entirely. European governments attribute attacks to GRU coordination. They arrest perpetrators. They designate The Base as terrorists. NATO describes the threat level as “record high.”

The United States has the same attack signature, the same organization openly calling for infrastructure attacks, the same founder operating from Russian soil—and the FBI response is to deprioritize.

Nazis Call Themselves The Base

The Base recruits through a Russian email address. It operates cells in Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest—photos from 2025 show masked men with rifles and skull masks in American forests. Its Ukrainian wing claimed the July assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv. Its Spanish cell was just rolled up by Europol.

Nazzaro’s December audio was explicit:

Our long-term strategic goal is to accomplish something similar to what al-Qaida and IS accomplished in Syria. Form an organized, armed insurgency to take and hold territory.

He named two countries with the “necessary prerequisites”: Ukraine and the United States.

The VKontakte post was operational doctrine:

…targeted attacks on essential infrastructure and resources [that] contribute to the political fragmentation of the country over time if the attacks remain consistent.

Less than three weeks later, 130,000 San Francisco customers lost power.

American Accountability Gap

PG&E’s response to the December 20th fire: hire Exponent.

Exponent is the firm that defended tobacco science, manufactured doubt about asbestos, and specializes in producing uncertainty for clients facing liability. This is not an investigation. This is typical PG&E narrative preparation, where the underlying pattern is clear:

  • The infrastructure is undefended (55,000 substations, effectively zero guards)
  • The threats are explicit (Nazzaro’s audio, The Base’s VKontakte posts)
  • The agency responsible has been captured (FBI deprioritizing under Patel)
  • The accountability mechanism has been privatized (Exponent)

We know the 1990 OTA (Putin KGB timeframe) found that losing three substations could blackout a region. A later leaked FERC assessment concluded losing nine substations plus a transformer manufacturer would collapse the entire grid for eighteen months.

We know from industry reports that intentional infrastructure attacks exceeded 15,000 incidents between June 2024 and June 2025 (Putin President timeframe).

We know The Base, a Nazi front group for Russian assets, called for exactly this kind of attack, from Russian soil, days before it happened.

Back to Preparedness Day

On July 22, 1916, a bomb exploded during San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade, killing ten people. The attack was never solved.

Source: SFGate

But it was used.

Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, political organizers with no connection to the bombing, were targeted and convicted by President Wilson’s corrupted justice department on fabricated evidence and unfairly imprisoned for decades.

The institutional utility of the unsolved attack, for President Wilson, was it could be attributed to whoever served under his white nationalist agenda, which aligned at the time with German assets infiltrating America to bomb infrastructure.

Screen capture from 1915 movie “Birth of a Nation”, which President Wilson screened at the White House to restart the KKK and incite violence across America

The December 2025 blackout will likely follow the same trajectory.

Not solved, but enabled and used.

Exponent’s track record speaks for itself: 500 automotive lawsuits, zero findings of defect. Over $100 million from Ford for litigation defense. Tobacco industry work in the 1990s to keep people smoking. It will produce a shallow report that creates reasonable doubt about any specific cause to protect PG&E from any real investigation. The FBI will no longer hunt Nazis while ignoring The Base’s explicit calls for this exact attack. The pattern of unsolved professional operations is expected to continue under Trump’s puppet-like performances.

So don’t bother asking whether we can prove The Base conducted this specific attack or any others.

Ask instead why is a Nazi group openly calling for American infrastructure attacks from Russian territory, through Russian communications channels, led by an alleged Russian intelligence asset while sitting undesignated as a terrorist organization in the country that it explicitly targets.

The answer is the same as it was in 1916 when the KKK ran the White House as “America First”: the unsolved attack by foreign assets is more useful than the solved one.

The conventional narrative frames President Wilson and Henry Ford as naive pacifists, when they were the exact opposite. Ford refused to sell munitions to Britain and France, and “disappeared” millions in taxpayer money, while Germany couldn’t buy anyway due to the blockade; proving functional support aligned with the German war machine.

Ford received over $21 million in government contracts during WWI and delivered effectively nothing; $14 million for Eagle boats that were “either useless or not constructed,” $1.3 million for tractors never delivered, $5.5 million for spare parts never delivered. That’s not pacifism, because it’s sabotage through contract fraud, exactly paralleling what German military intelligence was doing with shell companies during the same period. Ford redirected $30,000 into Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign at Joe Tumulty’s personal request, which nobody denied when challenged in the Congressional Record.

The history clearly shows that Wilson and Ford actively undermined America by sabotaging infrastructure for Allied preparedness, even enabling German agents to bomb San Francisco to kill Americans. Wilson knew. He was briefed. His fake “neutrality” rhetoric, funded by Ford, was disinformation to cover their foreign alignments.

Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1880s nativist slogan “America First” for his 1915 Presidential campaign and soon after the infamous white robe costumes appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-only audiences.
Nick Fuentes, a self-admitted white supremacist, claims MAGA means that 40% of staff in the White House are America First.

The “America First” administrations, both then and now, know foreign-directed sabotage is spreading, suppress investigations, and use overheated “immigrant” rhetoric to obscure right-wing extremist domestic terror cells operating with impunity.

Security

Quantum Industry Under Threat From Shit Flinging Defense Academics

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Did you see the headline that Virginia Tech researchers claim quantum can “connect drones for disaster relief, bypassing traditional networks“?

Physics disagrees, but hey, what do I know? I’m just a disinformation expert. And I’m saying when you cut a press release that contradicts your own paper, you’re not doing science. You’re doing disinformation… poorly.

Virginia Tech apparently has convinced Phys.org to print that quantum entanglement allows instant communication across any distance:

Once entangled, any modification to one will also happen to the other, no matter how far apart they are—from opposite ends of the same swarm, to opposite ends of the galaxy.

We have a word for this in the vast, quiet prairie flint-filled hills of Kansas.

Bullshit.

Their published statement violates the no-communication theorem, a foundational result in quantum mechanics that every quantum compute newbie learns. You cannot transmit classical information via entanglement. Not across a room. Not across a galaxy.

The entanglement of two particles means quite literally, as you guess from the word itself, that when you measure one particle it instantly affects what you find when you measure the other one.

Einstein said this was “spooky action at a distance” because you can’t control what result you get. So the press release completely omitted that we are dealing with a randomness problem; can’t send a message using random. When you measure your particle for “1” you don’t know what you’re going to get back. That means you have to compare notes through another channel, which means a non-quantum one. No side-channel, no information, get it? Get it? That was a double-pun. Anyway, the entanglement is real; communication without infrastructure is impossible.

A fancy big name academic knows this, or should. His own paper assumes “an ideal quantum channel environment with no losses“. That’s fancy big hat talk for the framework requires a network more fragile than the classical infrastructure it supposedly replaces.

The quantum channel doesn’t bypass networks.

It demands infrastructure that would be the first casualty in any real scenario, let alone a disaster full of complicated threats to everything and anything. Smoke, fire, debris, snow, rain… forgettaboutit. We see a researcher publicly stating things his own paper contradicts. This isn’t a PR telephone game, it’s not a weak semaphore across windy mountain tops.

It’s the source.

The Actual Paper

The authors of an eQMARL framework discuss a real problem: how do you train multiple AI agents to cooperate without sharing raw observation data? Hell, I’m of course interested in THAT! Let’s talk turkey.

The solution uses quantum entanglement to couple distributed learning processes during the R&D phase. Compared to classical baselines, it converges 10-17% faster and uses fewer parameters.

These are modest, legitimate improvements to federated learning architectures. The paper is competent for what it claims. Call a chicken a chicken. A duck is a duck.

What this paper doesn’t do:

  1. Enable communication without networks
  2. Work in disaster conditions
  3. Function during drone deployment at all
  4. Slice bread

From the paper itself:

During execution, the agents interact with the environment independently and are fully decentralized.

Reality: drones run classical inference after training. The quantum entanglement is a training optimization. The deployed system uses normal classical policies. If your disaster drones need real-time coordination, this paper offers them exactly nothing.

How does nothing sound for a disaster? I’ll take none.

Pumping Shit Has a Name

We’ve seen the hype cycle many times before. New technology, low barrier to expertise, suddenly integrity disappears like a freckle on a pig in a blizzard.

Strategic Defense Initiative (1983): Reagan borrowed Carter-era missile defense research and inflated it into fictional space-based laser shit to unlock funding that physicists knew technology couldn’t deliver. The more failure, the more funding! Technical objections were ignored because benefactors didn’t care about outcomes, they cared about their income. Billions flowed into political lobbying to keep the GOP in power. Unaccountable tech was the punchline; physics was the windup.

Theranos and Tesla (2003-2018): Revolutionary! When you only have to demonstrate laboratory conditions, and say “next year” to everyone asking why it doesn’t work, you get rich quick. Timelines are compressed rhetorically while the technology stays theoretical. Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk talked about saving lives while their machines were so obviously unreliable they were killing more people than without them. Tesla is literally called a death-trap by courts handing victims hundreds of millions in Tesla dollars.

Quantum Supremacy (2019-present): Google glibly announced quantum supremacy with a calculation that IBM immediately contested. Pushing PR before peer review, applications before reliability, is threatening to become a norm in quantum announcements. Each press release talks revolution while the underlying paper delivers increments if anything at all.

Take a drive… to Mars, tomorrow! Step right up and give money to the charlatans. Watch them get rich and take over the government to end regulation of such obvious fraud.

Bullshit. Source: Twitter

The eQMARL coverage fits this shit template unfortunately. The press release promises a whole new look at disaster relief because quantum. Yet the paper delivers marginal training improvements and evidence that quantum couldn’t help. The timeline compresses radically (“10 to 15 years” versus “coming quickly into focus” within the same article). A fantasy generates the coverage; the contradictory physics sits in footnotes.

Here’s a narwhal tusk. It’s proof that unicorns are real. How many do you want to buy? Unicorn meat is the next big thing, solves world hunger.

Follow the Infrastructure

Virginia Tech’s Institute for Advanced Computing in Alexandria sure sounds impressive. The framing flaws perhaps are not accidental.

“Disaster relief drones” and “wildfire response” are grant magnets. They invoke urgency, public benefit, and national security simultaneously. A paper about “10-17% faster convergence in distributed ML training” doesn’t get you status and Ronald Reagan sized corruption tickets to the handout train. A paper about super network drones that communicate “through the fabric of space”… CHA-CHING!

The actual legitimate use case—privacy-preserving federated learning—serves defense contractors, healthcare systems, and financial institutions who want collaborative AI without data sharing.

That’s a real market. That’s a real natsec benefit.

It’s also not a headline.

These researchers (or their institution, or both) apparently made a choice to frame laboratory simulations as disaster response as a form of social engineering. Frame training optimizations as communication breakthroughs. Frame physics violations as innovation.

Fact-Checking Theater

Phys.org flagged this article as “fact-checked” by editors Sadie Harley and Robert Egan. Their editorial process produced a summary stating:

Quantum entanglement enables secure, network-independent communication between devices such as drones.

No. This is the opposite of true.

It’s not a simplification or a minor error. This is a fundamental misstatement of entanglement capability, endorsed by a publication’s credibility infrastructure.

The summary continues:

Entanglement allows information transfer by correlating qubit states, bypassing traditional connectivity limits.

Again: no.

Entanglement correlates states. It does not transfer information. The distinction is not subtle. This is the entire point of the no-communication theorem.

A credibility badge, an integrity seal, has been applied to a total fiction. The “fact-checked” label provides cover for claims any basic checking process should have caught and lit up like a Christmas tree.

It’s the Physics

Quantum entanglement is real and useful for specific applications. Here’s what it actually does:

  • Creates correlations between particles that persist across distance
  • Enables certain cryptographic protocols (quantum key distribution)
  • Can couple distributed computational processes during training

Here’s what it cannot do:

  • Transmit classical information without a classical channel
  • Enable faster-than-light communication
  • Bypass the need for network infrastructure
  • Function in degraded RF environments like disaster zones

The no-communication theorem isn’t a technical limitation waiting to be overcome. It’s a mathematical consequence of quantum mechanics’ structure. Claiming entanglement now enables network-independent communication is like announcing a triangle has four sides.

Integrity Breach

Quantum computing is real and approaching useful applications. It’s coming and people need to saddle up and get ready to ride a whole new beast of burden.

Cryptography is the near-term example that I work on almost constantly now. Quantum systems will soon enough break current encryption standards, and quantum-resistant protocols are already being deployed in response.

That’s right. Deployed.

Every shit-flinging press release makes the real work harder. When researchers claim physics-violating applications to secure funding or headlines or whatever gets people up in the morning in Virginia, they create an environment where legitimate quantum advances get dismissed.

The credibility cost is huge.

These people could have framed their work accurately: a novel approach to privacy-preserving distributed learning with modest performance improvements. They chose instead to let a whole institution promote claims their paper obviously contradicts.

As soon as I saw text saying quantum drones will be communicating through space, I saw more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

How could this be? Well, it isn’t.

The defense-adjacent research is marketed with physics-violating claims to justify continued funding from Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and federal sources. The “disaster relief” framing is the civilian cover story for military communications research.

Did the researchers review the press release before publication? If yes, they approved physics violations with their names attached. If no, Virginia Tech is fabricating claims without consent. Either answer is evidence of a serious integrity breach.

The pattern continues. Theranos, Tesla… what’s next?

The paper is here: DeRieux et al., “eQMARL: Entangled Quantum Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Distributed Cooperation over Quantum Channels,” arXiv:2405.17486.

It’s actually a good read for what it claims. The press release and coverage are… shit.

Security

60 Minutes Story Killed by Trump’s Plant at CBS

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Bari Weiss, planted as CBS News editor-in-chief after the Ellison family acquired Paramount to serve Trump, has killed a fully vetted “60 Minutes” story about Venezuelan deportees tortured in El Salvador.

Her stated reason: the Trump administration didn’t explicitly tell her to allow it. She refuses to allow journalism unless authorized by Trump.

She even provided Stephen Miller’s phone number to the production team, because without White House approval, speech no longer is allowed.

This is not editorial judgment. This is coordination.

Dictator Plant

The sequence matters.

Trump sued CBS over a “60 Minutes” interview with his political opponent, a lawsuit legal experts called frivolous targeted censorship.

But the lawsuit wasn’t meant to win, since it would not have. It only existed as a performance during Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount.

The outgoing Paramount leadership settled the lawsuit, bending to the whim of autocracy, and the incoming leadership agreed to unspecified “FCC concessions” designed to pacify Trump-aligned appointments.

Larry Ellison’s son then purchased Weiss’s startup, a cynically named The Free Press, with $150 million to reward her political alignment and make her editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Her qualifications were obviously suspect. She had no broadcast experience. None. Her qualification was loyalty to the regime, understanding the assignment.

When Trump sat for a “60 Minutes” interview last month, Weiss traveled to Mar-a-Lago to oversee the propaganda. During the conversation, Trump dropped “know-nothing” dog-whistles like “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person”, just the sort of thing you say about someone you’ve definitely discussed with mutual friends.

Now she’s operating in true “know nothing” fashion by killing stories for Trump, despite every institutional checkpoint CBS maintains giving a green light.

The Mechanism

Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s internal memo, leaked within hours, identified what just happened:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.

The CECOT story had been screened five times.

It cleared legal review.

It passed Standards and Practices.

Every verification process CBS uses to ensure accuracy had signed off.

Weiss punched her Trump censor button, claiming she didn’t have White House authorization to allow a journalist to speak.

White House silence became the secret-squirrel veto. She made it so.

The Cover

Trump’s public statements about CBS create useful confusion.

On social media and at rallies, he complains that “60 Minutes” treats him badly, that the new ownership is somehow worse than the old.

If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!

This is intentional misdirection.

The public channel establishes only the appearance of arm’s-length relations. The private channel of Weiss coordinating interviews at Mar-a-Lago, Weiss providing Miller’s number, Weiss killing stories the administration finds inconvenient, all maintains state-run operational control.

The complaints are the cover.

The coordination is the product.

What It Costs

Venezuelan deportees agreed to describe torture on camera probably because they believed American journalism still functions.

They calculated that a brand like CBS would not suppress testimony about torture to serve the American dictator who has ordered human rights violations and war crimes.

They calculated wrong.

These men are now exposed. They gave interviews that their torturers’ allies can review. The story won’t air. They took existential risks on a premise that the Weiss house just falsified to serve the White House.

Alfonsi called it out correctly:

…a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

Weiss responded that she looks forward to airing the piece “when it’s ready”, double-speak for censorship.

It was ready by every meaningful measure.

It became unready when the White House’s plant at CBS decided she would make terms meaningless (e.g. defined only by the dictator, replacing law and order with tyranny).

The Pattern

I recently wrote how Condé Nast fired a New Yorker fact-checker based on assertions it refuses to substantiate. The company claims footage exists. The company won’t release it. Resolution happens in private arbitration.

Now CBS kills a story based on false concerns artificially manufactured to undermine speech. The administration refuses to give its perspective as a censorship trigger. Resolution happens in silence, with editorial meetings no one attends.

Same mechanism. Same censorship. Same outcome.

The privatization of accountability isn’t an isolated incident at a magazine company. It’s the operating system now. Institutions that sell verification exempt themselves from verification’s requirements. The product and the practice have fully decoupled.

At “60 Minutes,” a correspondent warns that her program is being “dismantled.” Employees are threatening to quit.

They’re not wrong, as the risk from working for a government plant is well-documented in other dictatorships.

The kill switch is installed.

It works.

The person operating it carries Stephen Miller’s direct number in her pocket like a switchblade to cut throats.

By the Way

The same week CBS killed a story about Trump administration deportees, the Justice Department removed files from its Epstein document release—including photos of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

When caught, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said speculation that a photo was removed because Trump was in it was “laughable.” The DOJ claimed it was protecting victims.

Then the DOJ admitted no victims were depicted in the photo and re-uploaded it.

Blanche appears twice in the Epstein files: he conducted the Maxwell interview, and he’s defending the selective removal of documents from that release. When Democrats threatened contempt proceedings, he responded:

Bring it on.

Same week. Same mechanism. Same confidence that censorship and accountability theater produces no consequences.

The kill switch isn’t just installed at CBS. It’s the whole tin-pot dictator operating system now.