The American people are constantly being told that they can’t have universal healthcare or high-speed rail or free college or any number of other great things citizens of other countries have because we spend so much money on defense. Now, however, the Defense Department is saying they don’t even have enough bombs to fight wars. Where is the money going?

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• Join us for a live interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser for an enlightening conversation about “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” his new book. Moser traces a long, buried lineage of Jewish rabbis, artists, lawyers, journalists, and activists who opposed Zionism on religious, ethical, and political grounds—and paid for it with exile, censorship, and worse. He argues that anti-Zionism is not a synonym for antisemitism but a Jewish tradition older than the state it critiques, one that warned against a nationalist project built on exclusion. We’ll discuss Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, the myth of consensus, and what this hidden history means now.

• US taxpayers have spent $44 billion to attack Iran, are sending $3 billion more to Israel for bombs, and now the WSJ reports that Trump wants to send $5 billion to oil-rich Gulf states to repair the infrastructure damaged in the US/Israeli war against Iran.

• Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko says that there are no available volumes of fertilizer to send to the U.S. This comes after Trump announced that he was working on a “massive Deal” to buy potash from Minsk at a steep discount amid the trade war with Canada.

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In 2002, I drew a six-panel political cartoon titled “Israel vs. Palestine: Where Do You Stand?” Each panel shows a different speaker making a statement about the conflict, with a bold label underneath that sarcastically identifies the speaker’s supposed position. In the first panel, a man labeled “MODERATE HONEST BROKER” says, “The Arab killers must be killed before they get the chance to kill.” Next, another man says, “It’s always sad when innocent women and children die, but hey—that’s war!” Then a woman identified as a “GARDEN-VARIETY ANTI-SEMITE” says, “i can’t help noticing that Israel kills more Palestinians than vice versa.” The labels escalate, culminating with a person called “THE LIVING INCARNATION OF ADOLF HITLER” saying, “Surely Israel could find a better way to keep itself safe?”

The cartoon’s joke is that any statement short of a blank-check endorsement of the IDF is recast as anti-Semitic. At the time of publication, reaction was predictable: supporters of Israel disliked it; those who criticize Israel liked it. I took the usual heat from the usual haters.

I recently reposted this cartoon, along with others from decades past, to my X and Facebook accounts. This time, as John Hiatt might say, things got strange.

Supporters of Palestine became angry. “Your comment is short-sighted, disingenuous, reactionary,” one “friend” barked. “Public figures such as you defending the Zionist project under the ‘Greater Israel’ mandate is certainly grist for Jew hatred,” another complained. Bear in mind, I have never supported Israel. I have always been on Team Palestine. I have drawn hundreds of cartoons along those lines—and caught abuse for it.

Hate me if you must, but not for the wrong reasons. So I added a comment to my 2026 re-post pointing out that my 24-year-old cartoon was dripping in sarcasm. It was depressing, I sighed, how many people missed that.

Someone responded to my clarification with the following: “The fact that media literacy is down so far that: 1. Next to no one identified this as sarcasm. 2. A good majority genuinely believe that the statements made in the comic align with the titles. 3. The people that disagree with the statements and the titles but did not identify the sarcasm and therefore are interacting with the post as if it were made in earnest.”

Others cited Poe’s Law.

Another person added: “I think it’s also a sad expression of how over-the-top Israeli propaganda has become that people are accustomed now to seeing arguments nearly this hyperbolic made seemingly in earnest.”

All excellent points.

There is an additional contributing factor: the systemic debranding of news and editorial content has radically increased decontextualization, making it far more difficult for people to understand what they are reading and seeing.

When I started in national syndication 35 years ago, the media landscape was obviously different. Now, when you come across a cartoon, the odds are that it is on social media, just one of a myriad of unrelated items in an infinite scroll. Many times the artist’s signature is missing or illegible. When the creator’s name is discernible, you probably do not recognize it.

In other words, the cartoon stands on its own. You do not know the cartoonist’s previous work, so you cannot compare the latest piece with what came before. Nor do you know the publication that originally ran it, which might have given you a hint of its political orientation: The Atlantic, thus corporatist/Democratic. Jacobin, thus Bernie progressive. There are no helpful labels such as “this cartoon was drawn by a liberal Democrat.”

You don’t know the author, you don’t know where they’re coming from. Like my French mom used to say, it arrives comme un cheveu sur la soupe—like a hair on your soup. Randomly, unexpectedly, devoid of context.

Until the advent of the internet in the 1990s, that same cartoon would have run in the same position on the page, day after day, week after week, in the same newspaper. There was usually a byline. Whether it was a cartoon or a movie review, you developed a sense of its creator’s point of view over time. You knew where the cartoonist was coming from ideologically, tonally, generationally.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of contextualization in a reader’s ability to digest and understand content properly. A regular viewer of “At the Movies” with Chicago newspaper movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, for example, would eventually notice that Ebert had more establishmentarian tastes than the edgier Siskel. So if Ebert, who generally disliked horror movies, gave a thumbs-up to one, it was notable.

That was the world in which I drew the aforementioned cartoon in 2002. Even though I was not on staff at a paper, the syndication clients that ran it tended to run me regularly in the same spot in the same publications.

Writing in Slate in 2012, Simon Doonan argued that “Sarcasm relies heavily on verbal delivery and face-to-face contact,” but sardonic humor in plain old text, no emojis to signal “warning: humor ahead,” used to be plentiful and easily grokked by all but the dimmest. Many of my papers were alternative weeklies whose sophisticated cartoons and writing deeply imbued with Gen X’s love of irony. As years passed, I developed a relationship with the readers. Without ever reading or watching an interview with me, they learned that I was to the left of the Democratic Party and that, among many other things, I was critical of the state of Israel and the way it treated Palestinians.

So when my readers—my regular readers, who knew who I was—saw that cartoon, they knew where I was coming from. Clearly, I was being sarcastic. Nobody, whether Zionist or anti-Zionist, thought or could have thought that my cartoon was pro-Zionist. People understood the point.

For the foreseeable future, we are not returning to a media model in which people subscribe to trusted media name brands and develop close relationships with those brands and their content creators. This leaves those of us who communicate with the public facing a choice.

We can be didactic to a fault, stating everything literally in the simplest possible vocabulary and grammatical constructions imaginable. Or we can wield irony, sarcasm and more sophisticated literary devices while necessarily taking the risk that we will be repeatedly misunderstood. There are workarounds, such as signaling sarcasm with internet-era markers like “/s,” though those gimmicks merely serve up didacticism in a thin veil of sophistication. In 2014 Facebook tested a “satire tag” because posts like those from The Onion kept getting taken seriously, but decided against it—or maybe they just were being sarcastic.

What happens next? Writing and other forms of expression become stupider. Or the marketplace of ideas generates an ingenious solution, such as automatically labeling the ideological leanings of a cartoonist based on their catalogue of previous content.

I don’t like the odds.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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Today we discuss:

• Trump asks “if and when do I blow the entire nation [Iran] up?”

•  The cost of the war in Iran was $43.6 billion through Sept. 3, with bombs, missiles and other munitions accounting for more than 60 percent of the expenses, the Pentagon told Congress.

• Security chief Mohsen Rezaei has laid out Iran’s new set of conditions to end its war with the U.S.:

• An end to the war on all fronts, including, in particular, Lebanon.
• The release of its frozen funds that run into billions of US dollars.
• An end to the naval blockade on Iranian ports.
• An end to US interference in Iran’s internal affairs.
• An end to US cooperation with “the opponents of our revolution”.
• An end to all US attacks on Iranian territory.

• Trump says his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch will now be a “top grade” military complex that will house drones, snipers and ammunition.

• Trump says the United States has entered a security agreement with Greenland and Denmark that “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.”

• Trump bans CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

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Trump’s pre-midterm offer to send every American adult $5,000 if the GOP retains the House and Senate has fallen flat with voters, not because it’s a bribe, but because they don’t trust him to deliver.

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• China, long highly vulnerable to oil supply shocks, has transformed that weakness into a source of geopolitical power, by stockpiling huge amounts of oil, building extra oil refining capacity and investing in coal and other alternatives. And it flexed that power by cutting off supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel to neighboring countries. Already dominant in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, China now has an unparalleled position across the energy landscape.

• Under pressure, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, rejected Hasan Piker’s argument that the U.S. has caused more terror than Al Qaeda. Can he/should he be cowed by the corporatists?

• Washington and Florida insiders – from billionaire Trump allies and Rubio-linked lobbyists to Cuban exiles – are jockeying for control of the communist-ruled island-nation’s assets, charging to help clients navigate sanctions, and positioning themselves to loot Cuba in case of regime collapse.

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Gen Z young people, especially men, have their parents deeply concerned because they are not having sex or partying the way young people used to. This may be the first time in history that an older generation has screamed at their kids to turn that damn music up.

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Politics is war. In war, capturing and replacing a rival head of state does not constitute victory. Looking into the future, policies and practices have to change.

But you also have to look back into the past. Statues of the old leader must be demolished. The people he appointed must be fired and replaced with new personnel. His institutions must be dismantled. If you fail to abolish their legacy, everything that mattered about them lives on. You may not know it—but you have lost.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint written as a governing plan for a conservative administration, understood that. It treated rolling back rolling back the prior Democratic agenda—especially Biden’s—as a central task. Trump spent much of his first year focused on that rollback, and Republican voters loved it.

As the 2028 campaign begins in earnest next summer, however, Democratic voters have little reason to believe the next Democratic president would erase Trump’s legacy with anything close to the same scale or energy. That is the Ratchet Theory, as former Reagan-Bush official Bruce Bartlett explained: “Republicans are extreme radicals; when in power they do extreme stuff. Democrats are moderates; in power they do moderate stuff. This means they never undo all the bad radical stuff Republicans do, so there is a steady ratchet toward Republican priorities over time.”

Bernie Sanders and the populist-progressive wing he leads have watched that ratchet work for decades. They want Democrats who fight for their own ideas and reverse conservative policies whenever they can. Trump is increasingly unpopular, and anti-Trump sentiment is at a fever pitch. Democratic messaging will still be incomplete without sweeping pledges to make it look as if no one named Donald J. Trump had ever lived in Washington.

Part of that is symbolism. Any 2028 Democratic nominee should promise to tear down however much of Trump’s White House ballroom gets built, restore the East Wing and Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden, and rip out that horrid helicopter pad on the South Lawn. Palm Beach International Airport should get its name back. Restore the bordello-ized Oval Office to its pre-Trump state. The Kennedy Center should get its name back, plus a new charter that guarantees its financial solvency and blocks future politicization. No more Gulf of America, no more Lake America—and blow up the Arch too.

I’d leave the Department of War. It’s a rare case of Trump telling the truth.

If history is any guide, far too much of Trump’s legacy will outlast both his presidency and his body. When Biden confided to wealthy donors in 2019 that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he won, he meant it.

Obama kept Bush’s wars and started new ones.

Biden kept Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and his Space Force. Rather than return to Obama’s status quo, he maintained Trump’s sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. He endorsed and tried to expand Trump’s Abraham Accords, refused to move the U.S. embassy out of Jerusalem, accepted Trump’s recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli, and continued a pro-fracking energy stance. He did reverse the Muslim travel ban and rejoin the World Health Organization. On two of the biggest issues, though—Israel’s war in Gaza and human-caused climate change—the two old white guys were hard to tell apart.

Approval of Trump’s tariffs regime is in the toilet: 30% in the latest polls. His Canada-specific tariffs are even less popular, at 20%. Yet California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a leading 2028 hopeful, will not promise to mend fences with our northern neighbor and closest ally. “I can’t guarantee that,” he says. Is making nice with Canada really such a heavy lift?

Similarly, only 5% of registered Democrats support Trump’s partnership with Israel in attacking Iran, a war that has become an economic disaster with no end in sight. Yet no major Democratic prospect has promised to withdraw U.S. forces from that war of aggression on day one. Newsom, who governs a state with a large Iranian exile community, echoes Trump-era talking points: the “corrupt and repressive Iranian regime must never have nuclear weapons,” and Iran’s leadership “must go.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro criticizes Trump for sidestepping Congress, then recites the same brief against the “Iranian regime”—the target of Trump’s war—as a repressive state and “the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” On this latest forever war, it is reasonable to expect the 2028 nominee to land, as Kamala Harris did in 2024, on Team Israel.

The party may be splitting, but its voters agree on this: they hate Trump, want his presidency behind them and want what he did undone. A pivot to the center for swing voters will not save a nominee who cannot close the enthusiasm gap. That requires a clear list of promises to unwind the last 8 to 12 years.

That means not only leaving the Iran war but moving fast toward begging forgiveness, diplomatic normalization and paying restitution. It means cutting off U.S. military and financial aid to Israel and redirecting those funds to Palestinians. Nicolás Maduro and his wife should be returned to Venezuela and allowed to resume the presidency; tear up the attempt to seize the country’s oil. Everyone fired by DOGE should be offered their job back, with back pay and restitution. People who entered the country with permission—including under Biden—should be allowed to return, with a path to permanent residency and citizenship.

With a presidency this extreme, it is not enough to promise to govern differently or better. You have to scrap what they built. Annul every executive order, reverse every law, fire every appointee. If you can’t promise that, why should anyone vote for you?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

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• The Wall Street Journal reports that dapper Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth only wants attractive, masculine, troops who meet waist-to-height requirements and have “impeccable” grooming to attend his speeches. This comes after he encouraged troops to inject testosterone and Hegseth’s speech at Quantico Base, where he declared “no more beardos” or “fat generals.” A scantily-clad Hegseth likes to work out with ripped, buff, totally 100% straight soldiers on base.

Hegseth, in Democratic crosshairs for investigations next year, ordered two US Air Force crewmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran in April to take part in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” about their experience.

• Trump set out to make it the 51st state. Instead, he has driven Canada into the arms of the European Union as an Associate Member, after antagonizing the Canadians for months, taunting the country’s prime minister and waging a relentless trade war. Trump threatened to respond with “serious tariffs” against Europe.

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• The Trump administration approves a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as public support for the country declines. The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.

• ICE went on a hiring binge last year. The agency offered $50,000 signing bonuses. The hiring happened so quickly that many new officers were put on the streets before being adequately vetted. The agency has begun quietly firing some of the recruits—and some are taking their own lives.

• FBI Director Kash Patel defends a new policy at the bureau that does not immediately disqualify potential hires who have engaged in bestiality.

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In America’s two-party system, voters who are unhappy with the incumbent Republicans have only one electoral alternative: vote for the Democrats they know will do the same thing.

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• A big win for the gerontocracy as half-dead octogenarian Mitch McConnell returns to the US Senate.

• The Supreme Court refuses to let Trump’s U.S. Postal Service tighten the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections. Homeland Security may have broken state laws as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

• The now-closed state-run Alligator Alcatraz ICE gulag in the Florida Everglades failed to comply with a host of federal detention standards, creating cramped conditions and “calming” migrants in tiny metal cages. Immigrants seeking documents from the government to prove that they are in the country legally are being ignored or provided paperwork that is heavily redacted.

• Star Wars! The United States has installed weapons in Earth’s orbit, Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink admits.

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Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Trump stands by his support for a united Ireland. Trump said in Dublin, sitting beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Saturday, that he’d “love to see” Ireland unified and that it is “going to happen eventually,” so it “may as well happen now.” He described uniting Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland as “fantastic,” adding: “The U.K. would have something to say about it obviously, but I think it would be a great thing, I mean, how can it be bad?” Trump later said Irish reunification would be a “very cool thing” while noting that “no matter what you say or how you say it, there’s no good answer.” Trump told reporters: “It just seems to me that you have Northern Ireland and you have Ireland. It seems to me that one of the naturals of all time is to put them together.”

• The National Security Agency is set to undergo its most extensive internal restructuring in at least a decade. The new design for one of the most powerful U.S. intelligence agencies, the brainchild of Army Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, calls for the creation of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence.

• Saudi Arabia is caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Trump refuses to attack the Houthis. Now, unable to export its oil, the kingdom’s leadership has few options.

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For the president and, presumably, his supporters, there is an alternative reality in which everything is going as well as possible. The polls show that most voters do not believe that, yet the strategy of speaking demonstrable falsehoods persists.

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From curbs on mail-in voting and the purging of voter rolls to widespread confusion about the validity of elections, the Trump Administration—dreading losses—is scuttling Americans’ opportunities to cast lawful ballots in the 2026 midterm elections.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

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• 25 years ago, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked 4 passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. Hasan Piker has taken heat for saying America deserved it. (He has since retracted that.) Shortly before 9/11, Central Asian jihadis told Ted the war was about to come home for America. Given the aggressive nature of U.S. foreign policy, it’s a question we need to engage with: did the U.S. deserve 9/11?

• Facing dwindling weeks until the midterms, deepening unpopularity and darkening political prospects for his party, Trump is tossing out a new idea: a $5,000 check for every American adult if Republicans keep control of Congress in November.

• The Census Bureau suggests adding a citizenship question to the decennial questionnaire. The proposal argues that the census count should exclude any undocumented immigrants and noncitizens without permanent residency because they are “not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.” Millions of residents could be excluded from the U.S. census, congressional representation could be reshaped and federal funds could be reallocated across states. Refugees and asylum seekers would be excluded from the population count. Trump administration officials also want to prohibit the Census Bureau from asking demographic questions, including about race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

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• In the harrowing months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe. But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as a half mile away according to documents released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani after decades of cover-ups.

• The Trump administration did not oppose a UK-led initiative to impose new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The White House’s decision not to push back on the UK effort is a signal of its frustration with the Netanyahu government’s policy in the West Bank. Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden joined.

• Israeli opposition politicians said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

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After the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, U.S. policymakers helped themselves to Iranian oil at discounted prices and smugly congratulated themselves. But the blowback was a bitch. Their puppet ruler, the Shah, was soon overthrown by revolutionaries who despised and resented the United States. Sanctions intended to soften the Islamic Republic had the opposite effect, hardening its resolve and prompting it to wage proxy wars against the U.S. and Israel throughout the Middle East. Fifty years later, the Middle East is a hot mess, Iran is its dominant regional power, and the United States has lost. So why is the U.S. pursuing similar policies against oil-rich, socialist-majority Venezuela?

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Last week there occurred a watershed moment in the history of American political cartooning. A major American newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an editorial cartoon created not by a cartoonist or graphic artist, but by unidentified staffers using artificial intelligence.

One year ago, the Sun fired its Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher. (Disclosure: KAL and I are friends.)

Which AI model was used was not disclosed, but more likely than not it was ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Why do I think so? I asked various AI models. I’m not a Luddite!

As a cartoonist, my reaction was similar to that of most of my colleagues. I checked out the cartoon. It sucked.

What the Sun published as a cartoon sucked worse than any cartoon ever drawn by any professional cartoonist could or ever has sucked, which is to say, a lot. This lickspittle slop sucked up to the mayor—no good political cartoon ever supports a politician, only criticizes them—and it had all the compositional subtlety of a propaganda poster published by the government of Saddam Hussein. H.L. Mencken, the brilliant, ornery columnist who spent years at the Sun, is surely biting his editors’ shins in hell, where they certainly reside.

All things considered, the gross incompetence of the Sun’s wading into the lifestyle of the artiste manqué is as good as it gets for a profession that is no longer in danger of dying, or in process of dying, but well and truly dead after having been murdered by publications like the Sun.

A professional humorist might have prompted AI to create work with superb humor and insight, albeit relying on the generic sub-MAD look of AI slopart. Since the concept is 99% of what makes a good cartoon, a good idea with lame art would have been even more disastrous for human cartoonists.

This being America, though, there’s always a danger that we might be missing the point of this startling low-budget attack on journalistic quality.

Yes, it’s disgusting that a newspaper that can afford to pay rent on an office building can’t scrape up the cash to hire a real cartoonist, employ a freelancer to create real political cartoons, or purchase work by real people for pennies on the dollar from a syndicate. Yes, it’s ironic that a newspaper that clearly doesn’t value cartoonists nevertheless understands that readers expect to see cartoons in their newspaper, and thus chooses to fill the hole in this ridiculously undignified way. And yes, this is an insult to readers.

The real issue here, however, is one that everyone, regardless of their politics, ought to be able to get angry about: theft. The Baltimore Sun is stealing from hundreds of cartoonists. And it owes them compensation.

The vast majority of the widely used AI models—ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.—were “trained” on millions of articles and images scraped from the World Wide Web. This includes thousands, most likely hundreds of thousands, of political and other cartoons.

Neither cartoonists nor, for that matter, writers were approached by these giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies to rent or purchase the training rights. Operating under the “move fast and break things” dictum that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, they stole copyrighted material worth billions of dollars without asking, much less obtaining, permission from the copyright holders.

When editors or staffers at the Baltimore Sun input their prompt to ChatGPT or whatever other model they used, it drew on that illegally purloined material to create their abomination of a cartoon. They also stole countless other cartoons—one-offs posted by individuals, stuff drawn by children and posted by their parents, there was no limit. If you ever drew or wrote anything on the Internet, you were almost certainly robbed too.

The newspaper, in other words, bought and published stolen material. At an incredible scale. Even though giant tech companies want you to think otherwise, there’s no practical difference between publishing AI work generated using pilfered intellectual property and buying a stolen TV out of the back of someone’s car.

Numerous lawsuits are working their way through the courts about these issues. (Disclosure: I am one of thousands of plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit and settlement against Anthropic, owner of the Claude AI model.)

There are smaller, ethically sourced artificial intelligence models. In those models, an artist uploads only their own original material and the AI learns that material and can then, with considerable work, begin to generate images drawn in that style. If that’s what the Baltimore Sun did here, and they have an on-staff artist whose work was used to train an AI, it’s still wrong because they are refusing to employ flesh-and-blood cartoonists. But it’s not illegal.

I reached out to the Sun to find out if that’s what they did. They did not reply.

If, on the other hand, as seems exceedingly likely, they used unethically sourced AI, the copyright section of the United States federal code requires that they pay each cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped at least $750 per scraped cartoon. There are hundreds of cartoonists and estates of deceased cartoonists who would be included in this category. The Sun and the relevant AI company used here ought to be held jointly and severally liable for this total sum, which may exceed the total market capitalization of most newspapers.

Under its current editorial direction, the Baltimore Sun purports to be a conservative publication that respects property rights. Capitalism cannot function if workers can have their products stolen from them without recompense. If this is the Wild West, what will be the motivation for entrepreneurs, artists or anyone else to be creative?

Consider this a cease and desist, Baltimore Sun. Delete the cartoon from your online edition. Issue payments of at least $750 to each and every cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped by your AI model. Apologize to your readers and promise never to do anything like this again.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the only group of which I’m a member, issued an open letter calling on the Sun to do the right thing. I don’t share the sentiment that AI is evil or the belief that this genie can be shoved back into its bottle, but it’s a nice statement.

What we really need is to nip this wholesale theft of intellectual property in the bud and hit the bastards who profit from unethically-trained AI in the wallet. We need an enterprising lawyer to organize a class-action lawsuit.

I’d be happy to help organize the effort.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is a Pulitzer finalist, twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and a former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post Grand Theft A.I. appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Today we discuss:

• There are major anxieties about interference in the 2026 midterm elections. Will the Trump administration use executive orders or declare a national emergency to sow confusion? Will there be federal agents at polls, ballot seizures, and restricted mail-in voting? Gerrymandering and eroded trust compound fears that results could be delegitimized or overridden. Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins Ted and Jamarl to tell us what fears are real.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and author whose reporting for the BBC, Guardian, and Rolling Stone has exposed voter-roll purges, Crosscheck programs, and suppression tactics since Florida’s 2000 election. His bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, plus films like Vigilantes Inc., document how officials and contractors have disenfranchised millions, especially voters of color.

• Middle East Escalation: A wave of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia wounds more than 70 people and ignited fires at several oil facilities and utilities in the kingdom’s southern region, raising oil prices and threatening to squeeze shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Iran plans to announce an “exclusion zone” outside the Strait of Hormuz aimed at vessels it believes are attempting to transit the waterway. The United Kingdom is expected to announce trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements, the latest sign that UK-Israeli relations have taken another downturn. And Israel orders settler outposts removed in the West Bank.

• The centrist-conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) was defeated by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in a Saxony-Anhalt state election. Friedrich Merz’s party lost more than half of its seats in the state parliament, while the AfD increased its count from 23 to 39.

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