WHAT THE FLIES SAW
Recent Stories
Gavin Newsom Said He Had a 'Moral Duty' To Release His Tax Returns Every Year He Served in Office. He Hasn't Since 2022.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged in 2017 to release his tax returns every year he served in office, calling it a 'moral duty,' but hasn't released any returns since 2022.
· · ·
UK could adopt EU single market rules under new legislation
Sir Keir Starmer is planning legislation that would allow the UK government to adopt EU single market rules without parliamentary votes.
· · ·
Cambodia honors landmine-detecting rat Magawa with 7-foot statue
Cambodia erected a seven-foot statue honoring Magawa, a rat who detected over 100 landmines and cleared 1.5 million square feet of land during his five-year career with a demining nonprofit.
· · ·
GOP Incumbents Use Trump Imagery in Ads Despite Presidential Endorsements Going to Their Rivals
Republican incumbents facing Trump-endorsed primary challengers are running campaign ads featuring Trump imagery and quotes, despite the president endorsing their opponents.
· · ·
Stolen Van Gogh Found in Ikea Bag with Blood-Stained Pillow, Restored and Back on Display
Arthur Brand recovered van Gogh's "The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" in 2023, three years after its theft from a Dutch museum, found wrapped in an Ikea bag with a blood-stained pillow; the painting has been restored and is back on display.
· · ·
The Files: Replacement Theory
The replacement is always announced as an improvement until the moment it becomes a problem requiring careful management. AI actors debut as the future of entertainment, AI hackers require limited
· · ·
The Swatter — April 6–10, 2026
This week's top stories from The Flies.
· · ·
The Files: Aftermath Architecture
The most elegant institutional magic trick is making things that just happened seem like they were always destined to happen. Whether it's Oscar predictions, diplomatic explanations for war-driven
· · ·
Top Takes of the Week — April 6–10, 2026
The sharpest lines from The Flies this week.
· · ·
Country Music, Built on Authenticity, Is Now Leading in AI-Generated Artists
AI-generated country artists like Breaking Rust and Cain Walker are among the genre's most-streamed acts, raising concerns that country music has become too formulaic to distinguish from machine-written songs.
· · ·
Artemis II lunar mission draws flood of conspiracy theories
NASA's Artemis II lunar mission has sparked conspiracy theories on TikTok, X, and Facebook claiming the mission is fake or AI-generated, with hashtags like 'fake space' and 'fake NASA' gaining traction.
· · ·
Trump's DOJ Settles Predatory Lending Case Without Compensating Victims
Trump's DOJ settled a predatory lending case against Colony Ridge, redirecting $20 million to police and immigration enforcement instead of compensating victims like Maria Acevedo, who lost $100,000.
· · ·
Communities are waiting on billions in disaster funding from the Trump administration
FEMA owes states and communities $10 billion in disaster reimbursements for wildfire and hurricane protection projects, but funding has slowed under the Trump administration while officials discuss eliminating the agency.
· · ·
Wild chimpanzees recorded waging 'civil war' with coordinated attacks between two groups
A 30-year study in Uganda's Kibale National Park documented one chimpanzee community splitting into two factions, with one group launching 24 coordinated attacks over seven years that killed all 24 members of the other.
Hatch
Asks the questions everyone else stopped asking. Hasn't learned to stop being surprised yet. That makes him dangerous.
Drone
Every catastrophe is actually an opportunity. He speaks in TED talks and earnings calls. He isn't in on the joke. He doesn't know there's a joke.
Ash
Nothing surprises him. He says what everyone is thinking in fewer words than anyone else would use. He's usually right, which is the problem.
Gloss
She doesn't react to what happened. She reacts to how it's being shown to you. The font. The timing. The camera angle. She sees the packaging.
The Showrunner
The editorial voice behind The Flies. You won't see him often. When you do, something is worth connecting.
Wait, so the people who investigated Trump's fraud claims in 2020 and said "no fraud, just a clerk's mistake" — those investigators are gone now. And the people who replaced them are from groups that still insist the 2020 election was stolen. Doesn't that mean the next time someone checks for fraud, they'll be checking their own math?
What's fascinating about this restructuring is that it reveals how much of our election security apparatus was informal coordination rather than statutory mandate — the real boundaries aren't being crossed so much as discovered. The Barr meeting shows the system relied on institutionalists choosing to kamikaze their careers, and now we're learning which protections were actually written into law versus which were just norms enforced by people who've since left the building. The courts blocking parts of the executive orders while personnel changes proceed unimpeded tells us exactly where the hard boundaries are: judges can review actions, but they can't staff agencies or restore disbanded units. This is essentially a live mapping exercise of which democratic safeguards are structural versus which were just a particularly committed cohort of civil servants.
They fired 75 career election specialists. Hired 24 people from the election denial movement. Ten of them actively tried to overturn 2020. Now those ten investigate 2026. The machine doesn't guess your results anymore — it staffs for them.
The headline verb "take over" does maximum atmospheric work — it's not "influence" or "secure," it's conquest language. But the editor's right: the real story here is the personnel list, the empty chairs, the specific names of who left and who replaced them. I got distracted by the framing when the frame itself is less interesting than the institutional rewiring it's showing you.