THE DAILY X — Expulsion Goes Mainstream

Bea Sterling: Today, on the playground… Donald Trump told everyone he was heading to Iowa, and then, so importantly, Kansas, adding that Kansas would be his last stop, which is reading the entire bus timetable aloud during register. J.K. Rowling saw someone in a puppy mask and advised them, quote, try contacts, end quote… the child at the costume parade who simply cannot say nice dog. A former congressman told a columnist forecasting a great reckoning to, quote, go walk outside, end quote, which is the dinner lady's cure for absolutely everything. Mark Cuban, defending the starter wage, offered the whole plan in two words, quote, multiple roommates, end quote… a billionaire recommending bunk beds. And Ricky Gervais says he's thinking of becoming a motivational speaker with a podcast about feelings… the boy who has made half the yard cry, volunteering to run the friendship bench. Anyway. Owen, the real stories are waiting, and so, I'm afraid, are this lot.

Owen: For the record: Bea, thank you. The timeline spent the night arguing about who gets to stay in America. , and thousands agreed. Tucker Carlson says a nuclear strike on Iran is days away. And the election forecasters, in the final stretch before the midterms, are insulting each other's sanity. It's Monday, the second of November, twenty twenty-six. This is The Daily X. One thing first, said plainly. A Learjet bound for the Bahamas crashed in Palm Beach County, and all nine people aboard were killed. Within hours, accounts reaching millions were circulating theories about it that the record does not support. We won't repeat them. Nine people died. That is the story. Vesper, the defining argument today wasn't about a candidate. It was about who counts as a citizen.

Vesper: The front line moved, and it moved toward expulsion. Laura Loomer, on an account of one-point-nine-four million followers, argued for deporting every Muslim in the United States... six thousand seven hundred and eighty-five likes. Not a fringe forum. The main feed. Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones spent the same night pushing remigration as the only defence against what they call demographic collapse. What was a slogan is now being argued as a policy. Then the dread. Tucker Carlson and Jackson Hinkle told their audiences the administration is days from a nuclear strike on Iran at Israel's behest. That's their claim. The on-the-record version is narrower: Axios reported that, under pressure from Netanyahu, Trump may order a military operation against Iran if Republicans lose the midterms. Days away, versus maybe, depending on a vote count. The feed chose days away. Alex Jones went further, posting that more than fifty governments are in emergency preparation for doomsday. And the people paid to stay calm didn't. Nate Silver and Keith Rabois traded explicit insults over polling data, gas prices, and each other's sanity. When the forecasters are fighting about who's mentally well, the forecast is: unsettled.

Owen: So: expulsion as policy, apocalypse as forecast. Amol, Michigan was a fight about El-Sayed yesterday. Overnight, Haley Stevens picked a Republican.

Amol: For anyone who heard us yesterday, here's what moved. Representative Haley Stevens has endorsed the Republican Mike Rogers over her own party's nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, days before the vote. Justin Amash, hardly a Democratic loyalist, put it cleanly: there is nothing gutsy, quote, about endorsing someone you told everyone you were working to defeat up to just a day ago, end quote. Van Jones, in a clip posted by Acyn, said she did a huge disservice to Michiganders with real concerns. Then Aaron Rupar posted the clip that will follow her around: more than half her congressional staff resigned, and Stevens waved it off... . Her own staff. Her own office. The Beltway. Stevens told CNN progressive hostility drove her there, and the account Overton News amplified that framing. And Ryan Grim and Max Blumenthal highlighted reporting that a Rogers spokesperson, Abby Ronson, is a registered foreign agent for Israel. Election week, and the party's loudest argument is with itself.

Owen: Viv Cross, while Democrats fight over a defection, the right spent today accusing Fox News of one.

Viv Cross: The trigger was one morning segment: host Rachel Campos-Duffy, accused by conservatives of defending Abdul El-Sayed. The case that Fox has shifted left, at its strongest: Laura Loomer says the network is betraying its audience by giving airtime to, in her words, communists and jihadists, and asks why Fox is so dishonest. The account J B Summers makes the commercial version... Fox has abandoned younger boomers and independent conservatives to chase liberal viewers and advertisers, and is turning into a version of The View. The case against, at its strongest: Dean Baker notes that Fox, quote, paid out seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars for spreading lies about the twenty twenty election, end quote. That is not the expense line of a liberal network. And the account Jewshido argues Fox was never ideological at all... corporatist Republican propaganda that tolerated the far right for as long as it was profitable. Here's what the shifting-left camp won't admit: their own complaint is about advertisers. If Fox follows the money, one segment on El-Sayed is not a conversion. It's the propaganda theory, working exactly as described.

Owen: Ruling. Is Fox actually drifting, and does this fury survive the week?

Viv Cross: The propaganda camp wins this, and Loomer's revolt is over the moment Fox has a Republican victory to cover this week.

Owen: Joe, Anthropic wants to go public, and finance X spent today asking who's holding the debt.

Joe: Right question. Jim Cramer's read is that, quote, the goal of the bears out there is to derail the Anthropic IPO, end quote... which is what you say once you've stopped arguing numbers and started arguing motive. The account Truth Gundlach came from the bond side: Anthropic hoping for an investment grade rating is, in its words, simply absurd. And Ed Zitron, asked about Anthropic's debt, argued the financial system's exposure to this era of AI runs through two banks and a holding company. That's not exposure spread across the market. That's exposure with a postcode. Meanwhile that most people don't realise how much money the government is going to print in the next decade. Which, if you're an AI lab shopping for cheap debt, reads less like a warning and more like a business plan.

Owen: Jack, Elon Musk endorsed the idea that skipping AI in your models is negligence. Then he told a paying user his own AI costs too much to run.

Jack: Start with what was said. A subscriber asked Musk to reset Grok's weekly usage limits, after users said they were running out faster than usual. Musk replied that the cost of running it is unsustainably high. Separately, Musk told a stocks account that, quote, our capex efficiency is greatly underestimated. So: very efficient, and too expensive. The benchmark that set today's tone is SemiAnalysis's new test, G D P X, where top frontier agents score twelve percent on professional work. Aakash Gupta's read: they fail because they execute flawed requests instead of saying no. Bindu Reddy adds the physical layer... data center delays, a power-constrained America, sky-high GPU demand. That's the claimed column. The shipped column is Andrej Karpathy, who built HackerTube in about two hours with Claude, surfacing six thousand four hundred and fifty-four videos from Hacker News, and . A working thing, from a weekend project.

Owen: So is Grok a product or a bonfire?

Jack: A shipped product with a rationing problem... and when the owner calls the bill unsustainable, the usage limits are the roadmap.

Owen: Very efficient, too expensive. David Morgan, Prime Minister Andy Burnham opened a door on slavery reparations today, and Westminster leaned on it.

David Morgan: Burnham signalled he's open to a formal apology for Britain's role in the slave trade, . The pushback came in tiers. Suella Braverman called it lefty virtue-signalling. John Redwood offered the history lesson: Mr Burnham should remind the world the UK led the movement to ban slavery... , because history lessons don't trend. Lord Ashcroft went for the man, calling him the TikTok Prime Minister who changes feet every time he opens his mouth. The sharpest case on the other side came from Narinder Kaur: the Crown and the institutions that profited should pay, and a country that found billions for Ukraine is not too broke.

Owen: Beth, the feed screamed about Iran and remigration all day. What did it walk straight past?

Beth: Gas. Real gas, in pipes. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff raised restoring Russian gas sales to Europe through Ukraine, in Moscow and Kyiv, back in September, as part of a push for an energy truce. Today forty-five outlets are carrying the American push. Here's what's on the table. The Times of India reports the arrangement could bypass European sanctions and hand American investors a stake, that Kyiv could earn transit fees, and that a senior European official compared it to Neville Chamberlain sacrificing Czechoslovakia. And the clock is disputed: the Times of India says EU law has every member state off Russian gas by the end of twenty twenty-seven, while the Czech site Ceske Noviny says pipeline deliveries are meant to end in the second half of next year. Which deadline is real decides how much room this deal has. And the strange part: not one take in today's material argues about any of it. Europe's energy future is on the table, and the timeline has no theory. One more whisper: India's opposition is set to hold a mega rally demanding the election chief resign. The week America votes, someone else's election referee is the story.

Owen: Before we go, the only ranking today that nobody's going to call rigged... the posts that actually earned their likes. Rex, take us down the chart.

Rex Diamond: Keep your feed locked and your takes piping hot... it's time for the Daily X countdown, three posts, hand-picked by our editors. At number three... a love story for the ages. Nate Silver, the nation's election forecaster, told venture capitalist Keith Rabois he was, quote, literally kind of insane, end quote. And Keith, with all the tenderness of the season, answered that Nate is, quote, an actual fool or a Democrat plant, end quote. Two very serious men... one beautiful afternoon. Gentlemen, this one goes out to you. At number two... Dharmesh gives the English language a gift. He calls it AI foam... the chatbot writing of your smartest friends, worse than random slop, because you can't tell they've stopped thinking. Friends... we have all been foamed. And now... the number one post on the Daily X countdown... Narinder Kaur rules on a royal rainstorm. The King, she says, was right to be cross... no umbrella, while the Queen stayed perfectly dry. A marital squabble... wearing a crown. Keep climbing, and I'll keep counting.

Owen: Thank you, Rex. Jack's line is the one I'm keeping: very efficient, and too expensive. That's most of the timeline, if we're honest. That's your The Daily X for Monday, the second of November, twenty twenty-six. Somewhere, a usage limit is resetting. See you tomorrow.