#if you haven't today go vote! some states' polls are still open!

[party-lemon]

been feeling like I'm gonna have a total sobbing meltdown all day long, how are you guys handling election day lol

[tinystepsforward]

automattic vs wp engine mastterpost

adrienne's GitHub recap is probably the best place to see a comprehensive timeline of what's going down. it's been kept up to date. my (very out of date) previous writeup is here.

what's happened/other links

Matt has not logged off, just switched platforms, so there's lots on X/Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News. it's really not worth wading through.

WP Engine actually filed suit.

the complaint includes some truly remarkable screenshots of Matt trying to blackmail the CEO of WP Engine.

which... personally i would not happily work for someone who just blackmailed me while not even my boss, but that's just me. he hasn't denied this at all, in fact confirming on Hacker News:

I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. [source]

and, notably,

I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share. [source]

this gives me the creeps. in the context of the rest of the way he's talking to her, and the ways in which he's interacted with women in general, it's. not great.

also he slid into an ex-employee (also a woman)'s DMs asking why she was being mean to him bc he'd never been nothing but nice to her, while also making legal threats. so y'know, pattern of behaviour.

a good writeup of the social side of things

if you don't care so much about the open-source stuff, Steph Lundberg's writeup is, like her previous one on Matt's Tumblr meltdown, pretty solid and people-focused.

Mullenweg has already demonstrated egregious lapses in judgment and abuses of power, it’s just that up until now he’s wielded his power against vulnerable populations without access to high-powered lawyers and their own massive platforms.

a more technical writeup

this one is melodramatic in the same ways Matt was (uses war terminology), which i don't agree with, and which led to some... internal arguments at Automattic. that part's not my story to tell, but a little more on that later. it's a solid writeup of the actual WordPress side of things. there's some seriously dodgy trademark behaviour going on here.

of note: this blogger locked comments on his post:

and then Matt, uh, found a way around that:

wild!

10% of Automattic leaves

that's a link to Matt's blog post. here's an Internet Archive link.

in short, staff were offered a severance deal of the higher of $30k or six months' salary. while that's very generous, it's still very risky in today's tech market, especially (for the same reasons i mentioned when Matt was melting down on here) for people outside the US, people who need the health insurance, or people with young kids. despite that, 10% decided with very little notice (they had two days to decide) to leave.

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!

i'm thrilled to see some of my ex-colleagues make it out. i'm keeping the rest who have stayed on in my thoughts. i don't know anyone who's wholesale shilling for Matt.

Matt's been pressuring staff to post in support of him, @-ing the entire company to vote on Twitter polls in his favor, and so on. many of the people who stayed have written blog posts about it, all starting with "I stayed". people on social media have pointed out the very clear pattern of Automatticians jumping into discourse to defend Matt, and it doesn't look good.

i don't have a lot to say about those posts, except to highlight Jeffrey Zeldman, whose "I stayed" post is perhaps one of the more honest ones. (his Rodney King reference was in poor taste, and he... i don't like his role at automattic, tbc) but like. he's nearly 70. he helped shape the modern internet and develop its accessibility standards. he has often put his neck on the line for disabled staff who don't have as much clout as he does. given the financial troubles he talks about and the state of this market and how old he is, i personally have read between the lines of what he's saying in a particular way.

fuck, man. i'm sad. i'm sad for all my friends who are creaking under the strain and watching others leave but who can't do that. i'm sad that many of them are left in teams which are half-empty or divisions where significant senior leadership are just gone, with no time to document what they had in progress.

i'm sad for Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the former executive director of the WordPress Foundation, who was dealing with a personal emergency and ended up having to miss WordCamp US (where Matt started publicly starting shit with WPE). she came back from that to a gigantic fire in the community she's invested a decade of careful, Matt-negotiating, stewardship to, and decided to take the severance offer. she deserved better.

other things Matt's been up to

mostly linking to comments or posts which compile things here, bc it's too scattered otherwise.

blocking people from the official WordPress X account if they disapprove of his actions.

publicly talking about a vulnerability in ACF, a plugin WPE maintains, which could put thousands of sites at risk. this is not normal, and he met with so much horror even from current staff that he deleted his post.

saying he comes across badly because he's "a little ASD", which is driving me personally up the fucking wall. he's never once said it before and he really is turning into Temu Elon.

generally bragging that he still has more planned. jesus fucking christ

continually saying that WPE's suit is against WordPress.org and the community, which is not true. on which note, his pinned tweet is certainly something:

his choice of lawyer is uh. the kind of guy to defend nestle against literal child slaves.

as always, while i think WordPress crumbling will disproportionately affect websites in poorer parts of the world, there are certainly tyrants who are causing much more immediate and potent suffering. if you've read this far, please do send anything you have spare to gazafunds.com.

[bllsbailey]

The Morning Briefing: Trump 47 Reckoning Is Hitting the Dems From All Sides Now

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is spending the day replenishing supplies at the Tri-County Organic Eggnog Collective. 

Once again, it's extraordinary how different the mood is as President-elect Donald Trump is preparing for his second stint in the Oval Office. 

When he won back in 2016, everything was weird. The Democrats immediately threw themselves into a visceral and unhinged tantrum, like they do. Probably half of the Republicans who voted for him were surprised that he won. The noise level was turned up to a zillion and there was confusion all around. 

I remember so many people who had voted for Trump in 2016 doing a lot of hand-wringing whenever they discussed him, as if their lawyers had ordered them to issue a disclaimer at the mere mention of his name. There was still a lot of that going on in 2020 as well. I think that the Democrats were assuming that was still the case here 2024, that we thought Donald Trump was simply our least best option who we felt guilty about voting for. 

It looks like it's beginning to dawn on them and some of the squishes that the MAGA folks are all pretty enthusiastic . We embrace Trump's overhaul of a GOP that had gotten too comfortable with losing to the Democrats. 

Let's look at couple of things from recent news cycles. This is from something Matt wrote about Mitt Romney:  

But hey, when the man is right, we should acknowledge it. In a revealing interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Romney made striking comments about the state of the Republican Party, its future, and the political shifts of recent years.  “Do you think that there's still — you think there's going to be a post-Trump Republican Party, or is MAGA now the Republican Party?” Tapper asked. Romney, who has often been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, left no doubt about where the GOP currently stands.  “Oh, MAGA is the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today,” he said bluntly.

Brilliant! The hand-wringing is healed!

One of the many false narratives that is being destroyed now is the notion that the Trump-supporting MAGA crowd was the fringe of the GOP. It was being perpetuated the Democrats' flying monkeys in the mainstream media, and the Never Trump crowd. It was never true at any point in this election cycle. 

Scott posted an article yesterday that shows that almost everyone is sick of the open borders insanity, with 73% of the respondents in a new poll saying that they favor a strong military presence to deal with the situation. 

My favorite bit of news from the weekend came from Van Jones, who is no stranger to hyperbolic takes on Republicans. Robert reports that Jones explained to Chris Cillizza (formerly of CNN) that Trump is kinda the smartest guy in the room. As Robert noted at the top of his column, the Left has been saying that Republican presidents are stupid for a long time. They started doing that with Ulysses S. Grant. William Howard Taft was probably the last one who they didn't call a paste-eater.

The mainstream media hacks haven't had much familiarity with the truth for a long time. It got worse in 2020 though, and they've been in full-time fiction writing mode since then. These are the people who spent more than half the year insisting that Joe Biden's obvious signs of dementia were a "stutter." 

The work that they did in July and August to make up a Kamala Harris who never existed was stunning. The fictions that they were spinning had no foundations in reality, which is why they are all falling apart so quickly. Perhaps the MSM propagandists are finally collapsing from the exhaustion of propping up Biden and Harris for four years. 

Let's hope the tantrums quiet down for a while so that the adults can get some work done.

Everything Isn't Awful