Price Fixing at Amazon

by | Apr 27, 2026 | Author Update | 0 comments

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Week Ending April 24, 2026 | Author Update

This week’s biggest publishing stories: Amazon price-fixing emails unsealed by California’s AG, a banned-book campaign that backfired into a bestseller, proposed copyright fee hikes, the latest AI model drops from OpenAI and Chinese rivals, new cover design tools from Author Media, and surprising data on where the money and readers actually are. Here’s what it all means for your writing career.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Price Fixing at Amazon?

California Attorney General Rob Bonta unsealed court documents this week in the state’s 2022 antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The filing reveals emails showing Amazon coordinated with brands to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, Chewy, and Home Depot.

One exchange involves Levi Strauss khaki pants. Amazon spotted lower prices on Walmart. It contacted Levi’s, which then pressured Walmart to raise the price to $29.99. Levi’s reported back that Walmart agreed, and Amazon confirmed it matched the higher price. Similar patterns appear with Hanes apparel, pet food on Chewy, lamps, Skullcandy earbuds, fertilizer at Home Depot, and Allergan eye drops. In one case the brand simply made the lower-priced item unavailable on Walmart so Amazon could maintain its higher price without competition.

Stacy Mitchell highlighted on X how Amazon trained employees to conduct these discussions over the phone or with legally approved talking points. This limited the paper trail while enforcing higher prices across the market.

Attorney General Bonta calls the conduct blatant price fixing that drives up costs for consumers everywhere. California seeks a preliminary injunction to stop the practice. A hearing is set for July. The full trial starts January 19, 2027.

Amazon denies the claims. The company says its policies benefit customers with low prices.

For authors this case hits close to home. Many indie publishers and KDP authors already experience the downstream effects. Price your book lower on your own website, Bookshop.org, or other retailers and Amazon often responds by burying the listing or removing the Buy Box. The evidence now public suggests these tactics form part of a broader strategy to suppress competition on price.

A court victory for California could loosen those restrictions. You might gain real freedom to discount books across channels without risking visibility on Amazon. Direct sales and wider distribution could become more viable.

Thomas’s Take:

Amazon claims it’s trying to offer customers the lowest prices, but it’s not doing so by actually lowering its own prices to match competitors like Home Depot. Instead, it pressures suppliers to raise prices at Home Depot.

This is how markets start to fail. In a truly competitive market, companies are incentivized to offer higher quality at lower prices. But monopolistic behavior undermines that dynamic. Amazon does this in publishing, by crushing royalties on low-priced books to prevent undercutting, and collapsing them on high-priced books to cap the ceiling. That’s market control. It’s even worse on Audible.

The key question is whether regulators will act, since monopolistic behavior is already illegal.

Breaking Amazon’s grip on these markets could open real competition, but Amazon has an unfair structural advantage. Unlike Home Depot, which actually needs its store to be profitable, Amazon is fundamentally a technology company. Its main profit engine isn’t the retail store, it’s AWS, which quietly powers much of the internet, including competitors like Netflix. So whether you’re shopping on Amazon or streaming from a competitor, the money flows back to Amazon either way.

Sources:

“Banned” Book The Camp of the SaintsHits Top 10 on Amazon

After pressure from the /BannedBooks subreddit, Amazon pulled the paperback and hardcover listings of Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints from its U.S. site on April 17, 2026. The company cited a violation of its “offensive content” policy. 

The subreddit r/BannedBooks celebrated the takedown the same day. Screenshots from the subreddit show users declaring the novel “not actually a book,” justifying the action because “it’s a private company,” and claiming librarians would remove it anyway. 

The hypocrisy drew immediate fire on X. User @reddit_lies posted the comments on April 21, which racked up millions of views and replies that mocked the selective outrage. By April 21 evening, the book was back on sale. Redditors then complained that it had “never been banned” and expressed fury at the restoration.

The backlash produced the exact opposite of the intended suppression. On April 22, tech entrepreneur and author David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) reported the novel had climbed to number 6 among all bestsellers on Amazon.  

The Streisand effect played out in real time. An attempt to limit access to a polarizing title about mass immigration overwhelming Western civilization instead handed the book massive free publicity. The r/BannedBooks celebration, paired with X amplification, turned an obscure policy enforcement into a national conversation. Small publisher Vauban Books now reaches readers who had never heard of the novel before the incident. The book remains available directly from the publisher as well.

Timeline highlights

  • April 17: Amazon delists paperback and hardcover (Vauban edition).
  • April 20: Publisher issues statement; r/BannedBooks posts celebration.
  • April 21: @reddit_lies threads go viral; listings restored.
  • April 22: Book hits #6 overall bestseller rank per @dhh.

 Thomas: It’s time for another round of “Was this a book ban?”

This isn’t some leftist crusading subreddit. This is the subreddit r/BannedBooks, which is all about preventing books from getting banned, and they’re trying to get Amazon to delete a book.

When private individuals pressure Amazon to delist a book, is that a book ban? No. The better word is a cancellation. Getting canceled right now is one of the best marketing techniques you can employ. The closer you get to true cancellation, the more money you’ll make.

The Overton window has shifted so dramatically that there’s now a rally-to-the-flag effect. People will rush to defend victims of cancellation, even if they don’t agree ideologically, just to push back agains the cancel mob. There’s a collective fear that you could be next, so if we don’t hang together, we’ll surely all hang separately.

It’s deliciously ironic that this particular cancel mob came from a subreddit called Banned Books.

Jonathan: Society has become so polarized that everyone is locked into a team. It’s automatic. As soon as you hear certain trigger words, it’s rally-to-the-flag time. That’s exactly what happened here. The book got canceled, but everyone used the word “ban” because “ban” is a trigger word. “Book ban” means pick a flag, whether it’s the conservative flag or the progressive flag, and fight.

But in practice, it was just Amazon delisting the physical editions. It’s a cancellation, not a ban. A ban would mean the government declaring the book illegal, with law enforcement backing it up.

Thomas: That said, we have seen cases where supposedly private organizations were canceling people at the as directed by the government. In our upcoming 500th episode, I cover is the censorship industrial complex, which the Biden administration was very much a part of, as revealed in multiple congressional investigations.

To clarify, only the paperback and hardcover got delisted from Amazon. The ebook and audiobook stayed up the entire time, which is the worst way to execute a cancellation. The book got all the street cred of being “banned” without anyone actually being denied access. You could buy the Kindle or audiobook version the whole time.

Now that the paperback is back up, it’s selling like crazy.

Jonathan: Big companies can absorb bad publicity, especially when it’s just authors or conservatives yelling about book banning. But the fact that Amazon kept the highest-margin formats available while dropping the lower-margin physical editions means they made a lot of money off this whole situation.

Thomas: In Amazon’s defense, I suspect the subreddit hijacked Amazon’s automated anti-spam system. If enough people report a problem with a listing using the right trigger words, the system will flag and remove it automatically. So there may be some truth to Amazon calling it a “technical glitch.” They’re saying these people exploited our system, and we’ve since patched that vulnerability.

Sources:

Book Cover Designer 2 is Here

The Patron Toolbox Book Cover Designer has been fixed and improved!

Book Cover Designer 2 is here. Originally built to help authors create temporary covers and reader magnet covers, the tool now offers a significantly expanded feature set.

New features include support for three AI image engines (GPT Image 2, Grok, and Nano Banana) along with a new image editing capability that allows minor tweaks to a cover without regenerating the entire design. That editing feature is a major addition.

Of the three engines, GPT Image 2 currently produces the best results by a clear margin. Grok and Nano Banana may perform better for certain genres or styles, so they’re worth trying if GPT Image 2 isn’t delivering what you need. One caveat is that popular models tend to get watered down over time, so GPT Image 2 is at its peak right now.

I tested all three engines with the same prompt (see below). I tested the image editing feature by requesting it to add a silver cross necklace. The tool then modified the existing image without redesigning the cover.

Authors are free to use Book Cover Designer 2 for placeholder covers or final designs.

View the various cover design results from each image tool in the YouTube video or in the thread at AuthorMedia.social.

  • Grok Imagine Support – We’ve added Grok Imagine to the list of image models you can use. This is worth trying but not the best model because we also have…
  • GPT Image 2 Support – This is far and away the best image model on the market right now.
  • Image Editing Support – You can now chat to an image to make tweaks to it.
  • Nano Banana 2 Support – Here is the same prompt for the above covers run through Google Nano Banana 2.

Here is the prompt I used on all three tools:

Prompt: Title, Genre and Author Name. Then for the Primary Visual Element I wrote: A young woman with long black hair wearing a green dress stands in the dark woods holding a flintlock pistol. The young woman is in color, everything around her is in grayscale.

New Tool: 3D Mockup Maker

I started work on the Patron Toolbox 3D Mockup Maker six months ago, and it is finally ready to share. It turns your flat cover image into a 3D mockup. The big challenge was getting it to design a spine without hallucinating the cover. We finally got it working.

Feel free to share your 3D mockups in the comments of this thread on AuthorMedia.social.

The U.S. Copyright Office published a notice of proposed rulemaking on copyright registration fees in the Federal Register on March 20.

Under the proposal, the single application option would be eliminated. Currently, indie authors can register a single work by one author for $45, but going forward, all applicants would use the standard electronic application, which is set to increase from $65 to $85.

Paper applications would also rise significantly, jumping from $125 to $185. Meanwhile, group registrations for unpublished works or short online literary works would increase from $85 to $130.

Officials say these changes are driven by rising costs. The Office last adjusted its fees in 2020, and expenses have climbed 23 percent since then. The new fee structure is expected to raise cost recovery from 41 percent in fiscal year 2024 to about 53 percent next year, with a long-term goal of returning to the historical level of around 60 percent. Higher fees for certain corporate services are intended to help offset the burden on individual creators.

The single application option, in particular, has created administrative challenges. It has the highest refusal rate, with many submissions failing to meet basic eligibility requirements. As a result, the Office is steering authors toward group registration options, which have proven more efficient.

Authors can submit public comments on the proposal through May 4 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time. A separate inquiry into alternative fee structures, including tiered pricing, is also underway, with comments on those proposals due by June 24.

It’s worth noting that copyright registration is still required before filing an infringement lawsuit in federal court, and a certificate strengthens claims for statutory damages. Many authors already focus on registering only their frontlist titles, and these fee increases could push more writers to skip protection for older works altogether.

The Office says it has designed the new fee schedule to keep services accessible—but whether it strikes the right balance is up for debate. You can review the proposal and submit comments through the Copyright Office website.

And as always, remember to like and subscribe to Author Update for weekly publishing news and analysis.

Thomas: Here’s what’s happening. The volume of content needing copyright registration has surged as more people use AI to generate work, and the Copyright Office is getting flooded. This fee increase is being framed as a tax on authors, but it’s really a tax on people generating AI slop. If you spent 500 hours writing a book, an extra $20 for copyright registration is negligible. But if you’re generating five books a day, that’s an extra $100 a day. This doesn’t hurt human authors in any meaningful way.

Jonathan: Realistically, you’re writing one book every six or seven months, and that’s fast.

Thomas: Exactly. And a faster, higher-quality Copyright Office is worth $85 or $125, depending on your category. It wasn’t just AI-generated content flooding the system, either. More authors suddenly realized that without a registered copyright, they might be excluded from the next class action lawsuit against AI companies, so they rushed to register.

And if you think the Copyright Office has it bad, the Trademark Office is worse — Amazon essentially broke it. For decades, the Trademark Office was a quiet operation where big companies occasionally filed trademarks. Then about three or four years ago, Amazon required third-party sellers to have a trademark as a way to fight cheap Alibaba knockoffs. Submissions went from a few hundred to thousands overnight. That’s why so many of those sellers have company names that look like passwords — random strings of gibberish letters. It’s strategic: the more random the name, the faster the Trademark Office can confirm it doesn’t conflict with existing trademarks and approve it.

These government offices do legitimate, constitutionally enumerated work, and they’re getting swarmed in this new era. They have to scale up. This isn’t something to grab pitchforks over. In fact, the Copyright Office is taking public comment right now, and if you want to push back against AI slop, you should submit a comment asking them to raise the price even higher. That would hit the people publishing five books a day where it hurts.

Jonathan: I’m all for that. Make this a business where only the best can move forward, not people churning out book after book after book.

Sources:
U.S. Copyright Office Fee Study—2026
Federal Register Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Copyright Office Fees
Copyright Alliance Statement and Survey on Fee Proposal
ASMP Advocacy on Fee Increases
X Post by @CreatureAuthor Detailing the Fee Changes

AI NEWS

GPT-5.5 is Here

OpenAI released GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026. The company calls it its smartest and most intuitive model yet, built for complex real-world work including coding, debugging, online research, data analysis, document and spreadsheet creation, and agentic multi-step tasks. In summary, it can do bigger, longer projects.

Key upgrades include stronger contextual understanding, fewer hallucinations on long tasks, more stable tool use, and the ability to operate with less human guidance—advancing toward autonomous “super app” workflows.

GPT-5.5 rolls out immediately to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users (standard version in ChatGPT and Codex). The higher-tier GPT-5.5 Pro goes to Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. API access begins rolling out today with updated safeguards. Pricing for API: $5/$30 per million input/output tokens once live. No native image, audio, or video generation in this release.

Chinese Models Launched Last Week
Two major Chinese releases hit this week, intensifying the global AI race:

Moonshot AI Kimi K2.6 (launched April 20–21, 2026): Open-weight ~1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model (32 billion active parameters). Excels at long-horizon coding sessions (up to 13+ hours), agent swarms (300+ parallel agents handling 4,000+ steps), and complex multi-agent workflows. Native multimodal support. Available now on Kimi platforms.

DeepSeek V4 (preview released April 24, 2026): Two open-source variants under MIT license—V4-Pro (1.6 trillion total parameters / 49 billion active) and lighter V4-Flash (284 billion / 13 billion active). Features a 1-million-token context window (roughly 750,000 words), drastically reduced compute and memory costs, and strong performance in reasoning, agentic tasks, coding, and world knowledge. Optimized for Huawei chips. Preview versions live on DeepSeek platforms and Hugging Face for immediate testing and feedback.

Implications for Authors
These models push AI assistance deeper into drafting, research, outlining, world-building, and even code-heavy tasks (book websites, apps, or interactive fiction). Cheaper, open-source Chinese options could slash costs for indie authors running heavy AI workloads, while agentic features let tools handle longer, more autonomous projects. Publishers and platforms may accelerate AI-content policies as quality and volume rise.

Thomas: Here’s the bottom line. Chinese AI models have closed the gap with American models from about a year behind to roughly six months behind — and they cost a fraction of the price. Per-token costs run around 10% of American equivalents, so for the price of one prompt on ChatGPT 5.5, you might get ten prompts on DeepSeek V4.

That cost difference will matter enormously as subsidies disappear. Right now, tools like Claude Code are generous with free tokens because adoption is still early and friction is high. But in two or three years, once training materials and courses proliferate, those subsidies will vanish. Your $200 subscription will buy you $150 worth of tokens. There will be no more freebies. All the American companies are using a price skimming strategy: charge low now to lock in long-term users, then raise prices over time. We’re already seeing this with API costs, and Anthropic recently removed Claude Code from the $20 monthly plan, so you now need at least the $100 plan.

The Chinese models are using the same strategy, just more aggressively. And because DeepSeek is open source, you don’t have to use Chinese servers. American companies install DeepSeek on U.S.-based servers and sell you tokens directly, which addresses the trust issue. You pay per token rather than subscribing to a Chinese company, and I wouldn’t recommend that.

Sources

OpenAI Launches GPT-Image-2, Supercharging Book Cover Design and Mockups

According to OpenAI, the company released GPT-Image-2 on April 21. This state-of-the-art model powers ChatGPT Images 2.0 and delivers gains in text rendering, instruction following, image editing, and complex visual layouts.

Authors now get precise, usable images from text prompts. The model handles multilingual text, detailed instructions, and refinements with greater accuracy.

Author Media updated two Patron Toolbox AI tools to harness this new model. According to posts on AuthorMedia.social, Cover Designer Version 2 now supports GPT-Image-2. Patrons generate high-quality book covers and then chat directly with the images to make targeted tweaks.

The new 3D Mockup Maker converts 2D book covers into photorealistic three-dimensional versions. It solves earlier issues such as accurate spine design without hallucinations.

These tools give indie authors professional marketing assets. They create compelling covers and mockups for Amazon A+ content, social media ads, and promotional videos in minutes instead of hours or expensive hires.

Strong visuals remain crucial for book sales. GPT-Image-2 combined with specialized author tools lowers the barrier for high-impact design.

Thomas: Here’s the bottom line. Chinese AI models have closed the gap with American models from about a year behind to roughly six months behind — and they cost a fraction of the price. Per-token costs run around 10% of American equivalents, so for the price of one prompt on ChatGPT 5.5, you might get ten prompts on DeepSeek V4.

That cost difference will matter enormously as subsidies disappear. Right now, tools like Claude Code are generous with free tokens because adoption is still early and friction is high. But in two or three years, once training materials and courses proliferate, those subsidies will vanish. Your $200 subscription will buy you $150 worth of tokens — no more freebies. All the American companies are using a price skimming strategy: charge low now to lock in long-term users, then raise prices over time. We’re already seeing this with API costs, and Anthropic recently removed Claude Code from the $20 monthly plan — you now need at least the $100 plan.

The Chinese models are using the same strategy, just more aggressively. And because DeepSeek is open source, you don’t have to use Chinese servers. American companies install DeepSeek on U.S.-based servers and sell you tokens directly, which addresses the trust issue. You pay per token rather than subscribing to a Chinese company — and I’d recommend keeping it that way.

Thomas: This one is genuinely big news. While GPT 5.5 is only a modest improvement over 5.4, Image 2 is leagues ahead of its predecessor, Image 1.5, and ahead of all competitors. It can generate 16:9 images in a single prompt, which it could never do before. I’d actually just canceled my ChatGPT subscription this week because Claude and Grok were better at everything I used it for. But now ChatGPT is the best at image generation, so they may have pulled me back.

Sources:

Authors Guild Adds New AI Clauses to Model Publishing Contract

According to the Authors Guild, the organization added two new clauses to its model publishing contract to block unauthorized use of consumer artificial intelligence tools on authors’ manuscripts and personal information.

The Guild released the statement and recommended language on April 16, 2026, with an update on April 22. Industry reports revealed that editors, agents, and other publishing professionals fed full manuscripts into tools like ChatGPT without author permission. They used the AI to create summaries, assessments, and marketing copy. This practice risks copyright infringement and privacy violations while feeding authors’ work into systems that train future models.

The first new clause reads: “Publisher shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy without written permission from the author or as otherwise agreed to hereunder; and when such permission is granted, it shall ensure that the manuscript is not used by third-party AI companies for training, such as by opting out of allowing training in user settings.”

The second clause states: “Publisher agrees and warrants that it will not use AI to substantially edit a manuscript (excepting the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications).”

Authors Guild Director of Policy and Advocacy Umair Kazi told Publishers Weekly that any sanctioned AI use must run on sandboxed models with guardrails to prevent training on the material. He noted that many reported incidents stem from individuals making quick decisions under deadline pressure rather than official publisher policy. Still, the Guild insists every AI step belongs in the contract.

This update builds on the Guild’s earlier AI clauses introduced in 2023, which already require author consent for AI-generated translations, audiobook narration, cover art, and training uses. Authors and agents can now request the full updated model contract language and push for these protections during negotiations. Publishers that agree to the clauses gain clear boundaries while still allowing limited, approved AI assistance.

The move comes as nearly two-thirds of publishing companies report some AI adoption, according to recent surveys. For indie and traditional authors alike, the clauses give concrete leverage to keep human judgment at the center of editing and marketing. Writers who sign contracts without these protections could see their unpublished work used in ways they never anticipated.

Authors should review their current agreements and negotiate these additions on future deals. Agents can insert the exact Guild language to close loopholes. The full set of AI-related model clauses sits on the Authors Guild website at authorsguild.org/ai-model-clauses.

Thomas: Let’s be clear: publishers have been doing the opposite of what they demand from authors. They ban authors from touching AI while using it extensively themselves. So this contract language is a bit of turnabout.

Looking at the Author’s Guild contract, though, nothing in it affects the Patron Toolbox. The key phrase is “consumer facing,” which I suspect means the free versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and similar tools. AI models operate in three tiers: the free tier, where your data trains the model; the $20 to $30/month subscription tier with greater privacy protections; and the API tier, which is the most expensive but offers the strongest privacy guarantees. The Patron Toolbox uses the API tier. It’s not consumer-facing, not marketed to consumers, and not easy to sign up for, since you have to become a patron first.

The second clause says the publisher warrants it won’t use AI to substantially edit a manuscript.

Jonathan: Our tool doesn’t do that. It doesn’t edit. It just gives you an opinion. It reads your work and gives you a list of things to consider. It assigns homework.

Thomas: So both clauses miss the Patron Toolbox entirely. But I do think this contract will generate some useful transparency, because many traditionally published authors don’t realize how much of what their publishers do is already powered by AI.

Someone in the industry compared AI use in publishing to premarital sex in the 1950s: everyone says it’s wrong, everyone denies doing it, yet the statistics show it’s widespread. That’s an interesting framing shift, because the people in traditional publishing tend to reject 1950s-era moralism. If the anti-AI movement starts to carry that puritanical association, it may not survive.

Jonathan: I actually think it might go the other way. The language of the past decade has been about tolerance, with sayings like “love is love” and “do what you want.” If people frame AI use the same way, saying “books are books” or “this is how I roll,” it could fit that tolerance framework. Although people do love their crusades, especially about things that don’t touch their own private behavior.

Sources:

AUTHOR ALERTS

Author Update Launches New Author Alert Segment

This quick-hit format delivers rapid-fire publishing headlines, platform changes, and industry alerts in concise bursts. 

Cultural Shift: Church Searches Surge Past OnlyFans

According to Google Trends, worldwide search interest for the term “church” is now twice as high as “OnlyFans.” The two terms were tied as recently as 2025.

This marks a sharp spike in faith-related searches in early 2026 while OnlyFans interest has declined. Authors of Christian fiction, spiritual nonfiction, devotionals, and Bible studies may see rising demand as readers turn toward religious content.

Sources:

Super Tickets Sold Out for 2027 Novel Marketing Conference

Super Tickets for the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference sold out. The premium tier included a Thursday pre-conference hands-on advertising workshop. Authors can still register for standard tickets to attend the main January 22-23 event in Austin, Texas, and gain the core marketing strategies and networking opportunities.

Sources:

2027 Novel Marketing Conference Registration Page

Anti-Grammarly Tool Debuts for Authentic Author Emails

Ben Horwitz has launched Sinceerly.com, an AI tool that deliberately adds typos to emails to make them sound human.

The Gmail Chrome extension adds strategic typos, removes AI hallmarks like em-dashes, and offers a slider for humanization levels from subtle to full CEO mode.

This is an indication of how people’s perception of typos is changing. The new vibe is that “Typos Prove Your Human”  

Jonathan: This is like a kid stealing the answer key from the teacher’s office and then deliberately getting a B so no one suspects him.

Thomas: The way people perceive typos is going through a radical shift. Typos used to signal that you were uneducated or unsophisticated. Now they prove you’re human.

So many people are sending AI-generated emails that this tool lets you generate one and then sprinkle in typos to make it seem authentic. It’s the same logic behind audio models that add “ums” and “uhs” to AI speech, even though the AI doesn’t need them. They’re just affectations designed to sound human.

Meta Cuts 10% of Staff for AI Efficiency

According to Bloomberg, Meta will lay off about 8,000 employees on May 20 and leave 6,000 open roles unfilled. The cuts follow the company’s decision to spend $135 billion on artificial intelligence this year alone. Authors who run book ads or build audiences on Facebook and Instagram should monitor ad pricing and algorithm updates closely as Meta streamlines operations.

Microsoft Launches First Voluntary Retirement Program

According to CNBC, Microsoft offered its first-ever voluntary retirement buyouts to about 7 percent of its U.S. workforce. The one-time program targets senior directors and below whose age plus years of service total 70 or more as the company controls costs during its AI infrastructure buildup. Authors who rely on Microsoft 365, Copilot writing tools, or LinkedIn for networking may see faster AI feature rollouts in the coming months.

Thomas: This is a sign of a technological turning point. When a major technological revolution happens, organizations tend to push out experienced people who struggle to adapt, because their expertise stops being an asset. These are people who are very good at reading code by hand, but nobody reads code by hand anymore. Everyone vibe codes now. The ability to read code is becoming far less valuable, and the people who excel at it are expensive.

We saw the same thing when personal computers replaced typewriters in the nineties. There was enormous pressure to retire the older workers who couldn’t adapt and insisted their typewriters were fine.

This is actually a sign that AI isn’t a bubble. It’s going to permanently change the landscape, and the people who fail to adapt are being pushed out or bribed to leave. Microsoft is a good example of the pressure this creates. Their stock has taken a real beating because they’re losing the AI race. They don’t have a competitive AI model of their own, CoPilot is terrible, GitHub has had reliability problems, and Windows 11 is awful.

ZEITGEIST

New Zeitgeist Page on Author Media.com

We are in the process of blogifying all our zeitgeist segments from Author Update and giving them their own page on the website.

Zeitgeist: Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment Exposes Alleged Fraud, Accelerates Vibe Shift on Racism Accusations

According to the United States Department of Justice, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21, 2026. The 11-count indictment charges the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. 

Prosecutors allege the organization secretly funneled more than three million dollars in donor funds between 2014 and 2023 to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America, and others tied to Unite the Right. The SPLC used shell entities with names like “Center Investigative Agency” and “Fox Photography” to hide the payments while it publicly denounced those same groups on its hate map and fundraising appeals.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. Blanche stated the SPLC manufactured racism to justify its existence. He said, “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” Patel added that the group lied to donors about dismantling violent extremists while it paid the leaders of those groups to facilitate crimes. The indictment claims the scheme began in the 1980s with a covert network of field sources known internally as “the Fs.” One informant alone received more than one million dollars while he held a leadership role in the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

The SPLC called the indictment a politically motivated attack by the Trump administration and vowed to fight the charges in court. Several civil rights organizations, including the National Urban League, condemned the move as an assault on the civil rights movement. Former federal prosecutors told CBS News the indictment may contain legal flaws that could lead to dismissal.

This story matters for authors because the SPLC’s hate-group designations have shaped publishing decisions for years. Editors, platforms, and retailers have cited those lists when they drop books, cancel tours, or refuse ads from writers labeled racist or extremist. The indictment now hands skeptics fresh evidence that the organization paid the very extremists it tracked. That revelation lands amid a broader cultural vibe shift. Accusations of racism carry less sting today than they did five years ago. Writers notice fewer knee-jerk cancellations when someone slaps the label on a manuscript that questions progressive orthodoxy on race, immigration, or identity. Readers and reviewers increasingly demand evidence instead of reflexively accepting the charge. The result is a freer atmosphere for authors to tackle uncomfortable topics without automatic career damage.

The shift does not erase real bigotry, but it does weaken the weaponization of the word “racist” by organizations that now face their own credibility crisis. Authors who once self-censored to avoid SPLC-adjacent backlash can write with greater confidence. Publishers weigh risks differently when the old gatekeepers look compromised. The DOJ case, still in its early stages, will play out in court, but the immediate effect is clear: the cultural monopoly on racism accusations has cracked.

Thomas: Alex Jones, our local kook here in Austin, claimed back around 2017 that the Charlottesville rally was funded by the SPLC. And it turns out you have to put money in the “Alex Jones was right” mug again.

Now, the SPLC’s defense is that these were just informants they were paying. But the allegations aren’t that they funded someone embedded in the organization. They were allegedly funding the person running the organization. If your goal is to end racism and you’ve gained financial control over the leader of a hate group, the logical move is to shut it down. Instead, the allegation is that they were generating the very problem they were being paid to solve.

Jonathan: You have to understand how nonprofits work. They don’t sell a product. They claim to correct something in culture: “We’re here to fight racism.” But what happens when racism stops seeming like a serious problem? There’s no reason for your nonprofit, no reason for your CEO salary. So you need to manufacture the problem to keep the donations flowing. You have to keep people churned up about racism, or abortion, or whatever your cause is.

Thomas: My parents once met a couple at church who were professional protesters. Their big cause was protesting Freon and how it was destroying the planet. When my parents asked where their funding came from, it turned out DuPont, the company that made Freon, was paying them. It makes sense once you understand the economics. DuPont’s patent on Freon was expiring, and they were about to face generic competition on a previously high-margin product. They had a new patented product called Puron ready to replace it. So they funded protesters to demonize their own old product, which quietly drove sales of the new one. We’ve seen the same cycle with glyphosate and DDT: perfectly safe while the patent is valid, then suddenly the worst thing ever once the patent expires. This has been happening for 70 years.

And most protests, especially during a workday, involve paid participants. Normal people have jobs. Not always, but most of the time it’s a PR stunt with very calculated strategy behind it. Another thing I learned working as a legislative aide is that most regulations are pushed by the companies being regulated, because they benefit the most. People assume regulation hurts big business, but in heavily regulated industries, only big business can afford to operate.

Jonathan: The little guys get pushed out.

Thomas: Exactly. And that’s why Anthropic constantly does PR about how dangerous AI is. What they want more than anything is regulation, so they don’t have to compete with Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, whose models cost a tenth of the price.

Jonathan: My experience with this is from a completely different angle. It was my job to go after terrorists, and they would hide weapons caches and targets under schools and hospitals. Anyone defending their own population puts military assets in hardened, isolated locations. When you hide them under soft targets, you’re capitalizing on the PR when those sites get hit. That’s what happens with Israel constantly: news stories about hitting a hospital, and no one mentions the weapons depot underneath it. The terrorists don’t care about the collateral damage because the casualties become martyrs for the cause and generate more donations. They throw it into a sympathetic media system and continue propagating their message. That’s how terrorism sustains itself.

Thomas: My prediction is the SPLC indictment is the first of many along similar lines. The racism industrial complex didn’t have a supply of racism sufficient to justify the billions being pumped into the anti-racism industry, so they had a massive incentive to generate racism to fight. I expect these indictments will come spaced about two to six weeks apart, using a PR technique called “trimming the puppy’s tail,” where you release bad news an inch at a time rather than all at once, letting the subject partially recover before the next cut.

Jonathan: That’s probably accurate. Trump is also running a campaign to dismantle institutions he sees as standing against him. He genuinely believes 2020 was stolen.

Thomas: The SPLC had real power. If they said something bad about you, PayPal could cut you off. Banks would close your accounts based on an SPLC report. This institution had enormous influence and received hundreds of millions in donations. For those outside the United States, that’s why this matters. And it’s very unlikely they’ll recover reputationally, because their entire pitch was “give us money to fight racism,” and the allegation is they were funding the Klan and neo-Nazis. This isn’t a garden-variety corruption scandal where you fire one bad apple and clean house.

This is an organization allegedly doing the exact opposite of its stated mission. It’s like an environmental group killing the whales it promised to save.

Jonathan: What I think matters culturally is this: if people see that the SPLC was lying and manipulating them to take their money, using the very cause they were preaching about, nobody tolerates that. It could erode the power of identity-based defenses that have shielded bad actors. For years, if you were part of certain identity groups, you were shielded from criticism because any attack could be deflected as racist, homophobic, or transphobic.

Thomas: And this may accelerate a broader cultural shift. For the last decade, the accusation of racism was the most powerful social weapon available. Just the accusation could end a career. That power is starting to erode. I’m seeing it in the UK and Europe especially, where a growing number of people, including young people, are openly embracing nationalist identities in ways that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Jonathan: To be clear, this isn’t about celebrating racism. The useful shift would be that people can call out corrupt or terrible behavior without facing an automatic defense of “you’re just racist.” That identity shield has protected a lot of bad actors.

Thomas: There’s also a broader erosion of trust in charitable organizations. This has been building for a long time: how much Red Cross money actually reaches hurricane victims? New York City spends around $80,000 per homeless person and has more homeless people than ever. There’s a growing sentiment of skipping the nonprofit and giving directly to people. During the last hurricanes, the advice was to pick a random church in the disaster zone because they’d spend the money better than any major nonprofit.

The SPLC story is the most extreme version of this problem, where the organization was allegedly doing the opposite of its mission. But there’s a much larger pattern of nonprofits that spend most of their money on executive salaries, consulting, and overhead rather than their stated cause.

There’s a fundamental conflict of interest whenever you fund an organization to end something. If they succeed, they cease to exist and everyone loses their income. As the saying goes, it’s impossible to educate someone about something when their livelihood depends on them not understanding it.

Jonathan: For authors, especially those of us writing mission-based fiction, the lesson is: be real. Don’t sound corporate. Don’t sound like the SPLC. Don’t use AI to write your emails, because AI will strip out your personality and center-line everything. People know my emails are real because I say things AI isn’t even allowed to say.

Thomas: I have a friend whose wife went to a local library and was so offended by the sexualized content on display that she was redirecting her kids’ eyes. He wanted to start an alternative library, and the question was whether to do it as a nonprofit or a business. I told him to make it an LLC and charge a subscription. This era of nonprofits and donations is winding down. Feature good, wholesome books. Different curation. If people want the rainbow shelf, it’s right by the door at the public library. If they want the good, the true, and the beautiful, they can find it at yours. For-profit businesses running with a mission-driven purpose may be the path forward in this era, because transactional relationships tend to be more honest than donation-based ones.

Jonathan: In the New Testament, Paul did tent-making so he wouldn’t be a financial burden on the churches he was building. He refused to take a CEO salary from this massive movement he was creating, because he knew how it would look. That protected him from accusations of profiting from the religion he was growing. It’s worth thinking about when you’re deciding how to structure your own mission or business.

Thomas: And if you’re for-profit, you can pay your CEO whatever you want and nobody bats an eye. Just be honest about it. There’s nothing wrong with making a profit.

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