Politics

You Have Committed Mortgage Fraud

Yes, you, dear reader. Or, I mean, maybe not. But in this day and age, you never know!

Endeavorance

15 Oct 2026 — 9 min read

I briefly unraveled the fabric of reality, but Stuff still Happened.

So, what's up?

Contracts & Coworkers

Employees of Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast have announced the formation of a union with the Communications Workers of America, seeking recognition from Hasbro and fair compensation for the people who make them profit.

Wizards of the Coast is the company that makes Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering among other projects. The union includes a wide range of individual contributors across many Wizards properties.

According to the union's announcement, they are seeking, among other things…

Better compensation standards
Stronger job security mechanisms
Accessible healthcare options
Hybrid work options
AI protections

This wasn't the first step by far, and is far from the end of their efforts as well. From here, if Hasbro suddenly decides to enhance their chill and recognize the union, there will still be negotiation efforts which can still take years in come cases. Yet, with a unionization effort making progress, and now with the support of the CWA, workers are in a stronger position to make their demands.

Wizards has already said they won't voluntarily recognize the union. But that's not the end of the road.

It certainly doesn't hurt that this unionization effort is supported by the consumers of Wizards properties as well as several high profile people in the world of "Actual Play" shows—a popular show format featuring people playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, often in real time. Such shows have been the beating heart of the Dungeons & Dragons boom over the past decade or so.

You Have Committed Mortgage Fraud

You are a criminal. Specifically, you have committed mortgage fraud. I mean, maybe you haven't, I dunno—but that is irrelevant to the well-established fact that you have committed mortgage fraud.

The Trump administration is no stranger to doing the things they claim were done to them. In this case, we're gonna look at "weaponizing the Department of Justice," which Trump and his ilk have routinely claimed was a major feature of the Biden presidency.

Biden's Department of Justice was far from great. And it did indeed investigate Trump. Though, and I may need to double check on this, I'm pretty sure Trump is now the President of the Country Again rather than In a Jail Cell Forever For the Obvious Crimes He Constantly Does.

And yet, when we look at the Department of Justice under Trump's second term, we'll find a fascinating pattern: critics of Donald John Trump just love to do mortgage fraud, specifically.

Put simply, the Trump admin has been going after political rivals with bullshit allegations of mortgage fraud in such a routine fashion that I'm genuinely confused why they keep doing it. So far this term, we've seen the Trump DOJ go after the following people in some way for mortgage fraud, be it investigations, referrals, or public statements by the president asserting their guilt:

New York AG Letitia James, who brought the civil fraud case against Trump in NY. The charges were dropped due to the illegal appointment of the prosecutor, and a grand jury refused to re-indict her. Twice.
Adam Schiff, a prominent Democratic critic of Trump. The probe has since "stalled".
Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Governor (and Black woman) who Trump very much wants to remove from her post but can't just do that. The investigation hasn't resulted in anything since August of 2025 when it began.
Eric Swalwell, disgraced former elected Democrat roiled by sex pest allegations, and prominent critic of Trump.
Fani Willis, Fulton County District Attorney who pursued investigations into Trump.

In order from top right to bottom left: Adam Schiff, Fani Willis, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Eric Swalwell

And recently, they've gone after Lisa Cook again after the first investigation has still failed to produce results. Trump has been trying to fire Lisa Cook from her role at the Federal Reseve, but when the Supreme Court held that he couldn't do that arbitrarily, he decided to put together a committee to "probe allegations of mortgage fraud"—his own fucking allegations that haven't resulted in anything in over a year of investigation.

A reasonable person would ask here, "seems odd, but surely it isn't out of the ordinary for politicians to be pulling off white collar crimes?" And, I mean, fair! There's a whole lotta crimes going on in our government. But unless we specifically turned over a new chapter in our Justice Department focused purely on rooting out long-shot vibes-based mortgage fraud, it may be more of a targeted use of the Department of Justice.

I dunno, maybe like a… weaponization? Of it?

Back in September of 2025, Reuters dug into the Justice Departments spree of mortgage fraud investigations into very specific targets. They reviewed 600 cases involving misstated information to lenders. Only 20 involved lying about a primary residence, and of those, only one was charged solely for the primary residence information rather than as a part of a larger criminal scheme.

It also doesn't help the administration's case that Trump has personally and publicly asked his own sitting Attorney General to prosecute specific people who he deemed "guilty." That… that is also… I mean… yeah.

A Quieter Internet? Perhaps Not.

Ukraine recently struck multiple data centers in Russia belonging to Yandex, a Russian tech company. They offer a search engine and internet services platforms, similar in scope to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Shortly after the strike, graphs of Russian bot traffic began circulating around the social web. People reported a dramatic drop in what they believed to be Russian bots posting inflammatory stuff online, and we all got the immediate satisfaction of knowing that our preconception of Russian bots being the root of all our problems was correct!

"Bot Traffic" chart from Cloudflare, showing a dramatic drop in traffic after the data center strike

Or… was it? Because—and I am so sorry—it's time for a Stuff Keeps Happening Party Pooper Fact Check Segment™!

The fact check is that no, kinda, mostly no, that's not what happened. But sorta!

The Cloudflare analytics graph circulating around the internet is real. It shows measurements of web traffic coming from Yandex data centers. After the Ukranian strike, two Yandex data centers went fully down, with another damaged and operating at limited capacity. Some other graphs were also circulating with various levels of dubious sourcing.

We know that Russian social media influencing campaigns are a thing. And really, it's not just Russia, but they're one of the more visible state actors here.

Traffic analytics looking at "bots" coming from Yandex data center networks noted a sharp decline, as one would expect when the servers are vaporized. But the traffic measured isn't the same "Russian bot" traffic as most people online think about it: you know, the ones with a handle like @MagaMommy88 with twelve US flag emojis in their name and a bible quote in their profile.

Note: not a real screenshot, just an extremely realistic simulacrum

While it very well may be the case that some bots were hosted on Yandex infrastructure, I find it most likely that the vast majority of the reduction in traffic is just that Yandex's systems couldn't reach out to the internet to continue to index webpages and scan for new data.

Google, Yandex, and every other search engine has what's called a "crawler" which is a sort of bot that just tries to follow links it sees on a webpage so that it can read and store that webpage in their database. This is what powers their search engine, and anyone who has looked at web analytics knows that it's just a part of normal web traffic.

But that doesn't answer why people all over the internet—even Zelenskyy himself—noted the drop in influencing bot activity across online social spaces. Perhaps you, dear reader, noticed a drop yourself! And that may have been real!

However, researchers whose full time focus is tracking and monitoring Russian bot traffic may disagree. According to them, there wasn't any meaningful disruption to influence campaigns online.

My semi-educated guess remains that a non-insignificant amount of automated social media influence bots were disrupted, causing a relative drop. Then, I assume people started looking for it and found confirmation bias, or perhaps truly did feel a reduction, coincidental or otherwise.

As it stands, the simple narrative of "data center got bombed, now Russia's influence campaign is ruined!" is likely exaggerated, though it would be wrong to say that it had no effect.

If your takeaway from this is anything, let it be that "bot traffic" doesn't necessarily mean "adverse operations from a foreign adversary" in the context of internet analytics. That, and when a story seems to line up perfectly with your preconceptions, take a beat to question it before celebrating.

Teach Them Kids

Can't just give 'em a frickin' packet, yo.

Students across France are protesting en masse, demanding that their government better fund education.

The demonstrators cite inflated class sizes, inadequate facility upkeep, and wide gaps in education quality for disadvantaged students, among an ongoing backdrop of anger from French residents over a worsening economy.

The protests have taken the form of blockades around schools, class boycotts from students, and marches in the street for the past few weeks, and the response from authorities has been harsh.

Riot police have deployed tear gas, swung batons, and shot rubber bullets at the protestors, many of whom are minors due to it being a student-centric demonstration. This past Monday, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after police used a stun grenade on protestors, escalating things quite a bit.

France's President Macron is not able to run again, and the state of the country after almost a decade of Macron in power hasn't left people feeling particularly great about things. Among other things, he oversaw massive tax breaks for corporations in France, dropping the corporate tax rate from 33% to 25%—a deeply America-coded move that auditors have cited as a factor in an ongoing degradation of France's fiscal foothold.

So far, the response from the French government has yet to meet the demands of the demonstrators. After the incident with the minor losing a hand, they suspended the use of stun grenades in this specific use case. Otherwise, there's slight movement in the French government towards "tackling the problems," but so far there's not been a meaningful solution offered by the state.

Solidarity, as always.