I opened my Sunday ink-on-paper New York Times to see my senator, Elissa Slotkin, wearing a grave expression in a Page One photo. The story was about increasing threats of violence to public officials. (Gift link, as always.)

Also “as always,” the copy bent over backwards to both-sides it. Subhed: Thousands of violent messages targeting U.S. Politicians Across Party Lines. The copy: They aimed at Republicans and Democrats alike, and at a range of officeholders from county clerks to United States senators. And the photo of Slotkin, a Democrat, was paired with one of Rodric Bray, a Hoosier state senator and a Republican.

But dive deeper and one politician in particular appears to be the wellspring from which the lion’s share of this violence flows. You’ll never guess who.

Consider the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example:

What started out as a flood of threats primarily from the left evolved into menace from the right, too, after Ms. Greene’s break with President Trump last fall.

Ms. Greene’s dispute with the president centered largely on Jeffrey Epstein, the sexual predator who eventually killed himself in jail. Like many on the far right, Ms. Greene had agitated for the release of government files pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Then she began agitating directly against the president she had once fawned over, when his government refused to do so.

Her disillusionment expanded after Mr. Trump took the country to war against Iran. She believed his tariff policies and curtailment of health subsidies were hurting her constituents in rural northwest Georgia, she said, and flouting his promise to put “America First.”

…Ms. Greene reached out to Mr. Trump, hoping for compassion from a president she had stood by for years. She forwarded copies of the threats to him, hoping that seeing the threats against her family would be enough to tone down the attacks.

She got a five-word reply from the president: “Your fault, you deserve it.”

Ah, why go through this again? You can all read it; it’s a good story. And I know why the NYT feels it can’t put a foot wrong in this environment. And yes, yes! CHARLIE KIRK WAS ASSASSINATED. That was a bad thing, a very bad thing, if only because it pushed Erika Kirk into our brainpans, and that has been excruciating. Still, though: Let’s not let quote-unquote fairness undermine facts.

Meanwhile, here’s another thing to make you wish for an early death: Muse, the AI agent Mark Zuckerberg thinks you need:

In September, small businesses around the country started receiving strange phone calls. “Hi, this is [Name],” they would begin before informing the recipient they were calling on someone else’s behalf. “I’ll be transcribing this call,” they would disclose, then launch straight into a request: “I’m looking for a quote to install three bidets”. Or: “I’d like to book a karaoke room.” Or: “I’d like to place a cake order for pickup today.” Some businesses simply proceeded, asking follow-up questions about the cake, getting answers, and logging the order. Others were more reluctant to continue. “Are you AI?” asked an employee at a Seattle karaoke place. “I need the real person.” Asked if he could help with the “customer-supplied” bidet job, a Colorado plumber replied with a question of his own, which was automatically transcribed, sort of: “Can you soak my dick?”

The mysterious calls came through Muse, an AI-assistant tool released by Meta last month, which the company says “handles it all” — including online shopping, purchasing flights, making reservations, managing inboxes, and, for some users, booking things over the phone. While internal documents leaked to 404 Media indicate that some of the calls in question may have been joint AI-human enterprises — with a call-center employee taking a handoff from an AI agent before sending the task back again — from the recipients’ side, it didn’t really matter. Suddenly, they weren’t talking directly to their customers anymore.

Did you ask for this? Because I did not. I don’t know anyone else who asked for this, either. I would like to invite Muse, and Mark Zuckerberg, to soak my dick.

Happy Wednesday.