Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week,

including why a seemingly minor announcement from Open AI ended up rippling across several companies

and what it says about the current state of the tech industry. I'm joined today by our

senior politics editor, Leah Feiger. Leah, welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Hey, Zoe.

Our first story this week is about Mark Bray. He is a professor at Rutgers University, and he wrote a book almost a decade ago about

Antifa, and he's currently trying to flee the United States for Europe. This comes after an online

campaign against him led by far-right influencers eventually escalated into death threats. On Sunday,

this professor informed his students that he would be moving to Europe

with his partner and his young children. Okay, Leah, you've obviously been following this really,

really closely. What happened next? Well, Mark and his family got to the airport. They scanned

their passports. They got their boarding passes, checked in their bags, went through security, did everything, got to their gate. And United Airlines told them that between checking in, checking their bags, doing all of this, and getting to their gate, someone had actually canceled their reservation.

Oh, my gosh. It's not clear what happened. Mark is of the belief that there is something nefarious at foot.

He's currently trying to get out. We reached out to United Airlines for comment. They don't have

anything for us. The Trump administration hasn't commented. DHS claims that Customs and Border Patrol and TSA are not

across this. But this is understandably a really, really scary moment for anyone that is even

perceived to be speaking out against the Trump administration. Okay, I feel like we need to back up here

because obviously the Trump administration in this second term is very focused on Antifa.

But can you give me a little backstory on why this has escalated so sharply just recently?

Yeah, absolutely. So this has been growing for quite some time.

Like how many unfortunate rambling speeches have we heard from President Donald J. Trump about how Antifa and leftist political violence was going to destroy the country. To be clear, that's not factual. Antifa isn't actually some organized group. This is an ideology of anti-fascist activists around the country. The very essence

of being anti-fascist is not organized in this way. So this all really kicked off on September 22nd when

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