Politics

In December 2024, I was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the Democrats and other allied interests responsible for burying the audit.

• Adam Zarnowski, ex-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr

See also https://archive.li/QoiuE

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct*. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.*

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber:

“SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.”

Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale.

Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.

So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused.

The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month.

Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently.

Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee:

“In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.”

Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories.

Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.\

archive link

Roughly half of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) resolutions to block the transfer of tens of thousands of bombs and assault rifles to Israel on Wednesday, signalling a small shift among lawmakers as Israel’s famine campaign in Gaza has reached new, catastrophic lows in recent days. On Wednesday evening, 24 senators voted for Sanders’s resolution…

Source

From Ken Klippenstein:

https://bird.makeup/users/kenklippenstein/statuses/1950746760818651325

• Michael Bennet (@MichaelBennet)
• Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal)
• Cory Booker (@CoryBooker)
• Maria Cantwell (@SenatorCantwell)
• Chris Coons (@ChrisCoons)
• Catherine Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto)
• John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman)
• Kirsten Gillibrand (@gillibrandny)
• Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan)
• John Hickenlooper (@SenatorHick)
• Alex Padilla (@SenAlexPadilla)
• Adam Schiff(@SenAdamSchiff)
• Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer)
• Jacky Rosen (@SenJackyRosen)
• Mark Warner @MarkWarner
• Ron Wyden (@RonWyden)

Note: Gallego, Kelly and Slotkin missed the vote.

Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, we've seen an awful lot of political censorship and nothing in the way of saving children. Children's lives have not been improved by this bill, but all of us have seen loss of privacy and loss of information we should be allowed to access in a free society.

There is a petition on the Parliament UK website to repeal the Online Safety Act that I have attempted to sign three times. I still have not received the verification email, meaning my signature has not been counted. I suspect this is deliberate and that many more than the official 427,000 people have attempted to sign.

The government has already responded to the petition by dismissing everyone's concerns and refusing to debate this in parliament. The whole point of parliamentary petitions is to trigger parliamentary debates, but the government is no longer pretending to listen to what we want.

The level of overreach in the Online Safety Act is off the chart. Section 179 bans people from saying something false that could cause "non-trivial psychological harm", potentially banning humour and satire. It could also ban any speech that counters a government narrative and is therefore deemed false.

If your government decides there is no genocide and you say there is, there is nothing stopping them deeming this misinformation and banning you. While you might not think things would go this far, you should remember that at the start of the Ukraine war, social media users were banned for challenging the narrative, including popular YouTubers like Lee Camp, Glenn Diesen and Rachel Blevins. Their message was peace and many of the things they were banned for are now accepted as true, such as arguing the war was unwinnable and could lead to World War III.

The Ministry of Truth now gets to decide which online content is factual or harmful and that will always be a political decision. There is no impartial way of doing this, and aside from anything else, people in a free society are allowed to say what they want. No one needs to be protected from speech.

It is incredibly easy to label any challenge to the official narrative as harmful. Those who opposed the Iraq war were being harmful because they were "Saddam sympathisers". Those who opposed the Afghanistan war were "terrorist sympathisers". Those who oppose Israel's genocide are "antisemites". Those who oppose the Online Safety Act are "paedos". You see how easy it is to label opposing views as harmful?

Your right to speak is at the discretion of bureaucrats, artificial intelligence, and social media bosses, all of who can silence anyone under the guise of protecting the public. So much for the marketplace of ideas.

Predictably, the backlash against the Online Safety Act has been enormous, so it's going to be interesting to see Labour's standing in future polls. In all likelihood, it will not even be one of the top three parties, and for a party of government, that is insane.

The government is now so desperate that it is resorting to calling people paedophiles for opposing the Online Safety Act. Given most people oppose the implementation of the Act, they are accusing a majority of the population of paedophilia. It's hard to see how their messaging could be worse.

Peter Kyle is a guy who reportedly once called the police on a constituent who wrote to him about Gaza, resulting in a 4am raid on his home. It seems Peter is greatly concerned about the safety of children, unless those children are in Gaza...

A government that has contempt for its public and acts with sheer disregard for their wants and needs cannot reasonably be described as democratic. A government that is giving itself increasing powers, instead of responding to public opinion is, by definition, authoritarian.

And this authoritarianism is hardly confined to the UK...

Have you considered it strange that countries across the world suddenly decided online safety measures were needed simultaneously? Almost like this was coordinated... Even the US is trying to get around its pesky first amendment with multiple bills aiming to censor online speech, such as the Kids Online Safety Act.

If the US can't introduce such laws, it will depend on so many of its allies introducing censorship rules that they become the new global standard. It will reach a point where it's easier for big tech to censor the entire planet than have different sets of rules for different countries. This means we will be subjected to the most draconian interpretation of the most draconian rules from around the globe.

The US has already banned foreigners from criticising Israel which is ironic considering Marco Rubio goes around the world lecturing other countries on free speech. Now it is trying to ban its own citizens from criticising Israel through the Stop Hate Act - a bill backed by the Anti-Defamation League that would fine social media companies $5 million a day for not removing posts critical of Israel.

It's not just the ADL that is demanding censorship, there are all kinds of shady groups that have been engineering this for years, such as the Global Coalition for Digital Safety. One member of the GCDS, Melanie Dawes, just happens to be the head of OFCOM.

While they're pretending this is all about "safety", these censorship measures are putting you at risk. Your personal data is being processed by companies that are registered abroad and therefore do not come under our jurisdiction. There is nothing stopping those companies handing your data over to hostile governments or selling it on the black market, and even if they don't, your data is now an easy target for hackers.

The UK government has not made the slightest attempt to protect your data or your right to free speech. It has instead ignored every recommendation that could have kept you safer and focused on measures that have nothing to do with child safety. As the Adam Smith Institute points out, “80% of the legislation [is] more concerned with censorship, the powers of Ofcom, and non-safeguarding matters.”

Age verification has already gone so much further than pornography sites and social media companies. Even Spotify is demanding age verification, for god's sake. If you fail to verify your age, or the facial recognition AI thinks you are under 18, your account gets deactivated!

YouTube is now using AI to monitor your every key stroke without your consent. Are you comfortable with this? Is it making you feel safer? What about if your government demands access to this information?

YouTube's surveillance still isn't enough for Australia which is about to ban under-16s from using the platform, a platform that already does not allow adult content and demands age verification for anything remotely sensitive.

If you're still unclear why that might be, just consider that TikTok has hired a former IDF instructor to decide what its users can and can't say about Israel's genocide.

All these measures are primarily about monitoring and censoring critics of Israel and western imperialism. Peter Kyle let the cat out of the bag when he pleaded with the public to not use VPNs. He insisted that verifying your identity keeps children safe, but it literally doesn't.

It makes no difference to a child whether adults access restricted content by age verification or a VPN. The only relevant factor is that if you use a VPN, the government can't spy on you. Kyle is mad that you are circumventing government surveillance. That's it.

VPNs are seeing a huge surge in users because people do not want to be spied on or put their personal information at risk. The government does not give a crap about what they want and is trying to force them to do something without their consent.

A ban on VPNs would not help children in any way because your nine-year-old isn't signing up to a VPN. A ban on VPNs would simply enable your government to spy on you.

Some internet service providers are already blocking access to VPNs, even though there is no legal requirement to do so. They implicitly understand what is expected of them so they're doing it anyway.

As if all this isn't enough, the government is looking at introducing a digital ID called BritCard, a move that could give them real-time data on every website you visit, every person you interact with online, every company you do business with, every real place you go.

Imagine having to inform the government every time someone visited your house, every time you went to a shop, every time you made a telephone call. You would call that totalitarianism. What we are seeing here is the emergence of digital totalitarianism.

What has come so far from the Online Safety Act is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, websites will be required to let the government access their source code and algorithms and even your DMs. It's a matter of time until they are enforcing the algorithmic suppression of content they dislike and arresting people for private conversations.

If you still believe the Online Safety Act is about protecting children, there truly is no hope for you. This bill is not making a safer world for children, it's making a world in which they cannot see unauthorised opinions and are not entitled to privacy.

This explains why the bill has attracted criticism from across the political spectrum, from the likes of @owenjonesjourno to Alex Armstrong. Only the most pro-establishment weirdos, who would be happy for the government to put cameras in their bathrooms, could think the Online Safety Act is okay.

Thank you for reading. All of my content will always be freely available, but if you wish to support my work, you can do so at Ko-fi or Patreon. Likes, shares and comments also help massively.

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For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer was perhaps the most dangerous job in America.

Unbelievably, it was Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin that finally revealed the actual numbers behind the panicky percentage claims. A 690% increase in assaults meant nothing more than this: ICE officers had been “assaulted” 69 more times since the beginning of this year as compared to the same six-month period last year.

Now, there’s even more bullshit to unpack. “Assault” means something else to law enforcement officers who want to claim they’ve been assaulted than it means to them when they’re filling out paperwork for assaults reported by citizens. According to ICE and other law enforcement officers, “assault” means anything from getting handed a beating to simply being inadvertently bumped when “interacting” with regular people while performing their public duties.

That’s exactly what happened in Ontario, California, when a masked officer claiming to be an ICE officer attempted to enter a private area of a private building — namely, the inner rooms of a surgery center. Employees of the surgery center demanded identification and a warrant — something well within their rights. In response, they got refusals and one employee got an ICE forearm to their throat.

Supposedly, there’s an assault in here but all I see is someone instinctively reacting to an assault by an ICE officer — one in which the employee did nothing more than place a hand on the officer’s arm in hopes of dissuading the officer from further assaulting their coworker:

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another…. wait for it… ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T13:55:16.100Z

While the officer was probably salty that the staff managed to separate him from the person he had illegally entered private property to pursue, having someone stand between you and your illegal acts is not engaging in assault. Instead, it’s you — the federal officer — who is both ignoring the constitutional limits on your power as well as refusing to respect the protections extended to the people you actually serve: the general public.

Once this recording began circulating on social media, the Trump administration reacted like it always does: by piling lies on top of lies before scattering some criminal charges on top of its mountain of bullshit. David Bier’s thread on Bluesky unpacks all of it extremely well, but let’s hit some of the high points.

First, there’s the government’s bullshit, which was, of course, delivered by DHS head Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, Tricia McLaughlin:

In a statement to KTLA about Tuesday’s incident at the surgery center, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said:

“ICE officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation to arrest two illegal aliens. Officers in clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests approached the illegal alien targets as they exited a vehicle. One of the illegal aliens, Denis Guillen-Solis who is from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement. He ended up near the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center where hospital staff assaulted law enforcement and drug the officer and illegal alien into the facility. Then, the staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’”

First off, it’s not “obstruction” to prevent someone from engaging in an illegal act, even if that person claims to be a federal officer. Even federal officers are not allowed to engage in warrantless searches of private areas not open to the general public.

As for “clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests,” don’t make me choke on my own bitter laughter. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars of equipment can crank out an embroidered patch at home that contains the same letter and then attach it to anything they’ve picked up from the local military surplus outlet. ID cards, badges, and warrants might be just as easy to fake, but that still doesn’t explain why this alleged officer refused to provide any of those things when asked to, as though all that was needed was an embroidered patch and the willingness to violate the Constitution.

There’s even more bullshit in this response, but those are the things that can be immediately gleaned from the officer’s actions, the surgical center employees’ response, and the DHS’s belated attempt to paper over a clearly illegal act one of its employees attempted to carry out.

The government is now pressing assault charges against two of the surgical center employees. That affidavit [PDF] directly contradicts the claims made by the soulless cretin currently employed as the assistant secretary of the DHS.

McLaughlin claimed this was a “targeted enforcement operation” seeking a known criminal. The charging documents say otherwise, as KTLA points out in its follow-up reporting:

According to an affidavit filed in the case, the confrontation began after two immigration officers conducting roving immigration enforcement operations in Ontario followed a truck carrying three adult men. The vehicle pulled into the parking lot of a local surgery center, and two of the men fled on foot when approached by agents.

There it is: ICE was just driving around looking for people who looked foreign and then sprung into action when the officers came across a few Hispanic-looking men. There’s nothing illegal about fleeing a non-consensual stop, but the ICE officer who followed the man into the surgical center apparently thought otherwise.

And that’s where the affidavit begins to fall apart. The government claims “exigent circumstances” (namely “hot pursuit”) completely nullified the Fourth Amendment. But the government is wrong. It doesn’t do that automatically in all cases and it especially doesn’t do it when the only suspected crime isn’t a violent offense. Fleeing from an officer isn’t always probable cause for further pursuit and/or arrest. Neither does looking sorta Mexican while doing it, as a federal court in California forcefully pointed out recently.

Even if you ignore those two factors, you’re left with the suspected “crime” of being in the country illegally, which is actually a civil law violation. And civil law violations don’t justify the abuse of warrant exceptions like “hot pursuit.”

The government probably won’t drop these charges because it’s too invested in pushing the narrative that ICE is beset on all sides by assailants. But it would be the smart thing to do because it’s going to have to explain why these officers chose to ignore the Constitution en route to being “assaulted” by people unwilling to be pushed around by thugs pretending to be interested in anything resembling actual law and order. And for the rest of us, we have another data point indicating that the exponential increase in “assaults” on ICE officers is likely just a whole lot of stuff like this where people are reacting normally to masked officers who choose to behave like rogue agents.

Article from 2020

We need more people like this in our government here in the USA.

As for the long term, candidates should enthusiastically address the need to restore sanity and good government to the country after Trump is gone.

I’d like to see people campaign on something along the lines of a 10-point plan. And my first draft is something like this:

1. Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.
2. Stop mass deportations. That includes defunding ICE, closing concentration camps, restoring temporary protected status, respecting asylum claims, ending to the harassment of people on visas, and welcoming more international students.
3. Revive the civil service. That means hiring back tens of thousands of workers who were driven out, undoing organizational changes, reestablishing the tradition of a nonpartisan bureaucracy.
4. Restart international aid.
5. Invert Trump’s tax changes, to increase taxes on the rich and lower them on the middle class.
6. Restart the Green New Deal and restore environmental protections.
7. Condition Israeli aid on humane treatment of Palestinians.
8. Restore the role of science in government decision-making.
9. Reassert support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
10. Support human rights for all, including trans rights.

Is it too early to start talking about how to roll back Trumpism? What do you think of my list? And what did I leave out? Please discuss in comments.