Politics

We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis on the day they publish their new book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, which looks at how the DOJ during the Biden administration was overly cautious in pursuing cases against Trump and his allies over 2020 election interference, the January 6 riot and more. Attorney General Merrick Garland felt it was important to “turn the page from Donald Trump” and not look too closely at abuses of power, says Leonnig, who also stresses many “stubbornly brave people … tried to do the right thing and could not succeed in this institution.”

A court has found Tommy Robinson to be innocent of a terror-related offence. It follows a border stop in which Robinson refused to hand his phone over to the police. Unfortunately, it’s far from the first time authorities have used terror legislation as a blanket excuse to do whatever they like.

Robinson detained under Terrorism Act

As reported by the BBC, Tommy Robinson was stopped by the police at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. It was there that he was asked to give his phone pin over, and it was there that he refused because he claimed to have “journalist material” on his device. As he was detained under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, police had the right to demand that he unlock his phone, but Robinson refused.

This is what we wrote during the trial:

Now, we here at the Canary don’t consider Robinson to be a journalist because he isn’t one; he’s a political activist who uses the veneer or journalism to push a far-right agenda. At the same time, we are very much opposed to the Terrorism Act and the inevitable overreach which results from it.

Anyone can be arrested at any time for refusing the police access to their electronic devices when ordered to do so under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. No suspicion is required.

No one should support the prosecution of Tommy Robinson under this legislation.

— Gyll King Post Skip Diplomacy (@GyllKing) October 13, 2025

Highlighting how terror legislation is frequently used to abuse civil liberties, Emily Apple wrote the following for the Canary back in 2016:

The police have shown repeatedly that they regard fracking protesters as an extremist threat. Fracking protesters have been included in Prevent training about extremism, and campaigners questioned under anti-terrorism legislation at airports.

The government’s proscription of Palestine Action is the most significant misuse of terror legislation to happen recently:

The Met Police in effect confirms that the govt’s decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group is “drawing resources away” from defending the public from actual terrorism. Who would have thought? pic.twitter.com/K1gvb1MCRJ

— Mark Curtis (@markcurtis30) October 4, 2025

EXCLUSIVE: A Scottish counter-terrorism board found that Palestine Action’s activities fell below the threshold to be considered terrorism before the group were banned by Labour, The National can reveal pic.twitter.com/FJ85pTlqpQ

— The National (@ScotNational) October 14, 2025

If people have broken the law, that needs to be resolved in some fashion. The problem is successive governments and police services have decided that opposing them is an offence in itself – even when said opposition does not cross the threshold of illegality.

This state overreach needs to stop.

When I read the full transcript of the interview, I realized there had been no pushback, no corrections, no challenging follow-ups. The entire interview had been an open-ended opportunity for Trump to tell rambling lies, only to have them cleaned up into a more polished product.

Fox News has run a report covering a series of AI-generated videos:

this is a viral string of AI videos and fox news reported on it like it’s a real person?! https://t.co/cbSGu8hNab

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) October 31, 2025

This isn’t a sign of what’s to come in future; this is a sign that outlets are abandoning any notion of objective journalism right now.

Fox News’ slopaganda

At the end of September, OpenAI released the Sora 2 video generator. While the app doesn’t always achieve photo realism, some of the videos it creates are disturbingly lifelike. This means people can now generate ‘deepfakes’ at the click of a button.

The Fox News article is still live despite people screaming ‘THIS ISN’T REAL’ at them. In the piece, Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi writes:

SNAP beneficiaries have expressed outrage on social media over the government shutdown that could affect their grocery benefits starting next month, and some are even threatening to ransack stores if food stamp payments don’t go through starting Nov. 1.

“It is the taxpayer’s responsibility to take care of my kids,” one emotional mother said in a video posted online. “It is the taxpayer’s job to pay for my kids to eat and for my kids to be taken care of.”

The same woman also complained about how none of her TikTok followers had sent her money, warning she would block anyone who viewed her videos without sending cash.

“Because of the government shutdown, now I can’t get my SNAPs for next month,” another user shared on social media.

The user went on to ask how she was supposed to feed her seven children.

“I have seven different baby daddies and none of ‘em no good for me,” she said.

Is Fox News going to retract the story about a Black woman with seven children by seven different men needing her SNAP funding? The story about the woman is AI generated, designed to enrage viewers. Fox needs to vet videos they find on TikTok before they use them.

— Ann C from Maine (@anniemgc) November 1, 2025

The videos mostly feature Black women who are speaking as if they’re in a racist cartoon from the 1920s. As the Fox article notes, one of those reacting to the videos is right-wing commentator Brett Cooper:

Our media ecosystem is so fucked truly

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) October 31, 2025

The question now is this: are Fox News writers too stupid to pick up on the signs of AI, or do they simply not care?

Deepfakes

People are highlighting that this situation was all very predictable:

This is just the beginning of how they will use AI. pic.twitter.com/aLxeEYBq3o

— Caroline Renard (@carolinerenard_) October 26, 2025

In the video above, TikToker Jeremy Carrasco says:

This is AI. Here’s how we know and why it matters.

It’s made by Impossible_ASMR1, who – after eight failed slop posts and a three-month break – decided that Sora could finally make their dream content – videos of black women trying to use [Electronic Benefit Transfer] in places it’s not accepted.

True creativity unleashed by AI.

The shutdown created an opportunity to have them yell at the camera, but it’s not until the whole family’s back there, that the full racist stereotype is fulfilled. This is rage bait, and will get angry commenters who – when they learn it’s AI – will say, ‘oh, but it’s true anyway’. Which of course it’s not, and that’s cope for being played.

They were so played they didn’t notice the kid missing half an arm while the other kids are frozen in place for no reason, and these down here are warping together. They were too focused on this fake AI person cramming in a script that they used three other times for their other fake AI people.

Decline of the times

The EU has already regulated AI, making it mandatory that:

Content that is either generated or modified with the help of AI – images, audio or video files (for example deepfakes) – need to be clearly labelled as AI generated so that users are aware when they come across such content.

The problem is, what happens when they don’t?

While there are no perfect solutions, Fox News can and should pay people to check that the content they’re reporting on is real. After all, if they can afford to settle a $750m defamation lawsuit, they can afford to do basic fact checking.

Zohran Mamdani speaks at a rally in Queens on Saturday, November 1, during the final stretch of the campaign. (Photo: Meghnad Bose)

Former Governor of New York and mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo’s billionaire donors have launched an expensive eleventh-hour effort to disparage his electoral opponent, Zohran Mamdani, splurging on attack ads against the Democratic nominee. The late surge drove independent campaign expenses in this election over the $50 million mark on Thursday, with more than $12 million spent in the second half of October alone.

Independent expenses are those made by groups such as super PACs, and the groups are not supposed to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. However, over the course of this NYC mayoral election, Cuomo’s campaign was hit with two separate penalties totalling $1.3 million for suspected coordination with Fix The City, a super PAC backing him.

Since early voting began on October 25, two billionaire-backed, anti-Mamdani super PACs—Fix The City and Defend NYC—have shelled out over $2.6 million in campaign ads, out of which nearly $2 million has been spent on attacking the Democratic nominee.

An analysis by Drop Site News shows that as of Thursday, independent expenses backing Cuomo were more than seven times the amount of money put behind Mamdani. Cuomo has exceeded Mamdani by a staggering $36 million in outside support. The difference highlights just how much independent expenses can skew the overall financial support behind a candidate.

Subtracting independent expenses, the Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns are on a more even financial footing, partly due to matching funds from the city. Mamdani’s campaign has had $17 million at its disposal, of which $13 million came from public funds, while Cuomo’s campaign has had $14 million available, of which $8 million was from public funds.

Yet, once the independent expenses are added, the total amount backing Cuomo or targeting Mamdani totals $56 million—close to two and a half times of the amount backing Mamdani or attacking Cuomo.

The largest super PAC supporting Cuomo, Fix The City, has alone spent $28 million, or 55% of all independent expenses in the election. The super PAC has already raised an additional $7.2 million, which is likely to be infused in the days leading up to polls closing on November 4.

The $51 million in independent expenses in this NYC mayoral race, with still a few days left for polls to close, is already 160% of the total independent spending amount in the 2021 election. In 2017, independent spending was less than $250k, and in 2013, the amount was just over $8 million.

Graphs depicting campaign spending versus independent expenditures between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral race (Graphs made by authors)

Graph depicting differences in total spending between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo (left) and graph depicting amount Fix The City has spent on Andrew Cuomo’s campaign compared to total independent expenses (right) (Graphs made by authors)

Billionaires who support Cuomo and the messages they buy

Super PACs targeting Mamdani have been boosted in recent days by big-buck donations from several billionaires.

Michael Bloomberg, former NYC Mayor and billionaire, contributed $1.5 million to Fix The City on Wednesday, four days into early voting. This latest contribution took the total amount he has given to Fix The City, the biggest anti-Mamdani super PAC, to $9.8 million. In 2023-2024, Bloomberg was the single biggest individual contributor to Democrats, backing them with more than $60 million, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by OpenSecrets.

On Tuesday, a week from Election Day, Ronald Lauder, former chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, and his wife Jo Carole Lauder, contributed $500,000 to Fix The City**,** taking their total contributions towards the super PAC to $1.5 million. Ronald is also a Trump donor, and in March this year, he gave $5 million to a pro-Trump PAC named MAGA Inc. Ronald is also the longtime president of the World Jewish Congress. On its website, WJC states, “Since the October 7th terrorist attacks against Israel, we have intensified our efforts to defend the Jewish state in the hallways of the United Nations in New York to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, and around the globe, WJC advocates for Israel.” The WJC website calls Israel “a beacon of democracy and innovation in a volatile region” and says the country contributes to global progress in fields such as humanitarian aid.William P. Lauder, Ronald’s nephew and chair of the board of directors of The Estée Lauder Companies, has contributed $1 million to Fix The City. And William’s brother Gary, managing director of Lauder Partners, also contributed $25,000 to Fix The City.The four members of the Lauder family have spent over $2.5 million to target Mamdani and back Cuomo in the mayoral race.Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, who was appointed by the Trump administration to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and as a chief design officer at the National Design Studio earlier this year, donated $1 million each to both Fix The City and Defend NYC on October 15.

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital and a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, contributed $1 million to the anti-Mamdani super PAC Defend NYC on October 14, and $250,000 to Fix The City on October 15 taking his total spending to $1.75 million.

In the lead-up to the mayoral primary in June, Mamdani had accused Fix The City of artificially lengthening and darkening his beard in a mailer attacking him. Mamdani, a Muslim candidate, had called the act “blatant Islamophobia.” Fix The City had spent nearly $9,000 on that mailer.

The latest infusion of big money in the general election has largely been spent on ads vilifying Mamdani on the airwaves and across social media. Some of these last-gasp efforts have taken an unconventional approach. After two days of early voting, a text message sent by Defend NYC, backed by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, called Cuomo “flawed” but urged New Yorkers to vote for him “to stop communism from coming to NYC.” The following day, the same super PAC sent out a text which began with a tweet that said “Cuomo murdered my husband and I am voting for him. That’s how bad things are in New York”—one of two messages on which a combined million dollars was spent by Defend NYC. The message went on to say, “We know what she means… And if she can do it, you can do it too. If you do, we will defeat Mamdani together.”

A text message blast sent by Defend NYC on October 28, 2025.

On Monday, Defend NYC spent $250,000 on a text message blast that said “🚨President Trump weighed in! 🚨He said what we already know: This race is between Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani and Cuomo is the ONLY choice for mayor. Cuomo is flawed but we have to do our civic duty and vote for him to stop communism from coming to NYC.”

A day later, Fix The City spent $1.15 million on a television ad that called Mamdani’s ideas “radically dangerous”.

The spending patterns of outside groups backing Cuomo and Mamdani show two drastically different approaches: while groups backing Mamdani have spent an overwhelming proportion of their resources on positive messaging about his agenda, those backing Cuomo have spent close to half of their resources in attacking Mamdani.

Groups favorable to Mamdani spent 83% of their money on efforts listed as supporting him, and only 17% on expenses classified as opposing Cuomo, according to a Drop Site analysis of data shared by the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In stark contrast, independent spending favorable to Cuomo focused considerably on attacking Mamdani, with 42% of the funds, or around $18 million, spent on targeting the Democratic nominee. Only $1.8 million, or 3.5% of the independent expenditures, were categorized as either supporting or opposing Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.

The latest polls show Mamdani ahead of Cuomo, with the Democratic nominee holding a double-digit lead. With less than a hundred hours to go before polls close on Tuesday, the flow of the big bucks into the election is unlikely to stop.

In the final stretch of this race, it’s money versus Mamdani.

About half of our goods (as measured in ton-miles of freight) travels by truck before reaching its destination, whether that’s in last-mile shipping from a warehouse, offloading freight from a railyard, direct ground shipping, etc. This makes the trucking industry a critical piece of our freight infrastructure and, because of the role goods play in our daily lives, a vital piece of the economy.

However, the value of the trucking industry in our daily lives does not give the industry a free pass from all of its negative impacts, whether that is the pollution exacting its toll on frontline communities, the heat-trapping emissions from this fossil-fuel-centric sector, or the disproportionate damage done to roads and bridges.

Unsurprisingly, representatives of the industry were on Capitol Hill earlier this year to ask for the federal government to weaken safety and emissions regulations, but incredibly they also asked for Congress to bolster highway funding while simultaneously requesting the elimination of the federal excise tax on new heavy-duty trucks that represents nearly 40 percent of the industry’s contribution to the Highway Trust Fund.

The trucking industry claims it wants to “pay its fair share,” but as I show below, today the industry falls well short of such funding, and if Congress were to listen to them, this gap would be even wider in the future. A close look at roadway costs attributable to trucks suggests a fair contribution from the trucking industry to roads and bridges would be about $150 billion annually, just over half of all highway expenditures, a substantial increase from the $60 billion they currently contribute to surface transportation each year.

What impact do trucks have on our infrastructure?

The trucking industry pretends that because they pay more taxes per mile traveled than passenger vehicles that this means they are already overburdened when it comes to funding our highways, but that ignores the obvious: heavy trucks weighing generally up to 80,000 pounds (and, in some states, as much as twice that!) clearly do more damage to our roads per mile traveled than your average passenger car or truck weighing around 4,000 pounds.

If we want to define “fair share” as the trucking industry claims, we need to think about the relationship between the damage caused by different types of vehicles and their relative contributions to funding.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) conducted a detailed study looking at the relationship between road damage and weight and found that the damage to roads are proportional to axle weight raised to the 4th power. For simple comparison, this means that a 5-axle tractor-trailer at its maximum federal weight of 80,000 pounds does roughly 10,000 times more damage per mile traveled than a 4,000-pound passenger vehicle (5 axle passes x (80,000/5)4 for a truck vs 2 axle passes x (4,000/2)4 for a car)

This study was largely affirmed in the 1980s, and this 4th-power law continues to undergird general practices around road design today in the United States. At the same time, there are nuances in the relationship related to things like the condition of the road (e.g., is it already damaged?), tire type and pressure, materials and design of the pavement, etc.

One study, funded by the trucking industry, found a much lower exponent (~2.31, as compared to 4) for flexible pavements (asphalt), which are today generally preferred to the rigid pavements (concrete) originally studied in the AASHO analysis 65 years ago. In that case, a comparison between an 80,000-pound truck and 4,000-pound car would yield a difference of around 300 times more damage per mile. Since this analysis was paid for by an industry seeking to limit its responsibility, this likely represents a lower-bound on the impacts of heavy-duty vehicles on roads relative to passenger cars and trucks.

Vehicle miles traveled by trucks vary across a wide range of vehicle types, configurations, and weights, all of which are much heavier than a typical passenger car or truck. A typical tractor-trailer is a 3-axle tractor with a 2-axle tandem trailer, for which we can see that while a large share of such trucks run near the fully-loaded federal maximum of 80,000 pounds, about two-thirds of these trucks run at weights much lower. (Data reproduced from FHWA 2016.)

Given the power laws above, we can estimate the relative damage of personal versus commercial vehicles in the United States. The Federal Highway Administration regularly collects detailed data on truck travel in the United States, allowing not just looking at mileage by weight but also by the number of axles on the truck. In this data we see clearly peaks at weights associated with an empty truck (and its trailer), another larger peak in mileage at the maximum federal weight a truck can maintain (for the share of trucking mileage that “weighs out”), and a broad distribution of mileage between (for the larger share of trucking mileage that “cubes out”, or fills its trailer before packing goods to the maximum weight). Supplementing this with data from the Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey for single-unit trucks not captured in this data set as well as curb weight data from EPA for passenger vehicles, we can compare the relative damages. (Further detail is provided in our methodology.)

Despite accounting for just 11 percent of the more than 3 trillion miles of travel on USroads annually, we estimate heavy-duty trucks are responsible for at least 91 percent of the wear and tear on those roads (and as much as 99 percent if the fourth power law holds!). Most of this damage comes from over-the-road freight: tractor-trailers are responsible for nearly 80 percent of the annual deterioration of highway infrastructure despite representing just 6 percent of all miles traveled.

A not-so-fair share

While construction costs are directly related to wear and tear from traffic, some additional highway expenditures are more closely related to traffic flow. For example, it could be argued that research and administrative costs or maintenance of the shoulder could be allocated based on the relative share of vehicle miles traveled. In the case of safety and law enforcement, it would be appropriate to consider the crash risks of the relative vehicles and their safety impacts. But by far the biggest share of highway costs is for construction, which should be proportional to the upkeep of that infrastructure—even when built as new, a project’s costs and amortization all reflect the load-bearing capacity of the traffic it’s being designed to carry.

Because trucks are heavier and less fuel-efficient (per mile) than passenger vehicles, trucks do pay more per-mile than passenger vehicles in local, state, and federal taxes and tolls for highways (roughly 16 cents per mile traveled for heavy-duty trucks compared to 4 cents per mile for passenger vehicles). However, you know who pays even more for highways? Everyone else. The general public, which includes non-drivers, pay the most towards our highway system because our highway spending is so out of control we have to pay for it through general government funds over and over again.

Government at all levels spent nearly $300 billion on highway funding in fiscal year 2023, with road users contributing to less than half that spending. The largest contribution to highway funding came from general government spending, paid for either directly (e.g., through property taxes) or indirectly (e.g., through income taxes) by the general public, regardless of how much they use the roads. (Data derived from FHWA Highway Statistics 2023 and allocated through UCS estimates for LDV and HDV users through BTS data)

Heavy-duty trucking represents the lions’ share of road damage, significantly impacting the costs of construction and repair of our highways. However, other costs like those related to routine maintenance or law enforcement are more closely related to miles traveled. Allocating the costs of our highways to the users of those highways based on their share of impacts shows that while heavy-duty trucks may make up a lower share of miles traveled, they are still responsible for just over half of highway infrastructure spending. At nearly $150 billion annually, this is in far excess of what is collected from the trucking industry annually. (UCS Analysis of FHWA data)

If we allocate highway costs to the vehicles traveling on the roads, including non-construction costs, we see that heavy-duty trucks should pay for just over half of all highway expenditures. Today, they currently contribute approximately just $60.1 billion in federal, state, and local taxes and fees, with a share of that contributing to non-highway expenditures (transit, government operation, collection fees, etc.), varying by jurisdiction. But, if we ignore transfer payments and just consider the gross inputs and outputs, taxpayers at all levels of government are subsidizing the trucking industry by $87.6 billion every year just in highway costs. By contrast, the direct subsidy for highway spending for personal vehicles is just $22.6 billion annually.

Rebalancing the books

The costs above are focused on total spending at all government levels, but focusing solely on federal spending, which includes transfers to states from the Highway Trust Fund, makes an even stronger case because federal dollars go almost entirely towards capital spending. We estimate that the trucking industry is responsible for $44.2 billion of federal highway spending, or nearly three-quarters of federal highway expenditures. Currently, trucking only contributes $19.2 billion annually to the Highway Trust Fund highway account, which means that the trucking industry receives a federal highway subsidy of about $25.0 billion every year.

And yet, despite this subsidy, the trucking industry is advocating to cut their own share of taxes by eliminating the federal excise tax (FET), which is a 12 percent tax on the purchase of new heavy-duty trucks. This tax represents 37 percent of the industry’s federal contribution to paying for the transportation system.

Just to stay even with today’s contributions, the proposed elimination of the FET would require an 18.0-cent increase in the federal diesel tax, shifting the tax from 24.4 cents to 42.4 cents per gallon. But that does nothing to pay back the American taxpayer—paying for the trucking industry’s highway subsidy through an increase in the diesel tax would require more than tripling the federal tax on diesel, with an increase of 62.9 cents per gallon, irrespective of what happens to the FET. But because fuel economy and global warming emissions standards still on the books are ensuring trucks get more efficient, and because a fuel tax is only indirectly connected to usage via efficiency, which can change over time, even this increase may not solve the long-term imbalance.

A better solution would be something that directly considers the long-term impacts of trucks, such as a weight-based mileage fee, also known as a weight-distance tax. Unlike a private vehicle mileage fee, there are no privacy concerns for these commercial vehicles, and implementation would be relatively straightforward because of recordkeeping already in place: much of the trucking industry has to maintain electronic logs for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that include location data, and interstate trucks already participate in programs like the International Registration Plan (IRP) and the International Fuel Tax Association (IFTA) which track mileage in different jurisdictions. And some type of these fees are already implemented in states, including New Mexico, New York, and Oregon.

Light-duty passenger cars and trucks make up the vast majority of both vehicles on the road and miles traveled, but they are responsible for less than one-quarter of all federal highway expenditures and may actually overpay into the Highway Trust Fund relative to their impact. On the other hand, while there are less than 3 million registered tractor-trailers on the road, they are responsible for nearly two-thirds of highway expenditures, largely because of the huge impact these heavy vehicles have on roads and bridges. (Vocational trucks encompass single-unit heavy-duty vehicles ranging from delivery vans and utility trucks to buses and garbage trucks.)

The public also pays for trucking’s health and environmental costs

It’s worth noting of course that an increased user fee on trucking will fall far short of paying the full costs of trucking. While the public subsidizes the trucking industry’s impacts on freeways by $87.6 billion a year, we also force communities near roadways to pay for between $71 billion and $98 billion per year in health costs resulting from the unmitigated pollution from those trucks, according to EPA models. And based on the latest estimates of the social costs of global warming emissions, the U.S. trucking industry is causing $99 billion in global warming-related public harm annually as the result of its petroleum dominated inputs.

As we look to improve the transportation system overall, we need to use all policy tools at our disposal to drive these impacts downward and ensure the trucking industry is paying for its harms in the meantime.

The trucking industry can afford to pay its fair share

There is no reason for the American taxpayer to foot the bill for a trillion-dollar per year industry. And we don’t need to.

For the heaviest trucks, the tractor-trailers that travel the largest miles per year and are responsible for the lions’ share of road damage, fuel costs have averaged just 23 percent of the hourly costs of doing business over the past decade. Increasing the federal diesel tax by 62.9 cents per gallon to balance the costs of highway upkeep would be less than the price of diesel has dropped over the past two years and would represent just a 17 percent increase. That is an impact on freight profit margins of just 3.5 percent, which is similar to the year-to-year variation due to the cyclic nature of the freight industry.

A weight-based mileage fee and/or increased diesel taxes to better account for the costs of trucking may not be the only permanent solution for federal transportation funding—we should be thinking about transportation as a public good, and that requires public investment in mobility writ large, not just more roads. But if the trucking industry wants to push for “fair pay” as part of its push for bolstering spending on roads, it needs to quit scapegoating electric vehicles and start looking in the mirror because trucks would be paying a whole lot more for road use than they do today.

The methodology and dataset for this analysis can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M6FOFP.