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The New York Times has had a rough few decades when it comes to being manipulated by bad actors. But their latest embarrassment—a complete non-story about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s college application to Columbia University from 2009—represents a new low in journalistic malpractice that combines hacked materials, racist sources, and a breathtaking willingness to be used as a vehicle for right-wing propaganda. Oh, and all for a story that has zero news value and zero insight into Mamdani’s qualifications to be mayor of New York City.

Here’s what happened: The Times published a story claiming that Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent, checked both “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on his Columbia University application all the way back in 2009. The implication, pushed by the story’s framing, was that this was somehow scandalous—a case of gaming the system for affirmative action benefits.

As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.

But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

I’m genuinely curious about the Times’ logic here. Person born in Uganda checks “African American” box. Where’s the lie? Did Uganda move? Is it not in Africa anymore? Are we really going to pretend that America’s racial categories, designed primarily for descendants of American slavery, map perfectly onto the global complexity of human identity?

If there is a story, it is solely about the Times’ decision and later justification for publishing this non-story.

Mamdani has a complex racial and ethnic background that doesn’t fit neatly into America’s crude racial categories. As he told the Times: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.” He also noted that he wrote in “Ugandan” in the space provided for additional information.

Oh, and for all the “could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani” reporting in the piece: it didn’t. He didn’t even get into Columbia. Even though his father is a professor there.

So much for gaming the system.

But here’s where it gets really ugly: The Times obtained this information from a massive hack of Columbia’s database, and their source was Jordan Lasker, who goes by the online handle “Cremieux” and whose hobbies include arguing that Black people are genetically inferior. Yes, really. The Times initially described him merely as “an academic who opposes affirmative action,” but as The Guardian previously reported, Lasker regularly argues that Black people are mentally inferior to other races and has written posts defending the idea that African countries have “average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.”

But wait, it gets worse. The NY Time’s description of him as “an academic” is generous at best (or perhaps just credulous). His own sister claimed that the family has no evidence he ever graduated and that he didn’t walk at the graduation ceremony that year and his name wasn’t listed in the graduation program. An analysis by another account noted that while he was a PhD student between 2021 and 2024 at Texas Tech, the only academic publication they could find by him turned into a huge scandal that got the professor he co-authored with fired. The paper was not just racist pseudoscience—it also involved lying to the NIH to get access to data. Two-fer!

That article also suggests Lasker (in that paper) lied about his supposed affiliation with the University of Minnesota. When asked about it, the University of Minnesota revealed that Lasker had been a “non-employee” “data consultant” and they had asked him not to claim an academic affiliation:

So, to summarize the Times’ sourcing: They granted anonymity to a person whose identity was already publicly known, who promotes ideas about racial hierarchy that would make a 1930s eugenicist blush, who may have lied about his academic credentials, and whose main claim to fame is getting a professor fired for publishing racist garbage research. And this seemed like a credible source to them for a story attacking a Muslim candidate of color.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Rufo Connection Makes It Even Worse

If this sounds familiar, it should. As Semafor reported, the Times rushed to publish this non-story because they were afraid of being “scooped” by Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who has openly bragged about manipulating mainstream media to advance his culture war agenda.

The paper believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo. Two people familiar with the reporting process told Semafor that the paper was aware that other journalists were working on the admissions story, including Rufo, a conservative best known for his crusade against critical race theory.

Rufo literally announces his manipulation tactics on Twitter. He’s written about how he plans to get outlets like the Times to amplify his disingenuous and misleading campaigns. And yet, the Times still falls for it every single time, then acts surprised when people point out they’re being played.

As Jamison Foser noted months ago about this dynamic, this isn’t really about the Times being “manipulated”—it’s about the Times wanting to publish these stories and using figures like Rufo as an excuse to do what they already wanted to do.

The Times had a choice: they could have ignored this obvious non-story, or they could have served as a willing vehicle for racists and right-wing propagandists to manufacture a fake scandal. They chose the latter. And then they doubled down on it.

But here’s what kills me: they could have written a fascinating story about how a network of racist activists was trying to weaponize hacked university data that revealed nothing particularly interesting to attack a Muslim mayoral candidate. They could have exposed the whole operation. Instead, they decided to become part of it. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch, with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy.

The Double Standard Is Glaring

The Times’ decision becomes even more indefensible when you consider their recent editorial choices. They refused to publish hacked materials about JD Vance during the 2024 election and declined to explain why. But when a racist hands them a hacked college application from 2009 that reveals nothing of public interest, suddenly those ethical concerns disappear.

The paper also famously decided not to endorse candidates in local elections—except when it came to Mamdani, whom they specifically urged voters not to rank at all on their ballots. Interestingly, they didn’t issue similar “please don’t vote for this person” guidance about Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned over sexual harassment allegations and has been plagued with scandals from his mismanagement during the pandemic. Apparently checking the objectively accurate box on a college application is more disqualifying than a pattern of sexual misconduct and mismanagement.

Manufacturing Controversy To Justify Bad Journalism

Perhaps most galling is the Times’ response to criticism. When readers and media critics pointed out how absurd this story was, an anonymous Times source told Semafor that the controversy proved they were right to publish this:

“The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.

But that’s not how any of this works. At all. Sometimes the “conversation and debate” is about how you should have known better.

Times editor Patrick Healy also doubled down, claiming—in a lengthy rambling thread on ExTwitter—that Mamdani responding honestly to their questions about this made it into a story.

The Times then published a follow-up piece asking readers about frustrations with racial categories on forms—a transparent attempt to retroactively justify their original story by suggesting there’s some broader conversation about racial identity that needed to be had.

But there was already a conversation about racial identity. It’s been going on for centuries. The Times didn’t need to platform a racist and manufacture a fake scandal to contribute to it.

The Real Story They Missed

As Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ former public editor, noted in The Guardian, this story tells us nothing about Mamdani’s qualifications or policy positions. It’s the journalistic equivalent of spending your time investigating whether someone returned their elementary school library books on time instead of, you know, whether they’d be competent at running a city.

Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.

The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.

The real story here is how easily America’s supposed “paper of record” can be manipulated by bad actors who openly announce their manipulation tactics. It’s about how the Times’ apparent opposition to certain candidates leads them to abandon basic journalistic standards. And it’s about how the paper’s desperate desire to appear “balanced” makes them perfect marks for right-wing propagandists who understand exactly which buttons to push.

As Hell Gate put it: “The failing, bumbling New York Times” has become a vehicle for race science and manufactured outrage, all while pretending they’re just doing journalism.

So who does this put the Times in league with? Much like its coverage of trans youth, it’s helpful to look around and see who else is pushing the same line of coverage. It’s hard-right ideology laundered as legitimate journalistic inquiry. The article’s print edition on Sunday ran under the title “Mamdani Faces Scrutiny Over College Application.” From who? For what? The Times clearly doesn’t feel all that interested in answering these questions, other than its providing cover for fascistic ideologues. The Times is coordinating with people whose work is actively eroding what’s left of America’s attempts at racial equity.

Again, it’s hard to tsk-tsk a newspaper that said it wasn’t endorsing candidates in local elections anymore, and then revised that to actually be like, “unless you’re thinking of electing a socialist, which in that case do not do that and instead vote for this sexual harasser.” Having failed spectacularly at stopping Mamdani, the Times is now unveiling its tried-and-true strategy to drum up controversy—and question the legitimacy of a person’s humanity—by doing the dirtiest of work for the worst-faith actors.

The Times owes its readers an explanation for why they thought this was a story worth telling. Why they granted anonymity to a person who promotes racial pseudoscience. Why they rushed to publish obvious non-news to avoid being “scooped” by a known manipulator. And why they continue to provide aid and comfort to people whose stated goal is to manipulate them.

But the paper has shown no inclination toward introspection. Instead, they’ve doubled down, claiming that the controversy they manufactured proves they were right to manufacture it.

In the meantime, the rest of us can learn something from this debacle: when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Chris Rufo has told us he manipulates mainstream media. Jordan Lasker has told us he believes in debunked racist pseudoscience about “racial hierarchy.” And the New York Times has told us that they’re willing to amplify both of them if it serves their editorial agenda.

We should believe them all.

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Trump advisor/subhuman ghoul Stephen Miller wants ICE to be arresting 3,000 people a day. So far, ICE has only managed to top out at 2,200 arrests in a single day, despite going full black ops in neighborhoods and businesses, driving unmarked cars, and leaving nothing exposed on officers’ bodies but their lifeless eyes.

Stephen Miller went after ICE itself back in May, calling it out for not being as cruelly efficient as it could be:

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.

ICE did go to Home Depot, it must be noted. And because it did, Los Angeles is now filled with soldiers — more than 4,000 National Guard troops and another few hundred Marines.

The Trump administration couldn’t find enough criminals to arrest the first time it held power. With the quotas increasing exponentially during Trump’s second term, it’s no longer acceptable to just let ICE be ICE and raid whatever the hell it wants whenever the hell it wants to. It’s not enough to send federal officers into US courts to arrest migrants for daring to show up for their mandated check-ins. It’s not enough to pile as many people with brown skin into a bunch of buses for daring to exist in a nation that used to be considered a melting pot, not to mention a beacon of hope to oppressed people all over the world.

This irrational hatred can’t be satiated using the normal stuff, or even the “new normal” stuff, like daily raids of businesses by ICE. It probably can’t even be satiated by turning ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency by adding another $60 billion to its budget, as Trump’s budget bill does.

Anything that might slow the removal of migrants from the US must be removed. The administration isn’t willing to tolerate any speed bumps that hinder its maximum cruelty efforts. Within the last two weeks, the administration has taken steps that will grease the already extremely slippery wheels of its mass deportation program.

To bump up numbers, the Trump administration is going to aggressively move forward with stripping US citizens of their citizenship.

Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.

Yes, Trump is again playing all the old hits. He brought back the Alien Enemies Act — something made infamous for its abuse of Japanese migrants during World War II — to justify extrajudicial expulsions of migrants, routing them to foreign torture prisons and war-torn nations the US has no interest in making any less war-torn.

This moves the cruelty plan forward a half-decade or so, aligning the Trump administration with Cold War McCarthyism and the expeditious stripping of citizenship of anyone Joe McCarthy and his supporters felt weren’t American enough to remain Americans. This move goes further than earlier denaturalization efforts pursued by President Obama and Trump during his first term in office, rigging the game for the government by allowing it to use criminal charge removal justifications while bringing these cases in civil court.

The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said; there is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases.

Robertson saysthat stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and infringes on the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Like any bully, the government isn’t interested in a fair fight. It will use criminal allegations during these hearings, while simultaneously denying those accused of full access to their rights.

Migrants not suspected of criminal acts aren’t in the clear, though. ICE may be working its way towards 3,000 arrests a day but that doesn’t mean the administration can’t punish people ICE hasn’t managed to arrest yet. Migrants in the country illegally will no longer be given a warning period before being fined for this civil infraction, allowing the government to run up the tab on several million people.

The Trump administration is looking to speed up its ability to fine those in the United States illegally — up to $1,000 per day — according to a rule set to be published Friday in the Federal Register that was obtained by ABC News.

Currently, the government can alert those in the U.S. illegally 30 days before it starts issuing fines.

The rule proposed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security allows the government to immediately start fining those in the U.S. illegally.

People who’ve never been told their actions might subject them to daily fines will now be several thousand dollars in debt before they’re even aware this is an option the federal government has at its disposal. Trump started fining migrants during his first term, something that was halted when Biden took office. Trump’s return to the Oval Office brought the fines back. But it’s only now that the heads up issued to migrants is being replaced with federal silence and the steady tick of increasing fines.

The DHS says this is just good government business, pinning the blame on those who will not be notified their continued presence in the United States might be costing them up to $1,000 a day.

And, finally (at least in terms of this post), there’s this: the DHS unilaterally deciding Haiti is safe enough for displaced Haitians to return to, despite all evidence (including the administration’s own statements) to the contrary:

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced that it would terminate temporary protected status for Haiti, setting the groundwork for hundreds of thousands of Haitians to potentially be deported from the United States once the designation expires later this summer.

The termination of temporary protected status — a designation that shields from deportation people who have traveled to the U.S. from countries that are deemed unsafe because of natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary conditions — would put up to 500,000 Haitians at risk of deportation, as gang violence continues to roil the country.

DHS Bratz doll Kristi Noem says everything is going great in Haiti, claiming there’s no need to extend the temporary protected status. What’s left unsaid is why this is even happening, because there’s no way in hell the Trump administration will ever be honest about its own fear-mongering about Haitian immigrants or its willingness amplify racist conspiracy theories on national TV.

Noem and Trump say Haiti is safe. The State Department still disagrees, even with Marco Rubio currently serving as the top level of mismanagement.

Since March 2024, Haiti has been under a State of Emergency. Crimes involving firearms are common in Haiti. They include robbery, carjackings, sexual assault, and kidnappings for ransom. Kidnapping is widespread, and U.S. citizens have been victims and have been hurt or killed. Kidnappers may plan carefully or target victims at random, unplanned times. Kidnappers will even target and attack convoys. Kidnapping cases often involve ransom requests. Victims’ families have paid thousands of dollars to rescue their family members.

Protests, demonstrations, and roadblocks are common and unpredictable. They often damage or destroy infrastructure and can become violent. Mob killings and assaults by the public have increased, including targeting those suspected of committing crimes.

The airport in Port-au-Prince can be a focal point for armed activity. Armed robberies are common. Carjackers attack private vehicles stuck in traffic. They often target lone drivers, especially women. As a result, the U.S. embassy requires its staff to use official transportation to and from the airport.

This move says two things. First, Trump wants to expel Haitians because he probably believes they’re eating pets or otherwise are too dark-skinned to remain in the United States. Second, it says Haiti probably isn’t safe, but it’s safe enough for people this government no longer wants in this country. Separately, these implicit statements are horrible. Together, they’re just more Trump administration ugliness and bigotry from an administration that truly doesn’t care how awful it is, so long as it still has the support of the most awful people in the nation.

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With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper’s, “Who Goes Nazi?” remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update*: Just after I finished writing this, it occurred to me that there was no chance I was the first to think of doing this, so I did a search and sure enough, the writer Talia Lavin had the same idea months ago. Hers is closer stylistically to the original, but for reasons unknown to me, she took it down. Though you can still find it through* the Wayback Machine.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre social media game to play while scrolling through your feeds: to speculate who in your network would go full MAGA. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—watching the 2016 election, the pandemic, January 6th, and now Trump’s return. I have come to know the types: the born MAGAs, the MAGAs whom social media criticism has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would fall for the grift.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any obvious characteristics. Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.

Sometimes I think there are direct digital factors at work—a type of media consumption, a pattern of social validation, and a form of tribal identity that has produced a new kind of citizen with an imbalance in their nature. They have been fed rage and filled with grievances that are beyond their capacity to process rationally. They have been subjected to forms of propaganda that have released them from the constraints of empirical reality. Their emotions are vigorous. Their reasoning is childish. Their civic education has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look through the feeds.

The Contrarian Intellectual

His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like “Uncomfortable Truths” or “Against the Grain.” He has an advanced degree and a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.

The clues are there if you know where to look. Watch how he behaves during the latest culture war dust-up—he cannot let any consensus pass without needling it, cannot let any moment of social harmony exist without introducing “complexity.” He calls it intellectual honesty. Others might recognize it as a compulsive need to be the smartest person in the room.

He’s not technically MAGA yet, but he’s on the glide path. He writes long pieces about how “the left has lost its mind” and how “we need to have difficult conversations.” He appears on podcasts to discuss “the excesses of woke culture” and “the importance of free speech.” He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.

But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.

His MAGA turn will come when he finally admits what’s been obvious all along: he’s more comfortable with the right than the left. He’ll frame it as a principled stand against progressive extremism, but really it’s just the natural conclusion of a grift that started with “I’m just asking questions.”

The Wellness Influencer

Her Instagram is a masterpiece of soft-focus selfies and inspirational quotes. She sells courses on “authentic living” and posts about the importance of “doing your own research.” She’s got 50K followers who hang on her every word about manifestation, healing crystals, and toxic relationships.

She already went MAGA during the pandemic, though she’d never admit it. It started with “questioning the narrative” about vaccines and evolved into sharing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. content and ranting about “globalist elites.” She doesn’t post Trump content directly—that would hurt her brand—but she’s constantly sharing adjacent conspiracy theories about child trafficking, fluoride in water, and the “plandemic.”

Her path to MAGA was predictable: someone whose entire identity is built on being special, on having secret knowledge that others lack, was always going to fall for conspiracy theories. The wellness-to-fascism pipeline is real, and she’s already at the destination.

The Centrist Politician

She calls herself a moderate Democrat and appears on cable news to provide “balance.” Her social media carefully calibrates every post to seem reasonable and bipartisan. She writes op-eds about “finding common ground” and “reaching across the aisle.”

But check her voting record: she confirms every Trump judicial nominee, opposes every progressive priority, and finds reasons to side with Republicans on every issue that matters. She claims to support democracy while enabling the people trying to destroy it.

Her MAGA evolution is already complete—she just hasn’t changed her party registration yet. She’s more concerned with maintaining her brand as the “reasonable Democrat” than with actually defending democratic values. She’ll keep providing cover for fascists as long as it keeps her on TV.

The LinkedIn Thought Leader

Here’s someone whose profile shows all the markers of success: MBA from a decent school, senior VP at a Fortune 500 company, ghost-written posts about “leadership” and “mindset” three times a week. He shares motivational quotes over sunset photos and humble-brags about his “journey.” His feed is a carefully curated performance of professional achievement.

But scroll deeper and you’ll find the tells. He reposts articles about “woke capitalism” destroying America. He quotes Jordan Peterson approvingly. He’s constantly posting about how “nobody wants to work anymore” and how “participation trophies ruined a generation.” His comments on political posts always start with “I’m not political, but…”

This guy will go MAGA the moment it becomes professionally advantageous. He’s already mostly there ideologically, but he’s waiting for the moment when his company needs MAGA cred the most. The day his company starts rewarding MAGA loyalty over quarterly earnings—or the day he gets passed over for a promotion he thinks he deserves—he’ll be posting about “taking our country back” with the same enthusiasm he currently reserves for synergy and disruption.

The Crypto Enthusiast

His Twitter bio lists his pronouns as “rich/richer” and includes at least three flag emojis. His feed is 60% cryptocurrency technical analysis, 30% complaints about government regulation, and 10% photos of his Tesla. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist” and thinks Elon Musk is a visionary.

He’s always been MAGA, even if he didn’t quite realize it. He rails against “establishment media” and gets his news from podcasts. He believes utterly in meritocracy while having inherited his initial bankroll from his parents. He thinks poor people are just lazy and rich people are naturally superior. He’s easily seduced by nonsense claims about race and IQ because they appeal to his long-standing belief that he’s an objectively special genius.

His MAGA evolution is complete except for the explicit political allegiance. He’s already anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax, and anti-anybody-who-questions-his-success. As crypto becomes even more explicitly partisan, he’ll be posting Pepe memes and talking about “making America great again.”

The Facebook Mom

She posts pictures of her kids constantly, shares recipes, and belongs to seventeen different local community groups. She seems harmless enough—lots of heart emojis, inspirational quotes about motherhood, and complaints about school board meetings.

But she’s already gone MAGA, and it happened faster than anyone expected. It started with concerns about “what they’re teaching our kids” and evolved into full-blown culture war participation. She shares PragerU videos, complains about “woke Disney,” and posts about “parental rights” with the fervor of a religious convert. She is absolutely convinced that there are human trafficking gangs from central America looking to kidnap her kids in the Target parking lot.

Her MAGA journey was enabled by Facebook community, which fed her increasingly extreme content disguised as “parenting advice” and “educational resources.” She genuinely believes she’s protecting her children from a coordinated attack on American values. She’ll vote for any candidate who promises to “protect our kids” from teachers, librarians, and anyone else trying to “indoctrinate” them.

The Venture Capitalist

His Twitter is a constant stream of complaints about “woke employees” destroying productivity and liberal professors poisoning young minds. He’s worth $500 million because of a few home run investments that he lucked into thanks to his Stanford network, but talks like he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy. His feed alternates between humble-brags about his latest investment and rants about how universities are churning out unemployable graduates who expect “participation trophies.”

He’s already MAGA, though he’d never admit it publicly—bad for fundraising. He privately complains that diversity hiring is destroying meritocracy while his portfolio companies are run entirely by Stanford MBAs who look exactly like him. He thinks workers asking for fair wages are “entitled” and students protesting genocide are “indoctrinated.”

His MAGA allegiance is wrapped up in his belief that he earned everything through pure merit, despite raising his first investment fund from family connections. He’ll vote for anyone who promises to cut his taxes and eliminate the regulations that might force him to treat workers like human beings.

The Legacy Media Reporter

His bio says “Covering politics for [Major News Outlet]” and he takes pride in his “objectivity.” He writes careful both-sides pieces about every issue and treats Trump’s fascist rhetoric as just another political strategy worth analyzing.

He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth.

His MAGA turn will come gradually, as he realizes that treating fascism as normal politics is more profitable than actual journalism. He’ll keep providing legitimacy to authoritarianism while telling himself he’s just doing his job. By the time democracy collapses, he’ll still be writing headlines about how “both sides share blame.”

The Business Owner

She runs a small business—maybe a restaurant, maybe a retail store. She posts about “entrepreneurship” and “the American dream.” She works seventy hours a week and takes pride in “building something from nothing.”

She’s prime MAGA material because she’s been trained to see her success as purely individual and her struggles as evidence of government overreach. When COVID restrictions hurt her business, she blamed “bureaucrats” rather than the virus. When she can’t find workers, she blames unemployment benefits rather than wages.

Her MAGA turn will be complete when she decides that her business problems are caused by taxes, regulations, and lazy workers rather than market forces and systemic issues. She’ll vote for anyone who promises to “get government out of the way” and let “job creators” like her prosper.

The Normie

He doesn’t post about politics much. His feed is mostly sports, vacation photos, and memes. He seems reasonable, moderate, unengaged with the culture wars. He’s the kind of person who says “I don’t really follow politics” and means it.

But he’s susceptible to MAGA because he’s politically lazy. He gets his information from headlines and assumes that “both sides” are equally bad. He’s annoyed by political discussions and just wants everyone to “get along.”

His MAGA evolution will happen gradually, through exposure to right-wing content disguised as non-political entertainment. He’ll start sharing “funny” memes that happen to have political undertones. He’ll begin to believe that liberals are “too sensitive” and conservatives are “more reasonable.” By the time he realizes he’s been radicalized, it’ll be too late.

The Ones Who Won’t

Take the small-town Republican from Ohio who should be MAGA by every demographic marker—pickup truck, church every Sunday, straight GOP for twenty years. But her childhood best friend came out as trans, and suddenly the culture war had a face she loved. Now she’s at city council meetings defending the very people she once thoughtlessly condemned. The MAGA crowd calls her a traitor. She calls it friendship.

There are others in the feeds who will never go MAGA, no matter what. They’re not necessarily the most educated or the most politically engaged. They’re not defined by their demographics or their stated beliefs.

They’re the ones who have something the MAGA-susceptible lack: a genuine comfort with complexity and nuance, an ability to tolerate uncertainty, and a fundamental respect for other people’s humanity. They don’t need to believe they’re special or superior. They have the same insecurities others have, but they don’t blame others for them. They don’t need enemies to blame for their problems. They don’t need simple answers to complicated questions.

They’re the teacher who posts about her students’ achievements without making it about herself. They’re the small business owner who pays his workers well because he knows it’s right and actually better for business, not because he has to. They’re the veteran who talks about service without wrapping it in nationalism. They’re the parent who worries about their kids without blaming teachers for everything.

They’re the people who can say “I don’t know” without feeling diminished. They’re the ones who can admit they were wrong without feeling attacked. They’re the ones who can see others succeed without feeling threatened.

The Pattern

The pattern is clear once you know what to look for. MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness.

It’s not about education or geography or even politics. It’s about character. It’s about whether you can tolerate complexity, whether you can admit mistakes, whether you can see other people as fully human.

The scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good. It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.

But the good news is that character isn’t fixed. People can change. They can learn to tolerate uncertainty, to admit mistakes, to see others as human. They can develop the emotional and intellectual tools to resist fascist appeals.

The question is whether they will—and whether the rest of us will help them, or just watch them scroll deeper into the darkness.

The game continues. The stakes keep rising. And the feeds keep feeding us exactly what we want to hear.

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However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons.

For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.

Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing as well. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.

After literally decades of fighting by activists, last year the FCC finally passed new rules putting a cap on the prices that these predatory telecom monopolies can charge. The new rules were finally thanks to the 2023 passage and signing of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which gave the agency clear authority to implement reform.

Fast forward to 2025, and Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is just ignoring the law because it upsets telecom monopolies. Carr’s delaying implementation of the rules until at least 2027. In a statement, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner, Anna Gomez, called it a “blatant attempt to sidestep the law”:

“Today, the FCC made the indefensible decision to ignore both the law and the will of Congress… rather than enforce the law, the Commission is now stalling, shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities at the expense of incarcerated individuals and their loved ones. Instead of taking targeted action to address specific concerns, the FCC issued a blanket two-year waiver that undercuts the law’s intent and postpones meaningful relief for millions of families. This is a blatant attempt to sidestep the law, and it will not go unchallenged in court.”

Carr’s statement on the decision feebly tries to blame “negative, unintended consequences” of the reforms. The “negative, unintended consequences” he cites mostly involve Baxter County, Arkansas Sheriff John Montgomery*,* who responded to the proposed changes by pouting like a baby and cancelling all calls for inmates. Carr’s other “examples” include whiny letters from telecom-giant Securus.

The original FCC rules imposed price caps starting on January 1, 2025, for all prisons and jails with average daily populations of 1,000 or more incarcerated people, and a deadline of April 1, 2025 for prisons with average daily populations less than 1,000. That’s now clearly not happening, and Carr’s FCC is likely to be sued as a result.

Again, these guys aren’t worried about inmates or their families, they’re primarily interested in protecting the corrupt kickback scheme that’s existed for a generation between shitty prison telecom monopolies, captured and corrupt lawmakers, and a largely unaccountable U.S. for-profit prison system. They dress up the corruption like it’s some sort of serious intellectual opposition, but it’s just greed.

Carr’s preparing to deliver numerous other gifts to prison telecom monopolies as well. As part of his “delete, delete, delete” agenda, he’s busy butchering whatever consumer protection standards are left at the FCC — including already shaky oversight of predatory telecom monopolies. You know, for “populism.”

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The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case isFree Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton and featured the parent companies of the world’s largest adult tube sites suing the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for targeting speech that is otherwise protected.

Mike Masnick already wrote for Techdirt about how the SCOTUS justices “threw out the First Amendment” to shield their eyes from seeing nudity on the internet. It’s bad news, to say the least. But what many in the discourse on the far-right will overlook or try to misinterpret is that this ruling is going to have negative impacts on so much more than just the pornography space.

When considering the true “winners” in the immediate aftermath of this ruling, age verification software providers are a visible class of beneficiaries. A trade group called the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) serves as the unified industry voice for companies that develop and market age assurance and identity verification software products. Member companies of the trade group include the likes of Yoti, Privo, Envoc, Experian, and AgeChecked.com. Yoti is one of the world’s foremost providers of age assurance technology, while Envoc is a Louisiana firm that developed the first white-label age verification measure used to require identity to access a website like the Aylo-owned property Pornhub within the statewide digital space. AVPA has a membership of around 30 companies, with many of the major players in the industry outside of the United States. For example, companies Yoti and Ondato are based in the United Kingdom.

I do not care about where these companies come from or if they have a trade group. The adult entertainment industry has the Los Angeles-based Free Speech Coalition, with members of the trade group based internationally. Aylo is in Montreal. xHamster’s parent company is in Cyprus.

I do care when the legal and regulatory environment artificially creates a market that could be in a valuation at billions of dollars due to the regulatory regime and asymmetric retaliation by a few powerful groups that operate in a minority over the wider population. With this high court ruling, the age verification providers are being handed the keys to a market that members of an industry that isn’t even similar in nature must rely on as legally mandated vendors. Though age assurance laws in the United States are a patchwork across the states with no national harmonization, trends in lawmaking and policymaking from around the world – especially in Republican-held states like Texas and in Western Europe and Australia – suggest the age verification laws are not going away.

And it will be a clear benefit for the aforementioned companies. According to AVPA data related to revenue published in 2021, the valuation projections for all member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that implement age verification laws and regulations will equate to GBP 9.8 billion within 10 to 15 years. Conversion to U.S. dollars is a sum of nearly $13.4 billion at today’s conversion rates. The OECD countries number 37, with the United States a founding member. No direct calculation has been made as to how much revenue will be generated by the forced adoption of these vendors by adult entertainment industry firms.

But it is expected to be hefty, considering that pornography remains one of the most searched for categories of content on the internet. To further complicate matters, countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have sweeping national laws governing age verification for virtually every website on the internet, including pornography. Australia is even preparing to require age checks for search engine providers like Google and Microsoft. In the United States, around 20 of the 50 U.S. states have some form of age assurance requirement to access pornography. Aylo, one of the most visible adult entertainment industry companies, has blocked users in all 20 of those states.

The most recent round of blocks occurred on July 1, 2025, with all Aylo-owned platforms being blocked in Georgia, South Dakota, and Wyoming. In my reporting for AVN on this development, a spokesperson for Aylo told me they blocked the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. That is a total population of 136.9 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 data. The same data estimates the national population to be 340.1 million. 203.2 million citizens are in jurisdictions without age assurance regulations and, therefore, aren’t (yet) blocked by Aylo’s websites.

About 40 percent of the U.S. population lives under these laws, meaning that four in 10 people do not have access to websites like Pornhub, RedTube, Brazzers, Men.com, or other Aylo sites. A consumer can simply download a VPN to circumvent the age gates, ultimately rendering such laws useless. However, this won’t stop AVPA’s companies from exploiting adult industry firms.

All of this said, I wish to also remind you that age verification technology is still total dogshit. Though this tech has advanced significantly in the past few years, the studies on efficacy and deployability outside the United States and Australia still conflict with promotional material published by AVPA’s member firms.

For example, the Australian government’s Age Assurance Technology Trial (AATT) found that age verification can be “effective,” but accuracy has much to be desired. A test conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “key flaws” in facial scanning technology meant to confirm age verification. In the news outlet’s test, they found that AI-augmented age assurance scans of a 16-year-old student’s face misidentified him as 19, 23, 26, and 37 years old. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found some of the software for age assurance to be highly effective, but it still fails significantly in differentiating between adults’ and minors’ ages. The Open Technology Institute at the think tank New America also found age verification tech to not be up to snuff, despite the claims of accuracy and effectiveness. In the NIST tests, Yoti was found to be the most accurate age-estimation software with an average error of 1 year in age. Most software made age estimation mistakes by 3.1 years on average.

Commenting in The Conversation about the AATT findings, an information sciences professor, Lisa M. Given of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, explained, “We are going to see a messy situation emerging immediately where people will have what they call false positives, false negatives.” This is consistent with other concerns for privacy rights violations and data loss.

Is all of this worth $13 billion for companies that a vast majority of people have never heard of? I think not.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

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The Trump Administration’s constant escalation of its mass deportation programs now means ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies must come up with thousands of arrests a day. This never had anything to do with removing criminals from the country and, even if you once believed that might be the case, an unending string of raids by ICE has clearly demonstrated this is all about removing as many non-whites from the US as possible.

Keeping up with the administration’s body count demands means ICE has been forced to pull out all the stops. Fortunately for ICE, the administration is pitching in with the PULL ALL THE STOPS process, flooding the Los Angeles area with thousands of military troops and constantly expanding executive power to cover anything that might be challenged in court.

Everything is moving inland, which means the nation’s external borders no longer matter. Immigration via border crossings — both legal and illegal — has pretty much ground to a halt thanks to Trump’s antipathy towards (non-white) foreigners. That means all the action is now happening dozens, if not hundreds of miles from US borders.

And that action now includes the conversion of border crossing tech to field use, allowing ICE (and their federal partners) to bypass legal constraints that prevent government agents from demanding identification from any random person they happen to come across. Thanks to what is hopefully going to be a steady stream of government leaks, Joseph Cox and 404 Media are reporting/warning ICE is capable of identifying people even when those people aren’t legally obligated to show ID.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.

[…]

“The Mobile Fortify App empowers users with real-time biometric identity verification capabilities utilizing contactless fingerprints and facial images captured by the camera on an ICE issued cell phone without a secondary collection device,” one of the emails, which was sent to all Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel and seen by 404 Media, reads. ERO is the section of ICE specifically focused on deporting people.

An activist warning others of ICE activity may have been subjected to this tech during an extremely sketchy stop by a bunch of pissed off, masked federal officers. The driver of the car had his face captured by no less than four different officers, as this recording shows.

Of course, it’s impossible to tell from this angle whether the officers were using the Mobile Fortify app or whether they were just going to run the driver’s face through other facial recognition tech once they got back to the office. But the emails seen by 404 Media make it clear ICE has literally mobilized the facial recognition system CBP and Border Patrol use at border crossings to identify people.

One is the Traveler Verification Service, which runs facial images against images already collected by the CBP. The other is a bit more vague, which suggests images captured by the mobile app might be run through any number of contracted services, which include Clearview’s facial recognition tech, which ICE is currently paying $3 million a year to utilize.

The second is the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow. This is what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) describes as an “intelligence aggregator,” bringing together information related to searches and seizures.

“The app uses CBP’s Traveler Verification Service and the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information for facial recognition,” the email reads. The exact definition of derogatory information in this context is not clear but 404 Media has previously reported on a database that ICE uses to find “derogatory” speech online.

Both ICE and CBP refused to comment on the leaked email. And there’s no reason they would. To comment is to confirm the validity of the leak.

Even if you can ignore the inherent problems with facial recognition tech, especially when the source images are less than ideal, there’s no denying the nasty implications of this expansion of the border to cover anywhere ICE officers might be operating. Plenty of ICE raids have occurred hundreds of miles from the border. And even the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) is now wandering far inland to engage in operations that aren’t even remotely related to customs enforcement and/or border protection.

And, once again, the deployment of facial recognition tech against anyone ICE officers feel like aiming it at makes a mockery of legal protections US residents (legal or otherwise) are entitled to. The government is not allowed to just run around shouting “papers, please” to anyone they happen to encounter while doing its government work. A phone app that bypasses these protections is nothing more than an en masse rights violation, especially when government agents feel comfortable targeting people who are doing nothing more than simply existing where these agents are performing masked kidnappings and/or hassling people for performing the public duty of watching the watchers.

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Both New York and Minnesota just passed laws requiring social media platforms to slap warning labels on their sites—warning labels based on zero scientific evidence, likely to be struck down as unconstitutional compelled speech, and designed solely to let politicians pretend they’re “protecting children” while actually making their lives worse.

You’d think lawmakers would learn.

When Texas passed a ridiculous law requiring adult websites to add “health warning labels” based on no science at all, even the notoriously ridiculous Fifth Circuit—a court that never met a garbage internet law it didn’t like—said “whoa, the mandated health warning part’s obviously unconstitutional.” The court explained that compelling websites to display the state’s preferred message about content when there’s no scientific consensus is completely out of line:

We are not scientific journal editors, much less social scientists, behavioral experts, or neurologists. The courts generally are not the place to hash out scientific debate, particularly not on so contentious a topic as the impacts of engaging with pornography. Experts must do that in academic journals, studies, and presentations. Therefore, the record leaves us with no option but to declare that the health impacts of pornography are currently too contentious and controversial to receive Zauderer scrutiny.

But apparently, NY and Minnesota lawmakers saw that ruling and thought: “Let’s do the exact same thing, but for social media!”

NY state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, serial cosplayer of “save the children!” tech panics, has now convinced the NY legislature to rubber-stamp a cartoonishly stupid and unconstitutional “think of the children” law that will require social media to slap warning labels all over their sites. He’s so hyped on his own grandstanding he can’t even be bothered to name or link the bill in his social posts—which, naturally, are on those supposedly dangerous platforms he’s “saving” us from.

While neither Gounardes nor Gothamist could be bothered to tell you the actual bill, it’s right here: Senate Bill S4505.

The New York bill requires platforms to display a warning that will be written by the “Commissioner of Mental Hygiene” based on their own reading of the science. That text may be adjusted annually based on the whims of the Commissioner. The Commissioner also gets some fun product management responsibilities, including getting to tell social media websites where and how the warning labels must appear, including how often they will see them when they scroll. This warning will appear whenever anyone in New York accesses a social media platform—not just minors, but everyone.

Minnesota’s version, HF 2, is similar. It requires platforms to “conspicuously” display a warning that will be written by the Commissioner of Health and will be visible “each time a user accesses social media” and can only be removed once a user “acknowledges the potential for harm and chooses to proceed to the social media platform despite the risk.” That’s making claims right there that are just not supported by the evidence.

Let’s be crystal clear about why this is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has established through cases like Zauderer that the government can only compel commercial speech (like warning labels) when the compelled disclosure is “purely factual and uncontroversial” and relates to preventing consumer deception. Neither condition applies here.

First, the claim that social media is inherently harmful is not “purely factual”—it’s a highly contested scientific and policy question. Second, social media platforms aren’t deceiving anyone about what their services are. Users know they’re using social media. This isn’t like requiring calorie counts on food or interest rates on loans—facts that consumers might not otherwise know.

And before someone makes the inevitable comparison: no, these are nothing like cigarette warning labels. Here’s the crucial difference that even first-year law students understand: cigarettes are a physical product you ingest. Social media platforms are forums for speech. The government can require factual warnings on physical products based on scientific consensus about health risks of the products itself. But social media platforms aren’t selling a product that users consume—they’re providing a forum for users to speak, read, associate, and engage in core First Amendment activities.

Imagine if the government required bookstores to post warnings that “reading may be addictive and harmful to your mental health” or forced newspapers to print disclaimers that “consuming news may increase anxiety.” That’s essentially what these laws are doing—compelling platforms to denounce the very speech they host.

And yes, lots of people (including the supporters of these bills) will point to the former Surgeon General’s report calling for similar warning labels as proof of their necessity. Yet, as we pointed out at the time, the then Surgeon General’s recommendation appeared to be based on very strong motivated reasoning, including ignoring the details of a report from his own office.

That report, titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” actually stated: “Social media can provide benefits for some youth by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests.” It specifically noted that social media helps LGBTQ+ youth find community, provides mental health resources, and enables creative expression. The report acknowledged that the relationship between social media and youth mental health is complex and individualized—not the simplistic “social media bad” narrative these warning labels promote.

Even more damning: the report admitted “We have gaps in our full understanding of the mental health impacts posed by social media,” and:

Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms. A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care.

None of that is covered or even mentioned in this mad dash for warnings.

The research on warning labels for social media is essentially non-existent. Unlike decades of research on tobacco warnings, there’s no evidence that slapping “this might be bad for you” on Instagram will do anything except fuel moral panic. Worse, these labels might backfire by encouraging parents to ban social media entirely rather than teaching kids digital literacy and healthy online habits.

Think about it: if your kid needs to research LGBTQ+ resources, connect with other kids with rare medical conditions, or find mental health support, these warning labels tell parents that those connections are inherently dangerous. That’s not protecting kids—it’s isolating them.

But, again, the most important part in all of this is that such labeling requirements, based on zero actual scientific evidence, is a fundamental constitutional violation, compelling speech from social media companies for no reason other than to make busybodies feel like they’re making a difference.

Courts have been clear about this. When California tried to require warning labels on violent video games, the Supreme Court struck it down in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, noting that the state couldn’t prove video games caused harm to minors. The Court emphasized that “the State must specifically identify an ‘actual problem’ in need of solving” and that the evidence must be “compelling.”

Here, there’s even less evidence of harm than there was for video games. In both cases, there were plenty of questionable studies to cite, but all were quite contested.

These laws will face First Amendment challenges, and they’ll lose. But in the meantime, taxpayers will foot the bill for defending obviously unconstitutional laws while politicians like Gounardes get to pretend they’ve done something meaningful for children. They haven’t. They’ve just wasted everyone’s time and money on performative nonsense that does nothing to actually help kids navigate the digital world safely and productively.

The real tragedy is that while politicians waste time on unconstitutional warning labels, they’re ignoring actual solutions that could help kids online: digital literacy education, better mental health resources, privacy protections, and giving users more control over their own experiences. But those require actual work and don’t generate easy headlines about “standing up to Big Tech.”

So instead we get this: warning labels that violate the First Amendment, ignore the science, and treat social media as inherently toxic rather than as a tool that can be used well or poorly. It’s lazy governance dressed up as child protection, and one hopes the courts will see right through it.

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Men in masks kidnapping people off streets or turning businesses into ghost towns is now nothing more than an everyday occurrence in the United States. The Trump administration never actually cared whether or not the people it ejected from the country due to their race, color, or creed were, in fact, criminals. All it ever wanted to do was place its thumb on the scales of justice to ensure the population of non-white, non-MAGAs decreased steadily.

The United States once promised a better life for anyone fleeing oppression or simply seeking a better fortune than could be found in their own countries. We haven’t been that nation for most of the last decade, if not longer. Instead, we’re the kind of country that aligns itself with people who would rather see a boat full of refugees sink than agree to share “their” country with anyone who isn’t as big on bigotry as our current president.

The new budget bill barely passed and it took the assumption that Vice President JD Vance wouldn’t accidentally vote the wrong way to get it done. It’s a Trump bill, which means social services will be stripped of funding, rich white voters will be able to take advantage of new tax breaks, and the administration’s hateful expulsion of immigrants will be extremely well-funded. The same administration that created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the pretense of making a big government smaller actually believes the parts of the government it likes should get much, much bigger.

This dissonance prompted a war of words between Trump and the former head of DOGE, Elon Musk — the white foreigner who spent a lot of his own money ensuring Trump’s return to office. Musk, for once, acted like a classic conservative, criticizing the billions being added to the deficit, despite Trump’s claims about trimming the federal fat while yanking the power of purse away from Congress as often as possible.

Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the new budget is the current national focal point, Immigration and Customs Enforce. ICE — along with its private prison contractors — is getting an exponential increase in funding, making it clear this administration is little more than a one-issue presidency.

The legislation makes U.S Immigration and Customs and Enforcement the largest federal law enforcement agency, giving it $45 billion for building new detention centers in addition to $14 billion for deportation operations. It also includes $3.5 billion for reimbursements to state and local governments for costs related to immigration-related enforcement and detention.

The bill funds an expansion to approximately double immigrant detention capacity, from about 56,000 detention beds to potentially more than 100,000. Private prison firms — many of which were significant financial supporters of GOP candidates for Congress as well as the president’s election campaign — will reap major financial benefits from this spending, as nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are currently held in facilities run by for-profit firms.

In terms of national concern, immigration is very low on the list of things bothering most people. The people doing the most complaining about migrants are racists who have suddenly been given a megaphone by a president who shares many of their deliberate misconceptions. These people complain immigrants are taking jobs from US citizens but there’s been no rush by US citizens to fill the void left by ICE raids at meat packing plants, farms, and other labor-intensive occupations. They also claim migrants burden the government with their free-loading, ignoring years of data showing migrants not only pay more than their share of taxes, but also commit criminal acts less frequently than natural-born citizens.

ICE is now the largest law enforcement agency in the United States — the recipient of nearly $70 billion to fund work it doesn’t really even need to be doing. As CBP data shows, the flow of migrants into the country has slowed to a trickle. The people being hunted down by ICE’s Gestapo-esque squads are generally just people who work hard, pay taxes, respect laws, and are a net gain for this country. The criminal element has largely been removed already and whatever’s left simply isn’t enough to justify raids of businesses, neighborhoods, and public gatherings. All that’s doing is fluffing ICE’s detainment stats. And the only people who care about those numbers are the bigots currently serving as un-elected officials in the Trump Administration.

And this means that ICE will continue to be this terrible long after Trump leaves office (assuming, of course, he decides to respect this particular law). Once the money becomes part of an agency’s budget, it takes a concerted effort to roll back the expected annual funding. And from what we’ve seen of the federal government pretty much since its inception, funding only gets cut if it scores political points. Since ICE is part of the DHS and the DHS is still pretending it gives a single shit about homeland security, all it will take for ICE to remain the largest US law enforcement agency is periodic assertions about its national security-related efforts, even if those efforts are just regular-ass racism the agency pretends makes this country safer.

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On Thursday, literally the day before flash flooding devastated Texas, the Texas Observer published an article warning that “Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster,” explaining how cuts to both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would likely lead to disaster for Texas.

Twenty-four hours later, those predictions came true with horrifying precision. And as with so many tragic situations, rather than examining how their own policies contributed to the death toll, Republican politicians are talking about prayers, as if that’s the only thing that can be done. Texas’s Governor Abbott announced a day of prayer, claiming that “prayer works.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson claimed that “all we know to do at this moment is pray.”

Turns out there were, perhaps, a few more things that “we” could have done, including better staffing, better warning systems, and better preparations for how to deal with flooding.

The Texas Observer’s warning (again, from a day before the floods came) was chillingly specific:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the country’s central weather hub, provides the analysis undergirding forecasts of wildfires, severe storms, and heavy rain events, and its observation systems (high-altitude balloons, aircraft, satellites, ocean buoys) provide the data required to support this activity. When you watch TV weather or get a fire warning, it is largely an NOAA product.

Consistent with its aversion to talk of climate change, the administration’s policy guide, Project 2025, recommends dismantling NOAA. Those functions not eliminated would be scattered among other agencies, privatized, or sent to the states. This has not happened yet, but DOGE has fired many of NOAA’s scientists, and there are suggestions its Oklahoma Storm Prediction Center will be closed. Also, crucial data gathering systems are at risk. Federal ability to warn the public is being degraded, and it is a public service no state can replace.

The piece also warned about FEMA cuts, something that I imagine is going to be talked about a lot in the coming days, weeks, and months.

DOGE already cut roughly 20 percent of FEMA’s staff and moved to freeze its funds. And Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled his interest in shifting disaster relief responsibilities entirely to the states. On June 11, he made that threat more concrete by saying that his administration would start phasing out FEMA after this current hurricane season ends in November. “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said. “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”

That, of course, would be bad news for Texas, where Republican leaders routinely play politics with disaster response and relief. Further warming in response to continuing greenhouse emissions ensures that the cost of climate change-augmented storms, floods, and wildfires will only increase with Texans prominent among the victims.

The Policy Cuts Hit Exactly Where They Hurt Most

The NY Times reported that, indeed, the National Weather Service’s local offices in Texas were understaffed, which may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the floods.

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.

Yes, that’s right. The person in charge of “warning coordination” took one of the DOGE buyouts just a couple months ago.

Some (including the White House) are saying that the lack of staffing at the NWS had nothing to do with this, given that the flood warnings were still issued. But issuing a warning is only the first step. The missing staff would have helped coordinate the response as conditions deteriorated:

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

The local infrastructure was equally lacking. Kerr County, where many deaths occurred, had no local flood warning system:

The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred.

In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending.

Emergency Communications Reduced To A Broken Social Media Platform

Perhaps most damning is how government agencies handled public warnings. A report from NPR shows that most of the warnings appeared to be posted on ExTwitter, a platform that has shed users, is increasingly buggy, and requires an account to view most content.

Think about the absurdity: in a life-or-death emergency, government agencies are relying on a social media platform that many people can’t even access without creating an account. This is what happens when public infrastructure gets hollowed out—essential services get outsourced to private, proprietary platforms that may or may not work when you need them most.

The timeline NPR put together shows over and over again that the remaining folks at the NWS seemed to rely on ExTwitter as their main tool for getting word out:

At 9:47 a.m. Texas Division of Emergency Management posted on X weather guidance in both English and Spanish, informing followers about what to do in a flood, adding: “As we head into the holiday weekend and the flood threat in West & Central TX continues, stay weather aware!”

[….]

At 3:35 p.m., the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio announced a flood watch on X*, saying “pockets of heavy rain are expected and may result in flooding.” A* flood watch is used when the weather conditions make a flood possible but it does not mean a flood will occur.

Friday, July 4th:

At 12:42 a.m., the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio posted on X upgrading its flood watch to a flood warning for part of the impacted area. In a post from 2:14 a.m., that area was expanded. A flood warning occurs when flooding is imminent or already happening.

At 1:26 a.m., the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center said “flash flooding likely overnight with significant impacts possible.” This message was posted on X a minute later.

When Prayer Becomes Policy Deflection

The politicians now calling for “thoughts and prayers” are the same ones who systematically dismantled the infrastructure that could have saved lives. They cut the staff who coordinate flood warnings. They pushed out the meteorologists who work with local emergency managers. They eliminated the positions specifically designed to help communities prepare for exactly this kind of disaster.

Then, when people die, they call for prayer.

This isn’t about whether natural disasters happen—they do. It’s about how humans determine just how catastrophic they become. The Texas Observer saw this coming from a mile away, almost down to the day. The staffing cuts hit exactly where they would hurt most. The warning systems were reduced to posts on a social media platform many people can’t access.

Every “thoughts and prayers” statement is an attempt to avoid this discussion. It’s an attempt to treat preventable deaths as acts of God rather than consequences of policy choices. The Texas flooding wasn’t unpredictable—it was predicted. The infrastructure failures weren’t unavoidable—they were the direct result of deliberate budget cuts and dismissals.

Natural disasters happen. But the scale of human tragedy is often a choice. And when politicians choose to gut disaster preparedness and then deflect responsibility through prayer, they’re making that choice clear.

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You might recall that about half a decade ago news outlets began to whine endlessly about the poor old news comment section. Editors at many outlets didn’t like the way the comment section was used to prominently point out errors in stories and challenge newsrooms.

They were also often too cheap to invest in moderating them, resulting in shitty comment sections they blamed on the nature of comment sections, not on their own cheap incompetence. Basically a lot of outlets outsourced all community interaction to the homogenized, badly managed, major social-media giants like Facebook, which degraded both on-site community and discourse quality.

To its credit, the Washington Post has kept and improved its comment section during that period, even though it’s increasingly made less prominent and viewable. They’re now engaging in a revamp of paper interaction that’s likely not going to serve actual readers, and is likely to only degrade the website’s own reporting — allowing powerful people to distort allegations against them.

According to a breakdown by the New York Times, The Post will soon let prominent people or companies comment on reporting within the confines of the article itself:

“The program will allow only people identified by name in an article to comment on it, and the articles included for now are only those published by The Post’s climate team, according to the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The Post will vet their remarks for accuracy and fairness, and the publication said it also might withhold comments that violated rules against defamatory or obscene submissions. The submissions will appear as annotations, revealed to readers if they click or hover a cursor over the source’s name in the article.”

They’re curiously choosing to trial this effort first on climate change reporting, an arena where billionaires and companies have long attempted to distort science and fact to their own financial benefit.

Reporters will be able to respond, creating an additional layer of conversation within each story. The ultimate aim, the Post claims, is to bring a lot of Post readers back from the major social media networks that news organizations ceded control to a decade earlier, which is foundationally the right idea:

“The ultimate aim is to keep readers on the site — instead of having them shift to social media platforms like X and Facebook to have a conversation about a story.

Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said in the memo outlining the program that its aim was to “continue and deepen the conversation about our journalism on our own platforms, rather than losing those interactions to social media, where sources sometimes turn.”

Again, if managed properly, this might not be the worst idea, giving journalism subjects the ability to expand the conversation. Journalism should be a healthy, curated conversation.

But given the overall direction of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos of late, and unrelenting fire of modern propaganda, it shouldn’t be hard to see how this could quickly go badly for real journalism. Companies could be allowed to endlessly “correct the misperception” of critics, and powerful people will be able to distort, deny, or distract from allegations based on substantive reporting.

That would make it harder for journalists to do their job, and undermine, not deepen, existing work, Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times:

“Most of the sources who talk to The Washington Post are very powerful people who are trying to use their power to shape the country in a way that they see fit,” she said. “And they are masters of manipulation when it comes to messaging and communication.” “The Post will have to devote a significant amount of resources to the fact-checking end of this to make it work,” Ms. McBride said.

It smells like a major concession to power by the kind of folks who have been signaling they’re intent on pandering to center-right (or far right) corporatist ideology. The kind of folks who refuse to run cartoons about powerful, rich tech titans. The kind of folks who refuse to publish editorials that challenge corporate power. The kind of folks who kill stories critical of the paper’s recent mismanagement.

Washington Post readership is plummeting as a result of these sorts of decisions, and it’s hard to believe that letting a billionaire CEO or a giant company deride your own journalists’ work within the confines of your reporting is the sort of thing that will bring the paper back from the brink. If done wrong with an eye on coddling power, it could easily accelerate things in the opposite direction.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a reaction to Kilmar Abrego’s story of the conditions inside CECOT:

We’re funding this with taxpayer money. We’re living in Omelas, only it’s worse and there are millions more being tortured than just one child. There’s no walking away though. We have to fight this. We especially have to fight the normalization and rationalization of this.

In second place, it’s glenn with a comment about assaults on ICE agents supposedly spiking:

Is it really “assault” when you defend yourself from “undercover” thugs attacking you on public property? Sounds like self-defense to me.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with That One Guy and another thought on the assault statistics:

No wonder they went with percentages instead of actual numbers.

Those numbers are so low given the explosion of interactions what with the kidnappings apparently even ICE can’t be bothered to report when they bruise their knuckles on someone’s head, which really undercuts their ‘Being a member of the US gestapo is the most dangerous profession in the country, that’s why they have to hide all identifying marks’ narrative.

Next, it’s TKNarr with a comment about the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions:

The Court is also turning the whole principle behind injunctions on it’s head: instead of viewing injunctions as a way of maintaining the status quo pending resolution of the questions being litigated, it’s removing them so that changes to the status quo can’t be blocked until after resolution of the litigation. Therein lies a very corrosive problem.

Over on the funny side, things haven’t picked up that much since the last two weeks. Just two comments (both in response to Tennessee banning books from schools) eked their way into receiving a badge, so we’ll present those here and forego the editor’s choice. In first place, it’s Heart of Dawn expressing surprise at some of the banned material in question:

John Calvin is his namesake

I thought Republicans would love Calvin and Hobbes. It’s about a loud-mouthed white male with an imaginary friend who loves to make up fake monsters, does a lot of grandstanding, hates girls, bends the rules to suit himself, and generally behaves like a child.

In second place, it’s Miles Archer seeking some silver lining:

Heck, it’s really hard to get kids to read. Perhaps telling them a book is banned will get them to read one of them.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020… remember Parler? The uncensored free speech social media platform? Well, it was changing its tune and starting to ban users as it embarked on a speedrun of the content moderation learning curve (and we also noted some striking clauses in its terms of service). Twitch and Reddit were ramping up their enforcement against hateful content, companies were issuing bogus copyright claims to hide police training materials from the public, and ISPs were bringing back usage caps after the very brief pandemic hiatus. Also, the Senate watered down the EARN IT Act while leaving in lots of problems, and research libraries stepped up to tell publishers to drop their lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, the Supreme Court declined to hear Google’s appeal in the Oracle case over API copyrightability. Donald Trump filed an absolutely hilarious lawsuit against Univision, France was taking its war on Uber up a notch (though this didn’t stop downloads from reaching record highs), and the EU was moving to create internet fast lanes under the guise of net neutrality. A Chicago area sheriff was trying to strong-arm payment companies into avoiding Backpage, a Newsday editor was calling for hate speech exceptions to the First Amendment, and in news that feels like it should have come much earlier, Congress was finally allowed to use open source software.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling in the Bilski case, allowing business method and software patents to survive. We wondered if another case might get a more direct ruling on the business method question, while the IEEE was celebrating Bilski with a misleading press release. ASCAP members were mad at the society for attacking Creative Commons, ACTA negotiators were responding to questions with more of the same rhetoric while USTR negotiators were avoiding the question of releasing the latest draft, and music publishers kept lashing out at consumer groups. Also, there was another casualty of the aggressive IP enforcement by the producers of Twilight.

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From the massive handout to already-wealthy Americans to the likely fatal cuts to Medicaid, there’s plenty to be disgusted by in the GOP Budget bill approved by Congress today.

But there’s also a lot of little gifts in there to corporations that will likely fly under the radar, including a massive new handout of valuable federal wireless spectrum holdings to wireless giants like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. It’s just the wireless industry’s latest reward for being utterly feckless, sniveling boot lickers in the face of historic authoritarian corruption.

Senator Ted Cruz recently killed a program to provide free Wi-Fi to poor, rural school kids because the plan upset large carriers like AT&T. That was followed up by efforts to pull billions in federal funding from states that attempt any sort of AI oversight. Cruz’s latest telecom industry-friendly effort involves a massive handout of valuable federal spectrum to wireless giants like AT&T.

Cruz’s plan could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and other, more publicly beneficial wireless efforts, and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers:

“The Cruz plan could take 200 MHz or more away from the 1,200 MHz currently allocated to Wi-Fi between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz. It could also take spectrum from the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which goes from 3.55 to 3.7 GHz.”

That means potentially slower Wi-Fi standards overall. The Wi-Fi 6E standard added support for 6 GHz spectrum, and the in-development Wi-Fi 7 is supposed to take full advantage of the band. Neither will wind up being as useful, fast, and robust if Congress just dumps a massive trove of that spectrum into the lap of AT&T.

The move would likely be particularly harmful for efforts to provide major connectivity at places where a lot of people gather, including schools and libraries. The move also has the potential to harm Internet of Things (IOT) development, given 6GHz’s particular benefits for indoor wireless use.

It’s ironic (?) because Trump’s first term FCC boss Ajit Pai was key in allocating the 6 GHz band to Wi-Fi in the first place back in 2020. Now that he’s shifted over to being the top lobbyist for the wireless industry, he’s playing a starring role in ensuring this public resource is handed over to major carriers.

Before Pai was a lobbyist, his FCC argued that “making the whole band available for Wi-Fi “promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum,” while “repurposing large portions of the 6 GHz band for new licensed services would diminish the benefits of such use to the American public.”

Funny how a new job as a lobbyist changed his outlook. New Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is also busy trying to transfer a massive swath of valuable spectrum from Dish Network (which the first Trump FCC created as a distracted from industry consolidation) to Elon Musk’s Starlink Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network.

While wireless industry lobbyists insist the industry needs more spectrum, privately, many carriers like AT&T are telling investors they don’t really need it. They’re just pushing for a major chunk of 6 GHz spectrum because they can, and thanks to Trump 2.0, we’ve entered the golden age of corruption where the public interest is the very last thing on anybody’s mind.

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

The Misleading Panic over Misinformation (Cato Institute)Claims that Online Misinformation Fears Are Overblown ‘Radically Understates’ the Scale of the Threat (Byline Times)EU Disinformation Code Takes Effect Amid Censorship Claims and Trade Tensions (Tech Policy Press)Content Moderation Is Not Censorship (Law & Liberty)Asked to think like a paedophile or act suicidal: Workers training Meta’s AI in Ireland speak out (The Journal)The Hidden Human Cost of AI Moderation (Jacobin)Brazil rules that social media platforms are responsible for users’ posts (Rest of World)X opens up to Community Notes written by AI bots (The Verge)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

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All hail Jason Fyk, one of the most aggrieved “failure to monetize piss videos” dudes ever. In fact, he might be the only person angered about his inability to turn pee into cash with third-party content featuring people urinating.

Anything that gives me a chance to embed this video (which also served as the ultimate piss take review of a Jet album by snarky music criticism overlords, Pitchfork) is welcomed, no matter how incremental the incident:

First, this is an ape, not a monkey. Second, while there’s definitely a market for videos of people urinating, it’s not on Facebook. It’s on any site that makes room for that particular kink, which means any porn site still in operation will host the content without complaint, even if it limits your monetization options.

Jason Fyk’s misplaced anger and long string of court losses stems from his unwillingness/inability to comprehend why any social media site might have a problem with this particular get [slightly] rich[er] scheme.

Fyk was already making plenty of money with his Facebook pages, if his own legal complaints are to be believed. Let’s check in with the author of this post, who has previously covered this extremely particular subject:

[T]hings were going good for Jason Fyk, at least as of a decade ago. He had 40 Facebook pages, 28 million “likes” and a potential audience of 260 million. Then it (allegedly)(partially) came crashing down. Fyk created a page Facebook didn’t like. Facebook took it down. That left Fyk with at least 39 other money-making pages but he still felt slighted to the extent he decided to start suing.

And sue he did! Of course, none of these lawsuits went anywhere. Not that Fyk hasn’t tried. He’s spent most of the last eight years hoping to smuggle a win out of federal court under the full-length dress of Lady Justice. Fyk lost and lost and lost and sued the government over Section 230 itself and lost and lost and lost.

Last year’s appellate Hail Mary from the would-be Pee King of Facebook was covered by Eric Goldman, who knows a thing or several about Section 230 and Section 230 lawsuits. Some Fyk fatigue was exhibited in Goldman’s December 2024 headline:

How Many Times Must the Courts Say “No” to This Guy?–Fyk v. Facebook

Goldman’s post suggested there might be a way to dissuade Fyk from increasing his losing streak:

Fyk argued that the law regarding anticompetitive animus had changed during his 6-year-long litigation quest, citing the Enigma v. Malwarebytes and Lemmon v. Snap decisions. However, the Ninth Circuit previously rejected the implications of Malwarebytes for Fyk’s case in its last ruling, and “Lemmon says nothing about whether Section 230(c)(1) shields social-media providers for content-moderation decisions made with anticompetitive animus.” Without any change in the relevant law, the court easily dismisses the case again. Remarkably, the court doesn’t impose any sanctions for what some courts might have felt was vexatious relitigation of resolved matters.

And that’s what Fyk does best: make arguments that make no sense, cite irrelevant court decisions, and generally waste everyone’s tax dollars and time. Here’s what the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court said to Fyk the last time around:

The remaining cases Fyk cites are unpublished, dissenting, out-of-circuit, or district-court opinions, which are not binding in this circuit and therefore do not constitute a change in the law.

Fyk is nothing if not persistent. Despite being rejected by the Supreme Court in the final year of what was supposed to be Trump’s only presidential term, Fyk decided his latest loss in the Ninth Circuit demanded another swing at Supreme Court certification.

And despite certain Supreme Court justices getting super-weird about content moderation since it’s preventing their buddies from going Nazi on main, Fyk return to the top court in the land ends like his last one: a single line under the heading “Certiorari Denied” in SCOTUS’s most recent order list release. Even justices sympathetic to bad people who want to be even worse online (so long as they hold certain “conservative views“) aren’t willing to die on Fyk’s piss-soaked hill, no matter how much urine of his own he sprays while wrongly correcting people about Section 230. His complaint is, once again, as dead as the banned account he’s been suing about for most of the last decade.

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Back in the summer of 2020, RFK Jr. was leading the Children’s Health Defense organization, built on an anti-vaccination platform. The organization sued Facebook/Meta that year, along with several fact-checking organizations, for limiting the reach of, and otherwise fact-checking, its posts due to their inclusion of medical and scientific misinformation. CHD argued, in an incredibly stupid filing, that Meta was acting as an arm of the government due to Democratic lawmakers complaining about misinformation being published on the platform and, idiotically, because Section 230 exists. Mike’s takedown of the lawsuit was thorough and complete and very much worth your time if you’re not familiar with this case.

The District Court agreed, tossing this turd in the waste bin. Its explanation was clear: lawmakers complaining about what appears on Meta does not amount to Meta being a state actor, nor does Section 230 existing, and, finally, Meta is a private actor allowed to moderate its own platform as a function of its own speech rights.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, CHD appealed the ruling, making essentially the same arguments, many of which it failed to provide legal precedent and/or any evidence of its claims. The Ninth Circuit ruled against CHD again, and for all the same reasons.

That should have been the end of it… again. Instead, CHD appealed once more to the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that is chockablock with conservative justices, a third of them appointed by President Trump. At a time when the GOP holds the majority of all branches of government. And, finally, at a time in which RFK Jr. is the head of HHS, having left CHD to pursue his career in federal government.

And with all of those factors in theory lining up in favor of CHD’s lawsuit… even this SCOTUS laughed the appeal out of the room.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away without comment a claim brought by the group formerly run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleging that its anti-vaccine speech was censored by the social media company Meta Platforms.

The justices left in place lower court rulings that tossed out the lawsuit, which claimed that Facebook, starting in 2019, colluded with the federal government to restrict access to its content. The issue came to a head during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Facebook removing the group’s page in 2022.

That will be the end of this. And hopefully it serves as a lesson to other, like-minded groups out there that don’t seem to understand that free speech laws apply and protect them from government actions, not privately held platforms that in fact have their own free speech rights. If Meta, or other social media groups, want to fact-check your content, take down your pages, or limit the reach of your posts on their platform… well, they can. It’s theirs.

Unfortunately, Kennedy remains free to do his anti-vax, anti-science damage from the halls of government.

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Way back in the day of EARLIER THIS YEAR, people could expect to be subjected to warrantless, invasive device searches only at US borders and international airports. Visa applicants, however, just needed to fill out some paperwork and wait for permission to head abroad to find work and/or continue their education.

Now, you don’t even have to enter the United States to be subjected to rigorous vetting that opens every digital drawer and roots around in your unmentionables/mentions. And pay no mind to Lady Liberty. She’s come a long way, baby.

November 2, 1883:

*“Give me your tired, your poor,**Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,**The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.*Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

June 18, 2025:

A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right.

[…]

Under new guidance, we will conduct a comprehensive and thorough vetting, including online presence, of all student and exchange visitor applicants in the F, M, and J nonimmigrant classifications.

To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”

That’s from Marco Rubio’s State Department, an announcement that makes it clear Trump’s anti-migrant actions aren’t just about ejecting foreigners of the browner-skinned persuasion, but about preventing foreigners from setting foot in the US for any reason at all.

F, M, and J visas are all related to seeking higher education and/or learning trade skills. There’s no free riding here. These aren’t people sneaking across the borders and laying low until they secure permanent residence. These are people who are here for a single purpose and willing to pay for the (actual) privilege of accessing educational and trade services.

But this administration’s inherent xenophobia means even people seeking nothing more than temporary stays in the United States must be free from expressed thoughts that aren’t fiercely patriotic for a country they’re only seeking to visit.

The State Department is now in the business of rooting out wrong think, something it made clear a few months ago:

The cable… states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”

That’s why visa applicants are now “instructed” to set their social media profiles to “public.” “Instructed” is a heavy word. The federal government isn’t asking. This is a mandate. If you want to come to the United States, you have to subject yourself to a thorough vetting of your social media profiles by State Department staff, who will then subjectively decide whether or not you’re pro-America enough to be granted a visa.

It’s always been true that visas are a privilege and not a right. But it’s only since Trump’s been in office that the State Department has decided to be a hard-ass about it. Generally speaking, if someone meets the requirements, they get a visa. While some vetting does happen, it’s usually been done to prevent actual criminals or terrorists from entering the country. Now, it’s just something more the federal government can do to prevent foreigners from entering the country by treating anything not completely supportive of Trump as a reason to reject a visa application.

The United States was once proud of its melting pot status. Now, we’ve got more in common with the Confederacy than the Union that defeated it two decades before the Statue of Liberty was erected as a beacon of hope directed at the entire world.

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People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as “The Prison that Nobody Leaves.” That’s one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, be impossible to ever get Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who goes by Kilmar Abrego) back: because El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, would never let anyone out to say what they had seen.

Indeed it was surprising enough, when Senator Chris Van Hollen was finally able to meet with Abrego, that he was told that once the controversy over his detainment got enough attention, he had been moved to a different prison. It was even more surprising that the US did actually bring him back to the country, even though it was to face what appeared to be completely fabricated criminal charges.

Because, bringing him back—even to fight criminal charges—would allow him to do something like tell the world (and the courts) about the hellscape that is CECOT.

Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.

The handoff from US to Salvadoran custody was seamless—and brutal:

Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was pushed toward a bus, forcibly seated, and fitted with a second set of chains and handcuffs. He was repeatedly struck by officers when he attempted to raise his head. He observed an ICE agent on the bus communicating with Salvadoran officials to confirm the identities of the Salvadoran nationals on board before the bus departed.

But the real horror began upon arrival:

Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.

The psychological torture was as systematic as the physical:

In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.

Guards weaponized the prison’s gang population as a tool of terror:

While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would “tear” him apart.

These weren’t idle threats:

Indeed, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel. Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards on personnel.

The physical toll was severe and immediate:

During his first two weeks at CECOT, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia suffered a significant deterioration in his physical condition and lost approximately 31 pounds (dropping from approximately 215 pounds to 184 pounds).

The complaint reveals that officials weren’t just torturing Abrego—they were actively trying to hide the evidence. This included staging photos to create a false narrative and, once the controversy grew, moving him to a different facility where he could be hidden from oversight.

The desperation to silence Abrego explains why the Trump administration is freeing actual criminals in exchange for their testimony against him—a remarkable admission that they’d rather have dangerous felons on the streets than let this witness speak freely.

Abrego’s testimony represents the first unfiltered account of conditions inside CECOT—and it’s damning. But this isn’t just about one man’s suffering. It’s about a deliberate policy of sending people, most without any criminal record, to a facility that operates as a torture chamber.

The Trump administration knew exactly what CECOT was when they started using it as a foreign rendition site. They knew people wouldn’t come back to tell their stories. They counted on the silence.

That silence has now been broken. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for turning torture into immigration policy.

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As predicted, CBS execs have folded like damp cardboard and decided to pay Donald Trump $16 million in an incredible and historic act of cowardice. CBS, seeking FCC regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, wanted to settle a completely baseless Trump lawsuit falsely alleging that 60 Minutes misleadingly edited an election season interview with Kamala Harris.

Again, this lawsuit had absolutely no basis in truth. CBS executives could have fought the lawsuit and found an unlimited supply of public and financial support. Talented lawyers country wide would have been happy to help with the case pro bono in order to shut up an authoritarian bully.

Instead, CBS ownership, keen to head to the exits and transfer ownership of the company to Skydance executives (who look to be even bigger Trump ass kissers), folded to a blatant attempt by our mad king to bully and extort a major media company away from doing basic journalism.

CBS owners like Shari Redstone have effectively put up a giant neon sign advertising they don’t care about integrity or journalism, and most of the people who still work at CBS know it.

The settlement comes after months of negotiations between the two sides, and had been sped along by concerns of discovery and a looming shakeup on the CBS/Paramount board of directors:

“After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal ahead of a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. Another deadline loomed: Paramount was planning to make changes to its board of directors this week that could have complicated the settlement negotiations.”

It’s worth noting that it takes the New York Times until the fifth paragraph to make it clear Trump’s lawsuit was baseless. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s legal team tries to frame this unconstitutional extortion racket as some kind of big win for the American public:

“A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the settlement was “another win for the American people” delivered by the president, who was holding “the fake news media accountable.”

“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” the spokesman said.”

The great irony is that CBS executives had already spent years responding to surging U.S. authoritarianism by hiring more Republicans and shifting their editorial Overton window rightward to please Republicans. It’s part of a broader (and not at all subtle) U.S. media industry effort to appease increasingly radical right wing ideology in order to protect their financial interests and access.

The CBS settlement comes despite hints from California lawmakers that they’d be investigating any settlement as a potential bribe under California law. CBS execs initially showed some hesitation in the light of the inquiries, but ultimately likely concluded that any financial penalties (after years of inquiries and litigation) were worth the approval for their $8 billion megamerger.

Over on Bluesky, Senator Ron Wyden promised he’d hold CBS executives accountable, and urged state lawmakers to follow through on their bribery inquiries:

Paramount just paid Trump a bribe for merger approval. When Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.

— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) 2025-07-02T13:50:46.810Z

It’s important to view this as an extension of a very successful, fifty-plus year mission by Republicans to bully U.S. journalism and discredit factual criticism of often extremely unpopular right wing ideology (destroying social service programs and rural medical care to fund giant tax breaks for rich assholes, as a random example plucked out of a hat):

The myth that U.S. journalism suffers from a systemic “liberal bias” is one of the greatest lies ever foisted upon U.S. public discourse. In reality, most U.S. journalism is comprised of center-right corporatists primarily reflecting the financial interests of affluent, white male Conservative ownership. That CBS folded in this way wouldn’t be a surprise to prominent and long-deceased media studies academics.

CBS’ reward for this feckless appeasement was utterly bogus lawsuits, baseless FCC “investigations,” and getting relentlessly attacked in the right wing media as some sort of leftist rag (when again, CBS, if anything, had spent much of the last decade pandering to the U.S. right). There’s simply no winning when it comes to folding to authoritarian bullshit.

The “new CBS” under Skydance will be owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the right wing tech billionaire who has backed Trump. It seems very likely they’ll either spin off and discard CBS’ news division, or increasingly turn “CBS reporting” into the sort of flimsy infotainment and propaganda artifice that’s slowly devouring the lion’s share of what remains of mainstream U.S. journalism.

Just an immense, historic act of cowardice for a U.S. media industry increasingly comprised of flimsy artifice. The era of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow it sure as hell isn’t.

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Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the real story here is that a bunch of cowardly state and federal politicians are placating the desires largely of the religious right, who are seeking to tightly control the books that children have access to in public, secular schools. And if you can’t manage to understand how plainly that is the antithesis of our form of government, then you’re beyond help.

But because authoritarianism makes a fool of itself as a habit, and religiously-based authoritarianism all the moreso, then end result of these attempts at censorship always eventually reveal themselves as absurd. And if you need an example of that, you need only look at the state of Tennessee.

Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, children’s poet Shel Silverstein and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Wattersonhave joined Judy Blume, Sarah J. Maas, Eric Carle and Kurt Vonnegut on a mind-boggling list of hundreds of books purged from some Tennessee school libraries.

The removals are the result of a growing political movement to control information through book banning. In 2024, the state legislature amended the “Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022” to specify that any materials that “in whole or in part” contain any “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” are inappropriate for all students and do not belong in a school library. This change means books are not evaluated as a whole, and excerpts can be considered without context, if they have any content that is deemed to cross these lines. This leaves no room for educators and librarians to curate collections that reflect the real world and serve the educational needs of today’s students.

And because you have groups of far-right activists marching around looking for any scintilla of material over which they can manufacture faux outrage, you get these examples of books being banned for their terrible, awful, smutty content. Such as a Magic Tree House, book that was banned because it had this pornographical image on its cover:

Special thanks to Mike Masnick for briefly allowing me to post porn images on Techdirt. And for all of you whose naughty bits are currently twitching due to that book cover, I offer you my sincerest apologies.

But if you thought that was bad, check out this panel image from a Calvin & Hobbes book that got it banned. Here we have the nude image of a child on full display.

Now, I sure hope everyone realizes that the above is a dalliance into sarcasm, because I was laying it on quite thick. I grew up on Calvin & Hobbes, not to mention Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic, which was also banned. Why? More butts, that’s why. And, because the universe is not without a sense of irony, one school even had to ban a book authored by an alumnus.

Oak Ridge Schools, where a significant number of the bans target art history books, even removed Richard Jolley: Sculptor of Glass, a collection of works by the artist, who graduated from Oak Ridge High School.

“Regarding the book written by Mr. Jolley, we were thrilled to feature a book written by an ORHS alumni on our shelves and were equally disappointed to have to remove it,” Molly Gallagher Smith, an Oak Ridge Schools spokeswoman, told WBIR. “Unfortunately, as an artist, Mr. Jolley’s book features depictions of the human body that are in direct violation of the law.”

There are more and the bans hit all the notes you would expect: LGBTQ+ material, books about the Holocaust, books about African American contributions to government and science, and, because of course, Fahrenheit 451 itself.

Now, this is indeed all absurd, but it isn’t remotely funny. There is a ton of literature, hundreds of books, that are being banned under this Tennessee law. Many of them reportedly without going through any review process.

And many of the bans are coming without any review or discussion. The Tennessee Association of School Libraries found in a survey of its members that in 20% of school districts, books were removed from the shelves at the command of district leaders without any sort of review process. “Librarians and educators are concerned that we will end up pulling a massive amount of books without looking at the books as a whole,” one member said in the survey. “It’s a slippery slope,” said another, “and I’m fearful of the next topic that will be regulated.”

Open up book bans to the frothy-mouthed mob. What could possibly go wrong, other than keeping valuable literature out of the hands of our children?

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A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.

The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to address understandable concerns about generative AI-created “replicas” by creating a broad new intellectual property right. That approach was the first mistake: rather than giving people targeted tools to protect against harmful misrepresentations—balanced against the need to protect legitimate speech such as parodies and satires—the original NO FAKES just federalized an image-licensing system.

The updated bill doubles down on that initial mistaken approach by mandating a whole new censorship infrastructure for that system, encompassing not just images but the products and services used to create them, with few safeguards against abuse.

The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters;  c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”

This bill would be a disaster for internet speech and innovation.

Targeting Tools

The first version of NO FAKES focused on digital replicas. The new version goes further, targeting tools that can be used to produce images that aren’t authorized by the individual, anyone who owns the rights in that individual’s image, or the law. Anyone who makes, markets, or hosts such tools is on the hook. There are some limits—the tools must be primarily designed for, or have only limited commercial uses other than making unauthorized images—but those limits will offer cold comfort to developers given that they can be targeted based on nothing more than a bare allegation. These provisions effectively give rights-holders the veto power on innovation they’ve long sought in the copyright wars, based on the same tech panics.

Takedown Notices and Filter Mandate

The first version of NO FAKES set up a notice and takedown system patterned on the DMCA, with even fewer safeguards. NO FAKES expands it to cover more service providers and require those providers to not only take down targeted materials (or tools) but keep them from being uploaded in the future.  In other words, adopt broad filters or lose the safe harbor.

Filters are already a huge problem when it comes to copyright, and at least in that instance all it shouldbe doing is flagging for human review if an upload appears to be a whole copy of a work. The reality is that these systems often flag things that are similarbut not the same (like two different people playing the same piece of public domain music). They also flag things for infringement based on mere seconds of a match, and they frequently do not take into account context that would make the use authorized by law.

But copyright filters are not yet required by law. NO FAKES would create a legal mandate that will inevitably lead to hecklers’ vetoes and other forms of over-censorship.

The bill does contain carve outs for parody, satire, and commentary, but those will also be cold comfort for those who cannot afford to litigate the question.

Threats to Anonymous Speech

As currently written, NO FAKES also allows anyone to get a subpoena from a court clerk—not a judge, and without any form of proof—forcing a service to hand over identifying information about a user.

We’ve already seen abuse of a similar system in action. In copyright cases, those unhappy with the criticisms being made against them get such subpoenas to silence critics. Often that the criticism includes the complainant’s own words as proof of the criticism, an ur-example of fair use. But the subpoena is issued anyway and, unless the service is incredibly on the ball, the user can be unmasked.

Not only does this chill further speech, the unmasking itself can cause harm to users. Either reputationally or in their personal life.

Threats to Innovation

Most of us are very unhappy with the state of Big Tech. It seems like not only are we increasingly forced to use the tech giants, but that the quality of their services is actively degrading. By increasing the sheer amount of infrastructure a new service would need to comply with the law, NO FAKES makes it harder for any new service to challenge Big Tech. It is probably not a coincidence that some of these very giants are okay with this new version of NO FAKES.

Requiring removal of tools, apps, and services could likewise stymie innovation. For one, it would harm people using such services for otherwise lawful creativity.  For another, it would discourage innovators from developing new tools. Who wants to invest in a tool or service that can be forced offline by nothing more than an allegation?

This bill is a solution in search of a problem. Just a few months ago, Congress passed Take It Down, which targeted images involving intimate or sexual content. That deeply flawed bill pressures platforms to actively monitor online speech, including speech that is presently encrypted. But if Congress is really worried about privacy harms, it should at least wait to see the effects of the last piece of internet regulation before going further into a new one. Its failure to do so makes clear that this is not about protecting victims of harmful digital replicas.

NO FAKES is designed to consolidate control over the commercial exploitation of digital images, not prevent it. Along the way, it will cause collateral damage to all of us.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog, with a link to EFF’s Take Action page on the NO FAKES bill, which helps you tell your elected officials not to support this bill.

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According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We’ve normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there’s every indication it’s going to get worse under Donald Trump.

While the federal government had been making some progress in getting wireless companies to belatedly adopt anti-spoofing technology, the Trump administration’s decision to lobotomize whatever was left of U.S. regulatory independence and consumer protection will indisputably leave regulators flat-footed in the ongoing battle to reclaim U.S. voice networks from scumbags.

The FCC still technically exists, but under Trump it’s become a weird and pointless grievance machine run by zealots. Its primary function during Trump’s term so far has been to harass companies for not being sexist or racist enough, or threaten media companies that dare do journalism critical of King Dingus.

Consumer groups like the National Consumer Law Center have repeatedly warned Congress that the key reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the “legit” companies like debt collectors that use the same tactics and routinely undermine reform and enforcement efforts.

YouGov’s latest study found that “just” 14 percent of May’s robocall total was from “scammers.”

Even before Trump, a corrupted court system had consistently limited the FCC’s authority to combat robocalls. Corrupt lawmakers and regulators, cowed into blind obedience by a massive, generational, cross-industry-lobbying campaign, like to keep the focus on scammers, when many “legit” companies, again, leverage the exact same tactics as scammers.

As a result, federal regulators refuse to hold large phone companies accountable for their lagging efforts to combat fraud and spam. Case in point: Truecaller’s U.S. Spam and Scam Report found that half of all major U.S. phone companies earned a D or F in their efforts to combat annoying robocalls and scams. Functional, developed countries (even many less developed ones) don’t have these problems.

So while the FCC is supposed to enforce robocall offenses and levy fines, terrible court rulings mean they aren’t allowed to collect fines. That’s left to the DOJ, which routinely just… doesn’t bother. As a result a comically small volume of the overall fines levied are ever actually collected. For example between 2015 and 2019 the FCC issued $208.4 million in robocall fines, but collected just $6,790.

And again, this is all before Trump 2.0. And before largely unregulated AI.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been promising to take a hatchet to whatever is left of U.S. corporate oversight as part of his “delete, delete, delete” deregulatory initiative. Big telecoms and robocallers have been making it very clear they’re very excited about it. Debt collectors in particular are very eager to roll back already flimsy rules governing how badly they can harass people they already know can’t pay.

Like so many systemic U.S. problems, the robocall menace isn’t something that gets fixed without first embracing much broader corruption, campaign finance, lobbying, and legal reforms. That is, obviously and indisputably, not something that’s happening under Trump and his sycophantic regulators and telecom industry-coddling courts.

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The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they’re doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups.

Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ordered his release, noting that the Justice Department appeared to have leaned on actual criminals to fabricate evidence against him. Now the Washington Post has the full story, and it’s even more damning: The Trump admin is literally freeing a repeat violent offender in exchange for testimony against Abrego—a man with no criminal history who was working and raising a family.

The Trump administration has agreed to release from prison a three-time felon who drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community and spare him from deportation in exchange for his cooperation in the federal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego García, according to a review of court records and official testimony.

Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, has been convicted of smuggling migrants and illegally reentering the United States after having been deported. He also pleaded guilty to “deadly conduct” in the Texas incident, and is now the government’s star witness in its case against Abrego.

Let that sink in: They’re freeing someone, who drunkenly fired shots in a community, to help them prosecute someone whose only “crime” was being the victim of the government’s own illegal deportation, making the Trump administration look totally incompetent in the process.

Remember, the Trump regime insisted that it was focused on going after the worst of the worst, the most hardened criminals of all. Yet, over and over again we’re finding out that they can’t actually find all those criminals they insisted were out there, so they’re randomly grabbing anyone they can find. In the case of Abrego, that meant taking a man who had no criminal history, and appeared to be gainfully employed, and raising a family, and shipping him to the one place an immigration court had forbidden the US to send him.

That set the DOJ off on a wild goose chase to try to justify their own massive fuckup, leading to these questionable criminal charges against him, which they used to try to distract from the fact that they accidentally sent a man to a foreign concentration camp after being forbidden from doing so.

But to make that work, apparently it involves freeing the actual hardened, dangerous criminal, in hopes that he’ll testify against Abrego.

Hernandez is among a handful of cooperating witnesses who could help the Trump administration achieve its goal of never letting Abrego walk free in the United States again. In exchange, he has already been released early from federal prison to a halfway house and has been given permission to stay in the U.S. for at least a year.

“Otherwise he would be deported,” Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, testified at Abrego’s criminal hearing June 13. The government is also likely to give him a work permit, the agent told the court.

There’s no way to look at this other than “we’ll release a hardened criminal who is here illegally, and who has already been deported multiple times, including letting him stay in the US with working apers, so long as he concocts a story that lets DHS and the DOJ save face after we fucked up royally in renditioning a man illegally.”

That should be an embarrassment to the Trump regime, but it will barely get any attention.

It Gets Worse: Trump Is Also Freeing MS-13 Leaders

But the Abrego case isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a pattern. At the same time Trump is manufacturing criminal cases against innocent people, he’s also cutting deals to free actual MS-13 gang leaders.

The NY Times has reported that for all of Trump’s promises to destroy the MS-13 gang, he’s cut a deal with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele to let actual top MS-13 gang leaders go free:

Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say.

Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.

His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.

But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.

The report details how these actual MS-13 leaders have evidence of Bukele’s corruption, and Bukele asked for them back, rather than letting them tell their stories to American courts:

But the Trump administration has not acknowledged another reason Mr. Bukele would want them back: U.S. prosecutors have amassed substantial evidence of a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who they say agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail, a New York Times investigation found.

The deal with El Salvador heralded by Mr. Trump as a crackdown on crime is actually undermining a longstanding U.S. inquiry into the gang*, according to multiple people with knowledge of the initiative. Two major ongoing cases against some of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders could be badly damaged, and other defendants could be less likely to cooperate or testify in court, they said.*

The Pattern Is Clear

So let’s be clear about what’s happening here:

Innocent people like Abrego: Prosecuted with manufactured evidence from criminals who get released in exchange for their testimonyActual violent criminals: Released early from prison and given work permits if they’ll help prosecute innocent peopleMS-13 gang leaders: Handed over to a foreign dictator to protect that dictator from corruption charges, undermining ongoing DOJ investigations

This isn’t “tough on crime”—it’s the opposite. It’s law enforcement theater that makes everyone less safe while covering up the administration’s own legal violations.

All that seems really bad! It’s almost as if the Trump regime is much more focused on public relations claims than actually helping to stop gang activity.

Meanwhile, the judge in his criminal case has agreed that even though they’ve ruled that he should be released, Abrego is probably safer in federal prison, because were he released, ICE would likely ship him halfway around the world to some dangerous war zone.

Think about that: A federal judge is keeping someone in prison not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re safer there than in the hands of immigration enforcement. That’s where we are now—federal prison as sanctuary from ICE’s lawlessness.

This is what happens when immigration enforcement becomes completely divorced from actual public safety and becomes, instead, a machine for generating propaganda victories, no matter how many innocent people get ground up in the process.

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The DHS finally decided to provide the underlying stats for its exponentially increasing claims of sky-high numbers of assaults on ICE officers.

Earlier this year, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted assaults were up 413%, which was parroted by acting ICE direction Todd Lyons in his whiny response to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump’s questioning of ICE officer tactics: namely, the unmarked vehicles, the refusal to identify themselves, and the fact that pretty much every person on a deportation task force seems incapable of doing the job without being dressed in camo and covering everything but their eyes with a mask.

According to Lyons and McLaughlin, the masks and lack of identification were essential to protecting ICE officers from the public, what with this massive spike in assaults on officers. Lyons’ response to Philip Bump cited McLaughlin’s public statements. The DHS’s public statements cited… absolutely nothing.

Since ICE refuses to release stats on assaults on officers, Philip Bump went digging into CBP stats to see if they were also increasing. They weren’t. In fact, assaults on CBP officers have been trending downward since 2022 and, if the rate remains consistent, there will be fewer assaults this year than last year.

ICE and the DHS doubled down when questioned, claiming a few days later the increase in the number of assaults was now 500%. To support this claim, the DHS’s official government website linked to… an article on right-wing rag Breitbart, I shit you not. And this article didn’t contain any stats. All it contained was a direct quote from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin about the 500% increase.

So far, all the DHS has given the public is statements that are closed loops. DHS says assaults are up 500%! Here’s a link to the DHS saying assaults are up 500%.

Maybe the DHS should have just continued doing that. At least that would have looked slightly less stupid than the actual truth. Bill Melugin (of all people), a Fox News correspondent, managed to secure the official stats from the DHS. And, as Jessice Pishko noted on Bluesky, the total number of assaults is laughably low.

That 700% number — from 10 to 79. Considering there have been thousands more encounters this is uniquely unimpressive. (Also, I would like to see each of these 79 reports bc I have a guess who started it.)

— Jessica Pishko (@jesspish.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T14:31:49.303Z

If you can’t read/see the post, this is what Pishko said about the assault claims:

That 700% number — from 10 to 79. Considering there have been thousands more encounters this is uniquely unimpressive. (Also, I would like to see each of these 79 reports bc I have a guess who started it.)

The screenshot of Melugin’s tweet has the receipts:

I asked DHS for the underlying raw data:

1/21/2024 – 6/30/24 10 assaults1/21/2025 – 6/30/2025 79 assaults

That’s it. Less than 70 more assaults year-over-year. And that’s an insanely small increase, given the massive increase in ICE activity, which includes daily raids of large businesses and densely populated areas.

More than 97,000 people have been detained over Mr. Trump’s first five months in office, CBS News’ analysis found, while ICE arrests, which do not always result in detentions, topped 100,000 earlier this month.

A record 59,000 people were currently being held in ICE detention as of June 23 — nearly half of them with no criminal record, CBS News reported last week.

Even if you choose to believe every assault reported here is actually an “assault” (rather than someone inadvertently bumping an officer, standing too close to an officer, “contempt of cop,” swearing at an officer, throwing a snowball at an officer, etc.), the government action far outpaces the corresponding increase in assaults. Those are rookie numbers, what with the number of officers involved in domestic terrorism mass deportation efforts.

So, now that we know the truth, we’re back where we started: DHS and ICE look absolutely ridiculous claiming immigration enforcement work is so dangerous every officer needs to hide their face and drive around in unmarked vehicles like the kidnappers they are. The next time administration officials claim there’s been another spike in assaults, remember it only takes ten assault allegations from officers to add another 100% to the total.

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