Techdirt

For years, we’ve written about the concept of “soft corruption,” which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government.

Lately, of course, it feels like the corruption is becoming more and more blatant. But there’s something telling about how soft corruption works: it operates by creating an atmosphere where everyone implicitly understands the game, but no one says it out loud. Though, apparently, that may be changing. Teddy Schleifer got a fascinating quote from Wall Street investor (and LimeWire founder… and RFK Jr. anti-vax funder) Mark Gorton, who was one of Andrew Cuomo’s biggest donors in his complete flop of a New York City mayoral run/comeback from disgrace:

Here's a fun thing that a top donor to Andrew Cuomo's super PAC just told me.

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer.bsky.social) 2025-06-25T23:03:08.131Z

If you can’t read the screenshot, it reads:

As donors try to assess their next moves in the mayoral race, one of the biggest donors to Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC, the investor Mark Gorton, said he is likely to back Mamdani. That is because of the support that Mamdani had gotten from Brad Lander, who Gorton said he ranked first. “I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” Gorton said in an interview. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sort of things were not useful things to do.”

Read that again. “That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo.” A quarter-million dollar donation, described casually as protection money to avoid being “shut out” by a politician with a reputation for vindictive retaliation against those who cross him. And Gorton’s matter-of-fact tone suggests this isn’t scandalous—it’s just Wednesday in American politics.

This is notable on multiple levels, starting with the fact that one of Cuomo’s biggest donors didn’t even rank Cuomo first on the ranked-choice ballot. But, the real story is the honest admission from Gorton that the only reason he felt he needed to cough up a quarter of a million dollars to Cuomo was to stay in his good graces.

This is soft corruption in its purest form: not a quid pro quo, not a bag of cash, just the quiet understanding that those who don’t pay tribute risk being frozen out when decisions get made.

What makes Gorton’s admission so damning isn’t just what it says about Cuomo—it’s what it reveals about how normalized this has become. We’re not talking about some back-room deal or smoking-gun evidence. We’re talking about a major political donor casually explaining, to a reporter, that a $250,000 contribution was essentially protection money. The fact that he’s comfortable saying this publicly suggests that everyone already knows this is how the game works.

Of course, in this case, it may have also contributed to Cuomo’s loss to Zohran Mamdani. Even as some people remained critical or cautious of Mamdani’s policy proposals, he came across as real and earnestly wanting to help actual people in New York, whereas Andrew Cuomo came across as… Andrew Fucking Cuomo, deeply cynical and a career political opportunist with no fundamental principles or beliefs beyond the pursuit of power.

This kind of soft corruption creates a feedback loop that undermines democratic governance in ways that are harder to prosecute but just as destructive as outright bribery. When wealthy donors make contributions not because they believe in a candidate but because they fear retaliation, it distorts the entire political process. Politicians learn that intimidation works better than persuasion. Donors learn that access requires tribute. And the public learns that their representatives answer to whoever can afford the protection money.

It’s also worth noting how this normalizes the harder (and even more blatant) corruption we’re seeing at the federal level. When “stay on his good side” donations become routine political pragmatism, it’s a shorter leap to the kind of brazen pay-to-play schemes we’re witnessing with Trump’s corporate deal approval power and Meta’s $25 million protection payment. The soft corruption creates the cultural infrastructure that makes the hard corruption possible.

But, really, the main takeaway from this is that we’ve become so inured to the corruption all around us that major political donors can casually describe protection rackets to reporters without expecting any blowback.

When the quiet part gets said out loud—and nobody seems particularly surprised—we’ve crossed a line. We’ve moved from a system where corruption hides in shadows to one where it operates in plain sight, confident that we’ve all accepted it as just how things work.

The real question isn’t whether we’ll slide into a system where corruption operates openly—we’re already there. Trump’s presidency has made it clear that the “soft” and “hard” corruption aren’t sequential phases but parallel systems. While Gorton was cutting checks to stay in Cuomo’s good graces, Trump was openly selling access, handing out get out of jail free cards to those who help him, and now requiring corporate executives to kiss his ring for deal approvals.

What Gorton’s casual admission reveals isn’t a warning about where we might be headed—it’s evidence of how thoroughly we’ve normalized the foundation that makes brazen kleptocracy possible. When protection rackets become “sad political pragmatism” that donors discuss matter-of-factly with reporters, we’ve already crossed every meaningful line.

The question now is whether we have any capacity left to recognize that this isn’t normal, isn’t inevitable, and isn’t something we have to accept. Because once we’ve shrugged our way through both the soft corruption and the hard corruption, what’s left to protect?

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Within days of each other, two federal judges in the same district reached completely opposite conclusions about AI training on copyrighted works. Judge William Alsup said it’s likely fair use as transformative. Judge Vince Chhabria said it’s likely infringing because of the supposed impact on the market. Both rulings came out of the Northern District of California, both involve thoughtful judges with solid copyright track records, and both can’t be right.

The disconnect reveals something important: we’re watching judges fixate on their personal bugbears rather than grappling with the fundamental questions about how copyright should work in the age of AI. It’s a classic case of blind men and an elephant, with each judge touching one part of the problem and declaring that’s the whole animal.

I just wrote about Judge Alsup’s careful analysis, which found that training AI was likely protected as fair use, but building an internal digital library on unlicensed downloaded works was probably not. Before that piece was even published, Judge Vince Chhabria came out with a ruling that disagrees.

The summary: AI training is likely infringing. But here, the plaintiff authors failed to present evidence, and thus, their case against Meta is dismissed. Ironically, Alsup’s ruling was probably a win for AI innovation but a loss for Anthropic. Chhabria’s is the opposite: a clear win for Meta, but potentially devastating for AI innovation generally.

Chhabria’s Flawed Market Harm Analysis

Chhabria’s ruling seems to overweight (and, I think incorrectly predict) the “effect on the market” aspect of the fair use analysis:

Because the performance of a generative AI model depends on the amount and quality of data it absorbs as part of its training, companies have been unable to resist the temptation to feed copyright-protected materials into their models—without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying them for the right to use their works for this purpose. This case presents the question whether such conduct is illegal.

Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes. What copyright law cares about, above all else, is preserving the incentive for human beings to create artistic and scientific works. Therefore, it is generally illegal to copy protected works without permission. And the doctrine of “fair use,” which provides a defense to certain claims of copyright infringement, typically doesn’t apply to copying that will significantly diminish the ability of copyright holders to make money from their works (thus significantly diminishing the incentive to create in the future). Generative AI has the potential to flood the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more. People can prompt generative AI models to produce these outputs using a tiny fraction of the time and creativity that would otherwise be required. So by training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works, and thus dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way

I find this entire reasoning extremely problematic, and it’s why I mentioned in the Alsup piece that I don’t think the “effect of the use upon the market” should really be a part of the fair use calculation. Because any type of competition can lead fewer people to buy a different work. Or it can inspire people to actually buy more works because of more interest. Chhabria’s example here seems particularly… weird:

Take, for example, biographies. If a company uses copyrighted biographies to train a model, and if the model is thus capable of generating endless amounts of biographies, the market for many of the copied biographies could be severely harmed. Perhaps not the market for Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, because that book is at the top of so many people’s lists of biographies to read. But you can bet that the market for lesser-known biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson will be affected. And this, in turn, will diminish the incentive to write biographies in the future.

This is where Chhabria’s reasoning completely falls apart. He admits in his own example that Robert Caro’s biography would be fine because “that book is at the top of so many people’s lists.” But that admission destroys his entire argument: people recognize that a good biography is a good biography, and AI slop—even AI slop generated from reading other good biographies—is not a credible substitute.

More fundamentally, his logic would make any learning from existing works potentially infringing.

If you go to Ford’s Theatre in DC, where Lincoln was shot and killed, you can actually see a very cool tower of every book they could find written about Lincoln. Under Chhabria’s reasoning, this abundance should have killed the market for Lincoln biographies decades ago. Instead, new ones keep getting published and finding audiences.

If any of the authors of any of those books read any of the other books, learned from them, and then wrote their own take which did not copy any of the protectable expression of the other books, would that be infringing? Of course not. Yet Chhabria’s analysis seems to argue that it would likely be so.

Or take magazine articles. If a company uses copyrighted magazine articles to train a model capable of generating similar articles, it’s easy to imagine the market for the copied articles diminishing substantially. Especially if the AI-generated articles are made available for free. And again, how will this affect the incentive for human beings to put in the effort necessary to produce high-quality magazine articles?

This argument would be more compelling if the internet hadn’t already been flooded with free content for decades. Plenty of the internet (including this very site) consists of freely available articles based on our reading and analysis of magazine articles. This hasn’t destroyed the market for original journalism—it’s just competition. And, indeed, some of that competition can actually increase the market for the original works as well. If I read a short summary of a magazine article, that may make me even more likely to want to read the original, professionally written one.

So I don’t find either of these examples particularly compelling, and am a bit surprised that Chhabria does. He does admit that other kinds of works are “murkier”:

With some types of works, the picture is a bit murkier. For example, it’s not clear how generative AI would affect the market for memoirs or autobiographies, since by definition people read those works because of who wrote them. With fiction, it might depend on the type of book. Perhaps classic works of literature like The Catcher in the Rye would not see their markets diminished. But the market for the typical human-created romance or spy novel could be diminished substantially by the proliferation of similar AI-created works. And again, the proliferation of such works would presumably diminish the incentive for human beings to write romance or spy novels in the first place.

Again, even his murkier claims seem weird. There are so many romance and spy novels out there, with more coming out all the time, and the fact that the market is flooded with such books doesn’t seem to diminish the demand for new ones.

This all feels suspiciously like the debunked arguments during the big internet piracy wars about how downloading music for free would magically make it so that no one wanted to make music ever again. The reality was actually quite different: the fact that the tools for production and distribution became much easier and more democratic, meant that more music than ever before was actually produced, released, distributed… and monetized in some form.

So the entire premise of Chhabria’s argument just seems… wrong.

The Alsup vs. Chhabria Split

Chhabria also takes a fairly dismissive tone on the question of transformativeness. And even though he likely wrote most of this opinion before Alsup’s became public, he adds in a short paragraph addressing Alsup’s ruling:

Speaking of which, in a recent ruling on this topic, Judge Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on. Such harm would be no different, he reasoned, than the harm caused by using the works for “training schoolchildren to write well,” which could “result in an explosion of competing works.” Order on Fair Use at 28, Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-5417 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025), Dkt. No. 231. According to Judge Alsup, this “is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act.” Id. But when it comes to market effects, using books to teach children to write is not remotely like using books to create a product that a single individual could employ to generate countless competing works with a miniscule fraction of the time and creativity it would otherwise take. This inapt analogy is not a basis for blowing off the most important factor in the fair use analysis.

Here we see the fundamental disagreement: Alsup thinks transformativeness is the key factor; Chhabria thinks market impact trumps everything else. Both can’t be right, and the fair use four-factor test gives judges enough wiggle room to justify either conclusion.

Chhabria does agree that training LLMs is transformative:

This factor favors Meta. There is no serious question that Meta’s use of the plaintiffs’ books had a “further purpose” and “different character” than the books—that it was highly transformative. The purpose of Meta’s copying was to train its LLMs, which are innovative tools that can be used to generate diverse text and perform a wide range of functions. Cf. Oracle, 593 U.S. at 30 (transformative to use copyrighted computer code “to create a new platform that could be readily used by programmers”). Users can ask Llama to edit an email they have written, translate an excerpt from or into a foreign language, write a skit based on a hypothetical scenario, or do any number of other tasks. The purpose of the plaintiffs’ books, by contrast, is to be read for entertainment or education.

But he thinks market harm is more important—a conclusion that would gut much of fair use doctrine if applied consistently.

Also, while Alsup focused heavily on the unauthorized works that Anthropic downloaded and then stored in an internal “library” and Chhabria goes into great detail about how Meta used BitTorrent to download similar (and in some cases, identical) copies of books, he leaves for another day the question of whether that aspect is infringing.

Indeed, in some ways, these two cases represent the old claim that the fair use four factors is just an excuse to do whatever the judge wants to do and then try to work backwards to try to justify it in more legalistic terms using those for factors.

The Plaintiffs’ Spectacular Failure

Given all this, you might think that Chhabria ruled against Meta, but he did not, mainly because the crux of his opinion—that these AI tools will flood the market and diminish the incentives for new authors—is so ludicrous that the plaintiffs in this case barely even raised it as an issue and presented no evidence in support.

In connection with these fair use arguments, the plaintiffs offer two primary theories for how the markets for their works are affected by Meta’s copying. They contend that Llama is capable of reproducing small snippets of text from their books. And they contend that Meta, by using their works for training without permission, has diminished the authors’ ability to license their works for the purpose of training large language models. As explained below, both of these arguments are clear losers. Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data. As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.

Given the state of the record, the Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books.

In short, the court’s ruling in this case is that the winning argument is the impact on the market, while the plaintiffs in this case focused on the claim that the outputs of AI tools trained on their works was infringing. But, Chhabria notes, that argument is silly.

The irony is delicious: Chhabria essentially handed the authors a roadmap for how to beat AI companies in future cases, but these particular authors were too focused on their other weak theories to follow it. It’s a clear win for Meta, but potentially devastating precedent for AI development generally.

What we’re watching is how the fair use four-factor test can be manipulated to justify almost any conclusion a judge wants to reach. Alsup prioritized transformativeness and found for fair use. Chhabria prioritized market harm and found against it (even while ruling for Meta on procedural grounds). Both wrote lengthy, seemingly reasoned opinions reaching opposite conclusions from largely similar facts.

This case isn’t settled. Neither is the broader question of AI training and copyright. We’re still years away from definitive answers, and in the meantime, companies and developers are left navigating a legal minefield where identical conduct might be fair use in one courtroom and infringement in another.

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To call the administration’s “worst of the worst” claims a ruse is to give this administration too much credit. It’s not clever enough to run a con. Going after criminals was never the point during Trump’s first term. And mass deportation was the platform Trump ran on to get back to the Oval Office for this term.

Given the expectations, ICE was always going to fall short of arrest quotas if it restricted itself to actual lawbreakers. That’s why it’s casting a wider net, one that not only removes anyone looking vaguely Hispanic, but also people who happen to disagree with Trump or his policies.

And that’s why most of ICE’s high-profile raids have targeted businesses. This administration is creating a labor crisis with its shotgun approach to deportation, something that’s only going to aggravate current financial problems created by the administration’s shotgun approach to perceived trade deficits.

Who are we ejecting from this country at the rate of dozens of people per day? Hardworking, law-abiding migrants who’ve done nothing more than seek jobs, pay taxes, and carve out a better life for their loved ones. The government knows what it’s doing. After all, it already has all the evidence it needs to show its mass deportation program has nothing to do with making this nation safer or more secure.

David Blier has dug into the data for Cato, and here’s the upshot of this mass forced exodus.

As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes.

The pretense of making America safer has been discarded. America won’t get any safer, just as surely as it won’t get any greater under this president. For years, it’s been known that migrants commit fewer crimes than natural-born citizens. But with arrest numbers flagging after an initial, more-targeted surge, the administration made it clear it was time to hit the streets and round up any foreigners ICE might come across.

This shift in policy resulted from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s meeting at the end of May, when he ordered ICE to start arresting more non-criminals. “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” he said. “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7‑Eleven?”

ICE did indeed go to Home Depot. And for that, it’s now dealing with multiple weeks of unending protests, with the focal point being the Home Deport raid that occurred in Los Angeles.

It’s nothing more than a racist purge — something that can be ascertained even with incomplete data. As Blier points out, it’s difficult to get a complete picture on deportation efforts, now that the job has been split up between ICE, CBP, and the Border Patrol. But just looking at ICE’s numbers, it’s easy to see this isn’t about ejecting criminals. It’s about getting rid of non-white people.

Since the beginning of this year, ICE book-ins based on ICE arrests have increased nearly sixfold, from a daily average of 215 to over 1,100 per day.

As that number has exponentially increased, so has the percentage of migrants without criminal convictions, who now make up nearly three-quarters of all ICE detainees. And yet, many of these people will be routed to whatever hellhole might take them, whether it’s being stacked up in repurposed shipping containers in South Sudan or forced into general population at El Salvador’s CECOT.

And we possibly haven’t even seen the worst of this.

The White House has ordered ICE to meet an unreasonable quota of 3,000 arrests per day, a target they were nowhere near achieving as of June 14.

Trump’s anger has been re-lit by incessant protests and an extremely low-energy birthday party. On top of all but declaring war on “Democrat” cities, Trump has ordered ICE to increase its deportations. At some point, the demands will outstrip the supply. That unavoidable fact — along with the administration’s blood lust for cruelty — increases the odds that actual citizens will be treated like disposable foreigners by people too busy to do the job right and too removed from any form of accountability to care.

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While dozens of AI copyright lawsuits wind their way through courts nationwide, Judge William Alsup’s ruling this week in Bartz v. Anthropic stands out — not just because it’s from one of the most thoughtful tech judges on the federal bench, but because it charts a somewhat nuanced path through the copyright minefield that could define how AI companies operate going forward.

The ruling has sparked predictably divergent takes, with observers claiming it’s both a big win and a big loss for AI. But the real story is more interesting: Alsup has essentially created a roadmap that validates legitimate AI training while drawing clear lines around what crosses into infringement.

The bottom line: this may cost Anthropic some serious money, but it’s actually great news for generative AI development generally should it stand up.

In short, Judge Alsup found that training an AI system on unlicensed copyright works is easily transformative fair use. So too was buying physical books and scanning them to be digital copies used for training. However, initially downloading a bunch of unlicensed works and storing them long-term as a kind of central library can be infringing.

To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.

The good (and I believe correct) part is that training is transformative fair use. Judge Alsup goes through the standard four factors analysis, with the correct emphasis on the transformative nature of the use for generative AI training. Alsup notes that the training on generative AI tools on a corpus of information is the equivalent of how humans learn from works of the past, not to replace them, but to learn from them:

In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.

The first factor favors fair use for the training copies.

He finds similarly (though for slightly different reasons) on the hard copy books Anthropic purchased to scan. The scanning, a la Google Books, was for transformative purposes and, a la the Sony Betamax case, to make the content more convenient:

Storage and searchability are not creative properties of the copyrighted work itself but physical properties of the frame around the work or informational properties about the work. See Texaco, 802 F. Supp. at 14 (physical), aff’d, 60 F.3d at 919; Google, 804 F.3d at 225 (informational); Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (“Sony Betamax”), 464 U.S. 417, 447 (1984) (rightful interests). In Texaco, the court reasoned that if a purchased scientific journal article had been copied “onto microfilm to conserve space, this might [have been] a persuasive transformative use.” 802 F. Supp. at 14 (Judge Pierre Leval), aff’d, 60 F.3d at 919 (reducing “bulk[ ]” “might suffice to tilt the first fair use factor in favor of Texaco if these purposes were dominant“). In Google Books, the court reasoned that a print-to-digital change to expose information about the work was transformative. Google, 804 F.3d at 225 (Judge Pierre Leval). And, in Sony Betamax, the Supreme Court held that making a recording of a television show in order to instead watch it at a later time was copying but did not usurp any rightful interest of the copyright owner. 464 U.S. at 447, 455. Important to the Supreme Court’s reasoning was the expectation that most such copiers would not distribute the permanent copies of the work.

And since that was effectively the same as what Anthropic did here, it gets another vote towards fair use:

Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).

Thankfully, Alsup flatly rejects the idea that it can’t be fair use because authors/publishers might have wished to license these works at a higher rate. That’s not how this works:

Yes, Authors also might have wished to charge Anthropic more for digital than for print copies. And, this order takes for granted that Authors could have succeeded if Anthropic had been barred from the format change. “But the Constitution’s language [in Clause 8] nowhere suggests that [the copyright owner’s] limited exclusive right should include a right to divide markets or a concomitant right to charge different purchasers different prices for the same book, [merely] say to increase or to maximize gain.” See Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519, 552 (2013); see also U.S. CONST. art. I., § 8, cl. 8. Nor does the Copyright Act itself. Section 106 sets out exclusive rights that fair uses under Section 107 abridge. Section 106(1) reserves to the copyright owner the right to make reproductions. But on our facts we face the unusual situation where one copy entirely replaced the another. And, Section 106(2) reserves to the copyright owner the right to make derivative works that add or subtract creative material — as occurs in a “translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, [or] condensation” of a book, 17 U.S.C. § 101 (definitions). For some “other modification[ ]” of a book to constitute a “derivative work,” it must itself “represent an original work of authorship.” Ibid. But on our facts the format was changed but no content was added or subtracted. See Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341, 1342, 1343– 44 (9th Cir. 1988) (yes where elements added to create new decorative ceramic).4 Section 106(3) further reserves to the copyright owner the right to distribute copies. But again, the replacement copy here was kept in the central library, not distributed. Cf. Fox News Network, LLC v. TVEyes, Inc., 883 F.3d 169, 176–78 (2d Cir. 2018) (enabling searching for “information about the material” can be transformative use, even if some distribution results); Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of Am., Inc., 964 F.2d 965, 968, 971 (9th Cir. 1992) (using nifty converter to “merely enhance[ ]” audiovisual displays emitted from purchased videogame cartridge was fair use of those displays partly because no surplus copies of cartridge or displays were ever created).

As a result, Anthropic’s format-change from print library copies to digital library copies was transformative under fair use factor one. Anthropic was entitled to retain a copy of these works in a print format. It retained them instead in a digital format, easing storage and searchability. And, the further copies made therefrom for purposes of training LLMs were themselves transformative for that further reason, as above.

My quibble with this is that there is an argument that with the books that were either legally purchased or licensed and then used for training, should you even need to get to the fair use argument at all. If you buy a used book and read it and learn from it without directly paying the author or publisher, it’s not because of “fair use” that you do it. It’s because reading and learning from the work doesn’t trigger copyright at all.

However, if we must go to fair use based on the fact that in this training process copies were made, having Alsup call it transformative fair use is a good outcome.

But then there’s the question of the non-licensed book collections (things like Books3 and LibGen) that Anthropic downloaded from the internet and then stored in the internal “digital library” it was using. And here, Alsup is not impressed and finds it difficult to see the fair use. Basically, in those cases, the company was clearly just downloading unlicensed copies to put into its own library.

This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use. There is no decision holding or requiring that pirating a book that could have been bought at a bookstore was reasonably necessary to writing a book review, conducting research on facts in the book, or creating an LLM. Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently, irredeemably infringing even if the pirated copies are immediately used for the transformative use and immediately discarded.

This feels close to reasonable. There are certainly plenty of cases on the books that show that simply downloading unlicensed content off the internet can be seen as infringing (though I’d still quibble that under the exact text of copyright law it only counts as a “copy” if it’s a “material object,” and purely digital content isn’t covered — but courts have long rejected that argument).

Where it still worries me a bit is that this feels pretty similar to things like “indexing the web.” Organizations like Google and the Internet Archive and many others copy all the content they can find online and store it in giant databases/indexes/libraries. And those have been found to be fair use in the past.

So what makes this different?

Judge Alsup tries to distinguish this from key cases regarding internet scanning, but this part feels weaker to me:

Nor were the initial copies made immediately transformed into a significantly altered form. In Perfect 10, images were copied by the search engine in thumbnail form only and deployed immediately into the transformative use of identifying the full-sized images and the pages from which they came. 508 F.3d at 1160, 1165, 1167. And, in Kelly v. Arriba Software Corp., images were copied at full size and then into thumbnails for immediate use in building a search engine, after which the full-sized copies were immediately deleted. 336 F.3d 811, 815 (9th Cir. 2003). Not here. The full-text copies of books were downloaded and maintained “forever.”

Nor does the initial copying here even resemble the full-text copying in the Google Books cases. There, libraries of authorized copies already had been assembled, and all copies therefrom were made for direct employment in a one-to-one further fair use — whether the transformative use of pointing to the works themselves, the use of providing the works in formats for print-disabled patrons, or the use of insuring against going out of print, getting lost, and becoming otherwise unavailable. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d at 97, 101, 103; Google, 804 F.3d at 206, 216–18, 228 (further distinguishing search and snippet uses, which “test[ed] the boundaries of fair use”). Not so here concerning the pirated copies. No authorized copies existed from which Anthropic made its first copies. No full-text copy therefrom was put immediately into use training LLMs. Not every copy was even necessary nor used for training LLMs. No initial copy was ever deleted, even if never used or no longer used. The university libraries and Google went to exceedingly great lengths to ensure that all copies were secured against unauthorized uses — both through technical measures and through legal agreements among all participants. Not so here. The library copies lacked internal controls limiting access and use.

This… feels like rationalization. Yes, the Perfect 10 and Arriba cases were about thumbnails, but search engines do more than turning content into thumbnails, and we generally consider that — even when it sweeps up infringing works on its own — to still be a fair use. So while I understand the logic of what Alsup is saying here, I do worry that it goes too far, and could wipe out other important and valuable uses.

Without going into too much detail on the other four factors (since they tend to matter less here), Alsup says the nature of the works cuts against fair use (but this factor rarely matters much in the final analysis), and while the copying required pretty much the entirety of the copyright-covered works, it leans towards fair use because (as multiple other cases have shown over the years), the use involved the amount necessary to achieve the transformative nature of the work.

Copies selected for inclusion in training sets were selected because they were complete and because they contained rich protectible expression, or so this order accepts the record shows for Authors. Was all this copying reasonably necessary to the transformative use?

Yes.

“What matters [ ] is not so much ‘the amount and substantiality of the portion used’ in making a copy, but rather the amount and substantiality of what is thereby made accessible to a public [in the purported secondary use] for which it may serve as a competing substitute [for the primary use].”

Then there’s the dreaded “effect of the use upon the market” factor, which I honestly think shouldn’t be a fair use factor at all. But in this case, Alsup splits the three classes of works, saying the training use again favors fair use, since it has no direct impact on the market. The use to build the library is mixed again: the purchased copies is seen as neutral, while the unlicensed download copies cuts against fair use (again).

So, in the end: fair use for training, fair use for buying used books and scanning them, not fair use for downloading Books3/LibGen and creating an internal library out of them:

This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.

The win for AI is that the training aspect (and even the scanning aspect) are found to be fair use. But, the people who say this is a win for the authors aren’t entirely wrong, because the downloading of the unauthorized copies was done by almost all of the big foundation LLM companies (though it’s not clear all of them set up a similar “library” as Anthropic did).

The prediction is that this one part, on which Alsup says there should be a trial, will likely lead Anthropic to try to settle the case and pay up for that use. That wouldn’t surprise me, given the insane statutory damages rates (effectively starting at $750 per work infringed, but going all the way up to a potential $150k per work if found to be willful).

Though, it also strikes me that even if the authors win, the remedy here wouldn’t require the destruction of the LLMs themselves, since it’s not the tool that is infringing, but rather the separate storage as a library.

Also left open, to me, is the question of what would happen if a model figured out a way to train on those works like Books3/LibGen just by scanning them when found elsewhere online, and not creating the internal library. That could limit some of the usefulness of those collections but would, in theory, avoid some of the liability risk Alsup sees here.

The end result then is that this ruling favors LLM training, which is good for innovation and usefulness. It might, however, ding more sketchy ancillary practices of the big LLM creators. And maybe that’s the proper balance? Alsup has created a framework that distinguishes between legitimate, transformative innovation practices and what amounts to direct infringement with a corporate veneer.

This distinction matters because it gives other AI companies a clear playbook (one that may come too late for some): if you want to avoid Anthropic’s potential liability, don’t create permanent archives of questionably sourced content. The ruling essentially says you can learn from copyrighted works, but you can’t just wholesale copy them into your corporate library.

Some will argue that’s a distinction without a difference, but it’s actually how copyright is supposed to work — focusing on the nature of the use rather than blanket prohibitions on touching copyrighted content.

Of course, this is still just one district court ruling among many pending cases, and appeals are inevitable. But if this framework holds up, it could reshape how AI companies approach data collection — favoring more legally defensible practices over the pure “move fast and break things” approach that might prove to be more trouble than it was worth.

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So you may have seen that Elon Musk’s long-hyped Robotaxis have finally “launched” in Austin. And it’s going just about how you’d expect if you’re familiar with the fit and finish of Elon Musk promises.

There are about a dozen Robotaxis now operating; Model Ys with a human observer in the front seat to try and avoid calamity. And despite years of hype about this product, social media is filled with videos of Robotaxis engaging in all sorts of problematic and dangerous behavior, including routinely veering into the wrong lane, failing to accomplish basic turns, or responding poorly to unique situations.

good morning, here's a gnarly mistake from yesterday's Tesla "robotaxi" launch day: the vehicle is in a turn lane, signaling for the left, and about halfway through it bails out and decides to drive directly into an oncoming laneseems extremely chill!youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?…

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) 2025-06-23T12:50:25.089Z

Elon thinks you're a crash test dummy. Watch this "robotaxi" make an absolutely bonkers mistake (and a second smaller one) as a Tesla super fan gets his first ride. Crazy. #teslatakedown #MuskMustFall

— #TeslaTakedown (@teslatakedown.com) 2025-06-24T02:08:29.993Z

The videos have apparently gotten the attention of U.S. auto safety regulators (or what’s left of them after Trump and his courts basically lobotomized all regulatory independence). In a statement to the press, the NHTSA said they’re monitoring the situation and have asked Tesla for more information:

“NHTSA is aware of the referenced incidents and is in contact with the manufacturer to gather additional information. NHTSA will continue to enforce the law on all manufacturers of motor vehicles and equipment, in accordance with the Vehicle Safety Act and our data-driven, risk-based investigative process.  Under U.S. law, NHTSA does not pre-approve new technologies or vehicle systems — rather, manufacturers certify that each vehicle meets NHTSA’s rigorous safety standards, and the agency investigates incidents involving potential safety defects. Following an assessment of those reports and other relevant information, NHTSA will take any necessary actions to protect road safety.”

Granted even under previous administrations the NHTSA routinely failed to do its job, particularly as it pertains to the growing body count of Tesla’s “full self driving” misrepresentations.

But under the Trump administration, it’s all so much worse. Federal corporate oversight genuinely no longer exists. Several Supreme Court rulings have declared that U.S. regulators can no longer do basic tasks without the explicit direction of a Congress that corporations know is too corrupt to function. The rulings were the culmination of a multi-generational quest by corporate power to lobotomize corporate oversight (under the pretense they were “reining in regulators run amok” for the greater good).

Now, even if U.S. regulators do try to do their jobs, they have a very good chance of having enforcement efforts crushed by the Trump-heavy 5th or 6th circuits (see the 6th Circuit’s recent decision to vacate a long-percolating FCC effort to fine AT&T for spying on customer location data without consent). Any attempt to do anything to protect consumers, markets, or public safety will be bogged down in legal fighting for years, quite by design.

That’s before you even get to DOGE cuts (the NHTSA staffers responsible for investigating the safety risks of automation were literally fired by Elon Musk), the fact that Trump has fired Democratic commissioners at several agencies and stocked most of the others with a rotating crop of weird extremists and ass kissers.

Cumulatively, it’s not hyperbole to state that federal consumer, labor, environment, and public safety protection no longer functions in this new golden age of corruption. That’s fucking dire and deadly. You simply won’t see this reality made apparent by most U.S. journalists.

If you read press coverage of the Tesla Robotaxi problems (TechCrunch, CNBC, Reuters) — or any story where regulators are involved — they all kind of act as if it’s business as usual. A reader walks away from all of those stories believing the NHTSA is truly “investigating” things, might do something about it, and there’s somebody competent managing the store. That there’s really nothing new under the sun.

Corporate media is conditioned to downplay the way that corruption has hollowed out our federal regulators because it’s a policy affluent media ownership supports. But it also feels like a lot of consumer and business journalism suffers from a sort of normalization bias. This all results in long stories about business and consumer policy that don’t mention the train has gone completely off the rails.

The Robotaxi stuff aside, that’s resulted in a lot of oblivious Americans who have no real understanding that we’re going to see widespread concussive failure of a lot of stuff they take for granted. Much of it fatal.

In Austin that means little real oversight while Tesla conducts a dangerous public beta (without Austin public input or approval) using obviously half-cooked automation. We’ll be lucky if this doesn’t ultimately end in fatalities, which, if history is any indication, once again won’t result in anything even vaguely resembling accountability for the executives or companies involved.

Tesla memestock was up ten percent the day reports emerged that the Robotaxis are dangerously undercooked. As per tradition.

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A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we will lose access to the world’s knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to place copies of the articles they publish in key backup archives. Although unacceptable, that oversight is more a matter of laziness and cost cutting on the part of publishers, rather than a result of outright animosity to the preservation of academic learning.

Indeed, if anyone a year ago had suggested that a far more serious assault on knowledge might take place, one that was a conscious and thoroughgoing attempt to expunge hard-won facts from the record, it would have rightly been ridiculed as too absurd a notion even to consider. And yet that is precisely what Donald Trump has been engaged in since coming to power. The fact that the unthinkable is happening has important consequences not just for learning, but also for academic publishing. The first signs of what was to come appeared in February. The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis.

After expunging words, the Trump administration moved on to wiping out entire databases. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration quietly announced that it would be deleting key datasets relating to marine and climate science. Environmental and science groups are now suing the US government for removing public information in this way.

The Internet Archive has already brought together together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations as part of its “Democracy’s Library,“ and now groups in Europe are joining in with their own projects to preserve holdings. Pangaea is a “data publisher for earth and environmental science,” hosted by the University of Bremen, in Germany. When the imminent deletions of US data were discovered, Pangaea announced the “PANGAEA Data Rescue Initiative 2025”:

Starting in 2025, the United States is facing unprecedented budget cuts to federal science agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These cuts specifically target climate research, environmental monitoring, and public health data programs, with plans to significantly reduce funding for data services and websites.

In response, members of the scientific community—both within and outside the U.S.—approached PANGAEA to help preserve critical data products that were at immediate risk of being decommissioned. This includes the potential loss of data availability and the shutdown of data portals, which would make it much harder to locate and access existing datasets.

Consequently, PANGAEA has started data rescue efforts in agreement with the respective data providers by following the FAIR data principles.

FAIR requires data to meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. One reason why Pangaea’s data rescue initiative can take place is that works of the US government are not covered by domestic copyright law. This means that copies can be freely made. The Knowledge Commons hopes to make backups of vital research on an even larger scale, and has applied for a grant from the Trust in American Institutions Challenge. That initiative is sponsored by Reid Hoffman, and will award a single $9 million grant over five years to the selected project. Knowledge Commons’ proposal includes an interesting approach to dealing with material that is under copyright:

we propose to build a novel technical architecture that preserves not only material to which we have a license (or is openly licensed), but also material that we do not hold a license for, by using PGP [Pretty Good Privacy] encryption to ensure that this material cannot be accessed until a valid copyright-expiring trigger-event has occurred.

Just as vital as key datasets are academic papers. Accessing the latter in the field of medicine is made easier thanks to PubMed, whose interesting origins are discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). As Hilda Bastian wrote in February this year:

PubMed is incredibly reliable. And a lot depends on it. It’s an ecosystem built around MEDLINE, the steady feed of new publications in biomedicine: It determines which journals count, takes their output in, adds valuable information and linkages, and feeds it back out – free to users globally. And there’s a lot more, too, that we rely on from the NCBI (the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH’s National Library of Medicine [NLM]).

That article featured a troubling hypothetical: “What if We Can’t Rely on PubMed?” Two weeks later, PubMed did indeed go dark, apparently due to some temporary problem. But in the wake of Trump’s attack on science, people realized that PubMed was vulnerable and might be shut down permanently. As a result, the German Library of Medicine, ZB Med, launched an effort to create an open-source global literature infrastructure. Hilda Bastian explained the plan:

The big vision is to move past the reliance on any single country’s investment in this core life sciences infrastructure: It’s not to have a duplicative, parallel structure in Germany, nor to simply transplant a centralized system from the US to Germany. The goal is a fully open source, federated, safety net, embedded within the international community, with a strong global network of support. If PubMed as it is now falls, then this “PubMed 2.0” could carry the load forward. And if PubMed powers on, then aspects of what’s developed would be available for the NLM and any other services to use.

As Bastian’s post notes, one of the biggest problems with the idea is getting traditional publishers on board:

ZB MED has begun negotiations with publishers this month, and several gold Open Access publishers have already indicated their willingness to submit their meta-data to this project. In the Q&A part of the meeting, there was discussion about the challenge of getting commercial publisher participation. It’s going to take a lot to convince publishers to contribute, and getting the library/government consortia that pay for institutional subscriptions to include this in their contracts may be critical

Academic publishing is emerging as key battleground in this new assault on knowledge. Last month, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in the top medical journals:

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Jama and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,” the US health secretary said on the Ultimate Human podcast. He accused the publications of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies.

Although he’s right that pharmaceutical companies do wield too much power in this world, his solution is arguably worse:

Kennedy outlined plans to launch government-run journals that would become “the preeminent journals” because National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding would anoint researchers “as a good, legitimate scientist”.

Government-run titles publishing “approved” research from “good, legitimate” scientists is a recipe for disaster. It’s part of a broader plan by the Trump administration to control every aspect of federally-funded research. Last month, in yet another executive order, Trump pledged to restore “Gold Standard Science.” Although superficially a welcome move, leading scientists have warned that it will “destroy American science as we know it.” They brand it as “Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.”

All these moves to restrict access to knowledge make re-inventing academic publishing even more urgent. The big publishers will doubtless implement any demands that Trump makes in an effort to preserve their healthy profits. Those could include refusing to publish scientists that have fallen foul of the Trump administration by daring to raise objections to the new approach, or by pointing out the harm it will cause.

Smaller open access publishers might step in and provide a global platform for those who have been banned in this way. However, they too are subject to commercial pressures, and may not want to take on the Trump administration. This underlines once more the importance of diamond open access, where no charge is made either to the researchers writing the papers, or to readers. Because of the underlying business model, diamond open access journals tend to be run on a shoestring, supported by grants from independent foundations. That makes them largely immune to even Donald Trump at his most vindictive. As the US war on knowledge sharpens, we can probably expect to see diamond open access titles emerge as the samizdats of the digital age.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.

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We’ve noted more than a few times that media and streaming execs are all out of original ideas. Now that the market has saturated and subscriber growth has slowed, streaming companies have decided to stop giving the public what it wants (few restrictions, low prices, better quality content) in order to provide Wall Street with the illusion of impossible, endless quarterly growth.

Instead they’ve started focusing on brand cannibalization efforts that have devastated the traditional cable sector: pointless and harmful mergers, price hikes, and the imposition of annoying new nickel-and-diming restrictions. Their latest big idea is the imposition of even more advertisements, or even higher fees to avoid them.

In early 2024, Amazon began charging Prime customers $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. At the time, they promised they’d try to keep ads to a minimum; yet in less than 18 months they’ve doubled the amount of ads users have to deal with.

Warner Brothers Discovery’s “Max” has, of course, followed right along, stuffing fifty-percent more commercial breaks into each program in its ad-based tiers. We noted when this trend emerged that Wall Street demands for impossible quarterly revenue growth would mean these companies wouldn’t be able to help but push their luck, so this sort of thing is right on cue:

“A support page for Max’s Basic with Ads plan says to expect six minutes of ads per hour, a 50 percent jump. And despite its original promise not to show ads during HBO programming, Max has been breaking up HBO shows with commercials as well.”

Max originally promised “a commitment to the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry.” But, like Amazon, those promises were utterly worthless. Very cool. Very innovative.

 As Ars Technica notes, this is steadily eroding the value of streaming. And there’s more enshittification to come. Linear TV still reportedly shows 13 to 16 minutes of commercials per hour, so there’s still plenty of runway for these execs to make their services shittier and erode their own quality standards further. At which point you’ll absolutely see a surge in piracy that these execs will blame on everything but themselves.

By 2026 or so you should see a lot of resurgent industry whining about piracy, followed by terrible industry ideas to try and “fix” a problem they created; like lobbying Congress for a ban on VPNs, or working even harder to kick poor people off of their broadband connections for downloading a TV episode.

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It’s a bit jarring to be reminded that it was only on June 10th that RFK Jr. decided to fire every member of ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. Those 14 experts had a variety of backgrounds all related to and demonstrating industry experience specifically dealing with vaccination science and policy. They were replaced by an 8 member panel, handpicked by Kennedy and chockablock with vaccine deniers/skeptics and folks whose credentials don’t exactly match Kennedy’s description when he announced the new panel.

Now, it’s one thing when someone like me, who has been quite out in the open about my distaste for this administration and for Kennedy specifically, to talk about how bad this all is. And it is! ACIP recommendations effect everything from the availability and recommendations of vaccine schedules among doctors to whether and what coverage insurance companies are mandated to provide for them.

But when a staunch GOP Senator who voted to confirm Kennedy’s appointment as Secretary of HHS says that Kennedy’s choices for ACIP were so bad that he’d rather they not meet at all? Well, that should be indicative of just how absurd Kennedy’s behavior has become.

Sen. Bill Cassidy(R-La.) called for the delay of this week’s meeting of a federal vaccine advisory panel handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, citing concerns about members’ lack of experience and potential bias towards vaccines.

“Wednesday’s meeting should not proceed with a relatively small panel, and no CDC Director in place to approve the panel’s recommendations,” Cassidy wrote in a post on X late Monday evening.

He noted that members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology,” and some may even have a “preconceived bias against” mRNA vaccines.

The Hill, which I generally like, has presented this quote in such a way that I don’t think it really provides the full impact of Cassidy’s statement. It almost sounds like just your run of the mill reaction from a politician on social media.

It’s not. This is Cassidy saying that Kennedy’s ACIP advisors are so ill-equipped to perform the role they’ve been assigned by RFK Jr. that they simply shouldn’t perform their jobs at all. Cassidy further couched his statements by saying that failing to at least delay the meeting, given how the panel is currently viewed, would create distrust of its recommendations. But that’s just saying the same thing again: the public would distrust ACIP’s recommendations because the ACIP panel members are largely completely unqualified for the role and some are actively hostile towards good public health policy.

ACIP is set to meet today and tomorrow. I somehow doubt that Kennedy’s arrogance, nevermind that of his boss, will allow him to delay the meeting as Cassidy requests. And, when that ends up being the case, the only remaining question is the one that we’ve been asking for some time: when is Congress going to put an end to RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS?

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There are a few thousand military troops in Los Angeles now, thanks to Trump’s Martial Plan. Local law enforcement officials pointed out they had the situation under control, what with most of the violence (what there was of it that isn’t police violence) limited to a few blocks in downtown LA.

The rollout of National Guard troops remains a point of judicial discussion. The imposition of Marines on Los Angeles has already resulted in military troops doing what appears to be cop work, which is something they’re definitely not allowed to do.

But having more dudes duded up in camo is definitely turning heads. Last week, a whole bunch of warfighter-looking officers invaded a Los Angeles flea market, turning a normal swap meet into downtown Fallujah.

When I tell you Los Angeles is an occupied city/county, this is what I mean…Yesterday, ICE agents showed up to a regular Saturday swap meet with armed Marines and a military helicopter overhead, like it’s a fucking war zone.

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-06-15T16:49:50.028Z

Now, we have the answer to a question no one should have needed to ask? How many officers does it take to effect two (2) immigration-related arrests?

With a Department of Homeland Security helicopter circling, several dozen heavily armed, masked ICE agents dressed in military tactical gear raided one of the most popular swap meets in Southern California, which caters to a predominantly Latino crowd, over the weekend.

[…]

An estimated 60 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were seen on the flea market grounds, which also houses a music venue.

Sixty officers and a helicopter. The optics of turning a local flea market into something that more closely resembles military actions in foreign countries. The absolute shock value of storm-trooping a domestic marketplace. And what did the administration get from this show of force?

It’s unclear if federal officials expected to detain a lot of individuals at the event, but despite their large numbers, only two people, a woman and a man, the latter of whom told an onlooker he’s Colombian, were seen in handcuffs as they were escorted away.

Not to nitpick, but it’s perfectly clear the government expected to detain a lot of people. That it didn’t shows how desperate federal officers are to meet constantly escalating deportation quotas. But, in this case, the optics are the end game. This administration has pretty much declared war on any state Trump perceives to be governed by his enemies.

And this underwhelming outcome was confirmed by the DHS, which appears to believe this is an acceptable cost-benefit ratio.

“ICE administratively arrested two individuals. Both entered the United States near Yuma, Arizona in March 2022. They were placed into removal proceedings and released from custody in 2023. They will now remain in custody pending the completion of removal proceedings,” the spokesperson added.

Yet again, we’re being shown the administration isn’t actually interested in removing truly dangerous immigrants from this country. All it wants to do is remove any (non-white, mind you) immigrants from this country and is willing to break laws to do it.

There was no specific target here. This was nothing more than the government utilizing its endless resources to troll for high-profile arrests. The government had no reason to believe the swap meet was host to dangerous criminals. It just sent 60 troops/officers and a helicopter to a place where there were a lot of people who looked kind of foreign.

The administration, of course, won’t see this as a failure. The primary purpose is a show of force in a “hostile” (using Trump’s words) city with the secondary intended effect being the promotion of a constant climate of fear. In any rational sense, the impromptu raid was a failure. But when the goal actually isn’t deportation of dangerous people, every loss is still a win.

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Here’s a fun corporate governance puzzle for you. Suppose you’re a foreign company trying to buy an American steel producer. The previous administration blocked your deal. The current president promised during his campaign to block it too, saying he’d stop it “instantaneously. Absolutely.” How do you get the deal approved?

If you guessed “write the president’s name directly into your corporate charter and give him personal veto power over your business decisions,” congratulations! You understand modern American capitalism.

That is, more or less, what happened with Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel. The company has filed amended corporate documents with the SEC that contain what might be the most extraordinary governance provision in corporate history: a section that literally names “Donald J. Trump” and grants him veto power over everything from plant closures to pricing strategies to executive compensation.

Initial reporting described this as a “golden share” arrangement with the US government, but that turns out to be wrong in an important way.

Historically, when governments privatized state-owned companies, they sometimes kept what’s called a “golden share”—a special ownership stake that gives the government veto power over certain decisions even though they no longer run the company day-to-day or even have a direct economic stake in the company. The idea was “we’re selling this to private investors, but we still care about some strategic decisions.”

More recently, golden shares have become associated with China’s approach to tech companies. Beijing lets companies operate with private investment but maintains golden share arrangements that give the government control over key decisions. Indeed, supporters of a TikTok ban often point to the supposed “golden share” that the Chinese government holds in the company (something TikTok kinda denies, by suggesting it only applies to the Douyin subsidiary, and not ByteDance proper or international TikTok).

To simplify: golden shares are a way for countries to pretend they have privatized industries that are actually nationalized. You know: the kind of thing MAGA Republicans used to call socialism or communism.

Trump supporters hated such things just a few weeks ago. Senator Lindsey Graham recently promised legislation to “remove any existing company that has a golden share structure from any American exchange.” Apparently, that principled stance expires when the golden share goes to Trump personally.

That’s a tweet from Lindsey Graham, just months ago, claiming:

I will soon introduce legislation with my Senate colleagues that prevents any company that has a “Chinese golden share” from being listed on any American exchange and further, remove any existing company that has a golden share structure from any American exchange.

Which makes it pretty wild that the US has now created its own version, except weirder: instead of “the government” having control, Donald Trump personally has control.

The SEC filing contains what may be the most extraordinary corporate governance provision ever written:

ARTICLE VI

1.            The Corporation shall not, either directly or indirectly by amendment, merger, consolidation or otherwise, without (in addition to any other vote required by law or this Certificate of Incorporation) (i) at any time when Donald J. Trump is serving as President of the United States of America, the written consent of Donald J. Trump or President Trump’s Designee*, or (ii) at any other time, the written consent of the CMAs (as parties to the NSA) (and any such act or transaction entered into without such consent or vote shall be null and void ab initio, ultra vires and of no force or effect):*

(a)            alter, amend, repeal or waive any provision of this Certificate of Incorporation, except as contemplated by Article XII of the NSA;

(b)            change the Corporation’s name from “United States Steel Corporation”, change the Corporation’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or change the Corporation’s domicile to a jurisdiction other than a state, commonwealth, district or territory of the United States;

(c)            reduce, waive or delay any Capital Investment (as defined in Schedule 2 to this Certificate of Incorporation), subject to receipt of necessary approvals and permits on an expedited basis;

(d)            (A) prior to June 18, 2027, close, idle or sell the Corporation’s Granite City Works or (B) prior to June 18, 2035, close, idle or sell any other Production Location, except, in each case of (A) and (B), any Temporary Idling or in response to, or as a result of, a Force Majeure Event;

(e)            fail to follow the recommendation of the CMAs (as parties to the NSA) with respect to Trade Actions;

(f)             effect any material acquisition of a business that is domiciled in the United States that competes with the Corporation or its suppliers;

(g)            implement pricing of the Corporation’s average spot sales price during any rolling six (6)-month period below eighty-five percent (85%) of the corresponding six (6)-month average for that applicable steel product as publicly published by the U.S. Midwest Domestic Hot-Rolled Coil Steel Index (i.e., Hot-rolled, Cold-rolled, and Coated steel); provided, that, for the avoidance of doubt, the average spot sales price will be calculated monthly and will be based on the average spot price for the applicable steel product for each individual customer transaction in the United States;

(h)            accept direct financial assistance from the Japanese government, excluding (a) financing obtained from Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) or other equivalent Japanese government related financial institutions on commercially reasonable terms and (b) financial assistance for research and development in Japan;

(i)             prior to June 18, 2030, reduce the base salary of employees of the Corporation; and

(j)             make material changes to the Corporation’s existing raw materials and steel sourcing strategy in the United States, unless such changes are intended to benefit the Corporation, its operations or customers, which changes, among others, include: to the extent steel making raw materials or inputs are or become inadequate in quantity or quality; and initial imports to the Corporation to accelerate the transfer of technology or commissioning or qualification of facilities committed to being built in the United States (e.g., grain oriented electrical steel).

The practical effect is that Donald Trump now has personal veto power over US Steel’s pricing, plant closures, executive compensation, acquisitions, and corporate governance changes. The company literally cannot make major strategic decisions without Trump’s written consent.

There’s something genuinely novel here. American corporations do not typically write individual politicians into their governance documents. Some might even argue it looks quite corrupt.

Many people have claimed that this is nationalizing US steel and embracing socialism (some claiming this is good, many others more correctly being horrified by it).

That latter link, by trade expert Scott Lincicome, points out how absolutely ridiculous this is:

As we’ve already discussed (twice), there is no reason for the U.S. government to be involved in what is inarguably a small transaction involving two publicly traded companies that are both eager to seal the deal on mutually acceptable terms. The “national security” arguments for blocking or amending those terms are bogus: As I explained in December, “the U.S. military needs a tiny amount of domestic steel output and gets none of it from U.S. Steel,” and security experts across the political spectrum—including officials in both the Trump 1.0 and Biden administrations—saw no serious concerns. The government’s involvement was and remains about politics, and the whole drama serves as a serious black mark on U.S. international economic policy (and Biden’s time in office).

But calling this “nationalization” doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. Nationalization suggests the government taking control of strategically important industries for policy reasons. This is more like… “Trumpalization”? The personal capture of corporate governance by an individual politician.

The structure makes this clear. When Trump is president, he controls US Steel directly. When he’s not, control transfers to Treasury and Commerce—the “CFIUS Monitoring Agencies” referenced in the documents.

This dual structure—Trump when in office, federal agencies otherwise—makes it impossible to defend this as standard CFIUS oversight. Normal foreign investment reviews don’t write specific politicians into corporate charters. They create institutional safeguards, not personal fiefdoms. If this were really about national security oversight, the control would run through established government agencies with expertise and continuity, no matter who was President.

This seems unprecedented, and not in a good way. A private corporation has voluntarily surrendered key governance decisions to Donald Trump personally, apparently as payment for his approval of their deal. It’s the kind of arrangement you’d expect to see in a kleptocracy, not a constitutional democracy.

And somehow we’re supposed to pretend this is normal corporate governance.

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Using statistics to lie is so commonplace, it’s hardly worth noting. But the DHS can’t even be bothered to use statistics to lie. Instead, it just repeats the lie and uses this lie to engage in circular reasoning.

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump angered ICE by asking a simple question: why are so many ICE agents wearing masks when engaging in raids? The only answer is the truth: they’re trying to dodge accountability for their actions. If they can’t be seen, they can’t be named, shamed, or sued.

Acting ICE director Todd Lyons was granted space in the Washington Post to print a rebuttal to Bump’s column. He claimed ICE agents were covering up to protect themselves against threats to them and their families. To support his claim, he offered this startling stat from the DHS:

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.

Lyons was kind enough to link the source of this statistic. But that didn’t help anything, because the link led to nothing more than current DHS frontmouth Tricia McLaughlin saying this exact same thing without offering any statistical support for her claim:

“Even during National Police Week, the media, members of Congress, and sanctuary politicians have demonized ICE and CBP officers who bravely serve their country,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Attacks and smears against ICE have resulted in officers facing a 413% increase in assaults. We are setting the facts straight and reassuring America that President Trump and Secretary Noem will continue to support ICE and CBP in their efforts to make America safe again.

The statistic is presented without support or context. Even given the expansive definition of the word “assault,” which can mean anything from actual physical assault to simply bumping into an officer to making the mistake of receiving a beating from an ICE agent, the stat is meaningless. There’s no starting point and no previous number to compare it to.

Philip Bump decided to dig into this mysterious figure after Lyons’ response in the op-ed pages, hoping to find an origin for this “413% increase in assaults” claim. What he found out using the government’s own statistics is that this figure is completely made up.

Here I will point out that Customs and Border Protection offers monthly data on the number of assaults on its officers. The year-to-date total is 20 percent lower than it was in 2024.

In fact, the data shows assaults on CBP officers have been steadily dropping since 2022. If the current trend in assaults remains steady, 2025 will end with fewer assaults than in 2024 (438 vs 457).

Granted, CBP isn’t ICE. But since ICE won’t actually release assault numbers, it will do for a rough comparison. (In fact, its whole stats section — even the stuff it wants the public to know — is littered with 502 errors.)

Information on assaults on ICE officers is nearly nonexistent, as Bump discovered:

I was able to find Justice Department and DHS news releases documenting a number of assaults against ICE officers since January — assaults targeting 12 individuals. Five of them were targeted at ICE facilities in California and Texas. An ICE news release also mentioned assaults during a sweep in Nebraska, though the announcement blurred accusations of “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” It also didn’t include a total number of officers targeted.

For context, ICE announced in April that it had conducted 66,463 arrests since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

ICE refused to respond to Bump’s requests for data supporting the 413% increase in assaults claim. Then it decided to double-down, mere hours after Bump’s second column went live.

A DHS press release, sent out on June 20, makes an even more incredible claim about assaults on ICE officers:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released new statistics on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facing a 500% increase in assaults against them while carrying out immigration enforcement operations.

Oh, wow! There’s a link in that statement! Let’s just click on it and continue on to the statistical source of this new claim… oh wait:

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I’ll just quote the pop-up directly so you can perform your spit-take at your leisure:

You are now leaving the Department of Homeland Security’s website and headed towards:

[ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/06/19/exclusive-ice-agents-face-500-increase-in-assaults-while-trying-to-arrest-illegal-aliens ]

Are you sure you want to proceed?

That’s right. The official government site is directing readers to view this “statistic” at far-right “news” outlet Breitbart. If you dare to click through, you still won’t find any actual statistics. You’ll just find the same claim repeated by the DHS spokesperson, this time surrounded by Breitbart branding.

“Today, the Department of Homeland Security released new data revealing that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Breitbart News.

But there is no “new data.” There’s only a new number — one still disconnected from anything that resembles “data.” There’s no link to data in the Breitbart article. And there’s no link to any data contained anywhere on either the DHS or ICE websites that would support this completely fabricated claim the DHS continues to pretend is based in reality.

This is a post-truth administration. It can’t even be bothered to manipulate data to make it appear as though its bullshit has a factual basis. Instead, it just says stuff and when anyone asks questions, it refuses to answer them, choosing instead to speak to pro-Trump publications that will print any stupid bullshit that happens to fall out of administration officials’ mouths.

ICE is now operating in a way it never has before. It’s performing broad daylight raids utilizing officers dressed like armed kidnappers. If there’s an increase in assaults, it might roughly track with the increase in raids. But there’s absolutely no factual basis for these absolute lies being told by DHS and ICE officials. And there’s still no justification for ICE’s rebranding as a Gestapo-esque force completely devoid of identification or accountability.

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Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation’s richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations.

One key part of the bill is a proposal to ban all AI oversight over the next decade. This is part of the so-far successful GOP effort to destroy all federal consumer protection, corporate oversight, environmental protections, and public safety oversight. Unfortunately the U.S. press hasn’t done a very good job illustrating what this means for everything from public health to national security.

The rich assholes and corporations pushing for this have a problem. If you kill federal consumer protection, states may rush in and fill the void. You saw this happen in areas like net neutrality and privacy. Courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility for things like consumer protection, it can’t then turn around and tell states what they can do.

So to prevent states from doing basic corporate oversight the GOP has had to get creative.

For example, to try and stop individual states from regulating AI in the wake of federal apathy, the GOP is including provisions in their giant bill that will try to ban states from receiving their share of $45 billion in broadband grants if they engage in any oversight of AI giants in the next decade. Any oversight. Even bare-bones environmental standards (see: Elon Musk’s xAI pollution problem in Memphis, or similar concerns about Meta’s AI data center environmental impact on parts of Louisiana).

The idea was proposed in early June by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and since then both the House and Senate have taken steps to codify it into the proposed bill.

“States that refuse to impose a moratorium will not get those dollars. Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute, an independent research institute, said the change could leave states in an uncomfortable dilemma, choosing between broadband dollars and the power to protect their constituents from AI harm.

“I can imagine that for lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, whose districts rely on BEAD funding for broadband access to their rural communities, it’s really a strange bargain,” Kak said.”

Some of what was originally in the gargantuan, ugly-ass bill has been jettisoned after the Senate Parliamentarian found they violated Senate norms and the law. But the state and federal ban on all AI oversight remains somewhat intact.

Granted anything done through reconciliation can be undone through reconciliation, so a “ten year ban” isn’t written in stone. And there’s some indication that the idea’s architect, Ted Cruz, is struggling to gain full Republican support for the ploy as he tries to thread the needle. With any luck that may result in the proposal being watered down and/or killed.

Still, it’s stupid and harmful and opens the door to a lot of potential problems.

As we noted previously, these broadband funds had already been awarded. States had already spent years carefully crafting their fiber investment plans on the basis of awarded funds. Now, if they attempt oversight of an AI industry that’s shown itself so far to be amoral and reckless, they risk harming their own communities by leaving them stuck without broadband access.

Unlike many past U.S. broadband subsidy programs, a lot of thought was actually put into this infrastructure bill program (BEAD, or the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program). It’s a major reason its taken so long. They tried to accurately map broadband access. Many states tried to ensure that a lot of money went to popular community-owned alternatives, and not just giant telecoms. It took years of collaboration between states, feds, and local communities to jointly develop these plans.

But there are also several layers of irony for long-time Techdirt readers. The GOP’s plan is harming their longstanding allies in “big telecom” (who risk losing billions in subsidies) to the benefit of their supposed ideological enemies in “big tech.” They’re also likely delaying the implementation of a broadband grant program they spent most of election season whining about taking too long.

Republicans are also busy trying to redirect billions of BEAD program dollars to their increasingly incoherent billionaire benefactor Elon Musk. It’s all just utterly, transparently buffoonish and corrupt, yet our press (and even many policy people) seem intent on normalizing it.

There are still a lot of moving parts. Again, several terrible aspects of the bill violate the law and Senate procedural norms and may be jettisoned. Others, like the plans to sell 250 million acres of public land, are getting no shortage of bipartisan blow-back. There are still chances for the bill to get better or much worse; but even any sort of “best” case scenario will be a historically corrupt (and historically deadly) piece of gargantuan shit that utterly fails to serve the public interest.

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There’s an old joke that dog and cat owners may be familiar with that goes something like this. What is the difference between dogs and cats? With a dog, you give it a comfortable place to live, give it lots of love and attention, feed it food and water, and it therefore assumes you must be God. With a cat, you give it a comfortable place to live, give it lots of love and attention, feed it food and water, and it therefore assumes it must be God. If there’s any point to that joke at all, it’s that cats and dogs are very different creatures, with different reputations, and are often seen as diametrically opposing forces as a cliche.

But if you’re Sony, dogs and cats are so similar that they can create trademark confusion, apparently. In the stated effort to protect its trademarks for one of its gaming studios, Naughty Dog, Sony has opposed the trademark application for a tiny foreign mobile game studio with two App Store games. That studio’s name is Naughty Cat.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has filed a Notice of Opposition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) against the “Naughty Cat” trademark application filed by a company called Naughty Cat Co., Limited.

This Hong Kong-based company has two apps listed on the App Store, both gambling “games” that promise to reward users with real cash. That’s a world away from the likes of The Last of Us and Uncharted, but that hasn’t stopped Sony’s lawyers from baring their teeth and barking angrily at their feline competitor.

In documents reviewed by IGN, Sony’s lawyers argue that the Naughty Cat trademark is “confusingly similar” to the Naughty Dog trademark it owns “in overall commercial impression and connotation.”

Notably, Sony does not have a trademark registered for the word “naughty” that I can find. Therefore, the commonality of that first word in both studio names is not itself directly infringing and can only be cited as contributing to the “overall commercial impression and connotation” of the marks. Instead, Sony seems to rely on the idea that cats and dogs are very similar in the minds of consumers, primarily because they are pets.

“The first, dominant element of the two marks, NAUGHTY, is identical,” Sony said. “The second elements, DOG and CAT, are highly similar in that both refer to house pets and are likely to mislead consumers into believing, mistakenly, that Naughty Cat is affiliated with SIE and/or Naughty Dog or that its goods are licensed or approved by SIE and/or Naughty Dog.”

“Registration of Applicant’s Mark will lead the public to conclude, incorrectly, that Applicant is or has been affiliated or connected with SIE, and/or that Applicant’s goods provided under Applicant’s Mark are or have been authorized, sponsored, endorsed, or licensed by SIE. Issuance of any registration to Applicant for the proposed mark will result in damage to SIE and the public.”

I’m trying to envision an argument against the idea that this is not absurd, but I’m failing. There is no suggestion that the company logos and branding are in any other way similar. The games they make are wildly different. Unless you accept that cats and dogs are similar in the minds of the average consumer, or even morons in various states of hurry, then there is no concern over public confusion.

Here’s what it all looks like in the App Store itself. If you think these listings in this manner are somehow going to bring to mind Sony’s studio for the consumer, please comment as such below so I can yell at you directly.

I suspect instead that this is a simple matter of Sony’s lawyers having entirely too much time on their hands, or seeking to bill for more hours. Or perhaps this is a result of permission culture run amok at this particular company, leading to a posture of draconian protectionism over common sense.

But what I know for certain is this: cats and dogs are not the same, nor are they particularly similar.

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The Trump Administration(s) aren’t simply content to declare satire dead. Trump’s reappearance in the Oval Office demands we dig up the corpse and desecrate it.

And while we’re desecrating that corpse, why not desecrate a few national landmarks? That’s the pitch from the National Park Service under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Spring-boarding off Trump’s revisionist history-enabling “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, Park Service staffers are being forced to ask Americans to tell them what history should be remembered and what should be forgotten.

Under the heading “Encouraging Public Participation,” [comptroller Jessica] Bowron’s memo states: “All NPS units are required to post signage that will encourage public feedback via QR code and other methods that are viable.”

An example image of a sign leaked to NPR for Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield in Missouri, the site of the second major battle of the Civil War, ahead of its potential installation, asks visitors to identify “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” (The sign also asks for feedback concerning areas and services that need repair or improvement.)

The obvious goal here is to bury things that white Americans did to non-white people and to reinstate other white people (mostly Confederate figures) to the positions of glory they never deserved. People can pretend it means something else, but that’s all this is: yet another effort to obscure the actions of racists and bigots so the government can comfortably pretend these historical figures (and their actions) are worthy of public praise and celebration. The whiter and straighter they are, the better. That’s how it’s gone everywhere else Trump has shoved his nationalistic brand of quasi-patriotism down the federal government’s throat and it’s no different here.

If you somehow still can’t be convinced this is nothing more than a little park signage cleanup that isn’t meant to vanish the more shameful parts of American history, here’s another fun data point you might consider before sounding off in the comment section:

The US Army said Tuesday it will restore the names of seven Army bases that previously honored Confederate leaders.

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee,” President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday at Fort Bragg, which was briefly known as Fort Liberty until the administration changed it back earlier this year. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change.”

Trump is saying the quiet part out loud here. These bases are all being “renamed” but really, they’re not. Trump is telling it like it is: these bases will revert to their Confederate army-honoring names. The military, however, is going to pretend that’s not what’s actually happening.

According to the Army’s Tuesday announcement, Fort Barfoot, a Virginia base previously named after Confederate General George Pickett, will be named in honor of 1st Lt. Vernon W. Pickett, a soldier who received the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism during World War II.

[…]

A Virginia fort once named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee will carry the namesake of Pvt. Fitz Lee, who received the Medal of Honor for his service during the Spanish-American War.

[…]

Georgia’s Fort Eisenhower will revert back to Fort Gordon, this time honoring Medal of Honor recipient Master Sgt. Gary I. Gordon, who during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, defended wounded crew members at a helicopter crash site.

The base […] was previously named after Confederate General John Gordon…

These are the acts of petulant children. These are not the acts of grown men in positions of power. They want to honor people who actively fought against their own countrymen just so they could continue to enslave their fellow human beings.

And that’s not all. The renamed forts also erase women and Black service members. There are more examples in the article, but these are the names being removed to “honor” Pvt. Fitz Lee, who’s only being honored because his last name is the same as General Robert E. Lee’s. This isn’t a new low for this administration, but it’s definitely near the bottom.

[Fort Lee] was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams after Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg and Lt. Col Charity Adams in 2023. Gregg helped desegregate the Army, including at Fort Lee, while Adams, in 1944, “was selected to command the first unit of African-American women to serve overseas,” according to the congressional naming commission. Her service was chronicled in the 2024 film “The Six Triple Eight.”

Fuck these racist pieces of shit. I really don’t know what’s holding the Trump Administration back from issuing an executive that will “restore Christian faith” by the ceremonial placement of burning crosses in unbelievers’ yards.

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This week, we’ve got a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on Kevin Williamson’s How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog’s evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today — and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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I’m going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We’ve mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself.

This is killing us.

Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying our capacity to respond to the crises that define our moment. Because while we perfect our poses of detached cleverness, people with deadly serious intentions are reshaping the world according to their vision.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ironic detachment is moral cowardice dressed up as intellectual superiority.

Let me be clear about what I mean. Ironic detachment isn’t genuine critique—it’s defensive armor. It’s the reflex that allows you to comment on everything while committing to nothing. It’s the stance that lets you mock both sides of every conflict while accepting responsibility for none of its outcomes.

You see it everywhere. The journalist who treats democratic collapse like entertainment, crafting clever observations about the “theater” of authoritarianism without ever stating plainly that democracy is worth defending. The intellectual who responds to moral clarity with knowing smirks, as if the ability to see complexity were the same as wisdom. The friend who greets every urgent concern with “well, it’s complicated” or “both sides have valid points” or “this is all just politics anyway.”

These people have convinced themselves that their detachment signals sophistication. That their refusal to take moral stands demonstrates superior understanding. That their immunity to “naive” concerns about right and wrong proves their intellectual maturity.

They’re wrong.

What it actually demonstrates is a profound failure of moral imagination. An inability to conceive of situations where clarity matters more than cleverness. A retreat from the responsibilities that come with living in a world where our choices have consequences.

Because here’s what ironic detachment really offers: the comfortable illusion that you’re above the fray while remaining safely within it. It lets you feel superior to those who “fall for” caring about things while never having to defend anything yourself. It’s the perfect stance for people who want to seem engaged without actually risking anything.

Moral seriousness is different. Moral seriousness forces you to face consequences. To choose clearly. To stake out positions that require genuine courage rather than performative intelligence. It demands that you say what you believe even when saying it costs you something.

And yes, this makes people uncomfortable. Because moral seriousness isn’t simplistic—it’s demanding. It isn’t arrogant—it’s responsible. It requires you to act as if your judgments matter, as if your choices have weight, as if the world depends on people like you making decisions about what’s worth defending and what isn’t.

The ironically detached hate this. They prefer the safety of eternal meta-commentary, the endless deferral of commitment, the pose that says “I’m too smart to be fooled by caring about anything.”

But here’s what they miss: intelligence without moral commitment is just sophisticated paralysis. Nuance without the capacity for judgment is just elaborate confusion. The ability to see complexity in everything is worthless if it never leads to clarity about anything.

So let me ask you directly: if moral seriousness bothers you—if you find yourself recoiling from people who speak with clarity about right and wrong—what does that say about you?

Does it say you’re sophisticated? Or does it say you’ve trained yourself to avoid the discomfort that comes with taking responsibility for your own moral judgments?

Does it say you understand nuance? Or does it say you’ve become so committed to seeing all sides that you’ve lost the capacity to choose any side?

Does it say you’re intellectually mature? Or does it say you’re using intelligence as a shield against the demands of living in a world where things actually matter?

I know this is uncomfortable. Good. It should be.

Because while you’ve been perfecting your ironic distance, people with no such hesitations have been busy. They don’t waste time wondering whether their convictions are sophisticated enough. They don’t apologize for moral clarity. They don’t treat their own beliefs as just another position in an endless debate.

They understand something the ironically detached have forgotten: that power goes to people who believe in something. That the world belongs to those willing to commit fully to their vision of what it should become. That democracy doesn’t survive on clever commentary but on citizens willing to say plainly what matters, what is true, and what is at stake.

The authoritarians aren’t ironic. They’re deadly serious about their goals. They don’t hedge their commitments or apologize for their clarity. They don’t treat their own power grabs as just another interesting development in the ongoing political show.

They understand that ironic detachment is the perfect ideology for people who want to feel important without actually mattering. For people who want to seem engaged without risking anything. For people who prefer the comfort of eternal spectatorship to the responsibility of actual participation.

This is why a culture built on irony will crumble in crisis. Because when everything is equally interesting, nothing is truly important. When all positions are equally valid subjects for commentary, no position becomes worth defending. When commitment itself becomes naive, only the uncommitted remain to watch the committed reshape the world.

We don’t need more cleverness. We need more clarity. We don’t need more sophisticated commentary on the complexity of our challenges. We need more people willing to name what threatens us and act accordingly.

We need citizens who understand that moral seriousness isn’t just stylistic—it’s existential. That democracy survives not on ironic detachment but on people willing to say what they believe and defend what they value.

The center cannot be held by people who refuse to acknowledge there’s a center worth holding. The flood cannot be pushed back by people who treat every rising tide as just another fascinating phenomenon. The wire cannot be walked by people who prefer watching others fall to taking the risk themselves.

Ironic detachment promises you safety through distance. But there is no safe distance from the collapse of the systems that make your detachment possible in the first place. There is no commentary booth elevated enough to escape the consequences of living in a world where serious people with serious intentions are making serious choices about the future.

The pose of sophisticated neutrality is itself a choice. The stance of ironic distance is itself a commitment. The refusal to take sides is itself taking a side—the side that benefits from your passivity, from your paralysis, from your conversion of moral clarity into epistemological complexity.

So choose. Not between simple answers to complex questions, but between engagement and evasion. Between responsibility and performance. Between the hard work of moral judgment and the easy comfort of ironic observation.

Choose to speak plainly about what matters. Choose to commit to what you believe. Choose to risk the discomfort of being wrong rather than the cowardice of never being anything.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the world belongs to people who take these simple truths seriously enough to build something real upon them.

The revolution is moral seriousness. The rebellion is choosing clarity over cleverness. The resistance is saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Every minute of every day.

Remember what’s real.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

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The cops are rioting and the military is swarming. That’s how things are going in Los Angeles, despite anything resembling a “violent protest” being confined to a few blocks near federal buildings in the downtown area.

ICE, meanwhile, continues to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans by acting like drug cartel members. Agents wear masks, refuse to identify themselves, drive unmarked cars without license plates, and generally do whatever they can to dodge accountability.

When someone demands something of others and claims it’s a law enforcement matter, those on the receiving end of those demands are free to ask questions. If those on the delivery end refuse to answer them (or show the proper paperwork), they’re free to go fuck themselves. And those on the receiving end of demands from masked men who won’t identify themselves are free to speculate as to which government agency employs them.

The narrative belongs to a baseball team at the moment, as NBC News reports.

The Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday blocked federal immigration agents from entering their stadium as dozens of ICE protesters gathered outside the venue, the team said.

The baseball organization said on social media that federal agents working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at the stadium Thursday and “requested permission to access the parking lots.”

“They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization,” the Dodgers said. Their evening game against the San Diego Padres went ahead as scheduled.

ICE tried to reclaim the narrative with a short post on XTwitter, which only said this:

This whole "imbroglio" could be avoided if ICE agents were required to wear uniforms and identify themselves, a tradition in law enforcement for the past few centuries

— Bobby Big Wheel (@kleinman.bsky.social) 2025-06-20T01:48:43.435Z

False. We were never there.

But that’s not true. They were near the entrance to the stadium parking lots. That much has been captured on (digital) film. CNN’s report not only shows officers just outside of the entrance to the parking area, but the protesters gathered in response to their appearance.

The longer excuse doesn’t make any more sense than the flat denial.

“This had nothing to do with the Dodgers. CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

This simply isn’t true.

The activist said they saw two people being detained at a Home Depot and followed the vehicles in which the detainees were taken away to near Dodger Stadium.

They saw a CBP agent, the activist said, whom they had also seen and spoken to at the Home Depot. “I asked what they were doing. He responded they bring the detainees there (near Dodger Stadium) to process them,” the activist said. “They conduct their investigation there without public interference, (…) that they can’t do it in the Home Depot parking lot because the public makes it too dangerous.”

So, this was related to an “operation or enforcement.” Whether or not immigration officers attempted to enter the parking area and were rebuffed by Dodgers staff is still an open question, but ICE/CBP officers were near the parking lot entry and were there specifically for reasons related to an “enforcement effort.”

The larger question is who’s lying about what. It doesn’t do anything for the Dodgers to go public with a lie about an interaction with federal officers. It makes perfect sense for ICE to lie about its actions because that might sideline some protesters who probably never would have expected the federal government to carry out a raid at sports stadium.

But I wouldn’t put that past ICE. And there’s no way any officer will have a judicially issued warrant for an action like this because no federal judge would grant a search warrant for a stadium or its parking lot.

And, if ICE wants to ensure it’s not mistaken for other law enforcement agencies (like CBP), its officers could take off the masks, put the insignia back on their uniforms, and provide identification when asked for it. If they want to continue to pretend raids carried out in public are still somehow undercover activities, then they can deal with the confusion the agency is deliberately causing.

Even if the Dodgers organization is completely mistaken about what happened at the stadium, it’s still making its voice heard:

In partnership with the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Dodgers have committed $1 million toward direct financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region.

[…]

“What’s happening in Los Angeles has reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people, and we have heard the calls for us to take a leading role on behalf of those affected,” said Stan Kasten, President & CEO, Los Angeles Dodgers. “We believe that by committing resources and taking action, we will continue to support and uplift the communities of Greater Los Angeles.”

The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant efforts are making it far more enemies than friends. Trump’s ever-so-brief walkback of ICE raids makes that much perfectly clear. But after seeing more people attend “No Kings” rallies than his self-indulgent military parade, the vengeful autocrat went back to his usual vindictive ways. If Trump didn’t like protests against cops during his last term, he’s going to fare much worse now that the protests are targeting him specifically. Unfortunately, it will be America as a whole that will pay the price for daring to push back against encroaching fascism.

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The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world—including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional.

In a shadow docket ruling yesterday, the Court stayed a lower court order that required basic due process protections for people being shipped to third countries. No analysis of the complex legal issues. No acknowledgment that they’re rewarding the Trump regime for repeatedly violating court orders. Just: “go ahead and traffic people to Libya.”

This isn’t hyperbole. We’re talking about the US government grabbing people—some who entered legally seeking asylum—and shipping them to countries where they’ve never been, don’t speak the language, and face credible threats of violence. Some of those destination countries are actively selling migrants into slavery.

This non-ruling will go down in history as one of the most shameful and horrific rulings from the Supreme Court. We’re talking Dred Scott/Plessy v. Ferguson/Korematsu bad. An obviously horrific decision that attacks human rights and basic due process for no reason… and totally without explanation.

There is a righteous dissent from Justice Sotomayor that excoriates the majority for just how evil this decision is, and I was tempted to just post all of that as this post, but I fear this one requires some explanation.

The Background: How We Got To State-Sanctioned Human Trafficking

The legal backdrop makes this even more shocking. Just last month, the Supreme Court (for the second time) told the Trump DOJ it had to provide some level of “reasonable” due process to those being shipped to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. For a brief moment, it seemed like even the conservatives recognized Trump’s lawlessness.

This case is a bit different. It involves people already deemed deportable. The question: can the US ship them literally anywhere in the world? Under existing law, the answer was yes—but with many limits and with guaranteed basic due process. Specifically, people facing “third country removal” had the right to a “reasonable fear” hearing where they could explain why being shipped to whatever random country the US picked might get them killed. And such removals were only supposed to take place if it was impossible to send them to countries they actually had a connection to.

This is actually important. While the issue of the US trafficking Venezuelans to El Salvador has been well covered, that was a deal with the Salvadoran government. There’s a separate issue of the US randomly shipping off people to a long list of dangerous countries, places where the people being shipped likely know no one, don’t know the language, and may be thousands of miles from anyone they do know. And some of those countries that the US is shipping people to are either war zones or engaged in selling migrants into slavery.

Even if you think immigration violations justify deportation, shipping people to countries where they face torture or slavery sounds like a crime against humanity. And many of these people entered legally seeking asylum—Trump has simply been revoking their status, another move the Court blessed a few weeks ago.

The Case: Government Defies Court Orders, SCOTUS Rewards Them

In this case (DHS v. D.V.D.), District Judge Brian Murphy had ordered DHS to provide basic due process before shipping people around the globe. The government’s response? It ignored him. Repeatedly. Remember Judge Murphy getting annoyed that DHS was shipping men to South Sudan? That was in violation of this restraining order. When he caught them lying about their removals, they kept lying.

Judge Murphy worked diligently to protect constitutional rights. The government thumbed its nose at him. And now the Supreme Court has rewarded that lawlessness.

The government not only gets away with ignoring Judge Murphy’s earlier order, it gets to effectively continue doing so. With no explanation as to why. This isn’t just horrific for due process and the people being trafficked this way, it’s a fucking insult to Judge Murphy who worked diligently to protect rights in this case.

Sotomayor’s Blistering Dissent Calls Out The Majority’s Cowardice

In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel. An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya.

Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.

Basically, the government is doing something really obviously horrific and evil here, a lower court—somewhat heroically—stepped in to help, and the Supreme Court is saying “oh no, go ahead with the evil stuff.” It’s fucking crazy.

Sotomayor notes that these kinds of “third country removals” (i.e., to a country not of their origin nor where they have connections, but only “is willing to accept people the US removes”) are quite “burdensome” on the individuals involved and therefore extremely limited by law. That is, Sotomayor (unlike the majority of the court) recognizes that Congress has put significant conditions on such human trafficking, which the Trump regime is gleefully ignoring.

Noncitizens facing removal of any sort are entitled under international and domestic law to raise a claim under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, S. Treaty Doc. No. 100–20, 1465 U. N. T. S. 113. Article 3 of the Convention prohibits returning any person “to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The United States is a party to the Convention, and in 1998 Congress passed the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act to implement its commands. The Act provides that “[i]t shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” §2242(a), 112 Stat. 2681–822, codified as note to 8 U. S. C. §1231. It also directs the Executive to “prescribe regulations to implement” the Convention. §2242(b), 112 Stat. 2681–822. Those regulations provide, among other things, that “[a] removal order . . . shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3.” 28 CFR §200.1 (2024).

The Pattern of Lawlessness

Sotomayor then details how DHS repeatedly ignored court orders not to send men subject to deportation to specific countries where they faced credible risks of significant harm. Sometimes it appeared to just outright ignore them. Other times it played games with courts, such as claiming that a temporary restraining order (TRO) against DHS removing someone to a certain country didn’t apply because the Defense Department, not DHS, handled the removal to that country.

As she notes:

The Government thus openly flouted two court orders, including the one from which it now seeks relief. Even if the orders in question had been mistaken, the Government had a duty to obey them until they were “‘reversed by orderly and proper proceedings.’” Maness, 419 U. S., at 459 (quoting United States v. Mine Workers, 330 U. S. 258, 293 (1947)). That principle is a bedrock of the rule of law. The Government’s misconduct threatens it to its core.

So too does this Court’s decision to grant the Government equitable relief. This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. See Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam). Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.

The sum total of the Roberts Court’s legacy is going to be “he completely wrecked any respect for the judiciary and the rule of law by making a mockery of it.” Each lawless move like this just makes and more people see the courts as illegitimate. And that’s doubly embarrassing after all of the effort Judge Murphy went through at the district court to make things work properly, despite a defiant Trump regime.

Emergency Relief For Whom?

And this raises the big question: the Supreme Court’s emergency docket is supposed to be used to put an immediate stop to something where there is imminent harm if they don’t. But here, the Court is doing the opposite. The irreparable, and possibly catastrophic, harms are being allowed to move forward, with no evidence of any real harm to the US. As Sotomayor notes:

In light of the Government’s flagrantly unlawful conduct, today’s decision might suggest the Government faces extraordinary harms. Yet even that is not the case. Rather, following a recent trend, the Court appears to give no serious consideration to the irreparable harm factor. See, e.g., id., at ___ (slip op., at ___); SSA v. AFSCME, 605 U. S. ___ (2025). Without a showing that a stay is necessary to avoid irreparable harm, however, this Court’s midstream intervention is inexcusable.

Besides the facially absurd contention that the Executive is “irreparabl[y]” harmed any time a court orders it temporarily to refrain from doing something it would like to do, see Application for Stay of Injunction 37, the Government has identified no irreparable harm from the challenged preliminary injunction.

The DOJ tried to claim irreparable harm because Judge Murphy told the government it could (voluntarily!) conduct the reasonable fear interviews in Djibouti (where the plane carrying some of the men was forced to land). Yet, as Sotomayor points out, that particular issue wasn’t even appealed by the DOJ and it was an option granted to the government after it requested it as an alternative to bringing the men back to the US (which it should have been forced to do because flying the men to South Sudan violated the existing TRO):

Instead, the Government locates the source of its injury in the District Court’s efforts to provide relief to the class members in South Sudan. Id., at 37–39. That argument is misguided. First, the District Court’s remedial orders are not properly before this Court because the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal. Second, the court adopted the narrowest possible remedy, allowing the Government itself to choose whether it would return the class members to the United States or provide them with process where they are held. Finally, the Government is in every respect responsible for any resulting harms. Had it complied with the preliminary injunction, no followup orders would have been necessary, nor would the Government have faced a “sudden need . . . to detain criminal aliens” abroad. Id., at 39. It does not face such “need” today, as it can return the noncitizens it wrongfully removed at any time. No litigant, not even the Government, may “satisfy the irreparable harm requirement if the harm complained of is self-inflicted.”

But the plaintiffs in this case clearly face very real and immediate harms:

For their part, the plaintiffs in this case face extraordinary harms from even a temporary grant of relief to the Government. A. A. R. P. v. Trump, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4) (recognizing detainees’ interests against removal are “particularly weighty”). The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks. Thirteen noncitizens narrowly escaped being the target of extraordinary violence in Libya; O. C. G. spent months in hiding in Guatemala; others face release in South Sudan, which the State Department says is in the midst of “‘armed conflict’” between “‘ethnic groups.’” N. 2, supra. Only the District Court’s careful attention to this case prevented worse outcomes. Yet today the Court obstructs those proceedings, exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.

When put that way, it feels like the kind of thing a Supreme Court is supposed to stop, not reverse a lower court on without explanation.

Sotomayor then points out the pure insanity of this decision:

Given its conduct in these proceedings, the Government’s posture resembles that of the arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.

The Legal Arguments Are Nonsensical Too

Even worse, she notes, if you get past the procedural stuff, the merits argument by the government is nonsensical as well. She calls out some of it as “absurd.”

Ultimately, the Government says, the plaintiffs in this case object to their removal. So, they should bring their challenges in a petition for review of an order of removal. Yet the Government also claims that it need not issue or reopen any orders of removal before deporting someone to a third country. That is part of the problem plaintiffs seek to remedy: Without an applicable order of removal, they have no way to raise their claims under the Convention. In the end, then, the Government’s view is that the only way to challenge its refusal to provide orders of removal is to appeal those (nonexistent) orders. That is absurd.

Even worse, under the government’s argument, these plaintiffs get no due process rights at all—which would also be a totally absurd scenario:

Even if the Government could establish that its enjoined actions (of providing no notice or process) are integral to the “operation” of §1231(b), that in turn would raise a “‘serious constitutional question.’” Webster v. Doe, 486 U. S. 592, 603 (1988). That is because, as the Government reads it, §1252(f )(1) threatens to nullify plaintiffs’ procedural due process rights entirely. Recall that the Government claims it may remove noncitizens in the space of 15 minutes. See supra, at 4. Such noncitizens cannot practicably file individual lawsuits to vindicate their due process rights. After all, they will not know of the need to file a claim until they are on a bus or plane out of the country. Nor will their counsel, whom the Government refuses to notify. The Government can hardly expect every deportable noncitizen to file a pre-emptive lawsuit. Thus, if §1252(f )(1) precludes classwide vindication of the right to notice and due process under these circumstances, then it effectively nullifies those rights.

It is that kind of lawlessness that the Supreme Court blessed yesterday.

WITHOUT EXPLANATION.

Then there’s the Administrative Procedure Act issue, where Sotomayor again points out that the government’s interpretation of the law effectively wipes out large segments of the statute:

That leaves, finally, the merits of plaintiffs’ underlying APA and due process claims. Begin with the statutory and regulatory scheme governing removal. In the Government’s view, once a noncitizen has been found removable, she can effectively be removed anywhere at any time. That view would render meaningless the countless statutory and regulatory provisions providing for notice and a hearing. See, e.g., 8 U. S. C. §1229(a)(1) (“In removal proceedings under section 1229a . . . written notice . . . shall be given . . . to the alien or to the alien’s counsel of record”); 8 CFR §1240.10(f ) (2024) (in removal hearing, the Immigration Judge “shall . . . identify for the record a country, or countries in the alternative, to which the alien’s removal may be made”); §241.8(e) (when a removal order is reinstated after a noncitizen illegally reenters the country, noncitizen who “expresses a fear of returning to the country designated in that order” must be given an interview (emphasis added)); 8 U. S. C. §§1228(b)(1)–(3) (noncitizens determined removable due to felony conviction must be given notice under §1229(a) and 14 days “to apply for judicial review”); 8 CFR §238.1(b)(2) (requiring notice to noncitizens removable due to felony convictions).

The Government asserts that it need only comply with these provisions once, for the first removal proceeding, and can disregard them afterwards. The consequence of that view is that what happens in removal proceedings simply does not matter. The Government could designate any location in its initial order, lose before the immigration judge, decline to appeal, and promptly thereafter deport the noncitizen to a country of the Government’s choosing. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in O. C. G.’s case.

In other words, the Trump regime is deliberately defying the law:

Where did the Government find the authority to disregard Congress’s carefully calibrated scheme of immigration laws? It does not argue the third-country removal statute provides it. See Application for Stay of Injunction 13. Instead, the Government simply falls back on the Executive’s implied authority in this field. Yet “the President must comply with legislation regulating or restricting the transfer of detainees” even in “wartime.”

But, Sotomayor points out, you can’t just ignore the law like that:

It is a “‘cardinal principle of statutory construction,’” moreover, that statutes should be construed so that “‘no clause, sentence, or word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant.’” TRW Inc. v. Andrews, 534 U. S. 19, 31 (2001). Here the Government construes the statute’s lack of “a particular process for carrying out” third-country removals, Application for Stay of Injunction 13, as conveying near-unlimited power to the Executive, rendering the remaining statutory scheme “‘void . . . or insignificant.’” TRW, 534 U. S., at 31. To make this claim is to ignore the clear statutory command that notice and a hearing must be provided. See supra, at 15. The Government cannot show a likelihood of success on plaintiffs’ statutory and regulatory claims, nor can it defend the lawfulness of its no-notice removals.

Even if Trump can ignore Congress, Sotomayor wonders how the Supreme Court can possibly bless his regime ignoring the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process:

Turning to the constitutional claim, this Court has repeatedly affirmed that “ ‘the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law’ in the context of removal proceedings.” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3); A. A. R. P., 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3). Due process includes reasonable notice and an opportunity to be heard. Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U. S. 306, 314 (1950). Of course the Government cannot avoid its obligation to provide due process “in the context of removal proceedings,” J. G. G., 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3), by skipping such proceedings entirely and simply whisking noncitizens off the street and onto busses or planes out of the country.

[….]

The Government barely disputes these basic principles. Instead, it obfuscates the issue by asserting that some (perhaps “many”) members of the class should be treated as if they never entered the United States. Application for Stay of Injunction 33–34. Yet even if that were true as to some class members, it could show at most that the class might be too broadly defined, not that the Government is likely to succeed on the constitutional merits.

As she concludes, due process is a core component of the rule of law. And here the majority is tossing it in the wood chipper with nary an explanation.

The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 646 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle. Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled. That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.

Some of the plaintiffs in the case quickly asked Judge Murphy for a new TRO and—interestingly!—he quickly responded that such an order is not necessary because (as Sotomayor noted above) the specific orders regarding the men illegally shipped towards South Sudan, and currently held in Djibouti, was not appealed! This ruling may apply to others, but the current order regarding these men stands:

The Court’s May 21, 2025 Order on Remedy, Dkt. 119, remains in full force and effect, notwithstanding today’s stay of the Preliminary Injunction. DHS v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153, slip op. at 12 (S. Ct. Jun. 23, 2025) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (“[T]he District Court’s remedial orders [were] not properly before [the Supreme] Court because the Government has not appealed them, nor sought a stay pending a forthcoming appeal.”).

I imagine the DOJ will challenge that, and tragically the Supreme Court may be on their side.

What This Means Going Forward

The Supreme Court just taught the Trump administration—and every future administration—a valuable lesson: you can ignore court orders with impunity as long as you appeal to the right justices. Why bother following district court rulings when you know the Supreme Court will bail you out without even requiring an explanation?

This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about the fundamental principle that government officials must follow court orders until they’re properly overturned. By rewarding DHS’s blatant defiance, the Court has opened the floodgates. What’s to stop Trump from ignoring the next judge who tries to block his policies? Or the judge after that?

And that shouldn’t take away from the fact that the human cost will be immediate and devastating. Right now, people are sitting in detention centers knowing they could be shipped to Libya, South Sudan, or any other country the administration picks—with no meaningful chance to explain why that might get them killed. Some will disappear into war zones. Others will be sold into slavery. And five or six justices couldn’t be bothered to write a few paragraphs explaining why this is legal.

This decision completes the Roberts Court’s long-term transformation from a judicial body into a partisan enabler of authoritarian rule. Each time they reward lawlessness with their assent, they make clear that the rule of law only applies to those without political connections to the right people.

Judge Murphy tried to do his job. He followed the law, protected constitutional rights, and demanded basic due process. For his efforts, he got a Supreme Court that essentially told him to shut up and get out of the way while the government traffics humans around the globe.

That’s not justice. That’s not law. That’s just power protecting power while people die.

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When last we checked it with the feckless execs at CBS/Paramount, they were preparing to pay Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars to settle a completely bogus lawsuit designed to bully the media giant into compliance. CBS desperately wants the Trump administration to sign off on their pointless $8 billion merger with Skydance. Trump desperately wants CBS to stop doing any real journalism and kiss his ass.

They’ll both likely get their wish, in the end. But in the interim there’s been an interesting wrinkle.

In late May, the California Senate opened an inquiry into whether this settlement would technically violate state bribery laws. One hearing on the matter examined “whether the company breached fiduciary duties owed by Paramount board members to shareholders, misused corporate funds vulnerable to shareholder derivative litigation, or violated federal anti-bribery laws and California’s Unfair Competition Law.”

That inquiry was apparently enough to at least temporarily give CBS executives cold feet, insiders told the New York Post. The right wing outlet can’t be bothered to mention that the lawsuit is utterly baseless, or that California’s inquiry is directly responsible for a pause in proceedings (that might make California sound good). But it is clear that the specter of possible accountability has CBS lawyers worried:

“A potential $35 million settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount’s CBS affiliate has been delayed after the company’s management continued to fear a potential legal backlash, The Post has learned.”

The Trump administration originally demanded $50 million to settle its baseless lawsuit and approve the Skydance merger. They’ve been negotiating over how pathetic CBS is willing to be since last fall. At one point CBS was even considering running a series of free Trump administration advertorials to get in the authoritarian administration’s good graces.

If CBS executives had backbone, they’d cancel the merger and tell the Trump administration to go fuck itself. They’d have plenty of legal and popular support.

But billionaire majority owner Shari Redstone, currently battling thyroid cancer, is poised to make $2 billion off the deal and is keen to head to the exits. Folks at CBS with any actual principles have already been leaving the company. Media moguls’ demand for consolidation under Trump 2.0 has been relentless as the administration destroys whatever’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits.

It’s unclear if this California inquiry actually has teeth, and I’d suspect this grotesquely corrupt exchange gets consummated eventually. Skydance execs poised to take ownership of CBS appear to be even bigger Trump ass kissers than the outgoing CBS execs. The end result will, one way or the other, be a company even-more terrified of doing any real journalism critical of our increasingly unpopular mad king.

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By now, it is common knowledge that RFK Jr. had a brain worm that consumed a portion of his brain. It’s actually not as rare or crazy as it sounds at first blush, mind you, but it’s also not terribly common in the United States. And, at the end of the day, a worm ate part of his brain, resulting in some health and memory issues he had as a result of the loss of brain mass.

Kennedy appears to be doing something similar to the Health and Human Services Department he runs. A significant amount of brain power has left HHS and its child agencies. Some of those losses have been due to budget cuts. Some of them have come from RFK Jr. personally firing them, as he did with the vaccine advisory panel at the CDC, replacing them with a group that includes anti-vax lunatics.

But while those instances have grabbed most of the headlines, there is also an exodus of brainpower from HHS from those choosing to leave government services because they no longer believe in those running their departments. The most recent example of this is Dr. Fiona Havers.

Dr. Fiona Havers, who led the CDC’s tracking of hospitalizations from COVID-19 and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), stepped down this week.

“Unfortunately,” she said in an email to colleagues, ” I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions.” The memo was obtained by The Washington Post. Havers worked at the CDC for 13 years. She presented hospitalization data at ACIP meetings.

Her resignation is the latest in a string of exits from the agency.

Indeed. The CDC specifically has also lost another high-ranking vaccine advisor, not to mention the five senior leaders that resigned earlier this year as a result of the new leadership put in place by the Trump administration. And you can be damned sure that there are many more that have left HHS and its child agencies without having generated any headlines.

It’s clear what is happening here. RFK Jr. is creating a climate inhospitable to the career experts and professionals who don’t align with his views on health and medicine. This is causing many of them to voluntarily leave, while Kennedy is then happy to terminate the employment of those who attempt to stick it out. Once HHS’ brain has been hollowed out by this Kennedy-worm, the cavity can be filled back in with the kind of problematic charlatans who give Kennedy the warm and fuzzies.

What’s important to understand about this is that the damage this is causing is immediate, as we’re seeing with the measles outbreak that is refusing to go away, but that it’s also long term. The harm done to our public health will echo for many years and, perhaps, even generations.

All because nobody is willing to stand up and demand Kennedy be removed from his post.

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After months of what can only be described as government kidnapping, Mahmoud Khalil is finally out of detention and released on bail. The Columbia grad student and green card holder was detained by ICE for the heinous crime of participating in pro-Palestinian protests—or as Marco Rubio apparently sees it, having opinions Rubio doesn’t like. It took a federal judge basically telling the government “the Constitution still exists, you fascist dipshits” to get him released—just three months later than it should have happened.

On Friday, he was finally released to return to his family, including his wife and infant child, who had not yet been born when Trump’s goons snatched Khalil.

As you may recall, two weeks ago a judge had ruled that Rubio’s stated reason for detaining Khalil was so obviously unconstitutional that he should be released. The DOJ then claimed that they still had other reasons to keep Khalil detained, and it looked for a little while like those might actually win out. However, on Friday, the judge ordered Khalil be released, with the bail condition being that he surrender his passport/travel docs, but that ICE provide him with a certified copy of his passport and green card.

Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered Khalil’s release on bail Friday after finding he is not a flight risk or a danger to public safety. The judge said it’s “highly unusual” to be seeking his detention at this point.

The judge also cited several “extraordinary circumstances” in Khalil’s case that led him to order his release, including “that there is a due process violative effort to punish” the Columbia University graduate who played a central role in negotiations on behalf of pro-Palestinian student protesters last year.

Khalil “is not a flight risk, and the evidence that has been presented to me at least is that he is not a danger to the community, period, full stop,” Farbiarz said.

While the DOJ promptly appealed, they took their sweet time actually obeying the judge’s order, leading to a follow-up text order on the docket by the magistrate judge on the case, Michael Hammer, wondering why they had not yet released Khalil:

TEXT ORDER: By Order entered earlier today that set the Petitioner’s bail conditions [D.E. 317], the parties were directed to file, by 6:30 p.m. CST, a letter indicating that Bail Condition #1 had been completed. As of this Order, the parties have not done so. The parties shall file the letter forthwith.. So Ordered by Magistrate Judge Michael A. Hammer on 6/20/2025

Soon after, both parties filed a letter stating that the conditions (regarding his passport) had been met, and next thing we knew, he was on a flight home.

Once again, the only reason Khalil was detained was because of his participation in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. The US cannot call itself a supporter of free speech while doing shit like that. Protests are part of the American way and are protected by the First Amendment.

In an interview he gave with the NY Times over the weekend, he notes that he came to the US knowing that we supposedly have strong free speech protections that would enable him to speak his mind about the treatment of his fellow Palestinians:

While he did not romanticize America, he believed that the country had strong institutions and a robust rule of law and that his speech would be protected.

“I came here with a clear understanding of freedom of expression,” he said. “Even when it comes to Palestine. I never had any sort of concern that speaking up for Palestine would actually get me in jail.”

He compared his treatment by ICE to the kind of government secret police abductions in Syria, which he claims was one of the reasons he left Syria in the first place. His case, once again, makes a mockery of what we’re told America is about. As he notes:

“If you have money, there is rule of law,” he said. “If you are abiding by the very narrow definition of what this administration is defining an American value to be, you may get rule of law. Otherwise you have to fight tooth and nail to get your due process and your rights.”

Khalil’s fight is far from over, but his unfortunate story is the kind that you know, years from now, will be one of the infamous, shameful moments in American history that kids are taught in schools about yet another moment when America showed how far it was from reaching its ideals, and how quick some powerful fascists were to spit on the basic promised (if rarely reached) values and principles of America, in order to lock up and intimidate those who seek to use their voice to make the world a better place.

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What a surprise. The most intellectually dishonest people in the nation still have the biggest bullhorns. That’s why a regular-ass drug raid that occurred in Tuscon, Arizona somehow makes headlines in New York City. Here’s the New York Post, disingenuously reporting the (Arizona) news:

A massive raid on a suspected cartel member found in Arizona with a huge stockpile of drugs and guns was interrupted by “idiots” who thought it was “an ICE raid,” according to a sheriff.

Investigators had spent around six months investigating the unidentified cartel member, who had crept back into the country despite previously being deported, according to Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple.

When they finally raided his home in southwest Tucson late Wednesday, they found millions of fentanyl pills as well as 32 pounds of cocaine, 22 pounds of meth, four guns — and some unexpected opposition.

“Here’s the crazy part — some idiots, thinking it was an ICE raid, came down and protested,” the sheriff said.

While the protesters may have looked a bit out of place protesting what appears to be a legitimate “worst of worst” raid performed by law enforcement, they’re hardly idiots. The raid was led by ICE agents with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department in tow, which is why it probably looked exactly like just another ICE raid performed for the sole purpose of ejecting brown people from this country, whether or not they’ve committed any criminal acts.

Of course, New York’s cop-friendliest paper (and that’s in a city that also hosts the New York Times) doesn’t limit itself to burying the lede. It ensures the most damning contradiction of this sheriff’s manufactured outrage doesn’t even make it into print. If someone reads nothing but the Post’s coverage, they might come away thinking protesters are protesting literally any law enforcement activity. You have to visit the links contained in the article to see why protesters might have thought this was just another bullshit immigration raid:

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office and ICE agents were executing a search warrant for narcotics violations at a home in the area of Irvington and Midvale Park.

That important information is contained nowhere in the NY Post’s “reporting.” That’s an essential part of the whole — something the sheriff willfully ignored just so he could call anti-ICE protesters “idiots.”

ICE raids draw crowds these days. And ICE has no one to blame but itself for this outcome. Sheriff Ross Teeple is the real idiot here, something that can be inferred from his full comment to local reporters:

“Last night, we had people protesting a drug bust,” Teeple said. “These idiots came out and protested us getting 5 million fentanyl pills off the streets. They don’t have individual thought, they have group think.”

Group think? Really? This is coming from a law enforcement officer who likely believes firmly in the power of the “thin blue line” and definitely thinks he and his agency should never face protests or criticism for partnering with ICE to conduct raid of homes. Being in law enforcement is the very definition of “group think.” This is why when one cop fires a gun, every other cop in the area tends to open fire as well, even if they haven’t personally experienced anything approaching a threat to their lives or safety. This is why there’s a code of silence that permits bad cops to carve out decades-long careers despite repeated misconduct. And this is why the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has been permanently sidelined by the group-thinkiest, most pro-cop president we’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing ascend to the Oval Office. (Twice!)

If you don’t like your law enforcement stuff being mildly inconvenienced by the presence of protesters, just opt out of partnering with ICE. You’re under no legal obligation to contribute to its anti-immigrant actions. If you’re just there to bask in the reflected glory of a drug bust that happens to involve a migrant, suck it up. But with ICE being the focal point of protests across the nation, it’s extremely stupid to put the public on blast because you’ve failed to realize you’ll often be judged by the company you choose to keep.

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The normalization of authoritarianism is happening in real time in federal courtrooms. While district court judges try to apply actual legal standards to Trump’s near constant attempts to find ever more constitutional crises to create, appeals courts are busy treating the wholesale dismantling of constitutional constraints as just another political disagreement.

Take, for example, what’s happened in LA with Donald Trump calling in both the National Guard and the Marines.

Can Donald Trump (or, really, let’s face it: Stephen Miller) be allowed to totally manufacture a crisis in LA to push for violence to try to justify even greater violence on the American public? The courts seem to be figuring all this out in real time. We covered the initial ruling by district court judge Charles Breyer saying that Trump had clearly violated the law in federalizing the National Guard under the rationale he used, only to have the Ninth Circuit put his ruling on hold to review.

Late last week, two things happened regarding the case. First, the Ninth Circuit issued a per curiam (i.e., unsigned) opinion overturning Breyer’s decision, which had ordered the National Guard be put back under the control of Governor Newsom.

Breyer’s original analysis was straightforward: Trump’s invocation of 10 U.S.C. § 12406(3) failed because (1) there was no evidence of the “rebellion” the statute requires, and (2) Trump bypassed the procedural requirement to work “through” the governor. These weren’t close calls—they were clear violations of statutory requirements.

But the Ninth Circuit panel decided that none of that matters. In a ruling that epitomizes how appeals courts are enabling authoritarianism through procedural deference, they rejected Breyer’s analysis almost entirely:

Affording the President that deference, we conclude that it is likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority under § 12406(3), which authorizes federalization of the National Guard when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” Additionally, the Secretary of Defense’s transmittal of the order to the Adjutant General of the California National Guard—who is authorized under California law to “issue all orders in the name of the Governor,” CAL. MIL. & VET. CODE § 163— likely satisfied the statute’s procedural requirement that federalization orders be issued “through” the Governor. And even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s TRO.

Notice what’s happening here. The panel doesn’t actually address whether there was a “rebellion”—they just defer to presidential authority. They don’t analyze whether Trump actually worked “through” Governor Newsom—they manufacture a procedural workaround through the Adjutant General. And then they dismiss even potential procedural violations as insufficient grounds for relief.

This is how constitutional constraints get dissolved: not through dramatic confrontations, but through judicial acquiescence wrapped in the language of deference and procedure.

The panel’s own jurisdictional gymnastics reveal the game being played. They acknowledge that appeals courts generally can’t review TROs, but then do it anyway because… reasons. Procedural constraints apparently only apply when they protect executive power, not when they limit it.

Notably, that ruling says that because the lower court had not ruled on California’s claim that Trump’s actions violated the Posse Comitatus Act, that issue was not before the appeals court.

Which brings us back to Judge Breyer’s courtroom, where on Friday he held a hearing specifically exploring whether or not Trump’s action violated that law:

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer put off issuing any additional rulings and instead asked for briefings from both sides by noon Monday on whether the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits troops from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil, is being violated in Los Angeles.

So we’re left with this: a district judge trying to apply actual legal standards to military deployment against American civilians, while an appeals court essentially rubber-stamps executive power grabs as long as they’re dressed up in statutory language.

The Posse Comitatus analysis gives Breyer another opportunity to impose legal constraints on what is, fundamentally, a manufactured crisis designed to justify military rule. But given the Ninth Circuit’s track record here, the more important question isn’t whether Breyer will do the right thing again—it’s whether the appeals court will let him.

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This was never an issue before, but it’s suddenly an issue now that ICE has gone full Gestapo to keep up with Trump’s mass deportation demands. ICE’s tactics — unmarked vehicles, masked officers, and untargeted raids of any place that might contain foreigners — have earned it all the criticism and hatred it now faces.

The DHS is trotting out fake stats to justify ICE officers’ actions and President Trump has gotten busy sending military troops to police city streets. ICE has decided to join the general lawlessness of Trump’s second term by not only refusing to allow US lawmakers to perform their oversight duties, but serving up arrests and bogus criminal charges when members of Congress demand access to detention facilities.

These intimidation tactics haven’t worked. In fact, they’ve backfired. So, in an effort to snatch victory from defeat, ICE has decided it no longer needs to respect the law when it comes to Congressional oversight.

After a spate of tense encounters involving lawmakers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, the Department of Homeland Security is asking members of Congress to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance.

Under the annual appropriations act, lawmakers are allowed to enter any DHS facilities “used to detain or otherwise house aliens” to inspect them as part of their oversight duties. The act outlines that they are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility.”

ICE knows what the law says. And it knows it can’t actually demand prior notice before detention facility inspections. Its new “guidance” [PDF] actually contains a full quotation of the law it says it can break, which says this:

Nothing in this section may be construed to require a Member of Congress to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility described in subsection (a) for the purpose of conducting oversight.

Subsection (a) refers to detention facilities. The only people that can be asked to give prior notice are Congressional staffers. Representatives and senators are not required to give ICE a head’s up.

Nevertheless, ICE is attempting to install just such a requirement, no matter what the law actually says.

When planning to visit an ICE facility, ICE asks requests to be submitted at least 72 hours in advance.

ICE can “ask” all it wants, but it certainly is in no legal position to demand this request be honored. So, that part of this guidance can be ignored, even by Congressional staffers, who are only required (by law) to give 24 hours notice.

ICE cannot actually enforce this request but presumably has placed it towards the top of its new guidance in hopes that it might trick a few people into submitting requests, rather than just exercising their legal rights. And it probably hopes no one reads past that paragraph, because it admits it has no right to make this demand latter in the memo.

ICE will make every effort to comply with the law and accommodate Members seeking to visit/tour an ICE detention facility for the purpose of conducting oversight, but exigent circumstances (e.g., operational conditions, security posture, etc.) may impact the time of entry into the facility. Regardless, Members must comply with entry requirements.

There’s ICE claiming it will comply with the law before adding a bunch of stuff that will give it the excuses it needs to avoid this legal mandate. Law enforcement agencies love their “exigent circumstances,” which are mostly just universal adapters for rights violations.

Of course, those expected to be affected most by ICE’s little policy dodge see right through this new DHS guidance. Here’s Bennie Thompson (D-MS) calling bullshit on this memo:

Kristi Noem’s new policy to block congressional oversight of ICE facilities is not only unprecedented, it is an affront to the Constitution and Federal law. Noem is now not only attempting to restrict when Members can visit, but completely blocking access to ICE Field Offices – even if Members schedule visits in advance. No matter how much she and Trump want to force us to live under their authoritarian rule, ICE is not above oversight and the Department must follow the law.

Thompson isn’t wrong. No matter what ICE/DHS might “request” in terms of facility oversight, the law is still the law. And since ICE has yet to allow an unannounced inspection without trying to serve up some collateral arrests, these confrontations will continue for as long as Trump remains in power.

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The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who we now find out, via his lawyer, prefers to be called Kilmar Abrego) keeps getting more and more bizarre. After being “accidentally” shipped to El Salvador — despite a judge’s order directly barring such a move — the Trump regime has spent months (1) denying that they could even get him back from El Salvador while (2) simultaneously trying to claim Abrego was a hardened criminal, possibly child groomer and murderer. And then, magically, a few weeks ago they were able to bring him back to the US to charge him criminally with charges that seemed obviously exaggerated, based entirely on a single traffic stop from years ago in which the cops let him go with no follow up.

And, in the first review of the criminal case, Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes found the entire thing so ludicrous that she ordered Abrego be released (something that won’t happen, as the DOJ immediately appealed). Among the many, many problems, the opinion found that much of the evidence presented wasn’t just double or triple hearsay, but relied heavily on some actual human smugglers, who appear to have been given leniency in response to their highly questionable and often contradictory claims. Not to mention some of their claims being effectively impossible.

When we wrote about the indictment, we highlighted how weak it sounded (not to mention a long-term DOJ criminal prosecutor resigning rather than bringing the charges). Some people told us that they were sure that the feds had more evidence to support the claims, but if they do, they sure didn’t show that evidence to Magistrate Judge Holmes.

Holmes admits upfront that her order that Abrego should be released is mostly an “academic exercise,” since she knows that the DOJ will appeal and the government admitted in a hearing directly that if Abrego is released, they will send ICE to rendition him to some other country besides El Salvador. But that doesn’t change how fucked up she believes the charges against Abrego to be.

Because the DOJ has basically no real evidence to support the charges or the idea that Abrego is a risk or threat to society, it tries to manufacture the claim that he “trafficked” children. The judge notes that the DOJ itself seems confused about the difference between trafficking and smuggling, pointing out that they used the terms interchangeably, despite the laws being different and the issues being different.

Then, she notes that the evidence of Abrego ever “smuggling” a child is beyond flimsy. They had a federal agent quoting a Tennessee state trooper claiming that there was someone underage in the vehicle Abrego was driving when he was stopped. Let us count the layers of hearsay:

Here, the Court finds that the origination of the roster and the circumstances surrounding its creation are so remote and attenuated from Special Agent Joseph’s testimony that it cannot be given the conclusive weight for which it is offered by the government. The exhibit on which the government relies is a photograph taken by THP Trooper Foster, not by Special Agent Joseph – first layer of hearsay – of a document prepared at the request of THP Trooper Foster – second layer of hearsay – by the occupants of the vehicle driven by Abrego – third layer of hearsay. While the body camera footage – which is itself hearsay – includes the passing around of a piece of paper among the vehicle occupants at the direction of a THP trooper on the scene, the detail of the roster is visible only briefly in the body camera footage. A still shot of the roster detail from the body camera footage was also admitted as a government exhibit.

Clearly, the most reliable evidence of the accuracy of the information in the roster would be the testimony of the individual who wrote down that information. Special Agent Joseph testified that, although HSI has identified and located six of the nine other people in the vehicle driven by Abrego on November 30, 2022, they have not located the individual who is purported to have provided a birth year of 2007. Absent that individual’s testimony, the next most reliable source about the accuracy of the roster information would be the testimony of THP Trooper Foster. If subject to examination, THP Trooper Foster could be asked whether he considered the 2007 birth year to be reasonable based on his observation of the individual who provided the information. Did the passenger look like a 15-year-old? Was he shaving yet? Was he slight of build? But THP Trooper Foster was not offered as a witness.

Also, the incredible weakness of the evidence becomes clear when the judge notes that there is a claim that rather than relying on a written list of birthdates, the cops supposedly photographed passports… but suddenly those photos can’t be found. Oops.

According to Special Agent Joseph, THP Trooper Foster’s body camera footage was purged and is no longer available. Special Agent Joseph additionally testified that THP Trooper Foster took photographs of the passports of the occupants of the vehicle, which would have confirmed the accuracy of the 2007 birthdate. However, even though the photograph of the roster was produced, the photographs of the passports cannot be located, according to Special Agent Joseph’s testimony.

Also… it’s not even clear that the supposedly written-by-a-passenger’s date of birth is 2007 was… actually 2007.

Additionally, defense counsel argued at the detention hearing that the 7 in the written birth year of 2007 appears to have been modified from a 1. That is not entirely without foundation, as there does appear to be some overwriting of the 7. Further, there is a question about whether the 7, even if not edited, is a number seven (7) or a number one (1). If a number one (1), then the individual with that birth date was born in 2001, not 2007. The number one (1) and the number seven (7) are among the letters, symbols, and numbers sometimes described as visually ambiguous characters because they can be indistinguishable in many types of print and especially in handwriting

The magistrate even points out that another of the submitted handwritten birthdates of someone who wrote either 1998 or 1999, the “1” is written in a manner similar to the “7” in contention in the 2001/2007 dispute.

The government’s entire argument that Abrego transported a minor on November 30, 2022 depends on the last digit in the birth year being 7 rather than 1. That the roster photograph invites this kind of scrutiny and supposition to resolve any doubts diminishes its reliability. The Court cannot find that the photograph is sufficiently reliable to satisfy the government’s burden of showing that this case involves a minor victim for purposes of § 3142(f)(1)(E) without some other corroboration such as the missing photograph of the individual’s passport, which THP Trooper relayed to Special Agent Joseph exists (or perhaps at least existed)

She also points out that the supposed support from those who told federal agents exactly what they wanted to hear isn’t all that believable for a variety of expected reasons:

The first cooperator, who provided interview statements and grand jury testimony, has two prior felony convictions, has previously been deported five times, and was released early from a 30-month federal prison sentence for human smuggling as part of his cooperation in this case. He is the purported domestic leader of the human smuggling organization in which Abrego is accused of participating. He has been granted deferred action on deportation in exchange for his testimony.

That sure sounds like the Trump regime is soooooo focused on convincing the world that Abrego is a human smuggler that they’re set to release an actual human smuggler so long as he swears Abrego is involved.

Oh sorry. Not one, but two such people:

The second cooperator is also an avowed member of the human smuggling organization and is presently in custody charged with a federal crime for which he hopes to be released in exchange for his cooperating grand jury testimony. He has also been previously deported and has requested deferred action on deportation in exchange for his cooperation. The second cooperator is a closely related family member of the first cooperator.

Yeah, this doesn’t seem very convincing at all, as the judge notes the “double hearsay” testimony defies common sense and would require physically impossible stunts by Abrego.

The Court gives little weight to this hearsay testimony – double hearsay through Special Agent Joseph’s testimony – of the first male cooperator, a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation, who has now obtained for himself an early release from federal prison and delay of a sixth deportation by providing information to the government. Nor do the hearsay statements of the second male cooperator on this issue fare any better, as his requested release from jail and delay of another deportation depends on providing information the government finds useful. Even without discounting the weight of the testimony of the first and second male cooperators for the multiple layers of hearsay, their testimony and statements defy common sense*.*

Both male cooperators stated that, other than three or four trips total without his children, Abrego typically took his children with him during the alleged smuggling trips from Maryland to Houston and back, some 2,900 miles round-trip, as often as three or four times per week. The sheer number of hours that would be required to maintain this schedule, which would consistently be more than 120 hours per week of driving time, approach physical impossibility. For that additional reason, the Court finds that the statements of the first and second male cooperators are not reliable to establish that this case “involves a minor victim.”

And while the government tries to argue Abrego is a flight risk because he faces a theoretical 90 years in prison, the magistrate notes that even if there were actual evidence supporting these claims, similar cases in this district received an average sentence of… 12 months.

Meanwhile, the magistrate judge is further unimpressed by the “evidence” that Abrego is a bigshot MS-13 member since it involves not just more hearsay… but contradictory hearsay!

The government’s evidence that Abrego is a member of MS-13 consists of general statements, all double hearsay, from two cooperating witnesses: the second male cooperator and N.V. Those statements are, however, directly inconsistent with statements by the first cooperator. In interviews, the second male cooperator, whose general unreliability the Court addressed above, stated broadly to Special Agent Joseph that Abrego was “familial” with purported gang members. Other than this vague statement, there is no evidence of when these interactions occurred or in what context (other than as general greetings), how the second male cooperator determined those other unidentified individuals to be known gang members, or precisely how some perceived interaction between Abrego and other unidentified individuals substantiates gang membership.

There’s even more nonsense with a previously paid informant who made some sketchy claims about Abrego’s gang membership, but the judge points out that the “cooperating witness” had only interacted with Abrego many years ago when she was still a teenager.

This is a problem when you’re manufacturing a fake case by finding a bunch of actual criminals looking for leniency who will say anything. Sometimes they (*gasp*) make shit up:

Contrary to the statements of the second cooperator and NV, the first male cooperator told Special Agent Joseph that, in ten years of acquaintance with Abrego, there were no signs or markings, including tattoos, indicating that Abrego is an MS-13 member. This statement specifically repudiates any outward indicia that Abrego belongs to MS-13, in stark contrast to the non-specific second cooperator’s and N.V.’s feelings that Abrego may belong to MS-13. Given these conflicting statements, the government’s evidence of Abrego’s alleged gang membership is simply insufficient.

On and on it goes. Each bit of evidence looking weaker and weaker. I could go through it all — including how weak the evidence is that Abrego transported drugs or owned a bunch of guns — but you get the picture.

If it wasn’t already clear from the weakness of the indictment, it is clear now: this is a wholly manufactured case by the Trump regime who was so desperate to turn Abrego into a gun-toting, drug and human trafficking “bad guy,” that they effectively fabricated obviously laughable evidence, knowing full well that the MAGA faithful and stenographer media would repeat.

But as soon as a magistrate judge looked at the details, they saw how it’s obviously all nonsense. Again, this won’t lead to Abrego’s release, but it should be a reminder of what this government will do to try to cover up its own horrific mistake.

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