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On the latest episode of the always excellent “The Bugle” podcast, comedian Alice Fraser amusingly describes the horror of what’s happening in Los Angeles the following way:

So let’s just clarify: this is arguably unlawful deployment of military force to enforce peace on peaceful protests over illegal arrests of illegal immigrants.

Here’s what actually happening in LA: Trump’s racist advisor Stephen Miller deliberately manufactured this controversy, directing ICE officials to raid Home Depots where migrant workers pick up day labor jobs, knowing it would provoke protests.

Direct orders from Stephen Miller ignited the Los Angeles protests, leading to the precarious, highly militarized situation the city is currently facing.

The plan from the beginning was to create confrontations that could justify crushing dissent with military force—even though the LAPD itself has repeatedly said the protests are peaceful and they don’t need military backup. But hey, why let reality get in the way of a good authoritarian power fantasy? Trump and his cronies are gonna fabricate “riots” whether they exist or not because they’ve been dreaming of using the military on Americans for years.

Now we have the manufactured result: Trump has sent both the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles in what California is correctly suing over as illegal federal seizure of state resources. Make no mistake about what’s happening: MAGA Republicans are declaring war on anyone who disagrees with them, and they’ll use military force against Americans to silence dissent.

And on Tuesday, Senator Tom Cotton underscored the point, rehashing his controversial, horrifying New York Times op-ed from five years ago for the Wall Street Journal, advocating for the use of the US military on American protesters. Cotton has literally recycled the same authoritarian playbook, using nearly identical language to justify military force against protesters—proving this has nothing to do with the specific circumstances in LA and everything to do with a long-standing terrifying authoritarian desire to illegally use the US military to crush dissent coming from the American citizenry.

Some of you will likely recall that almost exactly five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, the warmongering, hate-filled Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas took to the pages of the NY Times to advocate for bringing in the US military to shoot at American protesters and to silence them for their speech.

That 2020 op-ed caused a massive controversy when the NY Times published advocacy for using the US military against US citizens. Some very stupid people tried to turn it into a “censorship” debate when people criticized the Times for platforming such dangerous ideas. But as we pointed out then, the Times’ editorial decisions are their own free speech, not censorship.

The real issue that got lost in that debate was why bloodthirsty MAGA leaders are so eager to turn the US military on American protesters. Then, as now, Cotton’s justification was based on wildly exaggerating isolated incidents amid largely peaceful demonstrations to justify military intervention.

But Cotton obviously kept that op-ed in his pocket all these years, just waiting until he could run it again, this time with an assist from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And it’s just as horrific as last time.

Violent insurrectionists turned areas of Los Angeles into lawless hellscapes over the weekend, with anarchists setting fire to vehicles, throwing scooters and debris at police, and looting businesses—all while waving foreign flags.

Here’s where Cotton’s entire argument immediately falls apart: the LAPD itself—historically no friend to protesters—has directly contradicted his claims. The department issued an official statement calling the protests peaceful, and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell explicitly said they didn’t need military assistance and that deploying Marines would likely make the situation worse.

When even the LAPD—an agency with a long history of aggressive tactics—says military intervention is unnecessary and counterproductive, Cotton’s premise is exposed as pure fiction.

What we’re seeing from Cotton is textbook fascist authoritarian rhetoric: take isolated incidents from largely peaceful protests and paint them as citywide chaos. The reality is that protests were confined to a few blocks of downtown LA, with the most significant “violence” being some Waymo cars set on fire (which were likely as much about protesting “big tech” as about protesting ICE). Cotton transforms this into “lawless hellscapes” by non-existent “anarchists” (MAGAs’ favorite imaginary boogeyman) to justify military deployment.

The protests all began and remained mostly peaceful, with music playing, people dancing, vendors selling food and more. The only “violence” tended to come when law enforcement showed up in threatening military gear and provoked responses.

Again, this was entirely part of the plan. And Stephen Miller and Tom Cotton know that this is nonsense, and they don’t care. Their entire goal is to provoke and incite violence in order to justify much worse violence that they’ve wanted to inflict for years. The fact that Cotton is recycling nearly identical language from 2020 proves this isn’t about current circumstances—it’s a pre-written template for justifying military force against any protest he dislikes.

Despite the rising chaos, Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose office likened the riots to a Philadelphia Eagles playoff victory celebration, and Mayor Karen Bass, who refuses to support federal law enforcement, haven’t taken sufficient action to restore law and order.

Oh, fuck all the way off on that. There’s a very, very simple way to “restore law and order” which is to stop sending militarized federal cops into LA and provoking confrontations. Again, Los Angeles didn’t have any problems (or even protests) before Miller sent these goons into a Home Depot parking lot.

Meanwhile, incredibly, Democrats and the liberal media have again called this outbreak of violence “mostly peaceful protests,” while in the same breath blaming the riots, arson, and looting on President Trump for enforcing immigration law. The New York Times described “largely peaceful” riots with fireworks fired at police, cars set on fire, and more than 150 arrests.

Yes, because they have been mostly peaceful.

The threat from the radical left is clear: Don’t enforce immigration laws. If you do, left-wing street militias will burn down cities, and Democratic politicians will back the rioters. The president is absolutely right to reject this threat, enforce immigration laws, and restore civil order.

No, that’s not what is being said. Tom Cotton is stoking fear and nonsense because he’s trying to provoke outrage to get what he wants: the chance to use the US military on the American public. No city is being burnt down. There are no riots. No one is backing “rioters.” What they want is for the US government to stop grabbing people off the street for no reason other than the color of their skin.

From there, Cotton continues the myth-making, pretending that because these sweeps picked up a small number of actual criminals it means that everyone they’re arresting are murderers and child beaters.

Again, Cotton is playing the typical MAGA game of fearmongering by using the rare example to pretend it’s representative, just like I could point to the fact that the leader of Cotton’s party is a convicted criminal (on 34 counts!). Should we thus assume that everyone in the Republican party is a felon who should be sent to jail? It’s one or the other. Either Cotton thinks it’s okay to cherry pick a few people with criminal records and tar everyone associated with them with a broad brush, or he doesn’t.

But, of course, Tom Cotton lives by the motto “it’s okay for Republicans to do this, not anyone else.” Indeed, it’s even worse, because for everyone else he doesn’t even want basic rights or constitutional protections. He wants to send in the military:

The solution now is the same as I said then: an overwhelming show of force to end the riots.

THERE ARE NO RIOTS.

This is just blatant propaganda used to justify the force Cotton has always wanted to use against Americans he doesn’t like. They manufactured every bit of this. They provoked unnecessary confrontations, sending in heavily armed, militarized law enforcement where none was needed, following months of extreme policies and attacks on due process.

Once there, once people started to protest, they ramped up the provocation. And when there were a few rare examples of violence, they falsely labeled them as riots and used them as justification to ramp up the provocation even further.

It’s the “why are you hitting yourself?” school of governance, except with Marines.

There are no riots. No cities are burning. And sending in the military won’t stop the protests, because the protests are about this horrific and dangerous abuse of power.

As always, local police are the first line of defense, but when the police can’t restore order—or aren’t allowed to by Democratic mayors—the National Guard must be called out.

Again, the police have said everything’s fine. The protests have been mostly peaceful. They don’t need to “restore” order, because there is order. They’re not being held back by the mayor or the governor. The only parts of the government they’ve complained about are the federal government sending unnecessary military personnel without any attempt at coordination.

Ask yourself this: to whose benefit is it to pretend that the LAPD has lost control and to blame it on Democratic politicians? Is it to the people of LA? Not at all. It is to Tom Cotton and his fascist buddies.

Cotton wastes no opportunity to further lie:

Mr. Newsom—incompetent and ideological all at once—refused to mobilize the National Guard, leaving Mr. Trump little choice but to federalize the California Guard to protect federal law-enforcement agents and restore order.

This is another outright lie. Reports indicate that Trump called Newsom late Friday night/early Saturday morning, and when Newsom asked about the National Guard, Trump changed the subject. Newsom was never formally asked to mobilize state forces. Trump simply seized control of California’s National Guard without going through proper channels—hence California’s lawsuit over the illegal federal takeover.

So again, you have to ask, why is Cotton lying, other than to get what he wants: the US military to conduct operations on American protestors? It’s pure blood lust against people calling out his bloodthirsty campaign of vengeance.

This is the fascist playbook. Lie, generate controversy, provoke people to protest, insist that their protests are “violent riots,” use that to justify an overly aggressive violent response completely out of proportion to what’s happening.

The end goal is not peace. It’s subjugation and suppression of speech—turning America into the kind of place where questioning Dear Leader gets you a visit from the 82nd Airborne (who, coincidentally, Trump addressed today, an event he used to mock California and cheer on military occupation of an American city).

And the worst part? They’re doing this while wrapping themselves in the flag and calling themselves patriots. Real patriots don’t send Marines after Americans holding signs. But these aren’t patriots—they’re just fascists who figured out red, white, and blue makes better branding than brown shirts.

Don’t let them get away with it.

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We’re just supposed to assume that the masked person brandishing a gun and ordering us to get into an unmarked vehicle is a federal agent, rather than a criminal. We’re just supposed to buy into this new, hideous version of immigration enforcement that utilizes military gear, long guns, and a complete lack of identification as normal stuff Americans should just put up with.

But various gods forbid we actually expect public servants to be a bit more forthcoming about their public duties. Using apparently completely made-up stats about “increases” in “attacks” on ICE agents, ICE’s enablers justify the complete erasure of public accountability — something that starts with informing people you are actually a law enforcement officer by… you know… behaving like a law enforcement officer. Your agency should be named prominently. Your face — unless you’re engaging in a truly covert operation — should be visible.

Raiding homes and businesses to round up anyone looking kind of Hispanic in broad daylight isn’t a covert operation. Do your job right or get the fuck out of the business. If you’re in public, you assume the risks. But lots of people in or orbiting the Trump administration seem to think the government should be allowed to spend tax dollars without feeling obligated in any way to the people paying their salaries.

Enter someone who definitely hasn’t earned his publicly-funded paycheck, Senator Lindsey Graham.

If you can’t read/see the embed, it’s a Xtwit from Lindsey Graham, which says he wants to make it illegal for anyone to name/shame ICE agents.

I will soon introduce new legislation that would increase penalties for existing statutes — or if necessary create new statutes — designed to protect ICE agents or other law enforcement officers involved in covert operations.

[…]

Disclosing ICE agents’ identities, as threatened, could put the agents and their families in danger.

This is Senator Graham’s response to comments made by House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries during a press briefing last week.

Democrats and immigration rights advocates have criticized ICE agents for wearing masks, likening them to enforcers from fascist and communist regimes.

“This is America. This is not the Soviet Union,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a press briefing on June 3.

“We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s. And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will of course be identified.”

Everything Jeffries said is true. We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. We’re not Hitler’s Germany. We should not have secret police. So, it stands to reason, officers carrying out federal government programs should be immediately identifiable via name tags, marked vehicles, and prominent display of the federal agency they’re working for. We expect this from regular law enforcement. Federal law enforcement shouldn’t be given a special exception to this assumption.

The only reason anyone would advocate for this is because they want to distance their stormtroopers from any form of accountability. When rights are violated (and they are… all the time) during migrant raids, masks and stripping of agency emblems makes it all but impossible to file complaints, much less lawsuits, against government agents who have violated rights. It also ensures officers won’t be named and shamed.

It also protects officers from any internal attempts at accountability, however unlikely they might be under this administration. Ensuring officers always remain unidentifiable hamstrings internal investigations by making any outside recordings of public interactions with officers completely useless.

Any speculation about the danger posed to ICE agents’ “families” is exactly that: speculation. There is no evidence suggesting this sort of threatening is so commonplace it justifies the continuous hiding of agents’ identities. If it was, you’d expect to see more protesters or undocumented migrants facing criminal charges for these threats.

This is Graham, once again, rolling over to show Trump his exposed belly. And that would be fine if it only ensured Graham was beholden to Trump as long as Trump remains in power. But this move affects everyone. And it’s hard to believe it would survive a review by the courts, despite the pre-loading of federal courts Trump performed during his last term.

This is cowardice in service of cowards who claim to fear for their safety even as they wage a war of terror on migrant-heavy neighborhoods and businesses. If you want to wear the jackboots, you should be willing to take everything that comes with it, including the fact that you’re still a public servant carrying out your duties in public. If you don’t like that part of the job or your obligations to the American public, you’re more than welcome to leave the job. And the country.

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After spending election season whining that the program was taking too long, Republicans have been introducing massive new changes to a $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program (BEAD) that not only don’t serve the public interest, but could also introduce years of potential new delays.

Their changes are twofold: one, they want to strip away requirements that the resulting taxpayer-funded broadband is (gasp) affordable to poor people. Two, they want to slather Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite service Starlink with billions in new subsidies, redirecting that money away from other, higher-capacity, better alternatives (like community-owned open access fiber).

Speaking last week to a Senate Appropriations Committee, Trump administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that the NTIA will “soon” issue a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that states will have 90 days to respond to. That will require states to basically reboot years of work in developing their state broadband plans, something outside groups say could take years.

It’s important to understand that numerous states were just a few steps away from deploying next-generation fiber to communities that had never had internet access before when Republicans decided they’d “fix” the program by shifting billions in funds to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, environmentally problematic satellite service. This while the press writes numerous stories about “Elon Musk leaving politics” and he and Donald Trump have their public falling out (which has now been more muted).

The Western Governor’s Association was quick to send a polite letter to Lutnick noting that “significant required alterations to state and territory plans could cause further delays by up to 12 months,” which again seems like a generous estimation. Senate Democrats also wrote a very polite May 30 letter to Lutnick lamenting the unnecessary delays:

“States have already developed plans to address these needs, and restarting or slowing down the process will only hold back progress,” the Democrats’ letter said. “States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions.”

When the former boss of the BEAD program, Evan Feinman, left his post in March he noted how numerous states were just steps away from launching their massive fiber expansions. Feinman wasn’t subtle about his belief that the revisions are a cronyistic hand out to Elon Musk that will actually harm the goal of bringing affordable, reliable, and fast internet access to the masses.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.

The original BEAD program prioritized fiber investment because high-capacity, future proof fiber is the best use of taxpayer money. Ideally you want to drive fiber into as many areas as possible, then fill in the rest with 5G wireless and fixed wireless. After that, you can fill in any remaining gaps with LEO satellite broadband options.

Again though, LEO satellite lacks the capacity to scale to actually address U.S. broadband gaps, and is too expensive for the rural Americans most in need of access. Not only is Starlink expensive and increasingly congested, it harms scientific research and there’s evidence that the disposable nature of the satellites as they burn up in orbit may ultimately erode the ozone layer.

But because Elon Musk runs the company, Republicans think Starlink is some kind of magic. Unfortunately for many Trump supporters, money directed to Starlink is money directed away from better options, including the cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and municipal broadband operations providing locals gigabit fiber, sometimes for as little as $55 a month.

“What this probably means is that most states will have to re-write their grant proposals and rerun their grant programs from scratch, and then NTIA will have to approve them,” Gigi Sohn, the Director for the American Association for Public Broadband, said in a post to LinkedIn. “This makes disbursement in 7 months largely a fantasy.”

Forcing your constituents to use shittier, more expensive broadband is very on brand for Republicans, who, in just the last year, have declared that the government helping poor people afford broadband is unconstitutional, killed a popular program providing $30 broadband discounts for low-income Americans, effectively banned holding your broadband ISP accountable for literally anything, and even banned schoolkids from getting access to free Wi-Fi hotspots.

In its place is basically a federal policy that rubber stamps every last whim of terrible regional monopolies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. And rich benefactors like Elon Musk. Anybody consciously voting for this level of sleazy self-serving corruption shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery.

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As RFK Jr. has presided over the decimation of the Health & Human Services department he runs, along with HHS’ child agencies, his anti-vaxxer stance has shown through. And, really, his appointment, confirmation, and subsequent actions should fully put to bed any question of the utility of congressional approval of cabinet positions. During those hearings, in which Kennedy spent most of the time either refusing to answer perfectly legitimate questions or else demonstrating that he had zero understanding how the programs he would be running actually work and are funded, Kennedy also voiced his support for vaccines generally, particularly for children. This flew in the face of the decades Kennedy has spent blaming vaccines for autism rates increasing, among other things. The consequences for what was a spectacular fail-job of a confirmation hearing was his appointment to Secretary of HHS.

Since his confirmation, Kennedy has helpfully put his incompetence on full display. He has bungled a measles outbreak that is the 2nd largest in three decades and still expanding, prattled on about chemtrails, committed to knowing the cause of autism this year only to walk that back, and at least attempted to pull back CDC guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for children and pregnant women. All of this should have laid to bare for government leaders that Kennedy is anti-science, anti-vaccine, and grossly incompetent to run a small medical clinic, never mind HHS.

But in case you needed an example the contrast turned all the way to 100%, Kennedy this week decided to fire every single member of the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. This decision was announced not in a press conference, nor in a congressional hearing, but by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

In an opinion piece published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy announced that he had cleared out the committee, accusing them of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and a group that has “become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”

“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy added.

The committee—CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—meets periodically to publicly review, evaluate, debate, and make recommendations on immunization practices. The CDC typically adopts the committee’s recommendations. The CDC’s vaccination schedules and recommendations set clinical standards for the country and determine insurance coverage.

The group is pretty damned important, in other words, when it comes to how the CDC, clinicians, and insurance companies throughout the country organized their parts of various vaccination programs throughout the country. Programs that Kennedy has historically railed against, regularly engaging in conspiracy theories. And you really do have to couple this news with Kennedy’s rejection of the germ theory of disease, which has been powering modern medicine for the past century or so. Put more simply: a man who has spent decades railing against modern vaccine practices and who rejects the cornerstone of modern medicine conducted his own less directly violent version of the Comrade’s Massacre, with the public ouster of these experts coupled with a public declaration of their being unfit to serve.

If you think that comparison is too harsh, you aren’t paying attention to the authoritarian playbook, which Kennedy has obviously adopted. Worse than accusing ACIP members of being purposefully corrupt, Kennedy outlines why they simply can’t help but be corrupted. There’s no agency in any of this among those he ousted. They are corrupt by a combination of any connection Kennedy could draw to the medical industry and his own declaration that they are so.

In Kennedy’s article, he criticized ACIP and FDA advisors for being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. However, he argued that the “problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt.”

“Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it,” he wrote. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”

In Kennedy’s op-ed, he indicates that new ACIP members will be appointed who “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. … will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry.”

Read all of this any way you like, but it’s fairly straight forward. Kennedy thinks that ACIP was working for the big pharma industry against the interests of the American people and their health, particularly when it comes to all things vaccines. He purged them and will replace them with his own hand-picked advisors that will almost certainly be plagued by similar misguided views. And that group, currently populated by nobody at all, will meet in 2 weeks to talk about immunization programs according to Kennedy.

Critics of this purge abound, as you would expect. And, because they come from the very medical experts and industries that Kennedy claims are conspiring against us all in order to, I guess, sell vaccines, they can be easily dismissed by his cadre of sycophants.

Kennedy’s move was quickly rebuked by a number of doctors groups. A statement released by the American Medical Association said it “upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.” The American Academy of Pediatrics called it part of an “escalating effort by the Administration to silence independent medical expertise and stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines.”

“This is horrifying,” a CDC official said of Kennedy’s move.

The American Public Health Association denounced it as an undemocratic “coup” of the process. The Infectious Disease Society of America called it “reckless, shortsighted and severely harmful.” The American College of Physicians accused Kennedy of having “circumvented the standard, transparent vaccine review processes” at the CDC.

If you thought that Kennedy would be allowed to retain his position, one for which he is hopelessly unqualified, and the extent of the fallout from it would be a mere measles outbreak, conspiracy talk, and maybe a handful of dead bodies, it really could get so, so much worse than that. A change in the government’s immunization guidance that deviates from actual medical science can’t help but filter down to some percentage of doctors and the public.

And people will get sick, and indeed some will die, as a result. In fact, that has already started to happen. The only question now is just how large a body count Kennedy will manage to rack up.

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U.S. consumer protection (or what’s left of it after several devastating Supreme Court rulings and Trump executive orders) is on life support. But one bright spot continues to be the “right to repair” movement, which is working to fight repair monopolies and make it cheaper and easier to repair the tech you own.

Washington state recently became the eighth state to pass right to repair legislation with additional states (like Ohio) looking promising. And the U.S. Army continues to indicate it’s starting to take right to repair reforms seriously after decades of concerns. At least superficially.

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll recently committed to including right-to-repair requirements in all existing and future contracts with manufacturers, a change, Sen. Elizabeth Warren tells The Verge, that will “put an end to our dependence on giant defense contractors who charge billions of dollars and take months to repair critical equipment.”

In an April 30 memo, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the Army secretary to “identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army’s ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data.”

The shift is promising but limited. At the moment, only the Army is interested in embedding such language in their contracts. Assuming they follow through.

There’s also a matter of enforcement: of the eight states that have passed right to repair laws, not a single one has bothered to take any sort of meaningful enforcement action. There’s certainly no limit of bad actors engaging in all sorts of bad behavior (“parts pairing,” obnoxious DRM, making parts and manuals hard to find, actively working to kill or acquire competing repair companies).

But America’s strong suit has never been standing up to consolidated corporate power. That’s going to be increasingly true of states that are facing unprecedented, costly legal challenges during the Trump administration on everything from health care and climate to immigration. Not many are going to be keen to start expensive new battles with corporations with bottomless budgets.

Whether the Trump-managed Army will do any better is an open question. We’ve seen decades of stories where (like the consumer and health care markets) the Army couldn’t repair essential hardware they owned because of weird restrictions imposed by big corporations trying to monopolize repair. Despite this potentially costing lives, it took until 2025 to even consider doing anything about it.

Language in a contract (or a state law) hinting that this sort of thing is bad is one thing. But enforcement and holding companies accountable is something else entirely. And a Trump administration that’s busy utterly destroying the federal government’s ability to hold corporations accountable isn’t going to have the leverage necessary to stop corporate power from being obnoxious on right to repair.

Still, progress is progress, and even having discussions about reforms is progress. But sometime soon activism needs to pivot some of its collective energy on this subject toward complaining about a lack of enforcement, if we’re to take rhetoric and reforms on right to repair seriously.

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Way, way back during the SOPA/PIPA fight, a very important part of the resistance against the bills was coming from infrastructure operators who explained how they were technically incoherent and dangerous. One prominent group was the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, co-founded by Christian Dawson. Today, with legislative amnesia setting in and new requirements for infrastructure-level site blocking rearing their heads, the Coalition has released a new report: DNS At Risk. This week, he joins us on the podcast to talk about the report and the ongoing dangers of attacks on the internet infrastructure.

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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Appeasing bullies never works. Not only does it reveal your willingness to abandon principles, but bullies will never be satisfied — they’ll always demand more.

Columbia University is learning this lesson the hard way. The school quickly caved to Trump’s demands to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests and discipline faculty. Meanwhile, Harvard stood up and fought back, winning praise, support, and initial legal victories.

So how is capitulation working out for Columbia? Not well. Not well at all.

The Department of Education announced on Wednesday afternoon that it has notified Columbia University’s accreditor of an alleged violation of federal anti-discrimination laws by the elite private university in New York that is part of the Ivy League.

The alleged violation means that Columbia, in the Trump administration’s assessment, has “failed to meet the standards” set by the relevant regional, government-recognized but independent body responsible for the accreditation of degree-granting institutions, as a kind of educational quality controller.

Despite Columbia’s compliance — the university has been aggressively cracking down on protests and abandoning its free speech commitments — Trump is still targeting the school for destruction. The threatened loss of accreditation would be catastrophic, cutting off federal financial aid and effectively crippling the institution.

The mechanism here is worth understanding: while the federal government doesn’t directly control accreditation, it wields enormous influence over the independent bodies that do. By alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, the Education Department is essentially telling Columbia’s accreditor to strip the university’s credentials or risk losing federal recognition themselves.

Columbia’s situation illustrates the fundamental strategic error of institutional capitulation. By caving immediately, the university signaled weakness without gaining protection. Harvard’s approach — principled resistance backed by legal action — has proven more effective at both preserving institutional integrity and rallying support.

This pattern extends beyond universities. The same dynamic played out with law firms that caved to Trump, only to find themselves abandoned by clients and still targeted for further attacks.

The lesson for institutions facing authoritarian pressure campaigns is clear: capitulation doesn’t buy you safety — it just makes you a more appealing target.

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The only laws the Trump Administration respects are the laws it gets to inflict on others. The rule of law, however, doesn’t mean the laws don’t apply to those who make the rules. And yet, here we are, seeing another flagrant refusal to comply with oversight laws just because the DHS and ICE feel they can keep getting away with this.

Last month, ICE’s refusal to allow congressional reps to engage in an unannounced inspection of a New Jersey detention facility resulted in the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka — something that occurred even though Baraka followed ICE officers’ orders and returned to the public sidewalk outside of the facility’s gates. That then led to federal prosecutors receiving a tongue-lashing from a federal judge for the arrest and refusal to dismiss the obviously bogus charges the feds used to justify their retaliatory arrest of the mayor.

It’s happening again, albeit without the arrests. But it’s still just as unlawful. Congressional reps on both coasts were denied access to ICE detention facilities — something ICE cannot legally do.

Three Democratic members of Congress from California and two from New York said over the weekend that they were barred from entering federal detention centers in their respective states to check on people who were detained in immigration raids or in protests against the raids.

All five members — Representatives Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez and Norma Torres of California and Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez of New York — said that they should have been allowed to enter the buildings as members of Congress.

The congressional reps are entirely in the right, even if DHS head Kristi Noem and professional liar/DHS PR rep Tricia McLaughlin say otherwise. Inconveniently for both Noem and McLaughlin, ICE’s current acting direction, Todd Lyons, has publicly confirmed congressional members have the right to engage in unannounced inspections of federal facilities.

“We do acknowledge that any member of Congress has the right to show up for an inspection at one of our facilities in their oversight capability,” Lyons said. He also said that while those visits are “unannounced,” members need to show identification and go through screening and can’t bring contraband.

By law, members of Congress are allowed to visit ICE facilities and don’t have to give any notice, although congressional staff members need to give 24 hours’ notice.

That’s what’s being said by ICE, but that’s definitely not how ICE is actually doing things. And ICE’s parent agency, the DHS, is only too happy to oblige ICE’s incorrect claims and unlawful actions by adding more bullshit of its own.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said that the lawmakers had shown up unannounced. ICE officials had told them, she said, that they “would be happy to give them a tour with a little more notice, when it would not disrupt ongoing law enforcement activities and sensitive law enforcement items could be put away.”

Wrong answer, Trish. The law says congressional reps can enter at any time without any prior notice. There’s no provision in the oversight law that gives federal agencies a bit of extra time to tidy up the place and hide anything incriminating. Oversight isn’t really oversight if those being inspected are given advance notice and enough time to sweep stuff under the rugs.

But ICE continues to pretend otherwise and Tricia McLaughlin is always on hand to misrepresent the law and/or claim these completely legal impromptu inspections are nothing more than political stunts. Even if they are “political stunts” (and they are, to a certain extent), the law doesn’t say federal agencies can bar Congress members from entry just because they might they have problems with any perceived motive.

The law is law, but somehow that just never seems to be the case when it comes to this administration. Trump and his cabinet are still picking and choosing which laws they’ll follow and relying on the resulting deluge of lawsuits to continue violating laws while overworked courts try (often in vain) to rein in this administration. Hopefully the tide will turn in the near future, and the system of checks and balances will slowly begin to drain the swamp Trump has created.

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We’ve noted how Republicans are busy screwing up the infrastructure bill’s $42.5 billion BEAD broadband grant program. After performatively whining that the program wasn’t moving quickly enough for their liking during the election season, the GOP announced it would be significantly slowing fund dispersal just to make life harder on poor people and to throw billions in new subsidies at Elon Musk.

To be very clear: this taxpayer funding had already been awarded to states years ago. Several states were just on the cusp of deploying next-generation, affordable fiber when Republicans decided to “fix” the program to the benefit of their billionaire benefactor.

Now Republicans are looking to cause even greater delays and legal battles by threatening to withhold billions in broadband grants from any states that try to engage in oversight of the “AI” industry.

The House had already approved a budget bill that attempted to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Now Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced budget reconciliation text in the Senate that would prevent states from getting their already-allotted broadband grant funds if they attempt to impose any oversight or regulation of automation.

From his proposal summary:

“Forbids states collecting BEAD money from strangling AI deployment with EU-style regulation.”

While most people don’t want onerous or badly written regulation that hurts automation innovation or locks in monopolies, a blanket ban is little more than ignorant corruption, especially given the sort of bad choices that corporations have been making with such technology (see: the use of faulty AI to deny Medicare to the elderly, the media industry’s use of AI as a bludgeon against labor, the dangerously rushed use of AI chatbots in mental health, or the ample new privacy questions being raised).

Despite a lot of whining, the federal U.S. approach to “regulating AI” so far has effectively consisted of zero oversight whatsoever. You’ll notice this still somehow isn’t enough for many tech giants or Marc Andreessen types; they want a blanket ban that effectively pre-empts the possibility of any sort of oversight, privacy, or consumer safety provisions that might protect the public from the whims of gentlemen like himself who have proven to have abysmal judgement and little to no functional ethics.

Between awful Supreme Court rulings, problematic executive orders, and regulatory capture, the Trump administration has effectively destroyed federal corporate oversight and consumer protection (something that still oddly isn’t getting enough attention in press or policy circles). That leaves states as the last refuge of any sort of compensatory oversight, which is why corporations — via the GOP — are now taking aim at state power.

Meanwhile this BEAD program was already facing up to two years of additional, unnecessary delays due to the GOP’s Elon Musk cronyism. Trying to bully and extort states into going easy on tech companies by stealing already allotted BEAD funding is inevitably going to cause endless new legal fights and even greater delay. It’s ignorant corruption dressed up as adult policy making.

The choice also exposes the ideological hollowness of a party that claimed to be looking to “rein in big tech” (read: bully them away from content moderating racist, right wing propaganda on the internet), and is now handing them a gift ensuring these companies are more unaccountable than ever.

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This weekend, Donald Trump pulled off something that’s happened exactly once before in US history: federalizing a state’s National Guard over the state governor’s objections without invoking the Insurrection Act. And he did it to deal with what the LAPD itself described as peaceful protests that were “under control.”

The constitutional implications here are important. Trump bypassed California Governor Gavin Newsom entirely, ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to directly command 2,000—then another 2,000—California National Guard members under 10 USC 12406, a statute that explicitly requires such orders to go “through the governors of the States.”

This isn’t just another Trump tantrum. It’s a fundamental violation of the constitutional balance between federal and state authority that the Founders specifically designed to prevent military rule. In the last few months we’ve seen so many attacks on the basic Constitutional underpinnings of America that it’s easy to brush this off as just another one. But this attack on the American way is the most serious one yet.

It’s fundamentally removing some of the most basic freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and making the US into a full-on authoritarian police state.

On Monday, Gavin Newsom officially sued Donald Trump and the US government over the National Guard deployment, likely the first of multiple attempts to fight this egregiously unnecessary authoritarian attack on the people of California:

The Governor of the State of California and the State of California bring this action to protect the State against the illegal actions of the President, Secretary of Defense, and Department of Defense to deploy members of the California National Guard, without lawful authority, and in violation of the Constitution.

One of the cornerstones of our Nation and our democracy is that our people are governed by civil, not military, rule. The Founders enshrined these principles in our Constitution— that a government should be accountable to its people, guided by the rule of law, and one of civil authority, not military rule.

President Trump has repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority. On Saturday, June 7, he used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab, this time at the cost of the sovereignty of the State of California and in disregard of the authority and role of the Governor as commander-in-chief of the State’s National Guard.

The lawsuit gets to the heart of what makes this so dangerous: Trump manufacturing a crisis to justify expanding executive power. The protests in Los Angeles were, by all accounts—including from the LAPD—under control. The few incidents that did occur (some Waymo cars getting tagged and burned, apparently in response to ICE agents arriving in Waymos) hardly constitute the kind of emergency that would justify federal military intervention.

The complaint also details how the mechanism Trump used for this, 10 USC 12406, is entirely inappropriate for this situation:

The vehicle the President has sought to invoke for this unprecedented usurpation of state authority and resources is a statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, that has been invoked on its own only once before and for highly unusual circumstances not presented here. Invoking this statute, the President issued a Memorandum on June 7, 2025 (Trump Memo), “call[ing] into Federal service members and units of the National Guard.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth, in turn, issued a Memorandum (DOD Order) that same day to the Adjutant General of California, ordering 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service. And on June 9, 2025, Secretary Hegseth issued another Memorandum (June 9 DOD Order) ordering an additional 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service.

These orders were issued despite the text of section 12406, which, among other things, requires that when the President calls members of a State National Guard into federal service pursuant to that statute, those orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States.” 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Instead, Secretary Hegseth unlawfully bypassed the Governor of California, issuing an order that by statute must go through him.

This isn’t some arcane procedural rule Trump’s team missed. The requirement that federal activation orders go through governors exists precisely to prevent exactly this kind of federal overreach:

The Constitution reserves to the States power over their respective state militias— now the National Guard— unless the State requests or consents to federal control. Only under the most exigent of circumstances can the President, over the objections of a State, call the National Guard into federal service. The balance the Framers struck between the State’s power to control its own militia and the very narrow circumstances in which the federal government may take command and control of the militia serves as a vital check against federal overreach. Section 12406 does not provide the authority Defendants have claimed and cannot be the vehicle for their actions.

The Constitution grants the States—not the federal Executive—the authority to conduct ordinary law enforcement activities and to determine how their own state laws should be enforced.

Reflecting the Founders’ distrust of military rule, the U.S. Constitution and the laws of our Nation strictly limit the domestic use of the military, including the federalized National Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act codifies these strict rules, prohibiting the military from engaging in civil law enforcement unless explicitly authorized by law. The authority to use the military domestically for civil law enforcement is reserved for dire, narrow circumstances, none of which is present here. Defendants have overstepped the bounds of law and are intent on going as far as they can to use the military in unprecedented, unlawful ways

What we’re seeing here is the classic authoritarian escalation pattern: manufacture a crisis, claim existing authorities are insufficient, then grab unprecedented power to “solve” the manufactured problem. Stephen Miller, who’s been openly fantasizing about using military force against domestic protests, has found his test case—and the fact that it’s so obviously a manufactured crisis shows just how desperate they are to normalize military intervention in civilian law enforcement.

Multiple videos show people dancing in the streets, rather than anything resembling a “riot.” This is what Trump claims requires 4,000 National Guard troops:

This is the spirit of Los Angeles.This is California.Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.#FreeDavidEndRaids

— California Fast Food Workers Union (@cafastfoodunion.bsky.social) 2025-06-09T20:43:06.586Z

Or this:

The are line dancing in the middle of the protest while shouting Fuck ICE

— Tina-Desiree Berg (@tinadesireeberg.com) 2025-06-08T23:26:34.129Z

This isn’t a riot. It’s certainly not an insurrection. It’s a protest in the grand tradition of American protests: calling out authoritarian abuse of power and showing solidarity those victimized by it. It’s American as apple pie.

The whole goal here is normalizing military intervention in civilian law enforcement while establishing precedent for bypassing state authority entirely. If Trump can federalize California’s National Guard over peaceful protests that local authorities had under control, what else will he demand the military do for him?

The most damning part of all this? For years, we’ve heard MAGA world shriek about hypothetical martial law and federal tyranny. Now, faced with actual federal seizure of state military assets over manufactured emergencies, they’re cheering it on. Turns out their “principled” opposition to government overreach only applied when it wasn’t their guy doing the overreaching.

And yes, MAGA Trump fans will still try to justify this, posting pictures of a couple of Waymos on fire, screaming about how LA is violent (it’s not) and needs “order” restored (again, even the cops say that’s nonsense). They all know that’s bullshit. Yes, your dumb uncle with a brain pickled by Fox News propaganda may believe some of it, but everyone who matters knows that this is all for show.

California’s lawsuit represents more than just pushback against Trump’s latest power grab. It’s a test of whether our constitutional system still has any teeth left when it comes to checking such extreme executive overreach. If Trump can get away with this—federalizing state National Guard units over the objections of governors for non-emergencies—then the balance of power between federal and state authority that’s existed since the founding is effectively dead.

As is the entirety of the American experiment.

That should terrify anyone who gives a damn about constitutional government and the concept of the United States of America, regardless of what they think about ICE or immigration protests.

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How’s your Monday going? Well, buckle up. The day ain’t over yet.

No sooner had California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state would be suing Trump over his illegal deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do when deployed illegally than the Defense Department turned Pete Hegeth’s tweeted threat into reality.

The Trump administration is mobilizing 700 Marines based out of Twentynine Palms, Calif., for Los Angeles, the scene of protests against immigration enforcement operations, a defense official confirmed with NPR before it was publicly announced.

U.S. Northern Command said in a statement on Monday that the infantry battalion had been put on “alert status” over the weekend and will be working with the National Guard “who are protecting federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”

If the National Guard deployment was mostly illegal, this one appears to be completely illegal. The statement from the military doesn’t make anything any clearer. It does, however, suggest the ongoing clusterfuck that is the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops will only get more clustered/fucked.

U.S. Northern Command has activated the Marine infantry battalion that was placed in an alert status over the weekend. Approximately 700 Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division will seamlessly integrate with the Title 10 forces under Task Force 51 who are protecting federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.

The activation of the Marines is intended to provide Task Force 51 with adequate numbers of forces to provide continuous coverage of the area in support of the lead federal agency.

Task Force 51 refers to the 2,000 National Guard troops that are already experiencing the joy of being used as pawns in Trump’s game of 4-D Candyland. This is how it’s going for the first show of force illegally deployed by the administration:

“Currently, there is no plan for where everyone is sleeping tonight,” the source said, adding that there was an urgent need to find more portable bathrooms and dumpsters for garbage.

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2025-06-09T19:20:21.331Z

Now another 700 Marines are being added to this bed-less, toilet-less mess. And it’s all being done with the same attention of detail we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from this administration: do whatever you want and when it all falls apart, start looking for scapegoats.

Los Angeles law enforcement honestly has no idea how it’s supposed to handle this influx of guys with guns, much less hearing anything at all from the federal government in terms of coordinating with federal officers and military members.

The LAPD Chief has weighed in on Marines being deployed. Basically: Why is this necessary?

— Celeste Pewter (@celestepewter.bsky.social) 2025-06-09T22:51:59.341Z

If you can’t read/see the embed, this is the statement issued by LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell:

“The LAPD has not received any formal notification that the Marines will be arriving in Los Angeles. However, the possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles—absent clear coordination—presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city. The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively. That said, our top priority is the safety of both the public and the officers on the ground. We are urging open and continuous lines of communication between all agencies to prevent confusion, avoid escalation, and ensure a coordinated, lawful, and orderly response during this critical time.”

If the true intent of these troop deployments was to protect federal property from violent acts and/or ease logistical demands placed on local law enforcement currently handling protests, it’s been an abject failure. But that can’t possibly be the real intent of the administration’s actions. It’s picking a fight, both with the state of California, as well as with federal law itself, which explicitly forbids what’s being done here. And it’s hoping an additional show of force will provoke a response from protesters it can then use to justify each progressive step towards martial law.

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Trump is setting the stage for martial law. Again. The reasons for his latest move are directly tied to the actions of his administration and, more specifically, the most visible arm of his anti-migrant policies.

ICE has been problematic for years, but it took two non-consecutive Trump administrations to turn it into the cartoonish supervillain it is now. Even during his first term, no one really believed Trump only wanted to rid the country of the “worst of the worst.” When he disparaged entire countries as “shitholes,” it was clear he just wanted to rid the country of non-white people. When he granted white South Africans an exception to his “no antisemites need apply” immigration policies during his second term, he made it explicitly clear his anti-migrant stance only applied to people less (naturally) white than the badly spray-bronzed Boss Of The US.

ICE raids are now being greeted by massive protests, some of those impromptu gatherings generated by the sudden and unwelcome appearance of unmarked cars (and unmarked people) in mostly non-white neighborhoods. ICE agents — and the federal agency conglomerate currently forced to help Trump stroke one out on main — are being chased out of neighborhoods and businesses by people who wish to protect their friends, neighbors, and families from a government determined to disregard their rights and remand anyone rounded up to the custody of the most accommodating foreign gulag.

It’s not just the big stuff — you know, the casual disregard of rights and deliberate refusal to abide by federal court orders. It’s also the small stuff — the insidious destruction of societal and governmental norms for the sole purpose of pumping up deportation stats.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to Los Angeles, California recently due to ongoing anti-ICE protests and the president’s promise to lay the groundwork for martial law in response. Down in the trenches is where some of the shittiest stuff is happening, which tends to get ignored because of what’s happening out in broad daylight.

Many undocumented immigrants who went to their Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in appointments at a federal building in Los Angeles this week were taken into custody and brought to the basement and held there, some overnight, according to immigration lawyers and family members.

It was unclear how many people were affected, but the attorneys told CBS News hundreds of immigrants were detained — dozens in the basement in rooms that could fit up to 30 at a time.

Oh, just going after the criminals? I mean, that’s the narrative Trump clings to even as he undercuts it with each subsequent statement or action. People just trying to comply with the law to further their attempt at citizenship or long-term residency are being scooped up solely because ICE knows a great place to find migrants to arrest is in courthouses where they’re scheduled to attend hearings.

It’s not just check-ins. It’s pretty much any legal proceeding that might involve an undocumented migrant. Here’s something that hits more close to (my) home in a state that, fortunately, has only been subjected to two retaliatory raids by ICE agents.

According to an emailed statement to KELOLAND News, Traci Smith with the Minnehaha County Public Defender’s Office said, “The ICE agents’ presence coincided with the presence of witnesses who had been subpoenaed to testify on behalf of the Defendant.”

Smith said jurors were on a break and many of them saw the ICE arrest, which happened in front of both the witnesses’ wife and infant daughter.

“Because of the scene it caused, the Judge declared a mistrial,” Smith said. “The witness had been lawfully subpoenaed to appear and testify. The actions of the prosecutor and ICE not only disrupted the trial but directly undermined the Defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial and caused irreparable harm to the judicial process.”

Smith said the person on trial is a U.S. citizen.

Yep, ICE hung out in a courthouse so they could ambush a migrant who was on a witness list in a criminal trial. The person on trial was an accused criminal. The person they arrested was doing their duty and responding to a subpoena. Even doing the right thing won’t save you from Trump’s antipathy towards migrants. (For that matter, neither will obtaining a REAL ID, which has been something millions of whiter Americans have been putting off for years because… well… the federal government has been putting it off for years.)

Then there’s the process that has nothing to do with due process: ICE agents show up to arrest people and then tell them their green cards or visas have been revoked. Any government not clearly enamored with its own cruelty would immediately know it’s unfair (and unconstitutional) to revoke immigration status without giving prior notice and allowing those affected to either arrange for legal representation or leave the country on their own terms. But that’s not how it works now under Trump 2.0. Instead, the notification and arrest are simultaneous. And those arrested are sent to detainment centers in judicially-friendly districts to short-circuit legal challenges.

Somehow, it gets even shittier than everything listed above. Here’s how government prosecutors are helping ICE inflate its deportation stats, something undoubtedly encouraged by their ultimate employer: Donald J. Trump.

The Trump administration has launched an operation to terminate the immigration court cases of certain migrants, in order to arrest them and place them in a fast-tracked deportation process instead, government officials and attorneys told CBS News.

Lawyers and advocates this week reported arrests of migrants outside of immigration courthouses across the U.S., saying teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had detained individuals whose cases in front of immigration judges had just been terminated at the request of the government.

Two Department of Homeland Security officials told CBS News that ICE is conducting an operation to expedite the deportation of migrants with court hearings scheduled in the near future. It’s the latest step taken by the Trump administration to dramatically ramp up immigration arrests across the country and fulfill what the president has promised will be the largest deportation campaign in American history.

Allowing charges to remain in place means allowing the court system to function properly and give those charged a chance to argue to defend themselves against these allegations. Dismissing the charges doesn’t give migrants freedom they haven’t earned yet, however. Instead, it reverts control of the case to immigration officials, who start expedited removal proceedings, which generally bypass courts entirely. Now, migrants utilizing the court system to make use of the rights extended to them by the US Constitution are finding those rights being unceremoniously stripped by prosecutors who, despite their oath, aren’t actually serving the interest of justice, but rather the belabored brain bleed of a monstrous aspiring autocrat who believes the country serves him, rather than the other way around.

So, when you see ICE agents fleeing extended middle fingers and the occasional thrown object, never forget they chose to be a part of this. And when Trump threatens to bring the military into the war on migrants, always remember he picked this fight and now wants a bunch of other people to fight it for him. Finally, never forgive the people who say “I didn’t vote for this” when they so very clearly did. If you want fascism that might temporarily benefit you, own it. When it finally comes back to destroy the people and rights you actually care for, remember you were the one in the voting booth that day. Or, more likely, weren’t anywhere near a voting booth when it mattered most.

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Last week, Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from the FCC. Simington gave all of two-days notice of his departure, which was odd not only because of the short notice, but because it delays Trump Republicans from getting a voting majority allowing them to actually do anything real.

In his wake, right wing media outlets like Fox News are suggesting that Simington may be replaced by Gavin Wax, a far right wing MAGA cheerleader. Wax has absolutely no serious qualifications for the role, but right wing outlets like Fox News are already busy pretending otherwise:

“Gavin Wax is being seriously considered by the White House to fill the vacancy that will be left by Commissioner Simington’s departure,” a source close to the FCC told Fox News Digital. “He’s seen as a strong conservative voice on tech and media policy, with close ties to key figures in both the policy and political arenas.”

Wax, an unabashed Trump earlobe nibbler, was promoted as Simington’s Chief of Staff a few months ago. If confirmed by the Senate, the 31-year-old Wax would be the youngest FCC Commissioner to ever serve. Wax has no meaningful experience in media and telecom policy outside of occasionally whining about media companies that don’t kiss Donald Trump’s ass:

“Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, according to Politico, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.”

Wax has been criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for, among other things, overseeing a private right wing Facebook chat from 2014-2017 where members “frequently used racial slurs, made jokes about the Holocaust and discussed topics like ‘race realism.'”

Wax is clearly being considered to help FCC boss Brendan Carr’s campaign to launch bogus investigations into media and telecom companies the administration either deems not suitably racist enough, or for the cardinal sin of occasionally doing journalism loosely critical of Trump.

In recent months, Wax has been co-writing ignorant op-eds with the softer-spoken Simington calling for the DOGE-like obliteration of whatever is left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight capabilities, and the elimination of any government programs that help minority communities or the poor (such as helping poor rural schoolkids get online to do homework).

We’ve noted how the Trump administration’s effort to lobotomize regulatory independence will ultimately leave the FCC without any authority to do much of anything real, outside of grievance-fueled tirades and fake investigations by the kind of people who get angry that Star Wars now has more black people.

Simington himself was never qualified for his role. Wax is somehow worse; a radical MAGA zealot with a long history of dodgy bedfellows (including white supremacists), who has less-than-zero qualifications to be making important choices about absolutely any of this. In other words: perfect for the Trump administration and it’s bizarre (and often illegal) war on equity and corporate oversight.

The selection of Wax is particularly insulting to actual adults, given the 2023 railroading of the FCC nomination of popular consumer advocate Gigi Sohn in 2023. Sohn’s nomination to the agency was scuttled after a joint GOP and telecom/media industry homophobic smear campaign falsely accused her of being a “radical extremist” who “hated police.”

That attack, if you recall, was aided by key Democrats like Joe Manchin and Mark Kelly, and successfully left the Biden FCC without a voting majority for the better part of two years. It’s worth highlighting the speed at which unqualified zealots and rank corporatists get confirmed to the agency, compared to the blockades and slowdowns seen for those, like Sohn, who actually represent the public interest.

Whether Wax can survive the Senate nomination process and get the needed 51 one vote majority remains an open question, but the very fact he has a very good chance is an embarrassing joke.

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Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that “emergency” keeps getting 75-day extensions.

Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic First Amendment protections. This will be the third extension since January — which should tell you everything about how “urgent” this national security threat actually was.

With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.

It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.

The pattern here is obvious: Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump promised to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Now he’s extending it again, treating federal law like a negotiating chip he can deploy when convenient.

Want proof this was never really about national security? When Trump spoke with Xi Jinping this week about trade — you know, the perfect opportunity to address this supposed existential threat — TikTok didn’t even come up.

Trump spoke by phone on Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping amid a breakdown in trade negotiations. The two leaders agreed that their teams would hold a new round of trade talks soon. The Chinese team is led by Vice Premier He Lifeng. The U.S. would be represented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Trump said.

TikTok didn’t come up on the call Thursday, according to a Trump administration official.

If TikTok really posed the kind of national security risk that justified circumventing the First Amendment (which the Supreme Court said was only justified based on the supposed severity of the threat), wouldn’t it be a priority in direct talks with the Chinese president? Instead, it’s apparently not worth mentioning.

But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.

I know that Trump is making a mockery of the Constitution in so many different ways right now, but it doesn’t mean that this particular attack on it should be ignored.

The TikTok saga has become a perfect case study in how moral panics work: manufacture urgency, rush through bad legislation, then quietly let it fade when the political winds shift. The only difference here is that the law is still on the books, being wielded like a sword of Damocles over a platform that hosts American speech.

We called this nonsense from the beginning, and every snooze button press proves us right. The real threat to American democracy isn’t kids posting dance videos — it’s politicians who treat the rule of law like a game show where they get to pick which laws to enforce based on what plays well on any given day.

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As ICE continues to engage in a mass deportation program that more closely resembles a mass kidnapping program, communities have literally taken to the streets to chase ICE and their law enforcement enablers out of town. Rolling in looking like some sort of cartel death squad just isn’t intimidating enough anymore. And if you can’t do your job legally or honestly, people may stop you from doing your job at all.

This uprising against ICE is completely earned. The administration’s pretenses for stripping people of rights and dumping them in foreign gulags have been constantly undermined by facts, leaks, and occasionally, the government’s own legal filings in the multiple lawsuits these actions have provoked.

Since the Trump Administration can’t win on the merits, President Trump has decided to open up the Martial Law playset he last toyed with during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020. Some assembly is required, of course. But the parts have been dumped on the table and are being arranged by Donald Trump.

With ICE agents being routinely forced to hightail out of neighborhoods they hoped to be raiding, Trump has declared war on California, in a matter of speaking. The memorandum issued by the White House on Saturday says Trump will be sending in the National Guard to ensure ICE can continue to violate rights on the regular with its indiscriminate migrant hunts.

[B]y the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.  Further, I direct and delegate actions as necessary for the Secretary of Defense to coordinate with the Governors of the States and the National Guard Bureau in identifying and ordering into Federal service the appropriate members and units of the National Guard under this authority.  The members and units of the National Guard called into Federal service shall be at least 2,000 National Guard personnel and the duration of duty shall be for 60 days or at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense.

The opening invocation is pretty much meaningless. Claiming you’re using “authority vested in me” only means something if you actually have that authority. The law cited by Trump only allows the mobilization of the military if there’s a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion,” an “invasion or danger of invasion” by a foreign nation, and (more vaguely) the administration is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

The first two prongs are non-starters. No invasion or rebellion is happening. The third might support this deployment if Trump feels ICE can’t perform its usual work of vanishing people (along with their rights) into the nearest vehicle headed towards a detention center or foreign prison.

And if that were all the law said about that particular issue, Trump might be in the clear. But that’s not all it says:

Orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors of the States or, in the case of the District of Columbia, through the commanding general of the National Guard of the District of Columbia.

Without more, Trump can’t do this. The states themselves would have to issue these orders. Without that key component, this flooding of the zone with National Guard troops is illegal — and that’s even before you consider the Posse Comitatus Act, which says military members can’t be used to engage in federal law enforcement activities. National Guard units are generally considered to be covered under state law, which means they could be used to help enforce state laws. But this memo directly instructs the National Guard to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law.”

Given that fact, it’s probably only a matter of time before Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to keep his martial law plans on track. If he does, he’ll be setting the sort of precedent one would hope would taint him and his administration forever.

The last time this was used was to protect civil rights and liberties.

In 1958, President Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to Arkansas to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision ending racial segregation in schools, and to defend Black students against a violent mob.

If Trump decides to go this route, he’ll be doing it to insulate the administration from the consequences of its own actions, adding military muscle to a mass deportation program that has been carried out with a complete disregard for things like due process, the Fourth Amendment, and the entire judicial system.

On top of all of that, President Trump has given his hand-picked Defense Department head free rein to add whatever he wants to the mix:

In addition, the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.

And, of course, Pete Hegseth has already responded to this open invitation by threatening to make everything even more illegal than it already is.

If you can’t read/see the embedded image, it’s a post by Pete Hegseth on XTwitter that says:

The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil; a dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.

Under President Trump, violence & destruction against federal agents & federal facilities will NOT be tolerated. It’s COMMON SENSE.

The @DeptofDefense is mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY to support federal law enforcement in Los Angeles. And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert.

I’m sure both of these men are just dying for an excuse to mobilize the military against US citizens and residents that refuse to treat ICE operations with anything else but complete deference. During Trump’s first term as president, there were still a few people capable (or willing) to pull him back from the edge of the brink. In this administration, there’s no one willing to perform that function. They’re only willing to push him closer to the edge and, when the time comes, join him in his leap into the void.

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Despite the ongoing fake promise of “populism,” so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon.

As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its $20 billion merger with Frontier approved by the Trump FCC. Comcast is rumored to be eyeing a merger with T-Mobile. And cable giant Charter is pushing for a new $34.5 billion merger with Cox Communications. As usual, the two companies are promising that more industry mergers will somehow make the sector more competitive:

“This combination will augment our ability to innovate and provide high-quality, competitively priced products, delivered with outstanding customer service, to millions of homes and businesses,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said in the press release. “We will continue to deliver high-value products that save American families money, and we’ll onshore jobs from overseas to create new, good-paying careers for U.S. employees.”

We’ve got forty years of hard data illustrating that this is not what happens when you let the U.S. telecom industry consolidate. Even if two merging companies don’t directly compete, the resulting telecom companies tend to be more politically powerful than ever. And one of their favorite pastimes involves abusing that political power to crush all competition and regulatory oversight.

Charter is, you might recall, the company that almost got kicked out of New York State after it lied to regulators repeatedly about whether it was meeting requirements fixed to its merger with Time Warner Cable.

These mergers never serve the public interest. And America’s historically too corrupt to care. Such consolidation helps temporarily boost stock valuations and generate rich tax cuts, while overcompensated executives celebrate their savvy deal-making acumen. The public harms of consolidation is then swept under the carpet with the help of an equally consolidated corporate press and captured regulators.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

So Trump 2.0 is both encouraging more of this harmful consolidation at the same time they’re taking an absolute hatchet to whatever was left of regulatory autonomy and corporate oversight. It’s the culmination of a generation of delusion by right wingers and Libertarian “free market” guys who (quite falsely) claim that unchecked monopolization results in near-mystical Utopian outcomes.

It doesn’t: letting telecom giants like Verizon and Comcast get bigger while you dismantle government oversight only results in those giants doubling down on existing bad behaviors. Again, that always means exploiting regional geographic monopolies and duopolies to drive up prices, undermining small business, fraudulently obtaining more taxpayer subsidies, and eroding the exact free market competition the supporters of these deals claim to be such huge proponents of. It’s utterly theatrical.

The same thing is playing out in media, with companies like Time Warner Discovery calling for even more mergers and greater media consolidation under Trump — at a time when the enshittification from such consolidation couldn’t be any more apparent. That’s simultaneously resulting in shittier journalism, higher prices, lower quality choices, and a flood of corporatist bullshit and right wing propaganda.

U.S. broadband is a patchwork of regional monopolies, coddled by corrupt federal and state lawmakers, who’ve worked tirelessly to demolish anything closely resembling competition in local broadband markets. U.S. media is a lazy patchwork of consolidated corporate giants obsessed with “growth for growth’s sake.” More mindless consolidation is the exact opposite of what these industries need.

We’ve taken that already broken model and somehow managed to make it dumber and more harmful under Trump 2.0, by fusing it all to the erratic whims of authoritarian zealots. Zealots looking to further exploit the merger approval process in exchange for these companies’ promises that they’ll be more racist and shittier than ever. Great stuff. What could go wrong?

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side MrWilson with a comment about a Republican school superintendent bemoaning that “parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history”:

Another accusation-confession. Walters has opted the state of Oklahoma out of understanding American history.

In second place, it’s Professor Ronny with a simple comment on that same post:

Remember, if you are not “woke”, you are asleep.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from MrWilson, this time in response to the question of how the Trump administration is going to determine who meets its hiring requirement for “patriotism”:

Oh, that’s easy. They’re patriotic if they didn’t apply for a position in the Trump Administration.

Next, it’s Uriel-238 with a comment about CECOT:

I’m still looking for an answer of exactly for what kind of convict does CECOT exist for, considering it’s punishment greater than that which should be exacted on anyone regardless of the crime.

CECOT’s very existence is wrongdoing against all of humanity.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about relaxing concerns about children being exposed to lead:

Well, if you knew anything about science, you would know that lead protects you against radiation, like bleach protects you against Covid.

In second place, Mamba with a response to an idiotic comment about DOGE cancelling government research funding:

It was a proposal to use an electron microscope to find your brain. It was denied do to near certain failure.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Kinetic Gothic about Senator Joni Ernst’s defense of Medicaid cuts:

She says she’s glad she didn’t have to bring up the Tooth Fairy…

Considering that the MAGA cult believes in trickle down economics, abstinence-only sex ed and has a noticeable flat earth contingent, she probably should.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment that speaks for itself:

Republicans have all been mask off ever since, in 2020, it was discovered that wearing a mask can help other people.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, while many in the media were hedging their bets and wringing their hands in their coverage of the rapidly escalating protests over the murder of George Floyd, I was proud that we ran an appropriately uncompromising take from our own Tim Cushing: Let The Motherfucker Burn. In a followup, responding to some of the reaction to that piece, Tim addressed the idea that “peaceful” demonstrations can fix the system. Later, we covered the giant mess that unfolded after the New York Times published Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to respond to the protests. Unrelated to all that, this was also the week that major publishers sued the Internet Archive over their ebook lending program.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, Mitch McConnell was pushing a bunch of bad amendments to surveillance reform in order to block any good ones, but at least all of his amendments failed before the bill passed. The CIA director claimed that even debating surveillance was helping terrorists, while we wrote about how the NSA’s “cybersecurity” surveillance should be changing the debate about cybersecurity laws. The Supreme Court punted on a First Amendment question around “threatening” song lyrics on Facebook, Roca Labs’ lawyer was accused of intimidation for threatening a witness with criminal charges, and another lawyer stupidly sued the EFF for defamation because they criticized his patent, then backed down.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, a judge worryingly suggested that the AP would have won in its lawsuit against Shepard Fairey over the Obama Hope poster, a newspaper publisher defended filing a bunch of lawsuits in what would become an infamous crusade, and we examined how much the important Sony Betamax court ruling had been eroded over time. The EFF, Public Citizen, and ACLU were asking a judge to quash mass subpoenas from US Copyright Group, and Canadian politicians introduced Canada’s version of the DMCA. We also took a look at the results of Hollywood’s crusade against The Pirate Bay.

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There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn’t, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are fixations of expression. It could therefore also apply to a specific expression of a character as contained in one of those larger copyrightable works. But copyright is not supposed to apply to ideas more generally, and, indeed, per the First Amendment, it can’t, because that would mean that copyright could block far too much expression, including that which is entirely original, if whoever had the idea inspiring it first could get a monopoly on anything resulting from that inspiration.

And yet, when it comes to characters, that constitutional limitation somehow disappears, because with character copyright the copyright holder is able to prevent any other expression of the character, including in ways they have never been expressed before. Because it would be one thing to say that a specific frame of a Batman comic could be off limits for others to copy, and reasonable, because there the copyright would apply to something that has already been expressed, but it’s another thing entirely to say that any expression of Batman, including in ways it had never been expressed by the copyright holder, can also be off limits. Character copyright, as currently interpreted, gives copyright holders monopoly power over not just the literal expression of their character but the idea of their character in any way it may be expressed in the future, and by anyone.

Given this state of affairs, then, it is particularly important to have some limits on whether a character would be entitled to copyright in the first place, because if even flimsy, ill-defined characters could be copyrightable then some copyright holder would be able to prevent anyone else from being able to express anything using characters that might share some of the same rough contours with a character already in existence. But before this new decision by the Ninth Circuit in Carroll Shelby Licensing v. Halicki there were far fewer limits.

This case involves “Eleanor the Car,” which appeared in several movies connected with the “Gone in Sixty Seconds” franchise. While there are some similarities between all the Eleanors, per the Ninth Circuit now, there weren’t enough to render Eleanor copyrightable.

It used a test from the DC Comics v. Towle case to make this determination:

In Towle, we established a test to determine whether a character is entitled to copyright protection: (1) the character must have “physical as well as conceptual qualities,” (2) the character must be “sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same character whenever it appears” and display “consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes,” and (3) the character must be “especially distinctive” and contain “some unique elements of expression.”

And here the court determined that Eleanor failed each element of it. First, Eleanor had no “conceptual” qualities. While the court recognized that inanimate objects could nevertheless be characters, here Eleanor the car exhibited no personality.

Eleanor, however, lacks any such conceptual qualities. Indeed, Eleanor has no anthropomorphic traits. The car never acts with agency or volition; rather, it is always driven by the film’s protagonists. Eleanor expresses no sentience, emotion, or personality.4 Nor does Eleanor speak, think, or otherwise engage or interact with the films’ protagonists. Instead, Eleanor is just one of many named cars in the films. In this way, Eleanor is more akin to a prop than a character. Accordingly, Eleanor fails at prong one of the Towle test.

Second, its visual qualities weren’t persistent.

Turning to prong two of Towle, we ask whether Eleanor is “sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same character whenever it appears” and “display[s] consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes.” […] Here too, Eleanor fails. Across four films and eleven iterations in those films, Eleanor lacks consistent traits. For example, Eleanor’s physical appearance changes frequently throughout the various films, appearing as a yellow and black Fastback Mustang, a gray and black Shelby GT-500 Mustang, and a rusty, paintless Mustang in need of repair. Indeed, the latter Eleanors are unrecognizable until introduced as Eleanor by the protagonists. Halicki’s proffered Eleanor traits, moreover, only serve to further highlight Eleanor’s inconsistencies. Halicki claims Eleanor is always “incurring severe damage” and is “hard to steal.” But fewer than half of the Eleanors ever appear damaged at all, and the damage ranges from body damage incurred by a police chase, to cosmetic damage, to being entirely shredded for scrap. And of the Eleanors stolen by the films’ protagonists, most were stolen with little difficulty. Halicki also claims that Eleanor is “good at evading police” and “surviving spectacular jumps.” But these traits are more readily attributable to the films’ protagonists driving the cars, not to Eleanor. In sum, Eleanor is too “lightly sketched” to satisfy prong two of the Towle test.

And, thirdly, Eleanor wasn’t particularly distinctive.

Nothing distinguishes Eleanor from any number of sports cars appearing in car-centric action films. Nor is the name Eleanor unique; rather, it is a common female name—the normalcy of which was the entire point of codenaming vehicles in the films. Eleanor is a “stock” sports car and fails prong three of Towle.

In sum, the court concludes, Eleanor is but a prop and not a protectable character. Which is a good result that will help keep copyright holders, going forward, from locking up too many ideas for characters that can be as loosely described as Eleanor was because it applies the test in a way that can lead to a “no” as an answer for whether such a flimsily-defined character can nevertheless be copyrightable.

The issue, however, is that this decision is the second major one considering whether Eleanor is copyrightable, and it was an earlier decision in a case in 2008 that lent credence to the idea that it was. And it was on the strength of that opinion that DC Comics v. Towle rested.

And far from being a random, esoteric case, DC Comics v. Towle was the case that came up with the crazy idea that the Batmobile—an inanimate object whose appearance changed radically over time—was nevertheless copyrightable. Worse, DC Comics v. Towle has ever since been providing the foundational support for other subsequent courts finding characters copyrightable. But now that this earlier conclusion has been undone, it undermines the basis for concluding that the Batmobile was itself copyrightable too.

This new Eleanor decision attempts to sidestep directly undermining the result from the Batmobile case, noting how the Batmobile tended to have certain distinctive aspects that Eleanor lacked, which might justify a different result on the copyrightability question in each case. For instance:

We noted in Towle that a character can still be protectable even if it “lacks sentient attributes and does not speak (like a car).” This remains true. Sentience and the ability to talk are just two of many conceptual qualities of a character already discussed.

But the conclusion in Towle, that the Batmobile was copyrightable, rested on the idea that it did not take much to make a character copyrightable because so little had been needed to make Eleanor copyrightable back then. It is therefore not at all clear whether there is actually enough to make the Batmobile copyrightable, if one were to now reapply its own test in a way that is no longer shaped by the earlier Eleanor conclusion. And with its holding now undermined, its utility in supporting similar generous holdings on the copyrightability question for characters is no longer sound. As a result, even if the test for copyrightability that Towle expounded remains viable, this latest Eleanor case now teaches that it should be one that serves to limit character copyrightability, and not, as it has so far, expansively invited it.

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The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of an American citizen.

That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.

After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.

For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.

The best they can do was… finding a 2022 traffic stop.

In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.

Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.

Oh, so they could bring him back…

This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.

Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”

Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-06T20:51:36.817Z

All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.

El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.

Turns out all of that was theater.

We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.

The new criminal indictment

It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.

But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:

Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children

This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.

At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.

Everything is backwards

Here, the entire process has been backwards:

The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.

The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.

That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.

President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.

The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.

As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.

We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.

ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.

The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.

Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.

When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.

Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.

We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.

They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.

Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.

Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.

“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”

The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.

John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.

The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.

Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.

Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.

Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.

But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”

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When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is — well, that’s not legal strategy. That’s performance art.

Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the government “putting ICE agents’ lives in danger.”

Even worse: doing this based on a NY Post article… while ignoring that just days earlier the judge himself in the case had directly scolded the DOJ for ignoring that they themselves had requested this state of affairs and that they were absolutely free to arrange alternatives.

But that’s precisely what’s happening in the ongoing South Sudan deportation case, where the Trump administration is now crying about conditions they themselves created and refuse to fix despite having obvious alternatives.

Quick recap: Last week I wrote about how the US government shipped people to South Sudan without required due process hearings. When a judge blocked the deportation mid-flight, the plane diverted to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

Here’s the key part everyone seems to forget: When the judge asked about next steps, the DOJ specifically requested that the men be held in Djibouti for their hearings rather than brought back to the US. The judge made it crystal clear this was the government’s choice:

THE COURT: I’m very much considering this, but, if this is the route we go, my inclination would be to say, if you want to do all of these [interviews] where they are, you have to do them appropriately; if you don’t want to, you can always bring them home of your own volition and do it there. And so I’m not going to mandate that the Department do anything overseas*, but in an effort to craft as circumscribed a remedy as possible, I’m inclined to say if the Department wants to figure that out, I’m inclined to let them.*

The DOJ responded that DHS had informed them that they could handle the interviews in Djibouti. But then, five days later, they complained that it was too rough to do it remotely like that. In response, Judge Brian Murphy again reminded them, in print this time, that they could always bring the men back to the US for their hearings:

… the Court never said that Defendants had to convert their foreign military base into an immigration facility; it only left that as an option, again, at Defendants’ request. The other option, of course, has always been to simply return to the status quo of roughly one week ago, or else choose any other location to complete the required process.

So it seems pretty rich that a little over a week after that ruling, the DOJ filed a declaration from a DHS official, whining about how much of a pain it is to hold these men in Djibouti while organizing their hearings.

The aliens are currently being held in a conference room in a converted Conex shipping container on the U.S. Naval base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti. This has been identified as the only viable place to house the aliens.

The only U.S. government personnel authorized to maintain care and custody of the aliens upon their arrival in Djibouti were the three ICE officers who accompanied the plaintiffs on this removal operation. The team of ICE officers that was originally assigned to this mission was replaced and expanded on May 27, 2025. However, having to switch teams creates additional problems as ICE must identify officers that are available to work in the same potentially deleterious conditions. Notwithstanding staffing challenges, the current group of ICE officers responsible for administering these duties is expected to be replaced soon.

There are currently eleven ICE officers assigned to guard and maintain custody of the aliens and two ICE officers assigned support the medical staff. The eleven ICE officers are divided into groups of two and work twelve-hour shifts. Five officers are assigned to the day shift, and six officers are assigned to the night shift. Officers within each shift may only take breaks when another officer assumes the assigned officer’s responsibilities during the break.

ICE officers do not have the capacity to maintain constant surveillance, custody, and care of the aliens for prolonged periods of time. The surveillance and security that ICE officers are expected to provide includes escort service to a designated area to distribute medications, as needed; to the same location for medical consultations between aliens and the medical staff, as needed; and the restroom for each alien upon an alien’s request. The alien-designated restroom has sinks, six toilet stalls, and six showers. The designated restrooms are located in a separate trailer, which is forty to fifty yards from the unit in which the aliens are housed. The ICE officers conduct pat-downs and searches for contraband during movements to the restroom, or for any other outside activity. Only one alien is allowed to use the toilet or shower at a time, and one officer is required to escort the alien. Aliens are permitted to shower every other day, and showers occur at night due to the heat. From the onset of these ICE operations, the daily temperature outside has exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day

The conference room in which the aliens are housed is not equipped nor suitable for detention of any length, let alone for the detention of high-risk individuals. Notably, the room has none of the security apparatus necessary for the detention of criminal aliens. If an altercation were to occur, there is no other location on site available to separate the aliens, which further compromises the officers’ safety.

ICE officers are currently sharing very limited sleeping quarters, consisting of a trailer with three sets of bunk beds and six beds in total. Storage space is limited to an individual locker for each officer.

There is limited lighting in the area, which makes visibility difficult and creates a significant security risk for both the officers and aliens.

Currently, U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) resources are being used for the care of these aliens, causing disruption to the station’s operations and consuming critical resources intended for service members. DOD operators have expressed frustration, particularly about the proximity to DOD quarters of aliens with violent criminal records . ICE medical staff has also received limited medication and medical supplies for both officers and the aliens from DOD.

I have to imagine that it’s difficult, as a judge, not to respond to this by pointing out that they don’t need the judge’s permission to fix this. They have always been able to move them somewhere else, as the judge directly reminded them just a week ago.

Naturally, this manufactured crisis became fodder for the right-wing outrage machine, which then fed back into the administration, baiting the rabid MAGA crowd with lies.

First, the NY Post wrote a laughably false article based on this filing, claiming ICE agents were “stranded” in terrible conditions in Djibouti. Except, they’re not stranded. Again, the US government directly requested this and the judge gave them the option to stay there or to move somewhere else, so long as they provided the required due process.

Then, in a demonstration of how the Trump admin launders these lies, Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, tweeted — falsely — that the judge had ordered that ICE agents do this:

That’s Chad Mizelle linking to the NY Post’s story and claiming (again, falsely):

The Judge’s orders in the DVD case are literally putting ICE agents’ lives in danger. He grounded a removal flight to South Sudan that was already over east Africa, and now three ICE agents are “marooned in Djibouti with eight criminal migrants under ‘outrageous’ living conditions and the threat of rocket attacks from Yemen.” The illegal aliens these ICE agents are charged with securing in the meantime have been convicted of murder, sexually assaulting minors, robbery and arson.

This is a top-level DOJ official lying to the American public. The judge made it quite clear, multiple times, that officials could move the men elsewhere or bring them back to the US, complete their “reasonable fear interviews” and get on with the deportation effort. The DOJ itself — which Mizelle is supposed the chief of staff for — directly requested of the court that the men be held in Djibouti.

This is, yet again, how the Trump admin works. They lie with impunity. They blame others for problems they themselves caused and refuse to even take the options in front of them to fix the mess they themselves caused. I get that their MAGA followers love this thing where they play the victim and blame big evil judges, but at some point, it would be nice if senior government officials lived in the land of reality.

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Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated.

That private contractor would be Palantir, which has never shied away from the role of villain since its inception. And it only makes sense this administration would choose Palantir, what with the company’s founder being such a huge fan of Trump, fascism, and censorship.

Nearly a billion dollars are headed Palantir’s way, even as DOGE continues to strip funding from nearly every government agency it has decided to meddle with. That’s not a coincidence, as the New York Times reports.

Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.

Just more insiders doing some (horse) trading. Palantir has already received more than $100 million from the Trump Administration since Trump took office in January. The Defense Department’s outlay dwarfs the $113 million already allocated towards this project. The DoD has awarded a $795 million contract to Palantir, but has yet to actually start spending that money.

It obviously will end up spending it. But the main concern is the addition of Palantir software to a bunch of agencies not normally considered to be part of the federal government’s domestic spyware programs.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

The administration and its surveillance partner are also seeking to infect the IRS and Social Security Administration with Palantir’s tech, adding to the massive haystack the Trump administration can use for whatever purposes it wants.

Given how this administration has handled itself since returning to office, it’s not that much of a stretch to believe this massive data collection will be used to help Trump and his compatriots find targets for arrest, deportation, or unconstitutional executive orders.

Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said.

That’s obviously the point of this massive data pile, which removes silos that were put there for a reason. Stripping away these separations creates an extremely enticing target for malicious hackers, who always appreciate government contractors doing the dirty work of amassing personally identifiable information for them.

The only open question is whether Palantir’s expanded data collection will be exploited by malicious hackers or malicious administration members first. Rest assured, it will be abused by someone, and any legal recourse after the fact isn’t going to be able to undo whatever harms have been inflicted on Americans by this intermingling of data from multiple federal agencies.

Palantir, of course, couldn’t care less. Its statement on this disturbing development merely says that it’s proud to be a hammer but it can’t control what the administration decides are nails.

“We act as a data processor, not a data controller,” it said. “Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted.”

This is obviously true. A contractor can’t control what the government does with the tools it provides. However, it can decide whether or not to provide the tools. Palantir will never choose otherwise, no matter who’s in office. And if it’s willing to aid a president determined to do bad things with the data it provides, it’s certainly willing to sell to other autocrats and human rights abusers elsewhere in the world. Ethics are a luxury this multi-billion dollar company apparently can’t afford.

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We’ve long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The “news” outlet, originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVID was created in a North Carolina lab.

OAN “reporters” relentlessly kiss Donald Trump’s ass like dutiful stenographers. But OAN’s Gabrielle Cuccia, assigned by the network to pretend to seriously cover the Pentagon, has apparently paid the price for wandering a little too close to the truth.

Cuccia’s work at the network has consisted of fearmongering about immigration and taking fascists like Sebastian Gorka seriously. She recently posted a fairly unremarkable Substack post.

It spends a thousand words or so kissing Trump’s ass before eventually getting around to some light criticism of the Pentagon’s ongoing hostility to journalists, which has included banning reporters from large, non-secure parts of the Pentagon and assigning them goonish handlers:

“This marks a troubling shift in how the Department of Defense engages with the press and, by extension, the American public.

The Pentagon Press Association (although I am not officially part of the association —again hello I am MAGA) has raised valid concerns over the new restrictions on the movement of credentialed journalists within the Pentagon, even in non-secure, unclassified hallways.”

Hesgeth, himself a former fake journalist who failed upward into his completely unqualified role as Secretary of Defense, has launched a new harmful assault on real journalism to cover up the fact his short tenure has been potholed by a steady stream of staffer leaks and historically problematic security fuck ups. Screw ups which Cuccia’s broader post, of course, dutifully downplays.

Unfortunately for Cuccia, being too honest about Hesgeth’s assault on the First Amendment was apparently enough to get her booted from the Pentagon and fired from OAN, according to the Associated Press:

“Three days after her Memorial Day Substack post, Cuccia said her Pentagon access badge was revoked. “By Friday,” she said, “I was out of a job.”

The AP frames this as an almost-serious news organization firing a reporter because she expressed a human opinion in her off hours:

“Traditionally, the legacy media does not want its journalists expressing opinions about people they cover, since it calls into doubt their ability to report without bias. But exceptions are often made in cases where media access is at issue, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.”

The belief that reporters can’t express human, personal opinions in their free time without harming the credibility of their employer is something many major news outlets still adhere to as a form of performative ethics (recall the AP fired promising young journalist Emily Wilder because she did some light activism in college and wrote a few tweets sympathetic to Palestinians).

That’s of course gibberish. One because it implies OAN is real journalism. And two, because real outlets that enforce these types of restrictions will usually turn around and publish fifty stories in a row credulously parroting the strange claims of law enforcement, lobbyists, or CEOs without batting an eyelash. Or turn their websites into glorified blogspam affiliates for Amazon.com several times a year.

In this case, Cuccia was clearly fired for not towing the authoritarian line, which is OAN’s entire purpose. The firing is particularly ironic coming from the same Republican party that insists that any cable or satellite TV company that refuses to carry OAN (it genuinely doesn’t have that many viewers) is engaged in an act of overt, unfair censorship.

When DirecTV refused to carry OAN because the network wasn’t profitable for them, you might recall it was such a crisis that six Republican AGs felt the need to whine publicly about unfair “censorship,” and make vague threats against DirecTV for the crime of… making their own choices. But an OAN employee gets shitcanned for stumbling accidentally into the truth in her free time, and it’s crickets.

Again because Trump Republicans, shockingly enough, don’t actually care about free speech. They care about parroting, protecting, and perpetuating authoritarian bullshit.

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It was a couple of weeks ago when I was stupidly watching one cable news channel or another when I witnessed some GOP talking head say that Donald Trump likes to build a team of competing viewpoints that fight with one another as a way of producing the best results. I think it was Scott Jennings, but I can’t be sure. You’ll forgive me if I can’t recall which husk of a person with their soul on loan said something so profoundly ignorant. After all, one of the overarching stories of this administration from the jump has been how Trump has surrounded himself not just at the top level with yes-men sycophants, but how that posture has translated further down the ranks of government.

But those stories had to do with either his own cabinet picks or the purge of federal employees that came at the hands, in part, of Elon Musk’s DOGE program of chaos. We are all now watching the sun set on Trump’s federal hiring freeze, which is due to expire on July 15th, a little over a month from now. And as federal hiring is set to to be opened up once more, we’re getting a look into the administration’s plans for its hiring practices, which includes both an initial and ongoing loyalty test of sorts in the form of compulsory praise for Trump and his executive orders.

De-emphasizing degree requirements and banning DEI initiatives—as well as any census tracking of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion to assess the composition of government—the plan requires every new hire to submit essays explaining which executive orders or policy initiatives they will help advance.

These essays must be limited to 200 words and cannot be generated by a chatbot, the guidance noted. While some applicants may point to policies enacted by prior presidents under their guidance, the president appears to be seeking to ensure that only Trump supporters are hired and that anyone who becomes disillusioned with Trump is weeded out over time. In addition to asking for a show of loyalty during the interview process, all federal workers will also be continuously vetted and must agree to submit to “checks for post-appointment conduct that may impact their continued trustworthiness,” the guidance noted, referencing required patriotism repeatedly.

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to Donald Trump, it seems. Debasing government staff, or even prospective government staff, shall be the norm and without reprieve. And, yes, the Orwell references are flowing so freely about this administration so as to risk losing their impact, but there are simply times when no other reference will do.

Presidents are free to pick their Cabinet and direct reports, of course. And every president obviously wants to staff the government in such a way so as to implement his or (someday) her policy. But there’s a reason the best governments and leaders don’t surround themselves with pure yes-people. You lose all perspective when you do so. You miss the opportunity for competing thought. You get no challenge to policy or methods for implementing policy that might produce a better result. You get, if done in the kind of totality that Trump appears to be building, not even so much as single party rule, but single person rule. If the loyalty test is to Trump himself, then all things are permissible, all utterances from Trump correct, and all policy unmolested by such things as actual thought.

And it will also make the process for hiring new federal workers slow, painful, and deeply ambiguous.

Using various Trump-approved technical and alternative assessments would require candidates to participate in live exercises, evaluate work-related scenarios, submit a work sample, solve problems related to skill competencies, or submit additional writing samples that would need to be reviewed. The amount of manual labor involved in the new policies, the HR official warned, is “insane.”

“Everything in it will make it more difficult to hire, not less,” the HR official said. “How the f— do you define if someone is patriotic?”

Jenny Mattingley, a vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, told Politicothat she agreed that requiring a loyalty test would make federal recruiting harder.

“Many federal employees are air traffic controllers, national park rangers, food safety inspectors, and firefighters who carry out the missions of agencies that are authorized by Congress,” Mattingley said. “These public servants, who deliver services directly to the public, should not be forced to answer politicized questions that fail to evaluate the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.”

Except that misses the point entirely. The idea here is not to hire the best people for these federal jobs. That much is plainly obvious to anyone with a couple of braincells to rub together. Instead, the chief aim is to create a hive-mind of sorts among the federal workforce, in which staff members are mere extensions of the president’s will, rather than the People’s.

To take but one example, if you think aviation and air traffic control is in trouble right now, just wait until those roles are staffed with people who’s chief qualifying characteristic is being able to agree with anything that spills out of the president’s mouth.

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