U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week posted a photo of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St. Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. 

A short while later, the White House posted the same photo - except that version had been digitally altered to darken Armstrong's skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. The Guardian one of many media outlets to report on this image manipulation, created a handy slider graphic to help viewers see clearly how the photo had been changed.  

This isn't about "owning the libs" — this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the entire world. 

The New York Times reported it had run the two images through Resemble.AI, an A.I. detection system, which concluded Noem's image was real but the White House's version showed signs of manipulation. "The Times was able to create images nearly identical to the White House's version by asking Gemini and Grok — generative A.I. tools from Google and Elon Musk's xAI start-up — to alter Ms. Noem's original image." 

Most of us can agree that the government shouldn't lie to its constituents. We can also agree that good government does not involve emphasizing cruelty or furthering racial biases. But this abuse of technology violates both those norms. 

"Accuracy and truthfulness are core to the credibility of visual reporting," the National Press Photographers Association said in a statement issued about this incident. "The integrity of photographic images is essential to public trust and to the historical record. Altering editorial content for any purpose that misrepresents subjects or events undermines that trust and is incompatible with professional practice." 

Reworking an arrest photo to make the arrestee look more distraught not only is a lie, but it's also a doubling-down on a "the cruelty is the point" manifesto. Using a manipulated image further humiliates the individual and perpetuate harmful biases, and the only reason to darken an arrestee's skin would be to reinforce colorist stereotypes and stoke the flames of racial prejudice, particularly against dark-skinned people.  

History is replete with cruel and racist images as propaganda: Think of Nazi Germany's cartoons depicting Jewish people, or contemporaneously, U.S. cartoons depicting Japanese people as we placed Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Time magazine caught hell in 1994 for using an artificially darkened photo of O.J. Simpson on its cover, and several Republican political campaigns in recent years have been called out for similar manipulation in recent years. 

But in an age when we can create or alter a photo with a few keyboard strokes, when we can alter what viewers think is reality so easily and convincingly, the danger of abuse by government is greater.   

Had the Trump administration not ham-handedly released the retouched perp-walk photo after Noem had released the original, we might not have known the reality of that arrest at all. This dishonesty is all the more reason why Americans' right to record law enforcement activities must be protected. Without independent records and documentation of what's happening, there's no way to contradict the government's lies. 

This incident raises the question of whether the Trump Administration feels emboldened to manipulate other photos for other propaganda purposes. Does it rework photos of the President to make him appear healthier, or more awake? Does it rework military or intelligence images to create pretexts for war? Does it rework photos of American citizens protesting or safeguarding their neighbors to justify a military deployment? 

In this instance, like so much of today's political trolling, there's a good chance it'll be counterproductive for the trolls: The New York Times correctly noted that the doctored photograph could hinder the Armstrong's right to a fair trial. "As the case proceeds, her lawyers could use it to accuse the Trump administration of making what are known as improper extrajudicial statements. Most federal courts bar prosecutors from making any remarks about court filings or a legal proceeding outside of court in a way that could prejudice the pool of jurors who might ultimately hear the case." They also could claim the doctored photo proves the Justice Department bore some sort of animus against Armstrong and charged her vindictively. 

In the past, we've urged caution when analyzing proposals to regulate technologies that could be used to create false images. In those cases, we argued that any new regulation should rely on the established framework for addressing harms caused by other forms of harmful false information. But in this situation, it is the government itself that is misusing technology and propagating harmful falsehoods. This doesn't require new laws; the government can and should put an end to this practice on its own. 

Any reputable journalism organization would fire an employee for manipulating a photo this way; many have done exactly that. It's a shame our government can't adhere to such a basic ethical and moral code too. 

Republished from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.

Let's just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they're currently at the top of Trump's shitlist. Prior to last month's escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's possible ICE would have bragged about robbing money from people at an international airport.

But because this other thing (the MAGA dude) happened first — and because Minneapolis residents have proven incredibly resilient in the face of vengeful federal operations — ICE had to get out its X bullhorn and yell about taking money from people the MAGA faithful have been encouraged to hate by their dimwitted handler, Donald Trump. (For a bit of catharsis, here's a wonderful recording of the so-called "MAGA influencer" Jake Lang being welcomed to Minneapolis by counter-protesters while he tried to get his anti-migrant hate on. It seems this mook forgot protesters burned a police station to the ground following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.)

This X post comes to us via Dom Ervolina on Bluesky. But since that post can't be seen by people who aren't logged in, I'm going to screenshot the X post in all of its ingloriousness, because we certainly aren't going to be linking to and/or embedding a post from that particular den of depravity that's overseen by a landlord who can't seem to decide whether he should be an absentee landlord or a cheerleader for his CSAM-creating, Hitler proxy AI, Grok.

Here goes nothing:

It's an official post by the X ICE account. Although ICE wasn't directly involved with this airport robbery, it was first in line to celebrate it. Here's what it says:

UNDECLARED CASH SEIZED AT MSP

On January 18, HSI St. Paul and @CBP seized $14,135 from two Somali-born U.S. citizens who were departing on international flights from MSP.

ICE and CBP remain vigilant in detecting and preventing the illegal movement of funds across borders to protect national security.

It's accompanied by a photo of the alleged $14,135 scattered across a Formica table apparently located adjacent to (and somewhat blocking) an airport walkway.

Note that it says $14,135. $14,000 should have been enough. But the bottom right corner of the photo makes it clear federal officers weren't satisfied until they'd rifled through these people's wallets.

Yep, that's $35 dollars, splayed across the table like it's the focal point of a video produced by the least-successful SoundCloud rap artist ever.

Also, note the way this phrase is… um, phrased:

"…from two Somali-born U.S. citizens…"

You see what the government led with, right? They expect everyone who's going to cheer whatever they do to stop reading after the "i" in "Somali" (or maybe the "n" in "-born" at best). And they expect everyone to ignore the words that follow that: "U.S. citizens."

The rabble will get roused because it has something to do (however adjacently) with the people Trump hates and who will do all they can to stoke that hatred, even if that means the occasional bout of hypothermia. (See above link about Maga dudebro getting railed by the locals.)

Ignore the rest of the racist dogwhistling and you get nothing more than ICE celebrating the fact that the CBP stole $14,135 from US citizens.

But that's not even the stupidest part of ICE masturbating on main. The rules for taking money out of the country are pretty simple: you must declare any amount over $10,000 to Customs. There were two people and $14,000 involved here. Even the laziest of elementary school students should be able to spot the problem here.

No matter how you slice it up, CBP cannot use a customs violation to justify the seizure of $14,000 from two people. If one person was over the limit, the other person was carrying an amount of cash that didn't need to be declared. If both were carrying half, neither of them were violating the law.

And since the government has yet to give us more details on this, we're left to assume the government grabbed $14,000 from two US citizens just because it thinks it can get away with it.

Now, it's entirely possible the government will claim the two people were working together to smuggle more than $10,000 out of the country. But if it does, it should be directly and persistently challenged by the court that takes this case. If that doesn't happen, the government will be able to steal any amount of cash from any number of passengers boarding the same plane if that total manages to clear the $10,000 mark.

And it will also assume it can free-associate connections between people boarding different flights carrying cash by pretending these unconnected people are engaged in a conspiracy to violate a customs law that seemingly only exists to allow the government to pick people's pockets (figuratively but also LITERALLY) at our nation's airports.

On top of that, there are the activities of other federal agencies like the DEA and ATF, who pretend any mildly significant amount of cash in travelers' luggage must be the end result of illegal activity. And this is so fucking maddening because it has NEVER been illegal to carry cash from place to place, much less try to leave the country with an (undeclared) stack of greenbacks (under $10,000) that tend to produce better results in vacation destinations and ancestral homelands whose currency isn't worth as much as the US dollar.

There's no shaming the government into behaving better — not when it's headed by some of the most shameless government officials ever to hold executive branch offices. But, for the time being, you can possibly sue them into submission. And that's what needs to happen now. The government is engaging in racism and mouthing empty phrases about "national security" to justify its abusive xenophobia. Sure, this sort of thing predates Trump. But it doesn't mean we should consider it acceptable just because it's been SOP for most of this century.

Remember last summer when everyone was freaking out about the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material? The New York Times ran a piece in July with the headline "A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet." NCMEC put out a blog post calling the numbers an "alarming increase" and a "wake-up call." The numbers were genuinely shocking: NCMEC reported receiving 485,000 AI-related CSAM reports in the first half of 2025, compared to just 67,000 for all of 2024.

That's a big increase! And it would obviously be super concerning if any AI company were finding and detecting so much AI-generated CSAM, especially as we keep hearing that the big AI models (perhaps with the exception of Grok…) have been putting in place safeguards against CSAM generation.

The source of most of those reports? Amazon, which had submitted a staggering 380,000 of them, even though most people don't tend to think of Amazon as much of an AI company. But, still, it became a six alarm fire about how much AI-generated CSAM Amazon had discovered. There were news stories about it, politicians demanding action, and the general sentiment was that this proved how big the problem was.

Except… it turns out that wasn't actually what was happening. At all.

Bloomberg just published a deep dive into what was actually going on with Amazon's reports, and the truth is very, very different from what everyone assumed. According to Bloomberg:

Amazon.com Inc. reported hundreds of thousands of pieces of content last year that it believed included child sexual abuse, which it found in data gathered to improve its artificial intelligence models. Though Amazon removed the content before training its models, child safety officials said the company has not provided information about its source, potentially hindering law enforcement from finding perpetrators and protecting victims.

Here's the kicker—and I cannot stress this enough—none of Amazon's reports involved AI-generated CSAM.

None of its reports submitted to NCMEC were of AI-generated material, the spokesperson added. Instead, the content was flagged by an automatic detection tool that compared it against a database of known child abuse material involving real victims, a process called "hashing." Approximately 99.97% of the reports resulted from scanning "non-proprietary training data," the spokesperson said.

What Amazon was actually reporting was known CSAM—images of real victims that already existed in databases—that their scanning tools detected in datasets being considered for AI training. They found it using traditional hash-matching detection tools, flagged it, and removed it before using the data. Which is… actually what you'd want a company to do?

But because it was found in the context of AI development, and because NCMEC's reporting form has exactly one checkbox that says "Generative AI" with no way to distinguish between "we found known CSAM in our training data pipeline" and "our AI model generated new CSAM," Amazon checked the box.

And thus, a massive misunderstanding was born.

Again, let's be clear and separate out a few things here: the fact that Amazon found CSAM (known or not) in its training data is bad. It is a troubling sign of how much CSAM is found in the various troves of data AI companies use for training. And maybe the focus should be on that. Also, the fact that they then reported it to NCMEC and removed it from their training data after discovering it with hash matching is… good. That's how things are supposed to work.

But the fact that the media (with NCMEC's help) turned this into "OMG AI generated CSAM is growing at a massive rate" is likely extremely misleading.

Riana Pfefferkorn at Stanford, who co-authored an important research report last year about the challenges of NCMEC's reporting system (which we wrote two separate posts about), wrote a letter to NCMEC that absolutely nails what went wrong here:

For half a year, "Massive Spike In AI-Generated CSAM" is the framing I've seen whenever news reports mention those H1 2025 numbers. Even the press release for a Senate bill about safeguarding AI models from being tainted with CSAM stated, "According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, AI-generated material has proliferated at an alarming rate in the past year," citing the NYT article.

Now we find out from Bloomberg that zero of Amazon's reports involved AI-generated material; all 380,000 were hash hits to known CSAM. And we have Fallon [McNulty, executive director of the CyberTipline] confirming to Bloomberg that "with the exception of Amazon, the AI-related reports [NCMEC] received last year came in 'really, really small volumes.'"

That is an absolutely mindboggling misunderstanding for everyone — the general public, lawmakers, researchers like me, etc. — to labor under for so long. If Bloomberg hadn't dug into Amazon's numbers, it's not clear to me when, if ever, that misimpression would have been corrected. 

She's not wrong. Nearly 80% of all "Generative AI" CyberTipline reports to NCMEC in the first half of 2025 involved no AI-generated CSAM at all. The actual volume of AI-generated CSAM being reported? Apparently "really, really small."

Now, to be (slightly?) fair to the NYT, they did run a minor correction a day after their original story noting that the 485,000 reports "comprised both A.I.-generated material and A.I. attempts to create material, not A.I.-generated material alone." But that correction still doesn't capture what actually happened. It wasn't "AI-generated material and attempts"—it was overwhelmingly "known CSAM detected during AI training data vetting." Those are very different things.

And it gets worse. Bloomberg reports that Amazon's scanning threshold was set so low that many of those reports may not have even been actual CSAM:

Amazon believes it over-reported these cases to NCMEC to avoid accidentally missing something. "We intentionally use an over-inclusive threshold for scanning, which yields a high percentage of false positives," the spokesperson added.

So we've got reports that aren't AI-generated CSAM, many of which may not even be CSAM at all. Very helpful.

The frustrating thing is that this kind of confusion wasn't just entirely predictable—it was predicted! When Pfefferkorn and her colleagues at Stanford published their report about NCMEC's CSAM reporting system they literally called out the potential confusion in the options of what to check and how platforms would likely over-report stuff in an abundance of caution, because the penalty (both criminally and in reputation) for missing anything is so dire.

Indeed, the form for submitting to the CyberTipline has one checkbox for "Generative AI" that, as Pfefferkorn notes in her letter, can mean wildly different things depending on who's checking it:

When the meaning of checking a single checkbox is so ambiguous that absent additional information, reports of known CSAM found in AI training data are facially indistinguishable from reports of new AI-generated material (or of text-only prompts seeking CSAM, or of attempts to upload known CSAM as part of a prompt, etc.), and that ambiguity leads to a months-long massive public misunderstanding about the scale of the AI-CSAM problem, then it is clear that the CyberTipline reporting form itself needs to change — not just how one particular ESP fills it out. 

To its credit NCMEC did respond quickly to Pfefferkorn, and their response is… illuminating. They confirmed they're working on updating the reporting system, but also noted that Amazon's reports contained almost no useful information:

all those Amazon reports included minimal data, not even the file in question or the hash value, much less other contextual information about where or how Amazon detected the matching file

As Pfefferkorn put it, Amazon was basically giving NCMEC reports that said "we found something" with nothing else attached. NCMEC says they only learned about the false positives issue last week and are "very frustrated" by it.

Indeed, NCMEC's boss told Bloomberg:

"There's nothing then that can be done with those reports," she said. "Our team has been really clear with [Amazon] that those reports are inactionable."

There's plenty of blame to go around here. Amazon clearly should have been more transparent about what they were reporting and why. NCMEC's reporting form is outdated and creates ambiguity that led to a massive public misunderstanding. And the media (NYT included) ran with alarming numbers without asking obvious questions like "why is Amazon suddenly reporting 25x more than last year and no other AI company is even close?"

But, even worse, policymakers spent six months operating under the assumption that AI-generated CSAM was exploding at an unprecedented rate. Legislation was proposed. Resources were allocated. Public statements were made. All based on numbers that fundamentally misrepresented what was actually happening.

As Pfefferkorn notes:

Nobody benefits from being so egregiously misinformed. It isn't a basis for sound policymaking (or an accurate assessment of NCMEC's resource needs) if the true volume of AI-generated CSAM being reported is a mere fraction of what Congress and other regulators believe it is. It isn't good for Amazon if people mistakenly think the company's AI products are uniquely prone to generating CSAM compared with other options on the market (such as OpenAI, with its distant-second 75,000 reports during the same time period, per NYT). That impression also disserves users trying to pick safe, responsible AI tools to use; in actuality, per today's revelations about training data vetting, Amazon is indeed trying to safeguard its models against CSAM. I can certainly think of at least one other AI company that's been in the news a lot lately that seems to be acting far more carelessly.

None of this means that AI-generated CSAM isn't a real and serious problem. It absolutely is, and it needs to be addressed. But you can't effectively address a problem if your data about the scope of that problem is fundamentally wrong. And you especially can't do it when the "alarming spike" that everyone has been pointing to turns out to be something else entirely.

The silver lining here, as Pfefferkorn points out, is that the actual news is… kind of good? Amazon's AI models aren't CSAM-generating machines. The company was actually doing the responsible thing by vetting its training data. And the real volume of AI-generated CSAM reports is apparently much lower than we've been led to believe.

But that good news was buried for six months under a misleading narrative that nobody bothered to dig into until Bloomberg did. And that's a failure of transparency, of reporting systems, and of the kind of basic journalistic skepticism that should have kicked in when one company was suddenly responsible for 78% of all reports in a category.

We'll see if NCMEC's promised updates to the reporting form actually address these issues. In the meantime, maybe we can all agree that the next time there's a 700% increase in reports of anything, it's worth asking a few questions before writing the "everything is on fire" headline.

Trump's going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his "be the despot you wish to see in the world" efforts.

His top appointees are just as willing to lie, defame, deride, and overstep the long-accepted limitations of their positions as the president himself. Now that Trump has pardoned the people who raided the Capitol on his behalf in January 2021, he's going after everyone and everything that pissed him off about that particular election cycle.

Trump's Revenge Time Machine is taking him and his administration back to Georgia to engage in an unprecedented seizure of voting records, as ABC News reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county's Elections Hub and Operations Center.

[…]

The search warrant authorized the FBI to search for "All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election," in addition to tabulator tapes from voting machines and 2020 voter rolls, among other documents, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by ABC affiliate WSB. 

The warrant says the material "constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense" and had been "used as the means of committing a criminal offense."  It was signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

It's not surprising that Trump would attempt to extract some sort of penance from Georgia after he failed to convert that state into electoral college votes. The governor of the state, Brian Kemp, did all he could to swing the state back into Trump's favor post-election, including being sued by the DNC for claiming (with zero facts in evidence) that the Democratic party had "hacked" his state's voting machines.

Trump kept this issue alive by bringing Heather Honey — a fellow 2020 election denier from Georgia — into the in-group, appointing her to a high-level position in the DHS where she would [vomits] help oversee future election security efforts.

What is surprising is that any judge would sign this warrant. The allegations range from "threadbare" to "hallucinatory."

Specifically, the warrant listed possible violations of two statutes — one which requires election records to be retained for a certain amount of time, and another which outlines criminal penalties for people, including election officials, who intimidate voters or to knowingly procure false votes or false voter registrations.

Records were seized, which means it's unlikely records were deleted prematurely. And there's been nothing shown to this point that any sort of voter intimidation occurred… at least not on the behalf of the Democratic Party.

This appears to be voter intimidation of a different sort. Last month, the DOJ sued Fulton County (where the raid took place) for access to 2020 election records. This followed attempts to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election — acts that included Trump asking the Secretary of State to "find" the votes needed to swing the state, as well as its targeting of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who brought election interference charges against the then-outgoing Trump.

And, for some fucking reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended the raid to seize these voting records.

Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country's spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.

Asked about the rationale for her visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: "Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure."

Whatever, "senior administration official." This is Gabbard hoping to show up on Trump's radar again, after being sidelined during actual foreign-facing activity, like the kidnapping of Venezuela's president. Perhaps she's tired of seeing Kristi Noem flouncing from photo op to photo op as Barbie-in-Chief of the DHS's invasion of the United States.

I mean…

Two senior officials with knowledge of the matter said Gabbard's presence in Fulton County was unnecessary and was not requested by the Justice Department. 

Yes, it's another performance from the most performative administration in US history. And it will always play well because people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The GOP is a flat circle, or perhaps more accurately, a human centipede.

Breaking up this endless cycle of shit ingestion and shit creation are the side effects of this sort of mutual masturbation: the constant shedding of talent from agencies that already don't have enough of it, thanks to the administration's constant purging of anyone who's not MAGA enough.

The special agent in charge of the FBI's Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department's renewed push to probe Fulton County's role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI's investigation into President Donald Trump's longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election, according to the sources, who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity.

Remember all the shit we talked about the USSR and its efforts to rid itself of anyone but party loyalists? Well, we're doing it right here and now, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GOP says there's nothing wrong with this as long as it's the GOP doing it. The MAGA faithful have no problem with this as long as it's the MAGA front doing it. And the rest of us are expected to live with it, because the opposition party still seems to believe there's a polite, non-confrontational set of options to be deployed. Let's hope they'll realize that's no longer the case long before they have to issue a strongly-worded social media post about objecting to being first against the wall.

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We called bullshit when Republicans tried to order websites to carry content. We're calling bullshit now when Democrats are trying to do the same.

We spent years explaining to politicians across both parties why the government can't dictate how private platforms moderate content. During the Biden admin, GOP governors seemed most aggressive about trying to tell platforms they couldn't moderate. We wrote many thousands of words words about why Texas's HB20 and Florida's SB7072 were flagrantly unconstitutional. We cheered when courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, agreed.

And now California Governor Gavin Newsom has decided to… do the exact same thing, just from the other direction.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

Here's Newsom, announcing that he's launching a review of TikTok's content moderation practices:

That's Newsom's "press office" announcing:

NEW: Following TikTok's sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports — and independently confirmed instances — of suppressed content critical of President Trump.

Gavin Newsom is launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law.

We could save a lot of taxpayer dollars by just giving him the answer: no, it does not violate California law. It cannot. Because of the First Amendment.

It's even worse if you dig down one level and see what Newsom is responding to:

That's a rando X account with just a few thousand followers tweeting that "you can't even mention epstein lmao" showing a TikTok warning that her trying to post the word "epstein" "may be in violation of our community guidelines."

Newsom is quote tweeting this saying:

It's time to investigate. I am launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.

There's so much wrong here.

Let's start with the obvious: these "reports" are sketchy as hell. Beyond it coming from some rando account, TikTok has already explained that there was a data center power outage that caused "a cascading systems failure" affecting content posting and moderation. This happens! Content moderation systems fail all the time. Also, moderation systems make mistakes. All the time! As we've discussed approximately ten thousand times, even with 99.9% accuracy, you're going to have hundreds of thousands of "mistakes" every single day on a platform the size of TikTok. That's just math.

For the Governor of California to jump from "some rando users reported upload problems during a technical outage" to "we must investigate whether this violates California law" is… not how any of this should work.

But, who even cares about that? There's a bigger issue here: even if every single one of these reports were accurate—even if TikTok were deliberately, systematically moderating content to favor Trump—that would be totally legal under the First Amendment.

Content moderation decisions are editorial decisions. They are protected speech. A private platform can legally decide to promote, demote, or remove whatever content it wants based on whatever criteria it wants, including political viewpoint. It can decide what it doesn't want to host. It can do so for ideological reasons if it wants.

This is the same thing we've been saying for years when Republicans howled about "anti-conservative bias" on social media. And, arguably, Newsom merely investigating TikTok for its editorial choices creates chilling effects that themselves raise First Amendment concerns.

When Texas passed HB20, which tried to prohibit large social media platforms from moderating based on "viewpoint," we pointed out that this was flagrantly unconstitutional because it would compel platforms to host speech against their will. The Supreme Court agreed, with Justice Kagan noting during oral arguments that Texas's law would mean "the government can force you to have certain speech on your platform."

When Florida passed SB7072 with similar provisions, we said the same thing. The Eleventh Circuit agreed, calling it "an unprecedented attempt to compel private platforms to host speech," which violates "the First Amendment's long-held protection for the editorial discretion of private businesses."

So now Newsom wants to do the exact same thing, just from the other direction? He wants California to investigate whether a platform's content moderation choices—choices protected by the First Amendment—somehow "violate California law"?

What California law would that even be? The state has attempted a variety of social media laws, which keep getting thrown out as unconstitutional (just like we warned Newsom).

Is he just making up new theories now about how a state can control the editorial decisions of private platforms based on which political direction those decisions allegedly lean?

How is this different from when Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz threatened to strip Section 230 protections from platforms they accused of "anti-conservative bias"? How is this different from when Ron DeSantis tried to punish Disney for political speech he disagreed with?

The answer is: it's not different. It's the same unconstitutional impulse to use government power to control private editorial decisions, just wearing the other team's jersey. We've detailed time and time again that both Republicans and Democrats are super quick to reach for the censorship button whenever they see online speech they don't like, but it's particularly egregious here because the courts have already ruled on this exact issue.

The Supreme Court already made it quite clear that Newsom can't do what he's doing just a couple years ago in the Moody ruling, directed at the governors of Texas and Florida:

But a State may not interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance. States (and their citizens) are of course right to want an expressive realm in which the public has access to a wide range of views. That is, indeed, a fundamental aim of the First Amendment. But the way the First Amendment achieves that goal is by preventing the government from "tilt[ing] public debate in a preferred direction." Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U. S. 552, 578-579 (2011). It is not by licensing the government to stop private actors from speaking as they wish and preferring some views over others. And that is so even when those actors possess "enviable vehicle[s]" for expression. Hurley, 515 U. S., at 577. In a better world, there would be fewer inequities in speech opportunities; and the government can take many steps to bring that world closer. But it cannot prohibit speech to improve or better balance the speech market.

TikTok could, tomorrow, announce that they're going to remove every single piece of content critical of Trump and promote only pro-Trump material. That would be stupid. It would probably be bad for their business. Users would likely flee to competitors. But it would be legal, because private platforms have the First Amendment right to make their own editorial choices, even bad ones.

Newsom knows this. Or he should. We've been explaining it to politicians of both parties for years: the First Amendment protects against government control of speech, including a platform's editorial decisions about what to host. It doesn't guarantee anyone a right to have their preferred content amplified on someone else's platform.

We called bullshit when Republicans tried this. We're calling bullshit now when Democrats like Newsom are doing the same thing.

The state has no role in dictating editorial practices of any media entity. Period.

We've long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn't without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access.

But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, community fiber, and into the pockets of billionaire Elon Musk. In exchange for congested, expensive, Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband access the company planned to deploy anyway.

This alone was a pretty big grift. But Trump has also threatened to illegally withhold planed state broadband grants if they dare try to make sure the resulting taxpayer broadband is affordable, or attempt to hold companies accountable for failing to delivered promised service.

When states like Virginia have balked at the idea of prioritizing Elon Musk's satellite service over more reliable fiber, Starlink has cried and pouted like a petulant child. More recently, Starlink has been attempting to attach a rider to its grant agreements with states, saying they can't be held responsible if the broadband Starlink provides is slow, expensive, or not installed properly:

"The concessions sought by SpaceX "would limit Starlink's performance obligations, payment schedules, non-compliance penalties, reporting expectations, and labor and insurance standards," wrote Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute. Garner argued that SpaceX's demands illustrate problems in how the Trump NTIA rewrote program rules to increase reliance on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers."

So basically Musk — who likes to pretend he hates subsidies despite his entire existence being propped up by them — wants untold billions in new subsidies and no serious way for his company to be held accountable should it fail to deliver the promised, substandard product.

Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of "open access" fiber networks that generate local competition and challenge regional monopolies by dramatically lowering the cost of market entry. From there, you'd address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G.

Only then would you fill in the remaining holes with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband options like Starlink, which are ideally suited only for the most remote areas (and even then, Starlink is generally too expensive for most of the lower-income rural Americans who really need it).

Under an ideal program, you'd also confirm that the companies you're giving taxpayer money to can actually deliver what they're promising. The Trump FCC didn't do that with an earlier program (the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, RDOF), resulting in a whole bunch of companies (including Musk's Starlink) gaming the system to try and get money for projects they didn't deserve or couldn't finish.

Republicans have, in an open act of corruption, thrown this entire logic on its head to curry favor with their favorite white supremacist extremist billionaire. They're prioritizing Elon Musk's substandard satellite network (which will only become more congested as more people use it), then ensuring nobody can meaningful hold Musk accountable when he inevitably fails to deliver reliable, affordable access.

Who is going to hold Musk accountable if he fails to deliver? Trump's bootlicker at the FCC, Brendan Carr? The FTC, where Trump illegally fired all the Dem Commissioners? The NTIA, which is now run by a former Ted Cruz staffer who thinks affordable fiber optic broadband is "woke?" States, who risk losing out on a generational influx of subsidies if they challenge Elon Musk's greed or stand up to telecoms?

Musk's DOGE was always about destroying the regulatory state so he and other billionaires could sell the country for scrap off the back loading dock under the pretense of innovative efficiencies while being slathered with tax cuts and subsides. It's grotesque, historic levels of corruption in a fucking hat.

You might recall, folks like Ezra Klein made a big, extended stink about the fact this original BEAD program was taking a long time to deliver (for some obvious reasons). But since Elon Musk hijacked the program creating a lot of headaches, wasted money, and entirely new delays, I curiously haven't heard the "abundance" folks make a single, solitary peep.

The business and telecom press (and many folks in policy circles) have also already seemingly normalized hijacking a massive subsidy program to the benefit of a white supremacist billionaire. But as somebody that's been studying the challenges of broadband access for a quarter century, I guarantee that we're going to be documenting the damage (and lost potential) of this corruption for decades to come.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Raphael with a comment about Trump demanding billions from the IRS:

This reminds me, Trump loves to rant and rave about how poorly and dysfunctionally the countries of origin of many migrant to the USA are run, and how bad things look like there.

You know why those countries are so poorly run, Donald? You know why things are so bad there?

Because countries like that are usually run by people who love to pay out large amounts of public money to themselves. Because they're usually run by people who love to name everything after themselves. Because they're usually run by people who love to decorate everything in sight with lots of glittering gold. Because they're usually run by people who love to have their subordinates praise them to high Heaven all the time. Because they're usually run by people who let their armed goons do whatever they want. #

In short, because they're run by people like you.

In second place, it's dfbomb with a comment about calling what's happening by its proper name:

Minneapolis checking in.

They're still disappearing my neighbors.

They're still jumped up shits afraid of a city that cares for each other.

They're still doing ethnic cleansing.

They're still nazis.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Heart of Dawn about Tom Homan's "look what you made us do" comments:

That's exactly how abusers talk. "Don't fight back. Its your own fault if I hurt you."

Next, it's MrWilson with a comment about right wing "comedy":

Right wingers don't tell jokes. Their humor is just disgust and dehumanization of out groups and implied threats, with a lol as punctuation.

Speaking of comedy, over on the funny side our first place winner is David with a theory about the Trump Phone's failure to materialize:

Probably camera problems

Test video recordings still don't match Kristi Noem's scene descriptions, and the phone keeps recording when it should have an unfortunate failure.

In second place, it's dfbomb again with another comment from Minneapolis:

Minneapolis would cordially like to invite Tom Homan outside for a game of "Hide and go fuck yourself."

Things were a little slow on the funny side this week, so we'll just do one editor's choice — an anonymous comment about a brief line in one of our posts where we described a document in case "you can't read it":

THAT'S LIBERAL BIAS!

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user's lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were telling congress not to gut Section 230 on their behalf, and we wrote about how revoking 230 would not "save democracy". This came as House Republicans announced their big, unconstitutional, ridiculous plan to take on Big Tech, and we wrote about how they could actually tackle the sector by just trying to stop being insane.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, the New York Times filed a ridiculous copyright lawsuit over a book mocking the paper for glamorizing war, a writer tried to claim libel and copyright infringement over a screencap of her tweet appearing in an article, and a judge tossed out the silly idea that the monkey of monkey selfie fame could hold the copyright to the photo. Meanwhile, copyright troll Malibu Media trotted out an "expert" witness who appeared to be completely clueless, Pissed Consumer got the go ahead to take on Roca Labs over its bogus DMCA takedowns, and we dedicated an episode of the podcast to looking at just how bad the TPP was.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, the big copyright troll in the news was ACS:Law, as an accounting firm that was helping it collect fines tried to call off the whole thing followed by ACS:Law apparently giving up entirely, but soon there was a new trolling operation on the block involving Paris Hilton's sex tape, and another with a porn company trying out a twist on the technique, while a copyright troll in Germany was using debt collectors to pressure people to pay up. Meanwhile, IP experts were saying ACTA was inconsistent with EU law, the US government was pushing pro- and anti-privacy internet rules at the same time, and Apple began using its special security screws to prevent people from opening their iPhones.

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no.

So the DOJ arrested him anyway.

On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church's publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed acts of journalism.

And by this morning they were both in federal custody (though since released).

Organizers of the protest, to the extent they had any real organizational control, were arrested. Pictures of at least one of those arrests were run through one AI platform or another to make those arrested appear to be in more distress than they actually had been.

When that didn't quench the thirst for cruelty and fascism of this particular regime, Pam Bondi's DOJ then attempted to go after the journalists themselves. For what crime? Anyone's guess, honestly. The DOJ attempted to get arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon from the courts, which told them to fuck all the way off. The DOJ then attempted to appeal the rejection without informing the lower court, and attempted to get the Appeals Court to hide the request under seal. That wasn't successful either.

But rather than admitting that violating the First Amendment rights of journalists was a total stinker of an endeavor, the DOJ convened a grand jury, apparently got an indictment, and then both Lemon and Fort were arrested at Bondi's direction.

Local Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, along with former CNN journalist Don Lemon, were arrested by federal agents following their coverage of a protest at a church in St. Paul. Don Lemon's attorney said he was "taken by federal agents" on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 29, while he was in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards. Local independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested at her home by federal agents.

A statement from the Center of Broadcast Journalism called the arrest "An assault on press and on the 1st Amendment."

"Georgia Fort, a trusted and cherished journalist in Minnesota, was arrested in the early morning hours for doing her job by covering a pop-up protest at Cities Church in St. Paul," the statement read. "It is an outrage that a vetted and credentialed member of the media would be in any way prosecuted for doing her appointed duty in covering news. If the federal government can come for Georgia no member of the supposed 'free' press is safe." 

This is incredibly dumb for a variety of reasons. For starters, the Minnesota courts, where any trial will take place, are not going to take kindly to the idea that it told the DOJ its requests for arrest warrants were hot garbage only to have that same DOJ end run around the courts to make those same arrests via a grand jury. It's a slap in the face to the very court system within which the DOJ will have to operate. Elie Mystal is spot on about this at The Nation.

The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don't need to be a legal scholar to know that arresting journalists for covering the news is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Lemon's arrest is also flatly illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal magistrate judge, Douglas L. Micko, to ask for an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration then appealed and lost that appeal. The legal system literally said the government couldn't arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to get him.

Georgia Fort is a prominent Black journalist based in Minnesota. She was out front in covering the George Floyd protests, and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I have little doubt that this prior reporting is among the reasons she was targeted by the Trump administration.

Add to that the very open question, based on the law that the DOJ is citing here, whether any of this actually violates a statute, by anyone involved in this at all. I would very much argue that it does not, by plain reading of the law. As Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic notes, the legal argument is garbage.

The indictment itself makes for a strange read. No attorneys other than political appointees appear on the filing—a hint that career Justice Department employees might not have wanted to be involved. The government treats Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without acknowledging any protections afforded by their role as journalists. Both charges derive from the FACE Act, a 1994 law meant to prevent anti-abortion protestors from restricting access to reproductive-health clinics. Here, though, the Justice Department is leveraging a lesser-known portion of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently departed from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used—probably because "it's plainly unconstitutional" as an overreach of Congress's authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes committed against houses of worship while at the Justice Department, was unimpressed with the legal reasoning in the indictment. "I think it's very likely to face dismissal," he said. Not only might courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also contest the charges on First Amendment grounds, and the indictment doesn't clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.

But it's even dumber than that. As Dan Froomkin points out, part of the indictment tries to argue that the "overt acts" needed to prove a "conspiracy" is… that these journalists… interviewed the pastor. Or, as the DOJ says, "peppered him with questions."

My goodness. How dare he commit acts of journalism?

Separately, you can watch the Don Lemon stream footage. He makes it very clear that he is there in his capacity as a journalist. He is not actually interrupting services. He is there covering the story. The same is true of Fort.

Both arrested journalists are Black. The head of the DOJ's "civil rights division," Harmeet Dhillon, celebrated by retweeting Republican operative Mike Davis calling Lemon "a klansman."

Davis, for those unfamiliar, went on a right-wing fabulist's podcast before the 2024 election and promised that if Trump won, opponents would be "hunted." He promised "retribution." He said: "We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious…. We're gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo."

That guy is now calling a Black journalist a "klansman" for doing journalism, while the head of Civil Rights retweets it approvingly.

It's not just Davis and Dhillon joyfully cheering on this blatant attack on the First Amendment. The White House itself posted a black and white photo of Don Lemon cheering on his arrest, calling it (ridiculously) the "St. Paul Church Riots" (there were no riots) and tweeting "When life gives you lemons…" along with chain emojis.

That will likely go right into Lemon's filing for vindictive prosecution.

Courts have already ordered both Lemon and Fort released, though they'll be back in court. In Lemon's case, the judge refused to issue the requested $100k bond the government asked for. The court also will allow him to travel internationally on a pre-planned trip, even though the government demanded he hand over his passport. All of this seems clearly designed for blatant intimidation over media coverage.

The DOJ is now treating journalism as conspiracy, questions as overt acts, and coverage as crime. Courts told them no and they did it anyway—gleefully celebrating the end of the rule of law, openly gloating about punishing the President's critics for their speech.

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.

Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.

Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It's whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.

Fair Use Protects Analysis—Even When It's Automated

U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn't originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn't disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.

Copying that works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That's why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don't substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.

Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use. 

Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what's at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won't be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology. 

Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated. 

A Road Forward For AI Training And Fair Use 

One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative. 

The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court's ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone's market share. 

AI Can Create Problems, But Expanding Copyright Is the Wrong Fix 

Workers' concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times may be core functions of government, but copyright law doesn't help with that task in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won't stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression. 

Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won't restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.  

Fair Use Still Matters

Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.

Search, indexing, and analysis didn't destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.

Republished from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.

If you've been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to "run" CBS News. And by "run" CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to be "restoring trust in journalism."

It's… not going well.

Weiss' inaugural "town hall" with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network's decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — has spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists that haven't quit yet.

Weiss has, as all fail-upward media brunchlords do, repeatedly tried to blame her staffers for both her incompetence and for not doing more to coddle her public image. Things have gotten so heated at the crumbling CBS that Weiss has had to "pause" her "Honestly" podcast to put out fires at CBS:

"Thursday morning on her Free Press platform, Weiss said that taking on CBS News is a "huge responsibility," before continuing, "So here is the news: 'Honestly' is taking a little bit of a pause. I know it is hard to hear that, it's definitely hard for me to do that because I love doing this show. But I think and I hope that you will understand why."

"Don't worry, it's not forever; we'll be back in just a few short months," she added."

There's a dash of hubris there for Weiss to think that she can fix the problems at CBS in "just a few short months." There's every indication Weiss not only has absolutely no idea what she's doing, but that she lacks the introspection to be able to realize that she's the problem and to adjust accordingly. That likely means she continues to flounder until she's inevitably replaced by somebody even worse.

As we've noted previously, the problem for Weiss isn't that she's bad at journalism (though that's certainly true). The problem for Weiss is that she's bad at ratings-grabbing propaganda, the primary function she was hired for. If you're going to create noxious state race-baiting propaganda, you have to at least make it entertaining — something Roger Aisles understood well.

Weiss' incompetence is trouble for a CBS/Paramount parent company that has not only seen ratings in free fall at CBS, they've watched their stock drop 40 percent since Larry Ellison's clumsy hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO).

Ellison, fresh off his new co-ownership stake in TikTok, clearly wants to dominate both old and new media and to create a modern version of state television. The sort of thing we've seen in countries like Russia and Hungary, where autocrats have hollowed out what was left of media and turned it into an extension of the state (something we've already seen across much of U.S. corporate media and Fox News):

During the Soviet era, at times of govt instability, the state broadcaster would typically preempt scheduled broadcasts by airing performances of Swan Lake

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) 2026-01-26T02:59:44.529Z

If there's any bright spot to this mess, it's that absolutely nobody in this chain of dysfunction, from the trust fund nepobaby son of Larry Ellison, to the weird contrarian culture war trolls they're hiring to spread agitprop, have the slightest idea what they're doing.

If U.S. media and democracy is saved from these zealots, it won't be thanks to competent media reforms by the opposition party (which pretty broadly don't exist in the United States, yet), it will be thanks to the raw, blistering hubris and incompetence of folks like Bari Weiss and David Ellison.

We've been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it's always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that's worth keeping in mind today as we're just a little more than 24 hours away from the deadline for the latest installment, Gaming Like It's 1930! The ticking clock doesn't mean you've missed the boat, it means now is the perfect time to get creative, whip up a simple game, and make your submission!

There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. In past years, we've been blown away by the creativity on display in even the most basic of games, so if you don't have anything to do tonight, why not try your hand?

Head over to the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use. Submissions close at midnight tomorrow, January 31st, and after that we'll be diving in to choose winners in our six categories. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year's winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year's winning entries in more detail.

We've already had some excellent submissions, and we can't wait to see what else comes in tomorrow night. Your game could be one of them!

A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about "border czar" Tom Homan's ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn't stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they'd just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex Pretti, Homan was shipped off to Minneapolis to replace fascist-fashion lover Greg Bovino, and he gave a speech Thursday morning that the press so desperately wanted to portray as him "de-escalating" the mess in Minneapolis.

So much of the coverage is about the supposed "drawdown" of federal troops in Minneapolis:

But, if you listen to his actual words, he's still the same old Tom Homan, and this is all for show. He talked about how he supposedly "begged" for the toning down of rhetoric:

Homan: "I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March — if the rhetoric doesn't stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn't right. I don't want to see anybody die."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:38:44.966Z

Hey Tom, gonna be bloodshed from who?

From who, Tom?

Because last I checked, the bloodshed has been entirely one-sided. Citizens of Minneapolis haven't shot anyone, Tom. Your agents have.

But, instead, Homan only wants the "de-escalation" to go in one direction, saying he demands that the rhetoric against law enforcement be toned down, not the demonization of people throughout the Minneapolis / St. Paul region:

Homan: "I call upon those officials to stand shoulder to shoulder with us to tone down the dangerous rhetoric and condemn all unlawful acts against law enforcement in the community"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:39:56.596Z

Where are the calls to de-escalate the dangerous, hateful language against Somali immigrants? Or asylum seekers? Or anyone exercising their First Amendment rights? Those don't count, Tom?

And, as Radley Balko points out, Homan has been at the front lines of encouraging violence:

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."-Homan in February"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."- Tom Homan in March"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T15:32:03.784Z

So, look, if we want to "tone down the rhetoric" and stop the "bloodshed," that is entirely on the federal government and people like you, Tom Homan, to do.

But this is Tom Homan. And he can't help himself. When asked how many ICE & CBP agents are on the ground, he talked about how 3,000 of them are "in theater." That's a freaking military term, Tom. You're admitting that ICE & CBP is an invading force.

Q: Can you be specific about how many ICE and CBP agents are currently operating in the state?HOMAN: 3,000. There's been some rotations. They've been in theater a long time. Day after day, can't eat in restaurants, people spin on you, blowing whistles at you. But my main focus now is draw down

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:57:19.995Z

As for the complaint that they "can't eat in restaurants," maybe that's because they're dining in restaurants, and then kidnapping the staff. Maybe don't do that?

Also, when asked why they needed 3,000 thugs to invade a city, he lied again, and claimed "because of the threats of violence."

CNN: How did we get to a place where we had Bovino having Border Patrol agents stopping citizens in interior of the country, asking them ID, creating fear? Who made the decisions to allow this kind of operation to proceed?HOMAN: The reason for the massive deployment is bc of the threats & violence

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:49:26.506Z

There has been little violence from citizens of Minneapolis. Just federal officers crashing cars, tear gassing people for no reason at all, kidnapping, beating, and disappearing people. Oh, and shooting at least three people so far. The "threat of violence" came entirely from your forces. Don't gaslight America and say they had to come because of threats of violence.

You are the threats of violence.

As for the news headlines about a "drawdown," that's bullshit as well. In the video above, Homan says the pace of any "drawdown" is dependent on the "hateful rhetoric" stopping. Way to admit to a blatant First Amendment violation, Tom: "the beatings will continue until you're nicer to us" is a violation of basic fundamental rights.

Homan also admitted that federal thugs will only leave one they get "cooperation" from the city and state governments, getting help in further kidnapping and disappearing more residents.

Homan: "The withdrawal of law enforcement resources here is dependent upon cooperation … as we see that cooperation happen, then the redeployment will happen"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:43:34.390Z

And, so far, the people of Minneapolis are not impressed and have seen no evidence of any such drawdown or de-escalation.

Tom Homan wasn't sent to de-escalate anything other than all the negative press attention from federal thugs murdering people in the Twin Cities. And most of the media ate it right up.

The story of Minneapolis is not a story of "threats of violence." It's a story of violence, murder, and mayhem entirely from federal officers. The story of the people of Minneapolis is a story of a community banding together to help each other and support each other in the face of such unhinged and unnecessary violence.

Yeah, there's the overt cruelty. There's the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from "shithole" countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief.

Then there's everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts to kidnap people who are just trying to follow the law by performing their required check-ins. The sweeping up of anyone in the area who looks a little bit foreign any time federal officers are actually engaged in a "targeted" arrest.

There's so much of it happening every day that it's easy to lose sight of all the victims of this administration's cruelty. There's a human cost that never factors into the administration's calculations because, well, most of the upper echelon ghouls don't actually consider these people to be "human."

Politico's Kyle Cheney has been tracking thousands of immigration cases since the anti-migrant surge began. What he's collected — and this is only a small part of it — should make your blood boil. After all, you still have some pumping through your veins, even if the administration seems to be able to function on bile alone.

Consider the case of Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old Iranian refugee who fled religious persecution in her country, arriving in the United States in May of 1999. Her asylum request didn't work out and she was given an order of removal in October 1999. However, she was not deported and has lived here for the past 18 years under an Order of Supervision and Unsupervised Parole (OSUP) after she was picked up by ICE in 2008. In other words, as long as she continued to check in with the immigration court, she could stay indefinitely.

That ended once Trump took office and sent his goon squads out to remove pretty much anyone he felt didn't belong here. ICE officers arrested her at a check-in last November, without any prior notice or warrant for arrest. The government has already admitted it doesn't really have any way to deport her to Iran since our government has no diplomatic relationship with the country for obvious reasons. ICE can't deport her, but it also won't release her. She's been stuck in a detention center since this arrest — a place where she can't receive the medical help she needs. On top of that, ICE lost the medication she had on her when she was arrested and denied her an opportunity to attend a pre-scheduled medical appointment.

Why? Because it can. Even the government can't explain why it's doing this to her, instead assuming it can continue to do what it wants as long as it keeps tapping the 26-year-old order of removal. The California judge handling her petition lays this all out in devastating fashion:

Respondents do not contest either of these claims—or, indeed, any of Petitioner's other claims. Respondents' Answer to the Petition consists of three sentences, two of which recite the procedural history of this case. The remaining sentence reads, in full, "[a]t this time, Respondents do not have an opposition argument to present." They have not denied or contested any of the factual allegations in the Petition. They have not offered any additional facts or defenses. They have not argued that different statutes or regulations should govern this case. They have not lodged any relevant documents, despite being ordered to do so.

These are the actions of a government that feels it's above the law. It can't even be bothered to fake something up that might be taken as a counterargument. Instead, it hands in three sentences and moves on to address the outcome of another violation of rights in similarly cavalier fashion. Look at these assholes, the court says without actually using any of those words:

Thus, it appears that Respondents arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

Further, having acknowledged that they have no opposition to present to Petitioner's habeas petition, have they voluntarily released her? No. Thus, Petitioner remains in custody, and her counsel, and the Court, are required to expend resources and effort to address a matter that Respondents either cannot be bothered to defend or realize is indefensible.

That's the other "fuck you" this administration uses. There's the overt stuff that makes headlines and whips up the frothy loyalists. Then there's stuff like this where the government doesn't even care enough about the people it's illegally locking up to even toss a few paragraphs of boilerplate into the mix. This is just part of the dehumanization process: the administrative shrug. A collective GOP "so what" when confronted about the violations of the law.

"Worst of the worst" always meant "people the bigots in charge don't like." This ruling deals with a Mexican man who has lived here since 2006 with his wife, raising three children and, like most migrants, working hard, paying taxes, and living clean. When asked about this, the administration shrugs again — a shrug that prompts an order for his release:

Respondents make no suggestion that Audberto J. has a criminal history, and the Court concludes he has none.

There's more in that thread and it's all awful. There's the Minnesota man who was arrested and tossed in a detainment center despite having active refugee status. Or how about the mother with a 5-month-old baby and recently discovered heart condition who was arrested and sent to a detention center 1,100 miles away from her child and her primary physician? Are you cool with that, Trump voters? The court certainly isn't.

Ms. Lah has already lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby. While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to Operation PARRIS and other ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.

It is craven. This is the government's shrug in response to a judge asking why it sent Lah to a detention center in Houston, Texas almost immediately after arresting her.

On January 14, 2026, Respondents filed their one-page Response to Petition For Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion to Transfer but it did not actually respond to the Petition nor follow Judge Davis's Order to Show Cause. Respondents assert that Ms. Lah was transferred to Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, within hours of Ms. Lah's arrest, "due to local detention bed space shortage." Respondents' Motion asserts that the transfer occurred before the Court's Order to Show Cause enjoining removal. Respondents submitted the Declaration of Angela Minner in support of their Motion and purportedly attached documents in support. No documents were attached, and no support was otherwise provided.

In any normal world, the people handing in this sloppy work would be reprimanded by their superiors and perhaps even taken off immigration cases. That will never happen here. Not bothering to do the job right is just an easy way to do what you want while providing a minimum amount of lip service to any notions of the federal rules of procedure. If it destroys lives, harms people, or actually deports them to places where they'll end up dead, so be it. They were never considered people by this administration in the first place.

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Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that's saying something:

I think everybody - the American public believe it's absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump's tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that's not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.

Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let's establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump's excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There's no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump's tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.

And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt's statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn't profiting off his Presidency.

According to Forbes, Trump's wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he's ever been.

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he's stocked with cronies.

I need to repeat that. Donald Trump is trying to more than double his personal wealth by simply demanding that the IRS, which he controls, give him $10 billion in taxpayer funds. This goes beyond corruption. You need a different word for this altogether.

Let's break down the multiple levels on which this is absolutely batshit:

The President is suing his own government. Think about this for a moment. Trump controls the executive branch. The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump's personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President's personal lawyers. The idea that Trump can file a lawsuit against agencies he controls, staffed with loyalists who seem to believe they work for him personally rather than the American people, is so blatantly corrupt that it puts pretty much all past corruption to shame.

As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump's own lawyers get to decide whether Trump's claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it's now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.

The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying "harm" Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:

ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants' unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants' confidential tax documents.

And:

Because of Defendants' wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight ("8") separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs' financial records and taxpayer history

Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That's apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.

And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren't) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump's defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.

But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just "settle" and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.

The complaint undermines itself. In a truly galaxy-brained move, Trump's lawyers included this gem from Littlejohn's deposition:

When asked, "so you were looking to do something to cause some kind of harm to him?" Mr. Littlejohn responded, "Less about harm, more just about a statement. I mean, there's little harm that can actually be done to him, I think. . . He's shown a remarkable resilience."

They put this in their own complaint. The guy who leaked the documents, when asked under oath whether he intended to cause harm, essentially said "nah, you can't really hurt that guy." And Trump's lawyers thought this helped their case.

Or… they knew that it doesn't matter how bad the complaint actually is because Trump is effectively playing both sides, and that means the side the benefits Trump personally (at the expense of the American taxpayer) is almost certain to win out.

Isn't it great the Roberts Supreme Court said there's nothing the courts can do to stop this?

The legal theory is absurd. The complaint argues that the IRS should have known Littlejohn would leak documents because… the Treasury Inspector General had warned about "security deficiencies" in the IRS's data protection systems. By this logic, any time any government system has any vulnerability, taxpayers should be on the hook for billions if that vulnerability is ever exploited. It's malpractice dressed up in legal formatting.

The complaint also leans heavily on politicized language that has no place in a legal filing:

From May 2019 through at least September 2020, former IRS employee Charles "Chaz" Littlejohn, who was jointly employed by the IRS and/or one of its contractors, illegally obtained access to, and disclosed Plaintiffs' tax returns and return information to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other leftist media outlets.

"Leftist media outlets." In a legal complaint. Filed by a sitting president. Against his own government. Demanding $10 billion. This is a political document, rather than a serious legal complaint. Because, again, the legal stance here makes no difference. There is no adversarial process. Only Trump's insatiable desire to take people's money.

This is especially rich given everything else happening. This lawsuit lands at a time when Trump's administration is gutting the IRS's enforcement capabilities, when the DOJ has been transformed into Trump's personal law firm, and when the government is lurching from shutdown to shutdown. But sure, let's cut Donald Trump a check for ten billion dollars because reporters wrote stories about his taxes—taxes he refused to release voluntarily despite decades of precedent (and which also, once leaked, didn't appear to do him the slightest bit of political damage).

For all the talk about cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," the president himself is attempting to walk off with enough taxpayer money to fund the entire National Endowment for the Arts for the next 60 years.

And the most galling part? Every other presidential candidate in modern history released their tax returns willingly. Trump's entire complaint rests on the premise that he was harmed by the public learning information that every other candidate simply… disclosed. The audacity of claiming $10 billion in damages for being forced into a transparency that was voluntary for everyone else is genuinely breathtaking.

Littlejohn broke the law. He knew it, he did it anyway, and he's paying for it with five years of his life. Some have argued he was a whistleblower serving the public interest; others say a law is a law. But none of that matters here, because what Trump is doing has nothing to do with justice or compensation for actual harm.

This is a sitting president attempting to use the legal system to transfer $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury—which belongs to the American people—into his personal bank account. The case will be litigated by a Justice Department stuffed with his former personal attorneys. The damages he claims are fantastical. The harm he allegedly suffered resulted in him getting richer than ever and winning re-election.

So yes, Karoline, you're right: this is absurd. Just not in the way you meant.

According to new data from the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That's compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services.

Of course BLS doesn't explain why streaming video prices are soaring at such a dramatic rate. It's something we've touched on repeatedly: as giant media companies increasingly consolidate, they're trying to find new, frequently obnoxious ways to continue to goose quarterly earnings and create the illusion of perpetual growth despite a major slowdown in new subscribers.

That means significantly more ads (even if you pay for no ads). It means higher overall prices despite a decline in quality. It means layoffs, worse customer service, and companies that refuse to even host popular content they paid for because they're too cheap to pay for residuals. It means new annoying restrictions on what you're paying for, and companies that harass you for sharing your password with your college kid or elderly relative. It means more lazy, clickbait content catering to the lowest common denominator and less quality, thoughtful art.

It means enshittification.

And it's going to get worse. The corrupt Trump administration is demolishing whatever is left of U.S. media consolidation limits, ensuring another massive round of harmful "growth for growth's sake" mergers that temporarily goose earnings, create tax breaks, and badly justify outsized executive compensation, but generally make all of the existing problems in the industry worse (especially for labor and consumers).

According to the BLS, streaming and gaming subscriptions and rentals saw higher "streamflation" (read: price gouging) in 2025 than any of the other industries or services measured. The closest comparison was coffee (28 percent), which is largely soaring due to Trump's ignorant and pointless tariffs that consumers have to pay for.

If you're old enough, you've already watched this play out with traditional cable (many of the executives screwing up streaming were the same ones that screwed up traditional cable). So you know the pattern: they'll continue to push their luck on price hikes, driving many people to free alternatives (or piracy), at which point the executives who made out like bandits blame everyone and everything but themselves.

None of this is reflected honestly by any of the media companies that cover this sort of thing, because their tendency toward honest and courageous journalism is being undermined by the same forces. Like check out this Hollywood Reporter breakdown of the issue, which they dub "streamflation." They amusing hint at the fact there might be causes for this massive surge in pricing, but can't get around to listing any:

Again, because enshittification doesn't discriminate, and the same forces making streaming video more expensive and shittier are taking a hatchet to U.S. journalism and truth in service to the almighty dollar. Corporate media is incapable of reporting honesty about corporate media: there's no money in it.

I've been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on legislating the following rules:

• Games sold must be left in a functional state
• Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
• The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
• The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

If you can find fault in any of the above, tell me what that would be in the comments. I personally see no such flaws. I particularly can't find them in the context of a present reality in which games that people paid very real money for are ripped from their digital hands because publishers simply stop supporting them (online games) or because they were designed with planned obsolescence included (single player games that sunset when they can't check in with servers (hi there, NBA2K games!)).

In order to compel the EU Parliament to take up the issue in session, the petition needed to achieve 1 million signatures. That happened last summer. Step 2 in the process is a review by the EU to validate those signatures, to be sure there is no shady fuckery in them. And that just happened, with the petition boasting one of the smallest percentage of invalidated signatures in memory.

Stop Killing Games volunteer Moritz Katzner has shared an update on the popular European Union Citizens' Initiative to its official subreddit. The EU has successfully verified 1,294,188 of Stop Killing Games' 1,448,270 signatures, easily clearing the one million minimum count it needed to move forward in the process.

In the comments, user MikeyIfYouWanna calculated that about 89% of the submitted signatures were legitimate. Katzner agreed, estimating that Stop Killing Games has one of the top three lowest failed signature rates among EU Citizens' Initiatives.

"We're sitting at around 10%, while the best-performing initiatives tend to fall in the 10-15% range, which puts us firmly in the upper bracket," Katzner wrote. "Some initiatives see failure rates as high as 20-25% and still manage to get over the line, but it's worth noting that the overall sample size is quite small, only 11 initiatives."

Now, I will admit that I am no expert in how the EU legislative process works, nor how it interacts with the laws of its member countries. Over on the Stop Killing Games subreddit, where this signature achievement was announced, several commenters appeared aligned on how this works moving forward. Here is the best of them, from user AShortUsernameIndeed.

There's a few steps. The EU issues regulations (which are EU-wide laws) and directives (which are guidelines for national legislation). Since this initiative is framed as a consumer rights issue, the most that can come out of it on the EU level is a directive (because the EU does not have direct legislative powers on consumer rights). The actual laws will then be written by the legislatures of each member country, separately. So the steps are:

• get the EU commission and parliament to decide to legislate, then
• lobby them to get a directive that actually does what the initiative wants, then
• lobby the parliaments of all 27 member states to get the directive transformed into laws that actually do what the initiative wants.

That's a few years of work ahead, in the best case. We'll see what happens.

That looks correct, from my own poking around. And it does indeed mean that there are both years of work ahead before this turns into actual European laws and there are millions of lobbying dollars to overcome. But it's progress, if only incremental.

And while video game preservation has long been important to me, I will admit I never thought I'd see the day when a governmental body such as the EU Parliament would actually take up the issue. Through the power of the internet, a collective appreciation for the preservation of culture, and volunteer work, however, it appears that will happen at the very least.

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

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

In this week's roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, Senior Resident Fellow for Global and Democratic Governance at the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council. Together, they discuss:

• Who Owns TikTok in the U.S. Now? (NY Times)
• TikTok is investigating why some users can't write 'Epstein' in messages (NPR)
• TikTok users freak out over app's 'immigration status' collection — here's what it means (TechCrunch)
• TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes (Wired)
• Social network UpScrolled sees surge in downloads following TikTok's US takeover (TechCrunch)
• Europe votes to tackle deep dependence on US tech in sovereignty drive (Computerworld)
• Meta hides followers and following lists for users based in Iran (Iran International)
• Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only (Rest of World)
• The 'Social Media Addiction' Narrative May Be More Harmful Than Social Media Itself (Techdirt)
• Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it (The Verge)

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration's insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison.

For months, it's been clear the intelligence doesn't back the claims made by the deliberately stupid leaders of the Trump administration. A leak of intelligence information last May forced the Director of National Intelligence — personified in this administration by the always incredible (in the bad way) Tulsi Gabbard — to forcefully deny the TdA findings compiled by the Intelligence Community she supposedly oversees.

That's on top of the sketchy system run by even sketchier federal law enforcement officers to determine who is or isn't a member of a foreign gang like TdA. The stuff these slackers pointed to — tattoos, having any contact whatsoever with anyone else the government is pretending is a TdA member, etc. — wasn't actually backed by any research or intelligence-gathering. Unlike MS-13 and other gangs, TdA doesn't seem to require permanent skin ink as part of its onboarding process.

This hype about TdA was used to justify everything from the stripping of due process rights to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to push past whatever minimal resistance was offered by courts or timid members of Congress. The administration may now be more focused on punishing Trump's enemies, but the phrase "enemies both foreign and domestic" is still in play, which means the administration will still leverage "but their gangs" proclamations whenever possible.

But, in order to do so, the administration has to willfully ignore the growing body of evidence generated by its own agencies that contradict this narrative, as Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro report for Wired:

While senior administration officials portrayed TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite "intelligence gaps" in understanding how the group operated on US soil: Whether it had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflecting any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether US-based incidents pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous, profit-driven criminals.

These are what the documents acquired by Wired — internal law enforcement documents marked "sensitive" and not intended for public disclosure — actually said about TdA and its alleged international efforts:

While senior administration officials spoke of "invasion," "irregular warfare," and "narco-terrorism," field-level reporting consistently portrayed Tren de Aragua in the US as a fragmented, profit-driven criminal group, with no indication of centralized command, strategic coordination, or underlying political motive. The criminal activity described is largely opportunistic—if not mundane—ranging from smash-and-grab burglaries and ATM "jackpotting" to delivery-app fraud and low-level narcotics sales.

The boots on the ground can't find anything that agrees with what's coming out of the administration's collective mouth on any given day. And the lack of connective tissue between TdA and the Venezuelan government makes Trump' plan to "take over" the country look even more illegal than it already looked, back when Pete Hegseth's Defense Department was limiting itself to murdering people in international waters.

Administration officials — especially those making the most noise about TdA = international terrorism — have always had access to this information. And they've deliberately chosen to ignore it because it undercuts the supposed justifications for their massive, continuous power grabs.

This is the fact-free environment that is being forced on us by an administration that has chosen to only serve itself. Here's America's racist grandpa expounding on his idiotic hatred of one particular nation:

Trump singled out Venezuela in particular. "I was so angry with Venezuela," he said. "They emptied their prisons, almost entirely emptied their prisons, into the United States."

Here's the reality:

Over a 22-month period, CBP's own detection methods identified no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. 

Not quite the prison flooding Trump claimed. And even after CBP engaging in some very imaginative extrapolation of this small number (by simply adding in the unproven assumption that "one-half of one percent" of all Venezuelans seeking to enter the US "had ties to TdA") only raised that number to a little over 3,000 possible TdA gang members, which is far below the number anyone would reasonably believe amounted to an "invasion" by an international criminal cartel with a strong desire to get some terrorism on. It's even more stupid when you add in the other intel: that most TdA activity tends to be random, low-level crimes of opportunity, rather than the sort of coordinated effort you'd find in larger, far more competent criminal cartels.

While it's not that surprising that a presidential administration would filter out facts that don't fit the narratives it's trying to pitch, it's far beyond abhorrent that a president who claims he loves America and Americans more than any president in history would consider them to be nothing more than occasionally useful rubes. But those who continue to love Trump no matter how often he lies to them have proven they don't care what's being said. They only care who's saying it.

History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it's the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. As they are here, which is why it's time to recognize: for all intents and purposes, how the government of the United States of America is behaving is just like how the German Nazis behaved. It is doing to the people within its national embrace exactly what the Nazis did to theirs. The comparison to 20th Century Nazi Germany is not something that 21st Century America is still working up to; it's where we have already arrived.

That we have not (yet) set up an Auschwitz-Birkenau, replete with crematoria, is not evidence to the contrary. After all, the German Nazis didn't just suddenly start killing millions in the 1940s; their crimes against humanity began years earlier, in the 1930s. Even Hitler himself referred to the mass murder Auschwitz facilitated as the "final solution," because it was the tactic deployed only after he had already committed plenty of other atrocities first—atrocities that look an awful lot like the ones we are inflicting now upon the human beings in our own national midst.

In the case of both nations the atrocities began, as such horrors often do, with the "othering" of people, as if there were those who, by virtue of something about their own humanity, were somehow disqualified from being part of our national community. While the Trump Administration may have begun by ostensibly focusing on "illegal immigrants"—which itself is a grotesquely deceptive label (an immigrant cannot be illegal; an immigrant can only immigrate illegally, and, for the most part, such illegality is but a civil or misdemeanor offense and not the heinously lawless act the administration paints it as)—like the German Nazis it has also stigmatized racial, religious, and ethnic groups comprising America's cultural tapestry, as well as LGBTQ+ people. The rhetoric it espouses is all about conditioning the public to believe that there are some people who belong in America, and some who need to be expunged from it, so that the public will get on board aiding, supporting, and even celebrating the expunging that will soon follow.

The horror in both countries then continues by upending the law such that the targeted people cannot legally belong anymore. In Germany we saw how Jewish families who had been in the country for generations suddenly lost their rights as citizens. Here in the U.S. denaturalization has so far only been threatened, albeit palpably, but for non-citizens whose presence in the country has so far been entirely lawful, the Trump Administration has been unilaterally changing that status, moving people from welcomed additions to our community to accused interlopers who must be expelled and, per the government, right now.

But before the expulsions can happen, first the targeted people need to be rounded up. And so a force of federal police has been showing up at people's homes, schools, jobs, health care providers, bus stops, and anywhere American life takes place to arrest people, without warrants or due process, for no crime at all other than existing. Even if not yet officially prisoners, everyone targeted by the regime has already been made to be, by forcing them to withdraw from life in fear. Governor Walz is absolutely right: there is some child writing a new diary about what it is like to have to hide from a lawless regime incapable of respecting the law and liberties that are supposed to protect them, just like the German Nazis refused to respect any of it either.

After rounding its targets up, the American government then does what the German Nazis did and "concentrate" those they have snatched in detention centers, or, as in the case of some of the larger complexes, "camps," if you will. There these people—even small children—are kept as un-convicted prisoners, unable to leave on their own volition while, just like the Nazis' victims, they are forced to live in inhumane conditions—assuming they manage to stay alive at all. Here history has been loudly echoing once again, as the stories emerging from America's human warehouses are, as the German Nazis' were, tales of inadequate food and healthcare, brutality by the guards, and indifferent murder.

The comparison to history does not even stop there. For instance, German Nazis also liked to banish their prisoners to far-flung nations where they could be imprisoned instead. It is an example the Trump Administration has already followed, such as by sending its own to places like CECOT in El Salvador or other nations around the world where a secret flight could be sent in accordance with a secret deal made with a regime willing to accommodate America's evil. Furthermore, the Trump Administration has continued to walk in the path of the German Nazis in its penalization of any dissenting voice that would challenge its actions. Here, too, opponents of the regime have also become targets of its brutal power, being entered into databases, surveilled, and even summarily executed.

Naturally there are of course some differences between then and now. In fact, one of the biggest differences between what the Germany Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s did then and what the United States government is doing now is that we're mostly using airplanes instead of box cars to traffic innocent people to places where at best they are imprisoned, often tortured, and generally put in mortal peril. And, unlike the German Nazis, who were meticulous in their paperwork, our government can't seem to be bothered keeping track of whom we have sent to their doom. But apart from these differences what is happening now is still fundamentally the same as what happened then. Families are still being broken up, children are effectively being orphaned (even citizen children, who are also being expatriated), and lives and futures are being destroyed, if not ended outright. All without due process, and in grotesque volume, just as during the Holocaust.

However, there is another important difference: that so many in America can see what is happening for what it is and be willing to stand against it. There are of course stories from the Holocaust of people resisting Nazism and trying to save their neighbors—Anne Frank's, for instance—but history lacks good analogs to what is happening now, like in Minnesota, where virtually the entire community has stood in solidarity to shield their neighbors and protest en masse, with even local government pushing back as well.

But that wonderful exception to America's descent into Nazism does not mean the descent hasn't already happened. The comparison remains too apt, and too important to run from. Because it also is instructive for how we got here. After all, how could it have happened here, in a country strong enough to have defeated the actual German Nazis, with its nearly 250-year old constitutional order that should have prevented everything that is now happening. But the answer is revealing: because neither regime committed their crimes with any legitimacy. In both cases, the sitting governments had to destroy the law that would have restricted their evil in order to perpetuate it.

Of course, even if the Weimar Republic had been too weak to resist it, surely America should have been more durable and able to resist such a threat emerging from within. Yet here we find ourselves, which itself adds to the list of reasons why it is so important to realize it: because thinking it can't happen here is precisely why it has happened here. Saying it can't and wouldn't happen here is exactly what ensures that it can and will. It could and it did, because too many ignored one of the critical lessons of the Holocaust, which is that its horrors don't come from nothing. Yes, there are malevolent people, but they only have power over us when good people do nothing with the power they have to stop it. And here far too many people who should have protected us from what is now happening turned a blind eye to it while it was brewing on the horizon and in doing so cleared the way for it.

As history keeps demonstrating, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Which is why it is so important to stop burying our heads in the sand, or, worse, try to excuse the inexcusable by rationalizing, even if only out of some sense of misplaced patriotic vanity, that what is happening is anything less than what we believed should never be able to happen again. It is only by recognizing that this evil has slipped through our defenses that those defenses can be fortified.

And it is important to start now, because, again, the story of Nazi Germany offers even more important lessons. One is that there will come a tipping point after which it may be impossible to stop the horrors the government is perpetuating without risking war. Furthermore, even if the atrocities the American government is committing were to stop today—and at last there finally seems some political enthusiasm for trying to get them stopped—hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people have already been traumatized, tortured, or killed by these monsters we allowed to run around among us for the last year wearing our flag. There is no undo button for what has befallen them. But if we act now we can save others. As well as ourselves.

Because one other key lesson is that this evil doesn't just victimize others; it victimizes everyone. It is not just the targets of the regime but everyone's welfare that is at stake. The history of the Holocaust shows how ultimately every German suffered along with the people the Nazis specifically targeted. There is no allowing this evil to happen to just some among us. We're all in this country and world together with our fates inexorably intertwined. These are crimes being committed against all of us, trying to destroy the fabric of our nation, its values, and all the law that is supposed to protect us all. Saving everyone is the only way to save ourselves.

And the first step to salvation is acknowledging the true danger we face.

Note: I originally started writing this post because I thought it had an important point to make. Then I saw the execrable news that the US Holocaust Museum had the gall to criticize the comparisons being drawn between what is unfolding against the vulnerable among us now, and what unfolded decades ago against the vulnerable in Nazi Germany, as if any victims had some sort of a monopoly on sympathy for being victimized, and it only became more relevant. I may not be a Trump sycophant unlawfully operating one of the nation's most important museums, but I've visited enough Holocaust memorials and museums, studied enough Nazi propaganda in academic environments, and toured enough concentration camps to have learned the lessons that curators in every instance have been desperate to teach the future. The US Holocaust Museum board should think about becoming similarly educated so that they, too, can learn that the point of all these efforts archiving and instructing on the past is NOT to take the Nazis' side.

This week, a major trial kicked off in Los Angeles in which hundreds of families sued Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, accusing the companies of intentionally designing their products to be addictive (though Snap and TikTok both settled on the eve of the trial) . From the Guardian:

For the first time, a huge group of parents, teens and school districts is taking on the world's most powerful social media companies in open court, accusing the tech giants of intentionally designing their products to be addictive. The blockbuster legal proceedings may see multiple CEOs, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, face harsh questioning.

A long-awaited series of trials kicks off in Los Angeles superior court on Tuesday, in which hundreds of US families will allege that Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube's platforms harm children. Once young people are hooked, the plaintiffs allege, they fall prey to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and other mental health issues. Approximately 1,600 plaintiffs are included in the proceedings, involving more than 350 families and 250 school districts.

The lawyers involved are explicitly using the tobacco playbook, comparing social media to cigarettes. But there's an important point here: "social media addiction" isn't actually a recognized clinical addiction. And a fascinating new study in Nature's Scientific Reports suggests that our collective insistence on using addiction language might actually be making things worse for users who want to change their behavior.

The researchers conducted two studies. In the first, they surveyed a nationally representative sample of adult Instagram users and found something striking: only about 2% of users showed symptoms that would put them at risk for addiction based on the clinical criteria in the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. But when asked directly if they felt addicted, 18% of users agreed at least somewhat. In other words, people are dramatically overestimating whether they're actually addicted.

This matters a lot, because calling yourself addicted can have serious consequences. The study found that users who perceived themselves as more addicted (but not necessarily more habitual) reported feeling less control over their use and had made more unsuccessful attempts to change their behavior. From the study:

Self-labeling of clinical conditions (e.g., I think I'm depressed) has proved to be associated with maladaptive responses, including lowered self-efficacy and perceived control over the pathology

To test whether the addiction framing actually causes these problems rather than just correlating with them, the researchers ran a second study. They had some participants reflect on their own "addictive" Instagram use after reading language from the U.S. Surgeon General's somewhat questionable report warning that "frequent, excessive social media use is addictive." The control group answered the same questions but without the addiction framing first.

The results were clear and somewhat striking: simply priming people to think about their social media use as an addiction reduced their perceived control, increased both self-blame and blaming the app, and made them recall more failed attempts to cut back. The addiction framing itself creates a feeling of helplessness! The addiction to "addiction framing" may be a big part of the problem!

It is impressive that even the two-minute exposure to addiction framing in our research was sufficient to produce a statistically significant negative impact on users. This effect is aligned with past literature showing that merely seeing addiction scales can negatively impact feelings of well-being. Presumably, continued exposure to the broader media narrative around social media addiction has even larger and more profound effects. In conclusion, the addiction label does not empower users to regain control over their use. Instead, it hinders users by reducing feelings of control, increasing self-blame, and making the experience slightly less positive.

Perhaps one could argue that everyone screaming about social media addiction is doing more real harm than any actual social media product itself.

This matters because for the vast majority of heavy social media users, the problem isn't addiction in any clinical sense. It's habit. Habits and addictions are different psychological phenomena requiring different interventions. As the researchers note:

For the majority of social media users, however, curbing excessive use involves primarily controlling habits. Like any other habit, social media habits can become misaligned with the original motivations for use (e.g., to obtain social rewards), or conflict with other goals (e.g., sharing true information). Strong habits are notoriously difficult to control with willpower alone. For habitual social media users, the narrative of addiction and willpower-based attempts to control behavior could profitably be replaced with habit change strategies to realign their social media use with their current preferences.

Habits are context-triggered automatic behaviors. You pick up your phone in certain situations because you've done it a thousand times before, not because you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms or uncontrollable cravings, like an addiction. And habit change strategies—like removing triggers, changing your environment, or practicing substitute activities—are fundamentally different from addiction treatment.

But you wouldn't know any of this from the media coverage. The researchers analyzed three years of news articles and found that stories about "social media addiction" vastly outnumber stories about "social media habits." The addiction framing is everywhere. And every time the Surgeon General warns about addiction, every time a lawsuit alleges platforms are designed to be addictive, every time a news story describes teens as hooked, it reinforces the idea that users are powerless victims.

Indeed, the study found that the very lawsuits that went to trial this week are likely contributing to the problem.

In addition, over the 36 assessment months, the number of articles discussing "social media habits" never approached the number of articles including the term "social media addiction" (see Fig. 2). The stories driving these effects were often lawsuits. For example, the May 2022 and October 2024 peaks for "social media addiction" related to news reporting on multiple lawsuits against Meta (owners of Instagram). In addition, the May 2023 Surgeon General's warning about social media addiction seems to have contributed to the steady drumbeat of new articles during the April-June 2023 period for "social media addiction."

To be clear: most social media companies absolutely design their products with increasing engagement in mind. There are plenty of corporate incentives to keep you using the app longer. And some people genuinely do use social media in ways that harm their lives. Both things can be true while "addiction" remains the wrong frame. The question is whether calling it an addiction actually helps anyone, or whether it just makes people feel powerless.

But there's a meaningful difference between "this product is designed to form habits" and "this product is chemically addictive like heroin." A chemical addiction involves tolerance, withdrawal, and physiological dependence. The study found that only about 4% of users reported experiencing anything akin to withdrawal symptoms (restlessness or trouble when prohibited from using) often or very often. The most common "symptom" was simply thinking about Instagram a lot—which probably describes anyone who uses any service frequently.

I think about Techdirt a lot. Am I "addicted" to it?

The addiction framing removes human agency from the equation. It treats users as helpless victims who can't possibly resist the siren song of the infinite scroll. But the same study that found 2% of users at risk for addiction also found that 50% of frequent users recognized they had habits around Instagram use. Those users aren't powerless. They can change their environment, their cues, their routines. But first they have to believe that's possible—and the addiction narrative tells them it isn't.

Misclassifying frequent social media and technology use as addictive has muddled public understanding of the psychology behind these behaviors and likely inhibits users' understanding of the ways to effectively control their own behavior.

It also makes the technology appear inherently harmful, when (as pretty much every study keeps showing) only a very small percentage of people seem to have truly negative experiences with it. That should be cause to create targeted solutions for those who are genuinely struggling, not to declare an entire category of technology dangerous for everyone.

So here we are: lawsuits claiming to protect users from social media's harms may themselves be contributing to those harms by amplifying the addiction narrative. The lawyers will get paid either way. But if we actually want to help people develop healthier relationships with technology, we could start by not telling them they're powerless addicts—and instead give them the tools to change their habits.

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Let's open with a joke:

Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than "any domestic law enforcement agency."

"I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children," he said. "Not because we want to be, but because we have to be."

Granted, the punchline is weak and the person delivering it is even weaker, but for ex-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino — he of the routine violation of court orders and a predilection for Nazi-esque outerwear — to suggest that any part of the anti-migrant hate train is good with children is laughable. That's some gallows ass humor right there.

Trump didn't invent separating children from parents when detaining and deporting migrants, but he was the first to turn it into the rule, rather than the tragic exception. His second administration is definitely the one filled with people whose eyes absolutely light up every time they destroy the life of an immigrant.

Here's what Bovino was defending, while doing his best to talk around the issue. This photo is courtesy of the school that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos attended before being arrested (along with his father) and sent to a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from their home.

That's a federal officer holding onto the child's backpack, as if the frightened child might make a run for freedom at any point.

Since that moment went viral, tons of conflicting narratives have been sent out into the public domain. The government has said the usual moronic, hateful stuff about the father being an illegal immigrant who abandoned his child at school when officers closed in on him. The father's lawyer claims the father has a pending asylum claim, which doesn't actually make him an illegal immigrant. In fact, it means he can't be detained or deported until his case is heard.

Stumbling onto the scene following the second execution of a Minneapolis resident in the past three weeks is JD Vance, who was apparently sent out by the president to charm their critics into submission. But being charming or empathetic or otherwise projecting something resembling "normal human being" has never been one of Vance's skills. So, while he opened up with something approaching respecting the humanity of others — that being that he has a five-year-old of his own — he soon veered in the direction of MAGA incantations to claim the child got everything that was coming to him.

In Minneapolis, Vance sought to appear empathetic toward the child. He declared that he too has a 5-year-old, and said he'd been moved by the story. However, he said he'd done "follow-up research" and discovered that the father was an "illegal alien."

"Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?" asked Vance, speaking of ICE. He then scoffed: "If the argument is that you can't arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity."

"Follow up research" of course means "handed DHS talking points." And referring to the father as an illegal alien (repeatedly) is just a lie of convenience. And it's probably not even an intentional lie, as Greg Sargent points out in The New Republic. It's just Vance's worldview — one shared by plenty of people in the administration — getting out ahead of his pathetic attempt to calm the Minnesota waters.

But an even more grotesque Trump-Vance stance here is going unnoticed. Vance simply doesn't think it's a misnomer to call the father an "illegal alien," despite his asylum claim. That's because Vance plainly doesn't believe those awaiting asylum adjudication are here legitimately at all. He and Trump have adopted the position that legal loopholes allow them to deport asylum-seekers before their claims are heard.

Everyone Trump wants gone can be labeled an illegal immigrant. All federal officers and prosecutors need to do is strip them of their protected status, revoke their visas, void asylum applications, or dismiss pending immigration cases to convert people following legal pathways towards permanent residence into "illegals" who are supposedly "invading" our country.

And it will do this even though there are vulnerable people — children, the elderly, parents with newborns, people who are likely to be tortured or killed if deported to the countries they fled — in the mix. And then they'll send someone who's not quite as abrasive as Trump, Noem, Bovino, Bondi, etc. to soft-sell the horrors the administration will continue to inflict on this nation for the rest of whatever. It's callous, malicious, and above all, evil for its own sake. It does nothing to make America greater or safer. All it does is make it whiter.

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they'd cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the scary monster that is diversity.

But California regulators have thrown a few wrinkles into the mix for Verizon. The California CPUC has approved Verizon's merger request after months of discussions, but required that the company engage in a bunch of stuff the Trump administration has derided as "woke," such as (gasp) trying to make sure that the heavily taxpayer subsidized company occasionally offers broadband that's semi-affordable:

"A low-cost Internet plan commitment centers on the Verizon Forward service that offers home Internet for as low as $20 a month. Reynolds said the deal with Verizon "locked in" the $20-per-month plans for low-income consumers for the next 10 years."

Verizon's also being required to (double gasp) actually invest in network upgrades to marginalized neighborhoods these companies generally like to neglect:

"At yesterday's CPUC meeting, Commissioner John Reynolds described Verizon's commitments. Verizon will deploy fiber to 75,000 new locations within five years, prioritizing census blocks with income at or below 90 percent of the county median, he said. For wireless service, Verizon is required to deploy 250 new cell sites with 5G and fixed wireless capability in areas eligible for state broadband grants and areas with high fire threats, he said."

Verizon actually doing any of this will, of course, require constant monitoring by the California PUC, something that hasn't always historically been a strong suit for U.S. regulators. We've reported repeatedly how the Trump administration has been waging total war against not just telecom oversight, but literally any effort to make broadband more affordable to the public.

That has even extended to illegally threatening to withhold billions in already awarded infrastructure subsidies to states that attempt to rein in the bad behavior of unpopular telecom giants like Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and AT&T. It's even involved happily killing popular, bipartisan programs that delivered free Wi-Fi access to schoolchildren, primarily because telecom giants didn't like it.

You know, real "populist" good faith stuff everybody in long-neglected flyover states were begging for.

Keep in mind this basic attempt to hold Verizon accountable only applies to California. And that's, again, assuming California regulators hold Verizon accountable for following through.

Most states approved the merger with absolutely no public interest concessions whatsoever, ensuring that Verizon can leverage its even greater scale to dismantle competition, over bill customers in markets with limited broadband options, ignore low-income minority and marginalized communities, and generally behave like a predatory ass.

Because as we all know, doing absolutely anything to inconvenience America's biggest, shittiest monopolies is woke.

The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he's done to the CDC's ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It's really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill Cassidy, claimed they extracted promises from Kennedy that he wouldn't screw with vaccination programs and the like. These were all lies, designed to get him past those hearings and into the post, where the GOP would close ranks and refuse to do anything so crazy like impeach a charlatan from a cabinet position.

This iteration of ACIP is a disaster. It is full of anti-vaxxers who have already altered the guidance on vaccines for COVID, Hep B, and childhood vaccines more generally. And this is all happening in the context of a measles outbreak that is now in month 13 and getting worse, despite that disease having been officially declared eliminated over two decades ago.

Well, as you know, retro and nostalgia are all the rage these days, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that ACIP is pining for other eliminated diseases to come back. In this case we have the chair of ACIP wondering out loud on a podcast whether we should be vaccinating for polio any longer.

The conversation started off with this absolute banger.

Kirk Milhoan, who was named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, appeared on the aptly named podcast "Why Should I Trust You." In the hour-long interview, Milhoan made a wide range of comments that have concerned medical experts and raised eyebrows.

Early into the discussion, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, declared, "I don't like established science," and that "science is what I observe." He lambasted the evidence-based methodology that previous ACIP panels used to carefully and transparently craft vaccine policy.

I barely know what to say. "I don't like established science" is the kind of quote I would expect in The Onion, not on Ars Technica. As for the follow up line of "Science is what I observe," that is a gross misrepresentation of the scientific process. Observation is certainly a part of the method. But you have to couple that observation with tedious and silly things like generating a hypothesis based on those observations, and then testing that hypothesis through rigorous and skeptical methodologies, typically experimentation.

To instead state his stance as he did on this podcast is lunacy. Milhoan went on to claim that vaccines had caused all kinds poor health outcomes, such as asthma, eczema, and deaths. Going even further, he claimed that measles and polio vaccines didn't actually curtail the spread of those diseases, which flatly flies in the face of basic statistical analysis, before making the following jaw-dropping statement.

"I think also as you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then," he said, referring to the time before the first polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. "Our sanitation is different. Our risk of disease is different. And so those all play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not."

Polio is no joke. While a large percentage of infections will present with little to no symptoms, it is an incredibly infectious virus. 6% of cases have more severe symptoms, including aseptic meningitis and paralysis. Infants infected can get encephalitis. It can result in horrific body deformations as well. The disease is so horrible that international health organizations created the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the 80s.

And this assclown, hand-picked by RFK Jr., wants to use his position on ACIP to question the need to vaccinate against it?

In a statement, AMA Trustee Sandra Adamson Fryhofer blasted the question. "This is not a theoretical debate—it is a dangerous step backward," she said. "Vaccines have saved millions of lives and virtually eliminated devastating diseases like polio in the United States. There is no cure for polio. When vaccination rates fall, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death return. The science on this is settled."

Fryhofer also took aim at Milhoan's repeated argument that the focus of vaccination policy should move from population-level health to individual autonomy. Moving away from routine immunizations, which include discussions between clinicians and patients, "does not increase freedom—it increases suffering," she said, adding that the weakening of recommendations "will cost lives."

Yes it will. Milhoan may not like established science, but that science is established for a reason. It's also trivially easy to go look up case rates for polio and measles before and after mass vaccination programs were put in place and see the results.

Moving to curtail vaccinations of polio should be as clear a line in the sand as could possibly exist for those overseeing this fiasco in Congress. The anti-vaxxer stuff thus far has been bad enough to warrant impeachment hearings for Kennedy. This would be something completely different.

Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car.

The incident quickly prompted dueling narratives. Trump administration officials defended the shooting as justified, while local officials condemned it.

The shooting will also likely prompt renewed scrutiny of training and policy of officers and the question of them shooting at moving vehicles. There has been a recent trend in law enforcement toward policies that prohibit such shootings. It is a policy shift that has shown promise in saving lives.

Decades ago, the New York City Police Department prohibited its officers from shooting at moving vehicles. That led to a drop in police killings without putting officers in greater danger.

Debates over deadly force are often contentious, but as I note in my research on police ethics and policy, for the most part there is consensus on one point: Policing should reflect a commitment to valuing human life and prioritizing its protection. Many use-of-force policies adopted by police departments endorse that principle.

Yet, as in Minneapolis, controversial law enforcement killings continue to occur. Not all agencies have implemented prohibitions on shooting at vehicles. Even in agencies that have, some policies are weak or ambiguous.

In addition, explicit prohibitions on shooting at vehicles are largely absent from the law, which means that officers responsible for fatal shootings of drivers that appear to violate departmental policies still often escape criminal penalties.

In the case of ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, its policy on shooting at moving vehicles - unlike that of many police agencies - lacks a clear instruction for officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles where feasible. It's an omission at odds with generally recognized best practices in policing.

ICE's policy on shooting at moving vehicles

ICE's current use-of-force policy prohibits its officers from "discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle" unless it is necessary to stop a grave threat. The policy is explicit that deadly force should not be used "solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect."

That point is relevant for evaluating the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. Videos show one officer trying to open the door of the vehicle that Good was driving, while another officer appears to be in front of the vehicle as she tried to pull away.

Shooting to prevent the driver simply from getting away would have been in violation of agency policy and obviously inconsistent with prioritizing the protection of life.

ICE's policy lacks clear instruction, however, for its officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles where feasible. In contrast, the Department of Justice's use-of-force policy makes it explicit that officers should not shoot at a vehicle if they can protect themselves by "moving out of the path of the vehicle."

Notably, President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2022 requiring federal law enforcement agencies - like ICE - to adopt use-of-force policies "that are equivalent to, or exceed, the requirements" of the Department of Justice's policy.

Despite that order, the provision to step out of the way of moving cars never made it into the use-of-force policy that applies to ICE.

The rationale for not shooting at moving vehicles

Prioritizing the protection of life doesn't rule out deadly force. Sometimes such force is necessary to protect lives from a grave threat, such as an active shooter. But it does rule out using deadly force when less harmful tactics can stop a threat. In such cases, deadly force is unnecessary - a key consideration in law and ethics that can render force unjustified.

That's the concern involved with police shooting at moving vehicles. It often is not necessary because officers have a less harmful option to avoid a moving vehicle's threat: stepping out of the way.

This guidance has the safety of both suspects and police in mind. Obviously, police not shooting lowers the risk of harm to the suspect. But it also lowers the risk to the officer in the vast majority of cases because of the laws of physics. If you shoot the driver of a car barreling toward you, that rarely brings a car to an immediate stop, and the vehicle often continues on its path.

Many police departments have incorporated these insights into their policies. A recent analysis of police department policies in the 100 largest U.S. cities found that close to three-quarters of them have prohibitions against shooting at moving vehicles.

The gap between policy and best practices for protecting life

The shooting in Minneapolis serves as a stark reminder of the stubborn gap that often persists between law and policy on the one hand and best law enforcement practices for protecting life on the other. When steps are taken to close that gap, however, they can have a meaningful impact.

Some of the most compelling examples involve local, state and federal measures that reinforce one another. Consider the "fleeing felon rule," which used to allow police to shoot a fleeing felony suspect to prevent their escape even when the suspect posed no danger to others.

That rule was at odds with the doctrine of prioritizing the protection of life, leading some departments to revise their use-of-force policies and some states to ban the rule. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for police to shoot a fleeing suspect who was not a danger.

Banning that questionable tactic notably led to a reduction in killings by police.

This history suggests that clear bans in law and policy on questionable tactics have the potential to save lives, while also strengthening the means for holding officers accountable.

Ben Jones is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We've covered how there's a real push afoot to implement statewide "right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

And among those states, not one has actually enforced them despite a wide array of ongoing corporate offenses (though to be fair to states there is kind of a lot going on).

Of states that are looking to pass additional laws, Maine appears to be the closest, despite a lot of automaker lobbyist shenanigans. LD 1228, otherwise known as "An Act to Clarify Certain Terms in and to Make Other Changes to the Automotive Right to Repair Laws," aims to make it easier and more affordable for Maine residents to repair what they own.

The reforms were approved by Maine voters as a ballot initiative in 2023, again displaying how these reforms see broad, bipartisan public support.

But the auto industry hasn't been happy with language in the bill that would give consumers and independent repair shops access to vehicle data (because, if it's not clear, they're keen to monopolize repair). Their lobbying was effective enough that the Maine legislature sneaked in language to LD 1228 making it so the auto industry would determine precisely how to share this data with others.

That gave the auto industry too much power over the reforms, so the bill in its current form was recently vetoed by Maine Governor Janet Mills. From her veto statement:

"This provision — which was notably not included in the Working Group's unanimous recommendations — was included at the urging of automobile manufacturers. However, without timely access to vehicle data, independent auto shops are left at a significant competitive disadvantage, and consumers would have fewer choices for automotive service and repair. With this provision included, LD 1228 would undermine the existing law overwhelmingly approved by Maine voters and harm independent repair shops across the state."

The House, being pressured by automaker lobbyists, over-rode Mills' veto, but the Senate flipped and upheld the veto after automakers went overtime spreading scary (and false) stories about how right to repair reforms pose a dire new security and privacy risks (they don't). In some states, automakers have even lied and claimed that such reforms are a boon to sexual predators.

It's another example of how, while we're supposed to function as a representative democracy, corruption ensures that passing positive and even hugely popular reforms that challenge entrenched corporate power is as difficult as possible. And even if Maine does get a useful bill passed, serious enforcement is still an open question given limited state resources and attention spans in the Trump era.

This nation is filled with loudmouths who claim the Second Amendment ensures the rest of the amendments are protected. There are a lot of gun owners who bristle at any hint of gun control, even as they insist they might be the only thing protecting us from a hostile government.

This noise gets a lot louder any time a member of the Democratic party is in the Oval Office. You barely hear it at all when the GOP in the White House, even when the current iteration of the GOP looks a whole lot like the authoritarians these people swore they'd gun down the minute they reared their fascist heads.

Our rights are being destroyed daily but no one on the Second Amendment side has said a thing until now. Perhaps only reason they're speaking up now is because it's a fair-skinned gun owner who was murdered by federal officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the second murder of a city resident in as many weeks.

ICU nurse Alex Pretti stepped between a Border Patrol officer and the woman he was trying to douse with pepper spray simply because she was standing there recording him. Pretti stood there, holding his phone up, recording the officer as he first sprayed Pretti with pepper spray before pushing him up against a wall.

Moments after that, Pretti was wrestled to the ground, swarmed and beaten by federal agents. Mere moments after that, Pretti was executed by two of the officers, as described here in Bellingcat's frame-by-frame breakdown of all available footage of the shooting:

After firing once, the agent in the black beanie repositions, and then quickly fires three more shots at Pretti's back at close range while he appears to try to stand up.

[…]

Pretti collapses onto the ground after the first shots and the agents back away. A second agent (the one wearing the brown beanie hat) then draws his gun and fires at least one shot. This is the fifth shot that is heard. The agent in the black beanie can be seen and heard firing more shots. Shots five through ten all fired at Pretti's motionless body.

That shooting was immediately followed by the self-exonerating bullshit this administration has been cranking out since day one:

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander at Large Greg Bovino have claimed without providing further evidence, that Pretti arrived at the scene "to inflict maximum damage on individuals" and Noem told reporters that his actions amounted to "domestic terrorism."

"This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, that's the facts."

No. He came with a phone and was legally carrying a legally-owned handgun. If this government is just going to assume anyone carrying a gun is a criminal who can be summarily executed merely for being near federal officers, we're well past the point any "liberal" administration has dared to go.

And after years of ignoring cops shooting people who happened to be carrying guns (mainly because many of those people were minorities), two heavy-hitters in the gun rights arena have stepped up to criticize one of Trump's many ineffective prosecutors, Bill Essayli, who has decided there's no better way to cap off a long string of rejected indictments by claiming officers are fully justified if they decide to shoot people just because they have guns.

Here's what Essayli added to his repost of the DHS's claim that Alex Pretti signed his own death warrant by legally carrying a gun:

If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.

Don't do it!

Whoops. Gun Owners of America jumped on this first, adding this to its repost of Essayli shoving a loaded foot into his mouth:

[W]e condemn the untoward comments of @USAttyEssayli. Federal agents are not "highly likely" to be "legally justified" in "shooting" concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm. The Second Amendment protects Americans' right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.

Of course, even though this entity got all hot and bothered by the suggestion that law enforcement officers are welcome to kill gun owners, it had to first give credit where it isn't due (suggesting the DOJ has any interest in engaging in a full investigation) and dipping out of the tweet by sending some strays in the direction of the people who are currently getting murdered by federal officers:

Finally, the Left must stop antagonizing [ICE] and [CBP] agents who are taking criminals off the street and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.

Sooooo close. If the organization had stuck to the condemnation of Bill Essayli's assault on the only right they care about, it might have meant something. But it means so much less when this (justified) criticism of federal officials is sandwiched between bending the knee to the DOJ and mindlessly insulting people just like the person they (sort of, from an oblique angle) defended in retrospect.

The NRA followed that up with its own bit of Essayli ass-kicking.

This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong.

Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.

This one is much more straightforward, but still walks back the criticism of the federal prosecutor by telling everyone to "await" a "full investigation" which almost certainly isn't going to be happening.

Only 14 minutes earlier, the NRA account was actually running interference for the administration with a statement it released before Essayli angered the association.

"For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs. Unsurprisingly, these calls to dangerously interject oneself into legitimate law-enforcement activities have ended in violence, tragically resulting in injuries and fatalities.

As there is with any officer-involved shooting, there will be a robust and comprehensive investigation that takes place to determine if the use of force was justified. As we await these facts and gain a clearer understanding, we urge the political voices to lower the temperature to ensure their constituents and law enforcement officers stay safe."

This has led to Essayli trying to walk back his statement by claiming he didn't say the thing he said and that these two prominent critics are "putting words in his mouth." He "substantiated" his counter-claim by putting a whole lot of new words in his own mouth — words that very definitely weren't in the shorter post he put out in support of the DHS's smearing of the person its employees had just executed in broad daylight on a public street.

In the end, it means almost nothing. Two Second Amendment-focused organization raised their voices briefly — breaking with the administration they absolutely adore — to condemn a perceived attack on their rights. But they're utterly silent when it comes to condemning the act that prompted their belated reaction. They don't honestly care how many people are killed by law enforcement officers. The only thing they care about is being able to open carry while shopping at Walmart or invading federal buildings to overturn elections. Everyone to the perceived left of their core membership can continue to get fucked.

There's a line buried in Adam Serwer's recent Atlantic piece on the Minneapolis resistance to ICE that deserves to be pulled out, examined, and posted on every lamppost in America:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone.

Read that again. It explains so much.

Serwer continues:

In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

For years now, a certain strain of American political thought has operated on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, that "community" is a sucker's game, and that anyone who claims to care about their neighbors is either lying or being paid. It's the philosophy that undergirds every policy designed to punish rather than help, every sneer at "the woke mind virus," and every insistence that "facts don't care about your feelings."

And then Minneapolis happened.

When the Trump administration surged thousands of armed federal agents into Minnesota—ostensibly over a fraud case that Biden-era prosecutors had already been handling—they seem to have expected one of two things: either cowed compliance or the kind of violent resistance that would justify an even harder crackdown. What they got instead was something that appears to have genuinely baffled them: tens of thousands of ordinary people who simply refused to let their neighbors be dragged away.

Not activists. Not "paid operatives." Just… people. Moms with minivans full of car seats making grocery deliveries. Dads doing dispatch shifts between work calls. Biologists and lawyers and nurses driving around in the freezing cold, honking at SUVs with out-of-state plates. As Serwer describes it:

Even among those involved in opposing ICE in Minnesota, people have a range of political views. The nonviolent nature of the movement, and the focus on caring for neighbors, has drawn in volunteers with many different perspectives on immigration, including people who might have been supportive if the Trump administration's claims of a targeted effort to deport violent criminals had been sincere.

The thing that seems to have broken the MAGA brain is that even people who might have supported targeted enforcement of immigration law looked around at what was actually happening—the pregnant women dragged through snow, the doors kicked in, the indiscriminate terror, the senseless killings—and said "no." Not because they'd been radicalized by some shadowy operation, but because they have eyes and consciences.

Ana Marie Cox, who spent a decade in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region before moving to Texas, wrote for The New Republic about what she calls the "carbon-steel fibers wound together by generations of consistent, need-blind aid":

Bonds formed under the pressure of negative double-digit windchill are key to understanding what's happening. It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snowblowing an entire block's driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency. I cannot tell you one story about that happening to me. I have at least three or four. The pun is irresistible: Minnesotans have always declared common cause against ice, they've just changed their focus to the ice that you can't also use for hockey practice.

You can dismiss it as a joke until someone at a café gives you a spare scarf because you can't find yours. People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don't think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, "Just pay it back someday." Of course you will—everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern microdistance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don't help people out because you like them. You just do.

Cory Doctorow has referred to his "covered dish" dilemma in the past a few times, which goes like this:

"If there's a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor's house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It's game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you'd be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she's not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she'll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you'd have one, then she'll put on the safety and you can have a potluck."

It's basically a question of, in times of trouble, will your neighbors seek to take advantage of you. Or will they look to work with you as a community to respond to the adversity you all face.

The MAGA world seems to view only the former as possible. They always show up with shotguns. Reality keeps showing that most people lean towards the latter, and show up with covered dishes.

Minneapolis is showing up with covered dishes. Thousands of them.

This is the part that the JD Vances of the world genuinely cannot comprehend. Vance has said it's "totally reasonable" for Americans to want to live only near people they "have something in common with," that social cohesion requires ethnic homogeneity. Minneapolis is proving the exact opposite: that diverse communities can be more cohesive, not less, precisely because they've had to build those bonds intentionally.

Serwer captures this beautifully:

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it "neighborism"—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn't be more extreme.

What's been particularly striking is how the resistance has explicitly rejected the kind of violent confrontation that the administration seems to have been hoping for. The "commuters"—the volunteers who patrol neighborhoods looking for ICE vehicles—have been trained to follow traffic laws, avoid physical confrontation, and simply bear witness. Their weapons are whistles, phones, and car horns. As one volunteer told Cox in her second piece on the resistance:

"I don't mean to be flip about this, but they can't shoot us all."

There are more of us than there are them. There are more good people in the world than bad. There are more virtuous people who believe in community than angry insecure people who believe that everything is a zero sum game.

And for each act of cruelty, each selfish bit of nonsense from ICE or CBP or the administration, more Minnesotans realize they need to be involved.

The instances of physical violence only goose the number of people willing to be targets. Says Chris, "Every time they attack us, another round of volunteers comes in. We refuse to be cowed."

And it's somewhat working. The administration has already been forced to yank Gregory Bovino, the preening Border Patrol commander who seemed to relish his villain role, out of Minneapolis, though they replaced him with Tom Homan (who, to be clear, is basically as bad). But, still, it's not a sign of strength to be switching leaders and clearly demoting the guy who'd been the face of this invasion. That's a strategic retreat forced by people whose only armor is their willingness to show up.

The MAGA movement has spent years cultivating what Serwer identifies as a series of "mistaken assumptions":

The first is the belief that diverse communities aren't possible… A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying "In This House We Believe…" but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And, as Serwer correctly notes, part of the reason for this belief is that it has kinda been true… for the actual elite, who have spent the last year trying to pretend Trump isn't doing what he clearly promised to do:

And in Trump's defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders.

But it turns out that millions of ordinary Americans are not those people. They're the ones delivering groceries to families too scared to leave their homes, the ones doing laundry for the volunteers doing deliveries, the ones who signed up for constitutional observer training (over 26,000 through just one organization, according to The New Yorker).

Cox captures what this invisible infrastructure looks like:

So much of the resistance is either carried out by women or coded as women's work—unheralded, boring, unglamorous, and mostly undocumented. "You're in the middle of resisting fascism, and someone still needs to do laundry," Chris points out. A single father and a Parent-Teacher Association president, he stepped forward early on to do admin and dispatch, sometimes pulling four-, five-, six-hour shifts.

"I was eating nothing but takeout. I said something, and now I've got a full fridge." The grocery deliveries to immigrant families are vital. What keeps those deliveries happening are the deliveries to the people making deliveries. It's mutual aid all the way down.

Someone even volunteered to do the other volunteers' day jobs, the work-work—formatting spreadsheets, answering emails. She volunteered to sit at a desk; she has young kids and doesn't want to leave them alone. So she offered what she could: clerical skills.

The MAGA bros, full of hate and seething, have been running around X insisting this must all be organized and planned. They talk nonsense about "op sec" and "supply lines" when it's really just all communities looking out for one another.

There's a temptation to view all of this through the lens of political tribalism—Team Blue vs. Team Red, libs vs. MAGAs. But that framing misses something important. Pastor Miguel, who leads Iglesia Cristiana La Via in Burnsville and has been organizing food drives for families in hiding, told Serwer:

"One of the things that I believe, and I know most of the Latino community agrees, is that we want the bad people out. We want the criminals out," Pastor Miguel, who immigrated from Mexico 30 years ago, told me. "All of us came here looking for a better life for us and for our children. So when we have criminals, rapists—when we have people who have done horrible things in our streets, in our communities—we are afraid of them. We don't want them here."

He's not some open-borders absolutist. He's someone who looked at what ICE was actually doing—picking up people with pending asylum cases, targeting workers with valid permits, terrorizing entire neighborhoods—and recognized it as something other than law enforcement. Then one of his friends, a man he believed had legal status, was picked up by federal agents.

This is what the administration either didn't anticipate or didn't care about: that once you deploy armed agents to conduct indiscriminate sweeps through American neighborhoods, you're making everyone feel hunted. And when everyone feels hunted, everyone has a reason to resist.

Consider Stephen Miller's ridiculously racist stated belief that "migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands." Serwer's response is devastating:

In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The "conditions and terrors" of immigrants' "broken homelands" weren't being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

This gets at something crucial: the people organizing mutual aid networks, running food deliveries, and patrolling for ICE vehicles aren't doing it because they've been brainwashed by some progressive ideology. Many of them are doing it because they or their families have seen this before. They know what occupation looks like. They know what arbitrary state violence looks like. And they know that the only thing that stops it is ordinary people refusing to look away.

If you want to support what's happening in Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits has compiled resources for organizations doing this work. But Cox makes an important point: maybe you should also look around your own neighborhood. Because ICE is almost certainly already there, even if it hasn't made the news yet.

This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on Naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.

Start building those connections. In Doctorow's terms, bring the covered dish now, so that your neighbors know you won't bring a shotgun later.

The resistance in Minneapolis wasn't conjured out of nothing when the federal agents arrived. It was built over decades by people helping each other get through brutal winters, showing up for each other after police killings, and developing the organizational infrastructure that could be activated when the moment demanded it.

Serwer ends his piece with this:

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one's heroes, no one's saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

The morally depraved fear that virtue is common. Minneapolis is proving they were right to be afraid. People bringing covered dishes instead of shotguns is terrifying to them. But it's how civilization actually works—something the MAGA true believers may never understand.

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First off, there's a chance my headline (which went through several iterations) undersells what's actually going on here. What's detailed below is yet another jaw-dropping act of executive hubris, with the DOJ again deciding it can do whatever the hell it wants when a judge dares to tell it "no."

A little background: it was discovered at some point that the acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office, David Easterwood, was also a pastor of Cities Church, also located in St. Paul, Minnesota. A protest naturally followed. A bit more unnaturally, protesters entered the church and disrupted the service. CNN's Don Lemon covered the protest, drawing some fire of his own simply for being a rather persistent critic of the Trump administration and its actions.

Much more naturally, the administration immediately declared it was going to start arresting some people, a list that included CNN's Don Lemon and his producer.

U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said her agency is investigating federal civil rights violations "by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers."

"A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!" she said on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.

You'll note the qualifier AAG Dhillon used in this exclamation point-riddled X missive: "Christian worshippers." That sort of thing matters, because it makes it clear (perhaps unintentionally) that this government won't mind if other protesters disrupt religious services engaged in by members of other religions. (You know exactly what I mean as assuredly as Dhillon knew what she meant when posted that response to the protest.)

Meanwhile, in my home state, Kristi Noem's successor, Governor Larry Rhoden, announced legislation that would turn the misdemeanor offense of using threats or violent acts to prevent people from practicing their religion into a felony that would double the jail time and fine for those convicted of this offense (bringing it to 2 years in jail and a $4,000 fine).

"If religious liberties fail, any other liberty eventually fails with it," Rhoden said during a press conference. "If someone decides to target a house of worship, there will be real consequences."

OK. Well, we'll see how this gets selectively enforced in the future. I'm pretty sure some religions are more deserving of protection than others, even if the governor does better at keeping the quiet part quiet than Harmeet Dhillon did.

Long story short: the federal magistrate judge rejected five of the eight arrest warrants presented by DOJ prosecutors, including the two targeting Don Lemon and his producer. Rejected arrest warrants are probably even less common than rejected search warrants. But the DOJ continues to fail its way into history under AG Pam Bondi and the second Trump administration.

Like search warrants, those presenting them to judges have options when judges reject their offerings. They can revise them, perhaps sprinkling them with a bit more probable cause or other connective tissue. Or they can decide to buttress apparently bogus charges by talking a grand jury into signing off on an indictment.

But with grand juries brushing off the DOJ repeatedly in recent months and prosecutors desperate to keep winning the battle of headlines, the DOJ went an entirely different direction — a direction so unexpected and unprecedented that the state's top federal judge felt compelled to write two letters to the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court. Not only did the DOJ ask the Appeals Court to directly review the warrants that had been directed, it did this without notice to the lower court and asked the appeals court to seal its request to keep it from being made public.

That put Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz (a George W. Bush appointee) in the position of having to file an emergency communication of his own with the court, which was followed shortly thereafter by a longer email with more details about the DOJ's actions. Both letters are detailed in Steve Vladeck's extremely informative post on this string of events, which includes this chilling description of the DOJ attempted to do:

[C]hief Judge Schiltz is a highly regarded jurist who could not be accused of having an axe to grind against the current administration. And that's all the more reason why everyone, but especially his colleagues across the federal judiciary, ought to take seriously a pair of letters he filed on Friday in response to an extraordinary (in multiple senses of the word) attempt by the Department of Justice to end-run long-settled understandings of basic criminal procedure in order to bring federal criminal charges against individuals who protested inside a St. Paul church last Sunday.

The Schiltz letters are striking not only because of who wrote them, but because of the deeply unprofessional behavior they describe.

The first letter opens with this:

I am working from home today, as the program that my mentally disabled adult son attends each day is closed because of the extreme cold At 11:34 am, I received an email regarding Case No. 26-1135, entitled "In re: United States of America." The order in its entirety read:

The motion of the United States to seal is granted. The Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota is invited to file a response, at his discretion, to the petition for writ of mandamus. Any response is due by 2:00 p.m. Friday, January 23.

This is the first that I have heard of any petition for a writ of mandamus. The United States did not have the courtesy to tell me that they would be filing such a petition, nor did the United States serve the petition on me. I am unable to access any documents in Case No. 26-1135 because, at the request of the United States, the case is sealed-apparently even from me. So I have been given about two-and-one-half hours to respond to a mandamus petition that I have not read and cannot read.

Apparently I am supposed to guess what the petition is about and guess what the mandamus petition says and then respond.

On the evening of Tuesday, January 20, five of the eight arrest warrants were rejected by the magistrate judge. Within "minutes," the DOJ prosecutor was demanding an immediate review of the magistrates' rejections. The review was assigned to Judge Schiltz, who told the DOJ that because what it was demanding was "unprecedented," he would hold a bench meeting with the other district judges to decide how to proceed.

Somewhat ironically, that meeting was postponed due to "security concerns" related to the arrival of both J.D. Vance and AG Pam Bondi in Minneapolis, along with protests at the courthouse where two church protesters were scheduled to make their initial appearances. The meeting was postponed to January 27th.

That wasn't good enough for the DOJ, which had headlines it wanted to keep making. So, it went directly to the Appeals Court, said some extremely disingenuous stuff about "national security" and the ongoing danger of church disruptions if it wasn't able to arrest three more protesters immediately. (It appears to have given up on locking up Don Lemon.)

Judge Schiltz's follow-up email shreds the government's justifications for immediate judicial review of its rejected arrest warrant:

The government's arguments about the urgency of its request makes no sense. As the government says, "dozens" of protestors invaded Cities Church on Sunday. The leaders of that group have been arrested, and everyone knows that they have been arrested. The government says that there are plans to disrupt Cities Church again on Sunday. Of course, the best way to protect Cities Church is to protect Cities Church; we have thousands of law-enforcement officers in town, and presumably a few of them could be stationed outside of Cities Church on Sunday. The government does not explain why the arrests of five more people - one of whom is a journalist and the other his producer - would make Cities Church any safer, especially because that would still leave "dozens" of those who invaded the church on Sunday free to do it again.

Judge Shiltz should be commended for making sure all of this ends up the permanent record. The government tried to bury its attempt to bypass the normal chain of judicial command, but that has only led to it being further exposed as the thugs they are and definitely intend to be. The DOJ is supposed to hold the law in utmost esteem. But this version continues to act as though the law is whatever it says it is.

For now, the DOJ will still need to wait for a review of its deficient warrants by the lower court. The Appeals Court has rejected its end-around effort, albeit without saying anything more than it might be a little premature. But what was actually said by a judge concurring with the rejection of the writ of mandamus isn't exactly heartening:

"The Complaint and Affidavit clearly establish probable cause for all five arrest warrants, and while there is no discretion to refuse to issue an arrest warrant once probable cause for its issuance has been shown … the government has failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief," Grasz wrote.

Hey, Judge Grasz, if you're concurring with the rejection of an "emergency" review of the merits of rejected search warrants, maybe you should keep your views on the merits to yourself. Unless, of course, you're just signalling the Trump Administration that it should speed run the alternatives so the warrants can receive your thumbs up once they return to the appellate level.

For now, the warrants are dead. Unfortunately, the DOJ will have probably moved on to some new horrific thing before these get a second pass by the district court.

Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable.

As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix's attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda empire, and Trump has continually signaled his attempt to help him derail the Netflix deal.

Enter FCC boss Brendan Carr, who, right on cue, started popping up in the press to suddenly pretend he cares about competition. Carr did an interview with Bloomberg last week in which he proclaimed that Netflix's acquisition of Warner Brothers would be terribly uncompetitive:

"What you've seen Netflix do as a general matter, in terms of their organic growth, is fantastic," the FCC chair said. "There are legitimate competition concerns that I've seen raised about their acquisition here and just the sheer amount of scale and consolidation you can see in the streaming market."

Carr goes on to state he sees no competition issues with Larry Ellison, one of the wealthiest men on the planet and a key Trump donor and ally, hoovering up the entirety of new and old media.

So, a few things.

One, Carr's FCC has absolutely zero authority over this transaction because it doesn't involve any of the companies he actually regulates or the transfer of any broadcast licenses. Two, Carr has an absolutely abysmal record on competition issues, having rubber stamped no limit of harmful consolidation in telecom and, more recently, local broadcast media.

It would take a journalist covering Carr's comments all of fifteen minutes to find a long, long list of examples where Carr rubber stamped a terrible merger and ignored literally all labor, competition, and market harms. He's genuinely the last person anybody should be asking for their thoughts on market competition, but you're going to be seeing a lot of him in the months to come.

It's also worth noting that of the available paths forward from this point, a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers is probably the best of a bunch of bad options. Ideally you'd block all new consolidation in media, but that's not happening with Trump's disemboweled and captured regulators. As such, a Netflix acquisition is a better option than letting Larry Ellison create a right wing agitprop empire on the back of CNN, TikTok, and CBS.

Quick refresher: Warner Brothers rejected Ellison's higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president's son in law and the Saudis. When that didn't work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.

When that didn't work, Ellison and friends shifted their attention to trying to smear the "woke" Netflix deal in the media. Enter Carr, who is a useful idiot Trump and Ellison can use to prop the DOJ's inevitable scuttling of the Netflix deal as a matter of serious policy in the defense of the public interest, before offloading Warner Brothers (and CNN, and HBO) to one of Trump's top right wing billionaire donors.

Trumpism has long tried to pretend that it cares about populist antitrust reform and reining in corporate power, but it's always been a lie propped up by a broad variety of useful idiots; some of whom are purported experts on the subject (see: Matt Stoller), and many of which are major corporate media institutions whose journalism has been eroded by the relentless pursuit of consolidation.

Neither Variety, nor Bloomberg, for example, can be bothered to mention Carr's decade-long history of rubber stamping harmful consolidation across media and telecom. Kind of important if you're going to profile a major government figure's thoughts on competition, yes?

I'd be prepared for a fake Trump DOJ antitrust inquiry in the coming months, designed to transfer ownership of Warner Brothers to Larry Ellison and Skydance/CBS. Propped up, in turn, by the usual assortment of bad faith bullshitters pretending this is a public interest effort. Should that fail, Trump's investing in Netflix and Warner Brothers so he's certain to come out on top either way.

In all outcome the public, markets, and labor likely lose due to consolidation. But some of the paths are less harmful to the public interest, and democracy itself, than others.

Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you've ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head.

Perhaps by now you're tiring of all of these posts on America's measles problem that we've endured for over a year now. This is so passe, you might be thinking. So, you know, 1990s. And you would have been right before 2025 and the installation of a gravel-mouthed anti-vaxxer as the Secretary of HHS. Sadly, 2025 saw more cases of measles in America than at anytime in the previous several decades and a current outbreak in South Carolina, one which is already spreading to far-flung states across the country, has been left unaddressed.

In my last post on this topic, I complained that those in charge of these agencies are "barely talking about this." Now that one of those leaders has talked about it publicly, however, I think I understand why they were kept in silence previously.

After a year of ongoing measles outbreaks that have sickened more than 2,400 people, the United States is poised to lose its status as a measles-free country. However, the newly appointed principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ralph Abraham, said he was unbothered by the prospect at a briefing for journalists this week.

"It's just the cost of doing business with our borders being somewhat porous for global and international travel," Abraham said. "We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That's their personal freedom."

Okay, where to begin? Let's just start by pointing out that Abraham is a long-time anti-vaxxer. He has advocated for alternative treatments to all kinds of diseases for which we have actual medicine. He has also advocated for natural immunity over vaccines on the regular. Now that this clown is nominally running the CDC, while America is facing its worst measles crises in over thirty years, the response is as flippant as, "Shit happens because, you know, immigrants."

"When you hear somebody like Abraham say 'the cost of doing business,' how can you be more callous," said pediatrician and vaccine specialist Paul Offit, in an online discussion hosted by the health blog Inside Medicine on Jan. 20. "Three people died of measles last year in this country," Offit added. "We eliminated this virus in the year 2000 — eliminated it. Eliminated circulation of the most contagious human infection. That was something to be proud of."

That would be idiotic even if Abraham were right. But he's not right. As CBS points out in its post, we've always had occasional infections from foreign visitors and sources in America, but nothing like these outbreaks. Only 10% of infections over the last year or so came from outside the country. The rest were domestic spread. And while border policy surely has ebbed and flowed over the past 30 years, there wasn't some drastic change made in the last year that would explain any of this away.

Now, in all fairness, Abraham has also added that getting two doses of the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to prevent a measles infection. I'm sure saying it was painful for him, but he did it. Still, because the stupidest possible people are running our country right now, the CDC is also studying the genomic makeup of measles infections from different parts of the country. But Timothy, you're surely saying, that sounds like good science and something they'd use to help fight the disease.

Nope, wrong. They're desperately trying to show that the outbreaks are from disparate strains to argue that it hasn't been 12 months of continuous spread of a single strain to claim that we shouldn't lose our elimination status.

If the CDC's genomic analyses show that last year's outbreaks resulted from separate introductions from abroad, political appointees will probably credit Kennedy for saving the country's status, said Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the CDC's national immunization center, who resigned in protest of Kennedy's actions in August.

And if studies suggest the outbreaks are linked, Daskalakis predicted, the administration will cast doubt on the findings and downplay the reversal of the country's status: "They'll say, who cares."

Indeed, at the briefing, Abraham told a reporter from Stat that a reversal in the nation's status would not be significant: "Losing elimination status does not mean that the measles would be widespread."

The phrase "criminal negligence" leaps to mind. That appears to be the work product of our public health officials at the moment. Neglect and attempts to coverup for that neglect on technicalities.

Welcome back, measles. I guess you'll be staying with us a while.