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This saga of dumb began nearly a decade ago, in 2016, when a grocer named “Iceland Foods,” that was somehow granted an EU trademark for “Iceland,” began bullying other EU businesses using that word over supposed trademark infringement. Iceland, the country, caught wind of all of this when the company had the stones to oppose a trademark application for the term initiated by the country of Iceland and decided to bully back, challenging ownership of the trademark. Not surprisingly, Iceland won and the trademark was rescinded. Rather than take a sane ruling on this, Iceland Foods appealed the decision to the Grand Board of the EUIPO, which affirmed the previous decision.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. The grocer took this all the way to the General Court of the European Union to try to once again get its trademark, the name of a fucking nation, back. Well, that too has now failed, with the General Court affirming yet again in favor of Iceland.

The court dismissed the company’s attempt to overturn a decision by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which had previously invalidated its exclusive claim to the name ‘Iceland’.

The outcome means that Icelandic businesses operating within the EU are free to use their country’s name to market their products and services—something the supermarket chain had attempted to restrict.

I remain completely flummoxed as to how this story has managed to span a decade of time. This is a trademark that obviously never should have been granted. Geographic trademarks are generally supposed to have a high hurdle for approval to begin with, and typically with a very narrow scope, nevermind the name of a country in Europe that is part of the European Economic Area (EEA). From a purely common sense standpoint, it should be obvious that nobody should want the name of a country to be trademarked throughout the continent with which it is associated. That does nothing for the public, who’s benefit is supposed to be the main focus of trademark laws.

But at least it’s over… probably.

Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir welcomed the verdict: “It is of paramount importance for our companies to be able to refer to the origin, to the purity and to our unique position on the international stage. There is value in the name of the country and we will continue to protect these interests for Iceland.”

Iceland Foods Ltd. now has two months to lodge an appeal.

I want to say there’s no way Iceland Foods will appeal this decision too, but that would be too optimistic for my tastes.

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Earlier this month, CBS wimped out and paid Donald Trump a $16 million bribe to settle a completely baseless lawsuit — and to buy regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. The result is now going to be a CBS owned by Trump’s close billionaire friends, the Ellison family, who are clearly signaling they plan to turn the “new CBS'” news division into a glorified version of Fox News (read: propaganda).

Now that the king has received his bribe, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr will obviously have to wind down his fake “investigation” into CBS. You might recall that Carr falsely claimed that CBS had been engaging in misleading edits to make Trump look bad, therefore violating the FCC’s “news distortion” policy.

It was a lie: the real goal of the investigation was to apply pressure on CBS to fold to Trump, and frame CBS as being mean to Republicans to set the stage for what will come next: killing critical journalism at places like 60 Minutes, and turning CBS into another right wing propaganda mill.

So the Skydance folks and Carr now have to put on a little performance. A performance where the FCC pretends it is seriously weighing the merits of the deal, and that the deal will be good for journalism, media, and the public interest. Everybody knows Carr has to rubber stamp the deal to make the Trumps and Ellisons happy, but they have to pretend that’s not what’s happening and maintain the facade that U.S. antitrust still actually functions.

And the broken U.S. press is going to help them. The end results are little stage plays like the one playing out over at Deadline, which credibly repeats Skydance executive claims that the new CBS will be dedicated to “unbiased journalism”:

“According to afiling with the FCC, Ellison and his legal counsel, Matthew A. Brill, met Tuesday with the FCC officials, and they “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”

The Deadline story doesn’t talk at all about media consolidation. It soft-sells the Trump bribe. It shows no serious interest in the FCC’s broadly unpopular and well documented efforts to crush the First Amendment. Even the headline is misleading, helping Brendan Carr pretend that he’s some sort of good faith arbiter seriously thinking about the merger’s impact on journalism:

Most importantly, the outlet fails to mention to readers that when it comes to right wing bullshit, “unbiased journalism” and “diverse viewpoints” are code for making CBS more friendly to Republicans and corporate power. It’s not at all subtle.

Skydance is already making it clear that they’re interested in bringing on long-term nonsense peddler artist Bari Weiss to “shape CBS coverage.” What the Ellison family wants CBS journalism to be will closely resemble the interests of the Ellison family. That is, soft on Republicans and soft on corporate malfeasance. And while CBS claims it wasn’t politically motivated, it’s likely the new ownership had some role in the firing of Stephen Colbert.

Deadline also parrots the claim that the new CBS will work hard to please king Trump by being more sexist and racist. Note here, too, how dutifully Deadline adopts the Republican framing of their “war on DEI” (read: pro-segregation racism) as a serious thing:

“The filing also stated Ellison and Brill discussed with Carr their company’s “commitment to promoting non-discrimination and equal employment opportunity at New Paramount, ensuring the company is fully compliant with law.” One of Carr’s chief concerns has been corporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives that he has characterized as “invidious discrimination.” He has suggested that companies that maintain DEI policies would have difficulty securing regulatory approval.”

They just quote Carr and Skydance, without even bothering with lazy “he said, she said” journalism. Most of Carr and Trump’s lazy bullshit has involved claiming that efforts to fight widespread systemic racism and sexism is somehow discriminatory against white people. Shitty U.S. press outlets absolutely adore portraying this “war on DEI” as a serious policy, as opposed to the obviously hateful ignorance it is.

Another thing Deadline (and outlets like Variety) won’t mention is that these giant media mergers always end very badly for consumers, employees, and the broader public. As Warner Brothers Discovery just demonstrated in painful detail, these deals always generate massive debt that’s offset by mass firings and degraded product quality. You can set your watch to it.

U.S. media just got significantly, document-ably worse due to consolidation. The new CBS will be significantly more right wing and corporate friendly than it already was. The entire thing will be propped up by lazy claims to the complete contrary. None of which you’d really understand, not coincidentally, from reading mainstream U.S. journalism cover itself.

To get any truthful understanding of how gross and corrupt this CBS transaction was, you’d have to go read independent media. That pretty much speaks for itself. And without serious media reform and widespread efforts to creatively fund real journalism, it’s only going to get worse.

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Judge Loren AliKhan knows exactly how this story ends, but she’s going to make the Supreme Court write the final chapter themselves. Her ruling reinstating illegally fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter reads like judicial theater—a careful performance of applying precedent everyone knows is doomed.

We discussed this a bit when Trump first illegally fired both Slaughter and her other Democratic colleague on the Commission, Alvaro Bedoya. The legal foundation here should be rock solid: Humphrey’s Executor from 1935, where the Supreme Court told FDR he couldn’t fire FTC commissioners because Congress made the agency independent.

Bedoya was also a plaintiff but had to resign to get another job after the federal government stopped paying him—a detail that underscores just how immediate the harm is when Trump decides to ignore the law. Because of that, the judge claims that his claims here are moot.

The problem, though, is that the majority of the Supreme Court has made it clear it hates Humphrey’s Executor. In the last decade and a half, the Supreme Court has systematically hollowed out Humphrey’s Executor while telegraphing their eagerness to finish the job. You almost wonder if Trump fired Slaughter and Bedoya mainly to give the Supreme Court the exact vehicle to end Humphrey’s.

So we get this careful judicial performance. AliKhan methodically works through why Trump’s legal arguments are bullshit, while basically admitting she’s building a record for the Supreme Court to ignore.

The answer to the key substantive question in this case—whether a unanimous Supreme Court decision about the FTC Act’s removal protections applies to a suit about the FTC Act’s removal protections—seems patently obvious. In arguing for a different result, Defendants ask this court to ignore the letter of Humphrey’s Executor and embrace the critiques from its detractors. Defendants hope that, after doing so, this court will bless what amounts to the implied overruling of a ninety-year-old, unanimous, binding precedent. Because “it is [the Supreme] Court’s prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents,” United States v. Hatter, 532 U.S. 557, 567 (2001) (quoting State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3, 20 (1997)), the court cannot, and will not, fulfill that request.

This isn’t happening in isolation. AliKhan points to similar Trump power grabs at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit System Protects Board (MSPB) that courts initially blocked:

Indeed, courts have already considered—and rejected—President Trump’s challenges to similar removal restrictions for other independent, multimember agencies. In Wilcox v. Trump, 775 F. Supp. 3d 215 (D.D.C. 2025), for example, the court blocked President Trump’s attempt to remove a member of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) by relying on Humphrey’s Executor. Id. at 223-35. In so holding, it rebuffed President Trump’s argument that the Supreme Court had “repudiat[ed]” Humphrey’s Executor. Id. at 228-29. Similarly, in Harris v. Bessent, 775 F. Supp. 3d 164 (D.D.C. 2025), the court held that President Trump’s attempt to remove a member of the Merit System Protects Board (“MSPB”) was unlawful under Humphrey’s Executor. Id. at 173-178. It held that the Supreme Court had recently “reaffirmed the constitutionality of multimember boards with for-cause removal protections, as those agencies have a robust basis in this country’s history.”

But then AliKhan basically admits the game is rigged. She walks through how those seemingly protective rulings got systematically undermined: appeals court stays, en banc reversals, then the Supreme Court’s emergency docket doing what it does best—blessing Trump’s authoritarianism through procedural sleight of hand.

But, they did so without mentioning Humprhey’s.

So technically, Humphrey’s remains good law even as the Court signals its contempt for it. AliKhan admits that the government is asking her to “read the tea leaves”—to ignore binding precedent based on vibes and Supreme Court semaphore. Even the Court’s language about presidential removal power being “subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents” feels like bait.

And those precedents still include Humphrey’s.

But everyone, including the judge, knows what’s going to happen next, but that doesn’t mean she should frontrun the Supreme Court:

That said, the court acknowledges that the Supreme Court has questioned aspects of the Humphrey’s Executor decision. For example, in Morrison, the Court noted in dicta that “it is hard to dispute that the powers of the FTC at the time of Humphrey’s Executor would at the present time be considered ‘executive,’ at least to some degree.” Morrison, 487 U.S. at 689 n.28. And more recently, in Seila Law, the Court observed—again in dicta—that the “conclusion that the FTC did not exercise executive power has not withstood the test of time.” 591 U.S. at 216 n.2. But whether or not the Supreme Court has lost faith in its ninety-year-old holding is not a decision for this court to make. See Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 238 (1997) (holding that the trial court was correct to apply “binding precedent” “unless and until [the Supreme] Court reinterpreted [it]”). Even if the Supreme Court eventually chooses to overrule Humphrey’s Executor, it would be an act of judicial hubris for this court to do so prematurely

She later notes:

Defendants are, of course, free to take their quarrels with Humphrey’s Executor to the Supreme Court. This court has no illusions about where this case’s journey leads. But for the time being, Defendants’ attempt to remove Ms. Slaughter from her position as an FTC Commissioner did not comply with the FTC Act’s removal protections. Because those protections remain constitutional, as they have for almost a century, Ms. Slaughter’s purported removal was unlawful and without legal effect.

The subtext is deafening: “this court has no illusions about where this case’s journey leads.” AliKhan is creating a perfect record for the Supreme Court to reverse, while making them own the authoritarian power grab explicitly. It’s judicial resistance theater—principled, doomed, and ultimately serving to highlight just how far the Supreme Court has drifted from any pretense of following the law when Trump wants something.

Slaughter gets her job back, for now. But this is just Trump’s latest move in systematically dismantling the administrative state, one independent agency at a time. The Supreme Court will give him what he wants—they’re just making the lower courts do the paperwork first.

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Trump and his loyalists crave actual martial law. DHS head Kristi Noem has — out loud! — threatened to “liberate” Californians from the democracy they currently enjoy in the state of California. Plenty of idiots and idiot newscasters continue to pretend Los Angeles is under siege when, in reality, protests against ICE have been limited to few blocks in the nation’s largest city by area (contiguous US only, you pedants) and second most populated.

The sending of National Guard troops to “support” ICE raids was pretty much illegal, no matter what Trump might say about the Alien Enemies Act or his desire to treat protected First Amendment activity like an insurrection. It was also entirely performative. The state of California did not request this assistance and local LA law enforcement had already made it clear they had whatever little bit of “violent protesting” under control, which also included all the times LA cops generated violence, rather than merely responded to it.

Nevertheless, the National Guard responded to the president’s directive. Troops were sent to Los Angeles with no real sense of purpose. And also nowhere to sleep or spend their mostly inactive days, as early photos of the deployment clearly showed. For awhile, they weren’t even getting paid because the shoot-first administration wanted to get its show of force on the ground, allowing the actual logistics to remain on the back burner until the populace was sufficiently cowed.

The external backlash began immediately. So did the internal backlash, as Shawn Hubler’s conversations with National Guard troops demonstrates. While they were hailed as heroes for their response to California wildfires earlier this year (something the National Guard is actually prepared to do), troops are facing public ridicule for being the most visible face of Trump’s martial law experimentation.

Protesters jeer the troops as they guard federal office buildings. Commuters curse the behemoth convoys clogging freeways. Family members grill members with questions about whether they really have to obey federal orders.

What happens when you stay enlisted long enough to become the villain against your will?

“They gave Disneyland tickets to the people who worked in the wildfires,” one soldier said. “Nobody’s handing out Disneyland tickets now.”

The National Guard is a branch of the military, which makes simply quitting a luxury that’s out of reach of most volunteers. And the government’s general desire to display a unified front, that hides turmoil barely obscured by official statements, means the troops quoted in this report can’t actually identify themselves or even those enforcing the orders.

While six troops (out of the 3,000 sent to Los Angeles) is too small a sample size to extrapolate widespread disgruntlement, it’s safe to assume a lot of troops aren’t happy they’re being asked to play the villain in furtherance of a goal many are, at the very least, ambivalent about, if not actually opposed to: an untargeted deportation program that seeks to eject as many non-whites from the nation as is humanly possible. Hence the need for more humans, especially humans that already have guns and aren’t allowed to reject reassignment.

Here’s how things are going in this administration’s undeclared war on Los Angeles:

Several said they had raised objections themselves or knew someone who objected, either because they did not want to be involved in immigration crackdowns or felt the Trump administration had put them on the streets for what they described as a “fake mission.”

[…]

At least 105 members of the deployment sought counseling from behavioral health officers, and at least one company commander and one battalion commander who objected to the mission were reassigned to work unrelated to the mobilization, the Guard officers said. Some troops became so disgruntled that there were several reports of soldiers defecating in Humvees and showers at the Southern California base where the troops are stationed, prompting tightened bathroom security.

I do like the fact that shitting in Humvees somehow resulted in “tightened bathroom security.” That sounds like exactly the sort of galaxy brain thinking that might be deployed by officials and officers who are wholly supportive of sending troops to help with deportation just because the president doesn’t like Governor Gavin Newsom. Or maybe it just means troops will be tasked with installing Port-a-Potty latches on Humvee door handles to inform other troops as to which vehicles are currently “OCCUPIED.”

If morale is that low, be thankful your problems are largely limited to unexpected defecation options. For many of those whose enlistment is nearing its end, they’ll soon be free to use their own restrooms and go to work without being blamed for the actions of a rogue president. (Unfortunately, they’ll probably still have to buy their own Disneyland tickets.)

The California National Guard had 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment. Of those 72, at least two have now left the Guard and 55 others have indicated that they will not extend their service, according to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is fighting Mr. Trump’s deployment in court.

The military already has a serious retention problem it’s been unable to solve since the last time the draft was implemented. This isn’t going to make things any better. I can guarantee no one got into the military hoping one day they’d be deployed to engage in a war against their fellow Americans. While plenty of troops may not be happy with the places they’ve been deployed over the years, it was never because it put them in the position of potentially having to harm or kill Americans or even immigrants to this country.

The people getting out now are just the leading edge — the early adopters who have the opportunity to do so. More will be leaving and most likely won’t be replaced by anyone you’d actually trust with a uniform and gun. You can’t just wait this presidency out because there’s absolutely no guarantee Trump will be replaced by anyone less authoritarian-leaning. And that’s if he leaves at all, something else that isn’t exactly guaranteed at this point.

We’re all feeling this, but at least someone in charge is willing to say it out loud, even if they won’t put their name on it:

“The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,” one of the two Guard officials said. “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

Let’s hope the moral injuries are sufficient to stop what’s happening here. The other options are far, far worse, especially when the most powerful man in the world is clearly trying to provoke a situation that would justify him ordering military members to engage in violence against the people populating the country they serve.

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On July 8, an expanded coalition of library associations, civil society organizations, journalist groups, and other advocates for information access sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining their opposition to the Pro Codes Act. This coalition has grown significantly from the original group that opposed the bill, now including major organizations like the NAACP and numerous journalism organizations.

The Pro Codes Act is back (first as H.R. 4009, but refiled as H.R. 4072) in almost identical form to bill H.R. 1631 in the 118th Congress. The previous version was brought to the floor under suspension of the rules—a procedural mechanism typically reserved for non-controversial legislation—but failed to achieve the required two-thirds majority for passage. The use of suspension of the rules was particularly notable given that the Pro Codes Act is far from non-controversial. The Pro Codes Act has not received a committee hearing in this Congress or any previous one.

Works Incorporated by Reference Into Law

To understand the Pro Codes Act, one has to understand incorporation by reference. For example, a city may pass legislation saying that all residential structures must follow the International Residential Code 2024 (IRC 2024), published by the International Code Council (ICC).  That means the IRC 2024 is now law in that city – it must be followed and violations can confer civil or even criminal penalties. Another example is the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG), which the Department of Justice incorporated by reference into regulations requiring web and mobile applications operated by state and local governments to be accessible to people with disabilities.

These laws govern everything from backyard deck projects to life safety regulations for baby pacifiers.  They are accessed by construction professionals, DIYers, manufacturers, medical professionals, journalists, librarians, law students, consumers checking that products are safe, and many others.

Pro Codes prioritizes corporate profits over public access to law

At its core, the Pro Codes Act aims to grant standards development organizations (SDOs) exclusive ownership of large swathes of public law.  The bill’s text is fairly convoluted, but states that “a standard … shall retain such [copyright] protection, notwithstanding that the standard is incorporated [into law] by reference.”

Proponents of the bill claim that it is necessary because without copyright protections, SDOs will no longer be incentivized to create codes and standards. But Congress does not need to do anything to incentivize the creation of standards. Even without copyright protection for standards incorporated by reference, standards development organizations (SDOs) benefit financially from licensing the latest versions of the standards they develop, and selling training materials and programs on these standards. As the bill itself acknowledges, these private entities provide limited access to the law “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue from the industries and professionals that purchase copies and subscription-access to those standards”.

The bill includes a minimum requirement that standards be made “publicly accessible online,” but does not prohibit copyright holders from providing read-only access and prohibiting users from downloading, copying, printing, or linking to the standards. As UpCodes explains here, this and other restrictions impose severe restrictions on access to the law.

The False Claim About Financial Hardship

While the argument that SDOs need copyright protection to stay in business and continue creating these important regulations enjoyed a fair amount of traction in the last Congress, there is no evidence, as noted by multiple courts now, that this has any basis in truth.

The main proponents of the bill, ICC and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), are making more money than ever as can be seen from their Form 990s (ICC’s, NFPA’s), despite public interest groups like Public.Resource.Org and companies like UpCodes providing free, unfettered access to these laws for the first time ever.  The organizations are able to monetize a suite of auxiliary services around the law such as consulting, testing, inspection, certification and training.  This allows them to continue growing their revenues and maintain exorbitant executive compensation (with CEO salaries upwards of $1,000,000, compared to the median CEO salary for non-profits of $115,682).  In one case, a circuit court noted that:

“it is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”  (Veeck v. SBCCI, 5th Circuit)

This 5th Circuit ruling was from 2002.  The SBCCI went on to become the ICC and indeed from their 990s discussed above it’s seen that, 23 years later, the judge was indeed correct.

Courts Have Ruled Against Private Ownership of Law

The proponents also argue that the courts are split so Congress needs to intervene, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Every circuit-level ruling has upheld that laws can not be owned.  The supporters of the bill bring no evidence and are unable to cite any circuit-level case law showing codes adopted into law can be copyrighted.  On the other hand, the free law proponents have many rulings in their camp.  In addition to the above ruling, for example:

“The plaintiffs here claim a copyright over binding legal texts, which would enable them to prevent anyone from gaining access to that law or copying it for the public… As a matter of common-sense, this cannot be right: access to the law cannot be conditioned on the consent of a private party.” (ASTM, NFPA et al. v. Public.Resource.Org, DC Circuit Court)

“The citizens are the authors of the law, and therefore its owners, regardless of who actually drafts the provisions, because the law derives its authority from the consent of the public, expressed through the democratic process.” (BOCA v. Code Technology, 1st Circuit)

In 2020, the matter reached the Supreme Court with all three of the justices who wrote opinions concurring on one fundamental principle:

 “No one can own the law”  -Justice Roberts

“Beyond doubt, state laws are not copyrightable”  -Justice Ginsburg

“Statutes and regulations cannot be copyrighted”  -Justice Thomas

This is precisely why these organizations are now turning to Congress.  The courts refused to grant them a monopoly over public law, after which they began spending millions lobbying to push this ill-conceived bill.

A Role for Advocates

While SDOs dedicate significant resources to lobbying for Congress to pass the Pro Codes Act, Congressional offices heard surprisingly little about this last Congress.  Some offices report not getting a single note from constituents on Pro Codes.  If you agree that this bill is deceptively written, please take one minute to contact your representatives and tell Congress not to paywall the law.

Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries.  Garrett Reynolds is a Founder of UpCodes.

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Ring founder Jamie Siminoff isback at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices.

This is a bad, bad step for Ring and the broader public.

Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United States. After all, police have used Ring footage to spy on protestors, and obtained footage without a warrant or consent of the user. It is easy to imagine that law enforcement officials will use their renewed access to Ring information to find people who have had abortions or track down people for immigration enforcement.

Siminoff has announced in a memo seen by Business Insider that the company will now be reimagined from the ground up to be “AI first”—whatever that means for a home security camera that lets you see who is ringing your doorbell. We fear that this may signal the introduction of video analytics or face recognition to an already problematic surveillance device.

It was also reported that employees at Ring will have to show proof that they use AI in order to get promoted.

Not to be undone with new bad features, they are also planning on rolling back some of the necessary reforms Ring has made: namely partnering with Axon to build a new tool that would allow police to request Ring footage directly from users, and also allow users to consent to letting police livestream directly from their device.

After years of serving as the eyes and ears of police, the company was compelled by public pressure to make a number of necessary changes. They introduced end-to-end encryption, they ended theirformal partnerships with police which were an ethical minefield, and they ended their toolthat facilitated police requests for footage directly to customers. Now they are pivoting back to being a tool of mass surveillance.

Why now? It is hard to believe the company is betraying the trust of its millions of customers in the name of “safety” when violent crime in the United States is reaching near-historically low levels. It’s probably not about their customers—the FTC had to compelRing to take its users’ privacy seriously.

No, this is most likely about Ring cashing in on the rising tide of techno-authoritarianism, that is, authoritarianism aided by surveillance tech. Too many tech companies want to profit from our shrinking liberties. Google likewise recently ended an old ethical commitment that prohibited it from profiting off of surveillance and warfare. Companies are locking down billion-dollar contracts by selling their products to the defense sector or police.

Shame on Ring.

Originally posted to EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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I recognize that trademark law is a nuanced thing and I don’t expect the average person to be familiar with all of its intricacies. Hell, I write about trademarks all the time and I could probably fill a law school gymnasium with what I still don’t know about it. But I honestly am often surprised by how often the concept that you cannot trademark, or monopolize, a term that is purely descriptive of the product or service the mark is for. It seems to me that the concept that you cannot lock up language in commerce when that language describes a product for which there will be competing products seems to me to be quite obvious, yet it escapes far too many people.

And sometimes they have to be taught this multiple times before it takes. Randy White owns Doc Ford’s Rum Bar & Grille in Florida and includes on its menu a dish called “Yucatan Shrimp.” It’s a dish consisting of, well shrimp. And it’s cooked in the style popularized in the Yucatan region of Mexico. You probably already guessed all of that, because the name of the dish is purely descriptive. Despite that, White attempted to get a trademark on the term.

This has gone through several steps to date. First, the examiner reviewed the application, did their homework on the term, found it in use all over the place and noted its descriptive nature, and then denied the mark. White appealed the decision to the USPTO’s TTAB, which reviewed the examiner’s work and affirmed it. Not content with being taught about descriptive marks twice, White then appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals, which has now also affirmed the examiner’s and TTAB’s decision.

There’s a lot of good detail in the decision embedded below, but the highlights consist of the court doing what I can only describe as educating White and his attorneys on trademark law.

Substantial evidence supports the Board’s conclusion that the YUCATAN SHRIMP mark is merely descriptive of Mr. White’s goods. The examiner marshalled a legion of recipes and descriptions of “Yucatan Shrimp” dishes from third-party cooking and restaurant webpages, showing that the public understands “Yucatan Shrimp” to refer to a dish that features shrimp prepared with a set of common ingredients associated with Mexican cuisine, such as hot peppers or sauce, citrus juice, and cilantro. J.A. 39–113. The Board found that the third-party evidence establishes that YUCATAN SHRIMP is recognized as a dish using shrimp and particular ingredients associated with Mexican cuisine. J.A. 8.

The Board also relied on Mr. White’s own usage of the mark on his restaurant’s menu. The menu describes the dish as originating in Quintana Roo, Mexico, which encompasses a portion of the Yucatan Peninsula. J.A. 24, 26. And the menu explains that the dish is prepared using the same ingredients as the third-party dishes described above, further supporting the Board’s finding that the public would recognize the YUCATAN SHRIMP mark as describing a shrimp dish with common ingredients.

White tried to poke some very specific holes in the TTAB’s reasoning, but to no avail. He said that the TTAB should have had to prove that there was a specific style of cooking understood by the public to have originated in the Yucatan: denied by the court. He said that the TTAB changed the reasoning of the refusal compared to the original examiner because the examiner referred to the descriptive nature of the cooking style being from the “Yucatan,” while the TTAB referred to it as descriptive of “Mexican-inspired” food and that this made the TTAB’s review improper: denied by the court. White asserted that the examiner failed to consider “evidence” White provided by not reviewing a news article about the dish and restaurant: denied by the court, because it doesn’t change the reasoning of the examiner in any real way.

But this one is my favorite:

Finally, Mr. White contends that any doubts as to descriptiveness should have been resolved in his favor. This argument simply repackages Mr. White’s complaints about the Board’s adverse finding. There is no basis on this record to conclude that the examiner or the Board doubted the descriptiveness of the mark or that they improperly resolved any doubts against Mr. White.

Thrice now, White and his legal team have been told the mark is descriptive and to go away. Hopefully, as the saying goes, here endeth the lesson.

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Democratic politicians have a chronic problem: they keep accepting Republican framing instead of creating their own. They run scared of Fox News, moderate their positions to appease the unappeasable, and let political consultants convince them that authenticity is dangerous. They are so worried about how Fox News will portray anything they say, they try not to say anything interesting at all.

The costs of this approach became painfully clear in 2024. There was a brief shining moment last summer when the Harris Walz campaign appeared to be scoring real damage to the Trump Vance campaign by not falling into this predictable pattern. Instead, they were being authentic, calling out how fucking weird the MAGA world’s positions actually were, and it was working.

It was highlighting just how ridiculous the GOP’s policies are, and how damaging they can be. And yet, within weeks, Democratic political consultants killed it.

Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, “We’re not going back.” It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative.

In retrospect, not letting Tim Walz be Tim Walz was a huge blunder. When he spoke in a relatable way, people got it. He was authentic and real and, even if he made an occasional policy blunder, you got the sense that he actually cared. But the traditional Democratic advisors couldn’t stand that level of risk. They ran so scared of any potential “gaffe” that might give Fox News or the NY Post fodder, that they’d rather silence the candidates who actually resonate with people.

There were also efforts to curb some of his signature lines, including casting Trump and Republicans as “weird,” which slipped out of Walz’s speeches.

“He was encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism,” said another former Harris aide. “I think it is fair to ask whether, even if ‘weird’ wasn’t quite right, his instinct about how to approach Trump, to make him seem small, and a huckster, wasn’t closer to correct than the more self-serious tone that may have made us sound too in defense of the status quo.”

Mockery yields results. As does not being afraid of the way the other side is framing things. They’re going to call any Democrat a “socialist” or “communist” anyway. Stop letting Fox News decide how you act. People are hungry for someone who will actually say what’s really happening, rather than playing it safe and political.

Instead, the Democrats tried to run as “traditional Republican lite,” spending much of the campaign appearing with Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, which came off as incredibly inauthentic and designed only to appeal to people who want Republicans to like them. It turned off Democrats and didn’t attract any Trump supporters.

That’s part of why Zohran Mamdani is so refreshing in the NYC mayoral race. He’s been incredibly natural and authentic in making it clear he absolutely loves NYC and he won’t cave to misleading framing by either Republicans or the traditional Democratic political consultants. Now, winning a NYC mayoral primary is different from winning a national election—the media environment and stakes are different—but the core lesson about authentic messaging still applies.

Over the weekend, he put out a hilarious video that demonstrates this clearly:

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends. But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month. See you soon, NYC.

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social) 2025-07-20T14:37:21.480Z

In it, he notes that he’s on a short planned trip to Uganda, where he was born and raised, to celebrate his wedding from earlier this year with family and friends who are still in Uganda. The video is very good political theater. It takes criticism from the screeching class on X who keep telling him (obnoxiously) to “go back to Africa” and turns it into a joke.

The traditional Democratic consultant would say to try to keep this trip quiet overall, or cite “privacy” in not providing details. Mamdani makes it a joke, points out how he’s listening to his critics, and then caps it off with a knowing wink to the fact that some of his haters won’t want him to come back:

But depending on your perspective, don’t worry or I’m sorry: I’ll be back by the end of the month.

In the video he also says “I want to apologize to the haters, because I will undoubtedly be coming back.”

But, even better, he spends the latter half of the video jokingly suggesting potential NY Post headlines to exaggerate his celebratory trip (I’ll leave the best joke to those who watch the video itself rather than posting it here), but tonally, it’s perfect.

This does so many important things well that Democrats often fail it. It defuses a non-controversy before the MAGA world can turn it into a faux controversy. It uses sarcasm and humor to disarm people. And it comes across as someone authentic who loves his family and friends… as well as NYC.

This approach offers a model that Democrats desperately need: don’t accept the frame your opponents set, create your own. Use humor to deflate pompous attacks. Be authentic about who you are and what you care about. Trust that voters can handle complexity and honesty.

The alternative is what we got in 2024: a sanitized, consultant-approved campaign that felt disconnected from real people and real problems. Until Democrats learn to reward politicians who take authentic risks instead of those who play it safe, they’ll keep losing to candidates who may lie constantly but at least sound like they believe what they’re saying.

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It was over a decade ago that Mike wrote about the state of New York’s trademark bullying ways when it comes to enforcing its trademarks for “I NY.” Now, it should be obvious just how absurd it is for the state to even hold onto a trademark designed to promote the state, nevermind the manner in which the state government has enforced that mark. But the overall point is that such a broad trademark doesn’t serve as a source identifier.

Well how about one even broader than that? Over in Europe, German apparel company Spread Group applied for a trademark in 2022 for all kinds of categories. The mark applied for? “I ”. That’s it. That’s the entire applied for mark.

The idea was to get the intellectual rights of a capital “I” followed by a red heart, printed on three specific parts of clothing — left chest, inside label, and behind the neck. This was not considered distinctive enough for the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which analysed the request.

The EU office rejected the applications, pointing out that the symbol simply reads as “I love”, a message so common that it can’t reasonably be traced back to any one brand. Substantially, the symbol lacked the distinctive character, the essential criterion used by EUIPO for granting trademark protection. As in the world of fashion, hearts and declarations of love are just about everywhere, the “I ” doesn’t quite make the cut.

I mean… yeah? The idea of a single company locking up that letter/symbol combination, ubiquitous in the apparel industry, across an entire continent is plainly absurd. Far from operating within the purpose of trademark laws generally, this is quite obviously not about protecting the public from confusion, nor the company from tarnishment. This was a pure money and control grab from the jump. I’m sure there were suited-executives in some boardroom in Germany licking their lips about all the money that would be made from strong-armed licensing deals and/or trademark lawsuits.

So tantalizing was the prospect, in fact, that the company actually appealed EUIPO’s rightful decision up to the EU General Court. Unfortunately for them, things didn’t go any differently there.

But the Court wasn’t feeling the love, and they sided with the EUIPO, ruling that neither the symbol nor where it appears on the clothing items is not enough to distinguish the products from those of other brands.

The ruling reinforces the principle that commonly used symbols and expressions, even when stylised or strategically placed, cannot be monopolised through trademark registration unless they clearly identify the source of a product.

Sane trademark ruling shouldn’t be something we have to celebrate, but c’est la vie, I guess. But it sure would be nice if the USPTO could sit up and take notice of such sanity, devoid of it as they seem to be when it comes to New York’s mark.

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To be sure, the DHS is just going to blow off Senator Wyden’s demands for answers, just as it has blown off congressional oversight, court orders, and pretty much the entirety of the US Constitution. (We’re all just waiting to be told we’re obligated to house National Guard troops sent by the administration to whatever state happens to be irritating him at the moment.)

Last month, Dhruv Merota of Wired reported the DHS was now adding DNA collected from migrant children to a criminal database run by the FBI (CODIS [Combined DNA Index System]) and accessible by hundreds of US law enforcement agencies. It was originally created to track dangerous and violent criminals.

Now, for reasons only explained by this administration’s blind hatred of non-white people, more than 133,000 migrant kids (ranging from teens to at least one four-year-old) are now populating a criminal database solely because their parents were undocumented migrants.

DNA is forever and this is a forever database. The government has no obligation to remove anyone from CODIS, which means migrant children are intermingling with dangerous criminals, only a search away from being presumed to be criminals by any law enforcement officer located pretty much anywhere in the United States.

The presumption is that anyone added has been, at the very least, served with criminal charges. But that’s not what happened here. That’s what Ron Wyden’s letter [PDF] makes clear, as he seeks answers he’ll probably never receive from Kristi Noem and/or the multiple immigration-focused agencies she now controls. (h/t Dell Cameron/Wired)

Lots of legitimate concerns are raised by Senator Wyden, starting with this apparent abuse of a criminal database to fill it with a bunch of non-criminal DNA samples.

The Trump administration appears to be broadly detaining individuals and collecting their DNA for permanent storage in CODIS. Reporting also suggests that 97% of noncitizens whose DNA was collected were detained under CBP’s civil authority, and not on any criminal charges.

Of that 97% of non-citizen non-criminals, more than 133,000 were minors, which is something that would normally under a normal regime make these people exempt from DNA collection efforts. Under Trump, however, anyone looking kinda like someone in need of deportation is getting added.

DHS policy states that individuals under the age of 14 are generally exempt from DNA collection, but DHS officials appear to have discretion to collect DNA in certain circumstances. The Executive Branch has not provided any justification for the permanent collection of the children’s DNA samples, or for the storage of children’s genetic information in a system originally designed to ensure public safety from violent criminals.

The end result is this: this DNA collected from migrant children will remain in CODIS forever, accessed every time a law enforcement officer seeks a DNA match from the system. While some people may think this is a victimless crime, the reality is that these kids are treated as criminal suspects during queries (because the database presumes anyone in it is a criminal). When false positives happen (and they will!), innocent children will be treated as criminal suspects despite having done nothing more than… well, being lied to by government agents.

[P]ublic reporting suggests that individuals were not aware of their DNA being collected by federal officials—many individuals thought their cheeks were swabbed by federal agents for the purposes of a COVID-19 test.

Yep, and that’s in addition to the family separation policies deployed by both Trump administrations. Immigration agents have — for several years now — made it a point to break up families, which makes it easier to get migrant kids to do what the government wants without being blocked by parents who might try to invoke their rights or otherwise discourage cooperation with (seemingly unlawful) actions by the US government.

In addition to all of the questions the public deserves answers to, Ron Wyden makes a point that will surely be lost on the fascists currently running the nation.

Governments exercising such broad discretion to involuntarily collect and retain DNA are repressive authoritarian regimes also engaging in gross human rights violations, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and more. In fact, the U.S. Government has condemned the involuntary collection of DNA by the People’s Republic of China and has sanctioned entities engaged in this practice, yet this practice appears to be ongoing on our own soil.

Being compared to China with receipts attached is a low point for this nation. But that’s what Trump and his enablers seem to think will finally make America great: domestic surveillance, ethnic cleansing, the silencing of the media, the stripping of public funding from anything that seems remotely altruistic, and deploying the military to “police” cities and states whose the most powerful political figures oppose Trump and his actions. And every bit of info it can collect on the people living in the United States helps, even if its cheek swabs from kids who were told by federal officers they were being checked for possible infections.

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We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous lawsuits here at Techdirt, but the one that Donald Trump filed on Friday against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over the article about the birthday card he was alleged to have given Epstein is so legally incompetent that it reads like a masterclass in how not to file a defamation claim.

The complaint is such a train wreck of basic legal errors and factual misrepresentations that it can only be understood as a SLAPP suit designed to harass the WSJ and force them to reveal sources. The legal malpractice on display would be almost comical if it weren’t so transparent in its authoritarian intent.

Trump is using a Miami law firm that appears to specialize in franchise law—which might explain the amateurish quality of this defamation complaint. When you can’t get competent media lawyers, apparently you make do with whoever will take your money.

Let’s start with what the WSJ actually reported, because the lawyers filing this suit seem to have struggled with basic reading comprehension. It claims that Trump gave Epstein a card for his 50th Birthday that, well, here’s how they describe it:

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The Journal also includes the type written faux dialogue between Trump and Epstein that was apparently included, which is so bizarre I’m not even going to bother repeating it here.

Here’s where the legal incompetence begins. Trump’s defenders, led by JD Vance, immediately seized on the fact that the WSJ didn’t publish a photo of the letter as somehow “proof” it doesn’t exist:

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how journalism works. Major publications don’t publish stories like this without solid sourcing—the WSJ’s legal team wouldn’t allow it. More importantly, there are often very good reasons for media organizations not to reveal images of documents that have been leaked to them. Just ask Reality Winner. And, of course, I’m sure the Trump regime would love to know who leaked this document, so seeing an image might help reveal that information.

But that doesn’t make it a good legal argument. Unless you’re just trying to flush out the leaker.

So it’s notable that the lawyers decide to lead with that as their key piece of “evidence” that the story is fabricated—a strategy that’s likely to backfire spectacularly when the WSJ produces the letter in discovery (or before).

On the one hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely pass off as fact that President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter. And on the other hand, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained. The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists. Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.

That’s a bold claim. It seems like quite the gambit to open with a claim that the letter doesn’t even exist, when it seems quite likely that this argument will come back to haunt them.

Also, the lawyers can’t even accurately describe what the WSJ reported. The complaint claims the article states that “President Trump, in 2003, wrote, drew, and signed this letter.” But that’s not what the WSJ said. The article carefully states the letter bore Trump’s name and signature, and that the drawing “appears to be hand-drawn” without attributing the drawing to Trump.

This isn’t just sloppy—it’s the kind of basic factual error that suggests the lawyers either didn’t carefully read the article they’re suing over, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.

The complaint also has a weird argument about how the WSJ published this as an “exclusive” but then… disseminated it widely. As one does. With news. I don’t know why this paragraph is in here, other than to make it clear that the lawyer who wrote this is unfamiliar with how journalism works:

The Article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive.1 However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

They also double down on their claim that it’s impossible that this letter exists, which seems like a kind of lawsuit claim preceding an unfortunate event for them.

Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article. That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump.

But the most egregious nonsense comes in how they identify the allegedly defamatory statements.

In a defamation lawsuit, you have to state which statements made by the defendant were “false statements of fact” and that’s tough to do here, but these lawyers power on through.

They claim, among other things, that the phrase “the letter bearing Trump’s name” is false. They also claim that stating the letter “is bawdy” is false. Calling something “bawdy” would clearly be an opinion based on disclosed facts and literally can’t be defamatory.

But here’s where you know these lawyers didn’t actually read the article they’re suing over. They claim it’s defamatory that the WSJ described some contributors to Epstein’s birthday book as “childhood pals”—and they’re claiming this defames Trump. But look at the sentence:

The album had poems, photos and greetings from businesspeople, academics, Epstein’s former girlfriends and childhood pals*, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with them*

The “childhood pals” reference clearly refers to other contributors to the birthday book—not Trump. This is such a basic reading comprehension failure that it raises questions about whether these lawyers actually practiced law before filing this complaint.

They separately claim it’s defamatory to claim that Epstein socialized with Trump, which is ridiculous as the evidence for that is widespread, including multiple images, videos, and Donald Trump’s own words

This is not a serious lawsuit that anyone expects to win.

This is a SLAPP lawsuit.

And it asks for $10 billion dollars.

I mean, it’s kinda like this:

The real question is whether this strategy will work. Given that CBS just paid Trump $16 million to settle a similarly frivolous lawsuit, that ABC paid him $15 million to settle another lawsuit, and that Meta paid him $25 million in what amounts to protection money, Trump has good reason to think that flinging enough legal garbage will eventually pay off. Indeed, he crowed about these payoffs on social media as evidence that Murdoch will pay him too.

But this case presents a fascinating test of media power dynamics. Trump is essentially betting that he can bully Rupert Murdoch the same way he’s successfully bullied other media companies. That’s a bold gamble, in part because of how important Rupert Murdoch has been to Trump’s success. Rupert has been a Trump ally for years, but he can be ruthless when his business interests are threatened.

More importantly, the WSJ has the legal resources to fight this, and, hopefully, the financial incentive to do so.

If the WSJ folds here, it would complete Trump’s transformation of SLAPP suits from a nuisance tactic into a reliable revenue stream. The man who famously complained about “fake news” has figured out that threatening to sue over real news is far more profitable.

But Murdoch isn’t exactly known for backing down when someone tries to shake him down. This could get very messy, very quickly—which might be the most entertaining thing to come out of this embarrassing legal filing.

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No matter what the DHS and ICE say about the justification of ICE officers remaining masked during raids, it’s all about avoiding public accountability. DHS boss Kristi Noem says alarmist things about ICE officers being “targeted” or “doxxed,” but it’s all about inflicting America with its own secret police while it undergoes the process of being made great again (for the second time).

The administration can pretend it’s about ICE officer safety, but the undeniable fact is that the number of assaults on officers is a rounding error compared to the massive increase in full-blown raids of any place some brown people might possibly be found.

What should never have changed is how things are handled in court. Remaining anonymous is a luxury, not a right, and it only applies in certain extreme circumstances — and only after a judge has made a determination to allow a party (or their legal representative) to proceed anonymously.

Immigration courts and their judges aren’t quite as responsive to transparency as other federal courts. That being said, it should never have come to this: immigration judges preemptively granting anonymity to government lawyers during deportation hearings. That’s apparently becoming the new normal, at least in a couple of courts, as Debbie Nathan reports for The Intercept.

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.

Who’s “we,” Judge Xu? Everyone in attendance knows who you are, along with the names of the immigrants and their lawyers. “We” cannot possibly be the government’s lawyer, because only one person is being granted this extremely peculiar privilege.

The non-government parties objected to this unearned and completely unexpected anonymity but it didn’t matter. Judge Xu also apparently felt the non-government parties weren’t deserving of any legal justification for her decision to omit the name of the ICE lawyer from the public record:

Xu attributed the change to “privacy” because “things lately have changed.”

What had “changed” went unexplained. Either this judge was buying into ICE’s bullshit about assaults on ICE employees (which is a number so low it provokes unintentional laughter) or the government had decided it wanted anonymity and the judge decided she was going to oblige the party with the most power.

Either way, Judge Xu isn’t the only one doing this.

It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names, but The Intercept has witnessed the practice twice. On July 10, Judge James McCarthy in lower Manhattan neglected to identify the government’s attorney in several cases, referring to the lawyer instead as “Department.”

“Department, are we done with pleadings?” McCarthy asked. The word stood in for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Several immigration defense attorneys were attending the hearings by video. None objected.

That’s a whole lot of bullshit, ranging from the judge’s willingness to allow this to the immigrants’ legal reps failing to object. Granted, sometimes it’s best to just shut up and address only the legal matters directly affecting your case. But the more this sort of thing occurs without comment by targets of government legal action, the more comfortable government lawyers are going to be going forward with refusing to add their names to the public record.

The ICE lawyer who went unnamed by Judge Xu did, however, provide her name to the opposing counsel. She’s Cosette Shachnow, who is now the figurehead of this new opacity effort by ICE/DHS, whether or not she truly deserves to be. There’s nothing in the article that suggests Shachnow demanded anonymity, but there’s nothing in there either that suggests she opposed something that might have been an ICE directive, rather than her own personal choice.

Either way, everyone knows her now. And every time the government uses its power and will to shield itself from accountability, it will run into people who are very determined to undermine this unearned privilege. DHS head Kristi Noem may complain about “doxxing” of masked ICE officers, but nothing mobilizes social reaction like deliberately refusing to play by the rules.

If the government is going to impose its will on the public, it should have the strength of character to accept the accountability that’s supposed to accompany the massive amount of power it wields. That means ICE officers should identify themselves, obtain actual judicially issued warrants before engaging in arrests, and be honest about the limits of their administrative paperwork, which doesn’t actually give them the right to enter private spaces and/or detain people who aren’t the actual target of their investigations.

And the government’s lawyers should be willing to go on record when in court. If you don’t actually believe in the cause, get the fuck out. Don’t just sit there converting the infliction of bigoted misery on others into a paycheck unless you’re willing to own it. If you want to be one of the baddies, be big enough to let everyone know it. Otherwise, you’re not only a traitor to the American way of life, but a coward as well.

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I’ve been warning people since the beginning of the year to expect the Trump regime to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government and now we’re seeing exactly that play out. Trump is facing a bunch of pushback over the Jeffrey Epstein nonsense, so he needed some big new distraction quickly. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stepped up Friday with a supposed bombshell, claiming to have discovered that the Obama administration concocted false intelligence reports that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.

This is deliberate disinformation using the exact same Twitter Files playbook. The pattern is always identical: release narrow technical documents that most people won’t understand, surround them with inflammatory innuendo, then hand them off to gullible rubes like Matt Taibbi who will falsely claim the biggest scandal in history just dropped.

The “Russia Hoax” claim has been a central argument among Trump supporters for years, but it’s based on ever-shifting definitions. To understand why Gabbard’s latest “revelation” is manufactured bullshit, you need to understand what actually happened with Russian interference in 2016.

Here’s what actually happened: Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, primarily to sow chaos and division in the US. This generally involved supporting Trump (who brought more chaos) and attacking Hillary Clinton (whom Putin despised from her time as Secretary of State). This basic fact has been confirmed over and over again by multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans).

There was some overly hyped nonsense regarding Russia “colluding” (not a technical term) with the Trump campaign and then some unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier that appear unlikely to be true.

And then you have a bunch of extreme cultish partisans on both sides of the aisle who claimed too much. Some Democrats were way too credulous in believing that Russia worked hand-in-hand with Trump and did way more than they actually did. They were too quick to assume the worst at every turn with no proof. And they—not unlike QAnon folks—kept expecting some big bombshell to drop from something like the Mueller report.

The reality was much more mundane. Russia did seek to influence the election through various means, though it’s not really clear they had all that much success. MAGA folks have turned this into the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” claiming that because the most extreme versions of the narrative (“collusion” “pee tape”) didn’t bear out, it means that Russia was wholly uninvolved.

But that’s nonsense.

It is widely confirmed across multiple research reports from multiple sources, including one led by Republicans in the Senate that, yes, absolutely, Russia sought to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:

We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.

What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling*.*

The report also noted that:

Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.

Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.

That’s all an awful lot of prelude, but it’s important to know about in order to understand what has happened recently. As detailed earlier this month at Lawfare, the CIA released an “internal tradecraft review” analyzing the intelligence community assessment that was released in early January of 2017, exploring one single line in that initial report. The report included a line saying the intelligence community believed, with high confidence, that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

The original report attributed the “high confidence” in this particular claim to the CIA and FBI, while noting the NSA had “moderate confidence” in that claim. The new “tradecraft review” simply analyzes whether or not the CIA should have had “high confidence” in that claim and ends by saying that because of the word “aspire” and the evidence the CIA had on hand, it maybe should have said it had “moderate” confidence rather than high.

This is… not that big a deal. Basically, they’re saying that the CIA said it was slightly more confident than it actually was about Putin’s intent to help Trump. But it never denies that the assessment was still that Putin wanted to help Trump, as multiple other reports have said.

That takes us to Friday’s “revelation.” What Gabbard actually revealed was an intelligence assessment in December of 2016 that said that Russia was unsuccessful in one narrow thing: hacking into US voting infrastructure to change votes.

The key line:

We assess that foreign adversaries did not use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome this year.

That is referencing one thing and one thing only: Were they able to successfully hack into election infrastructure and change results. Answer? No, they were not. This is also… not new. Multiple other investigations found the same thing: that, for all its faults (and it has faults!), the US voting infrastructure held up nicely in 2016 (and in 2020). That doesn’t mean Russia didn’t try to hack into these things. There are plenty of reports detailing how they succeeded in targeting state and local election officials as well as voting tech companies. But no evidence that any of that resulted in changed votes.

And that’s all this “bombshell” is really saying: that there was no evidence of the election infrastructure failing. Trump won in 2016 not because someone hacked voting machines. That’s it.

Here’s where the deliberate disinformation kicks in. Gabbard and the MAGA crew are claiming this proves Russia did absolutely nothing to influence the election, and that Obama cooked up a fake story between December 2016 and January 2017. On top of that, she claims this is so egregious that she’s referring Obama and his team for possible prosecution.

This is spectacularly stupid for multiple reasons. The original report was narrowly focused on one thing that was widely known: no successful hack impacted the actual election. But it’s being used to pretend it proves that the Russians didn’t try to influence the election at all—a thing we already knew they absolutely did, as confirmed by multiple investigative reports, including the Republican-led Senate reports quoted above.

The second part of the nonsense is that Gabbard then misrepresents Obama’s request to the intelligence agency, following that initial assessment, to write an analysis about Russian attempts to influence the election as a whole. That is, having seen the narrow report about a lack of success in hacking in to change votes, the request was a broader look at the many ways which Russia simply tried to influence the election, which is something entirely different than hacking voting infrastructure.

These two things are not in conflict at all, but Gabbard presents them as though they are. It’s like saying a doctor’s report that “no broken bones detected” contradicts a later assessment about “possible muscle strain”—when they’re examining completely different types of injuries. Even worse, Gabbard and MAGA world’s freakout is like saying the doctor who said “no broken bones, but can we run an analysis of muscle strain” was thereby trying to cover up the lack of broken bones by asking for a report on the muscle strain. It’s stupid beyond belief.

This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again.

Take some internal docs and release them, but surrounded by a bunch of innuendo and exaggerated claims.Hand those documents to very stupid or very motivated (or both!) people who will falsely claim that the limited statement in those docs means the much broader thing that is in the innuendo.Voila! A wholly manufactured story.

And into the void leaps one of the same useful idiots: Matt Taibbi. On the same day that walking First Amendment violator Donald Trump was directly trying to silence negative stories about himself, Matt Taibbi was claiming that Gabbard’s release was the biggest story in ages, and way more of a scandal than literally anything Donald Trump has done.

That’s Taibbi (who regularly makes embarrassingly stupid mistakes) claiming that the “corruption” here “dwarfs the worst Trump scandals.” He further claims “It’s unprecedented. It’s now in writing that the whole Trump-Russia thing was invented.”

Except, to anyone who can actually comprehend what words mean, this is not true at all. It confirms two things we knew already: (1) Russia was unsuccessful in its attempts to literally hack the voting machines used in the election, and (2) Russia still very much sought to influence the election.

This is the same sort of shit they did with the Twitter Files, which revealed the kinds of challenging internal debates over how to operationalize trust & safety policies on edge cases, which Taibbi falsely turned into a giant scandal he still doesn’t understand to this day (because there was literally nothing scandalous in it).

But, of course, the Trump-supporting media (as they did with the Twitter files) is running with the innuendo. Fox News is claiming this is proof that “Obama and cronies created the Trump-Russia hoax.”

Breitbart is calling it a “treasonous” plot to “frame Trump” and says it “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”

This hysterical reaction is based on completely misrepresenting what the documents say. Obama wasn’t told there were no Russian interference attempts. He was told they didn’t successfully hack voting machines. That’s it.

And the research assessment that came a month later wasn’t in conflict with that. It noted (correctly as confirmed multiple times since) that the Russians absolutely tried to influence the election, which is not the same thing as hacking voting machines.

All that other stuff, including their desire to impact the election, their use of social media to do so, their connections to people in Trump’s orbit, and even their attempts at hacking voting systems, has all been confirmed. It’s not something that Obama had them make up. Even the CIA’s attempt to lower its own confidence on Putin’s intent earlier this month didn’t disagree with the fact that he did seek to interfere, even if he wasn’t that successful.

And, of course, thanks to Trump v. the United States, even if Obama had done something wrong here (and he clearly did not), Donald Trump’s Supreme Court made it clear that the President is immune for official acts, of which asking the intel community for an assessment is assuredly exactly that.

Unfortunately, even the mainstream media is reflecting Gabbard’s false framing, talking about how she called for Obama to be prosecuted over this, and burying the fact that it’s based on a deliberate misreading of what the documents show.

Meanwhile, Taibbi (who still isn’t criticizing Trump for his myriad attacks on press freedom) is literally claiming that Obama could end up in prison for this thing that the documents in front of him don’t show, no matter how often Taibbi claims otherwise (and apparently, Taibbi also seems wholly unaware of Trump v. US).

The irony here is staggering. While Trump is actively threatening journalists and media companies—behavior Taibbi’s crowd used to call authoritarian—Taibbi is fantasizing about imprisoning Obama over documents that any idiot can see don’t support his claims.

This is the Twitter Files playbook all over again and it’s designed to create exactly this kind of confusion. Gabbard knew that releasing these narrow technical documents with inflammatory framing would generate exactly the headlines we’re seeing. The goal isn’t truth—it’s providing Trump with a distraction from the Epstein stories and giving his base a new grievance narrative to obsess over.

For years going forward, due to useful idiots like Matt Taibbi, we’ll be hearing nonsense from otherwise smart people believing that it was revealed that Obama had the intelligence community come up with a fake report that the Russians tried to help Trump.

Which he did not—and it’s something we need to be clear about.

All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.

But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.

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In a lead up to the last Presidential Election, one of the lies circulated by the Trump camp to befuddle plebs and rubes was that Trump 2.0 was going to be “serious about antitrust reform.” You didn’t have to look far for some baseless claims in the press (or by supposed experts like Matt Stoller) that Trump would “expand on the antitrust legacy of former FTC boss Lina Khan” or “rein in big tech.”

The evidence of this claim was paper thin. Most of it circled around Trump’s attacks on companies like Google and Meta. Which had less to do with any good faith interest in “reining in corporate power,” and everything to do with bullying them away from engaging in content moderation of racist right wing propaganda, hate speech, and election disinformation online (quite effectively, as it turned out).

Still, much of the press (especially the Politico, Axios, brunchlord DC gossip press routinely ran over-credulous stories claiming that the GOP was “serious about antitrust now,” falsely helping sell a second Trump term as something that would be hugely beneficial to the common man.

That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.

If you’ve been napping, grotesque levels of lobbying and corruption under Trump have hollowed out all federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. Numerous dangerous and precedent-ignoring Supreme Court rulings have declared that U.S. regulators no longer have the authority to make expertise-driven determinations to rein in corporate power.

Trump’s also mindlessly rubber stamping mergers everywhere you look, provided the companies prove they’re racist and sexist enough, or promise to take part in Trump’s ongoing attacks against U.S. journalism and the First Amendment.

At the same time, agencies like the FTC are wasting endless time on right wing zealotry, anti-trans harassment, and politically motivated investigations, while agencies like the FCC strip away whatever was left of broadband consumer protection enforcement and media consolidation limits.

Despite this, the press still can’t seem to help itself in propping up claims that the second Trump administration gives a fleeting shit about unchecked corporate power. Bloomberg, for example, just this week ran a story with this headline, despite the fact the actual story doesn’t support it:

You only have to make it a few paragraphs into the article to find that’s clearly not true:

“Yet nearly six months in, a more nuanced picture is emerging. Ferguson’s FTC reached settlements in several multibillion dollar megadeals and dismissed one Biden-era lawsuit altogether. He has acknowledged harm from mergers, but eschews the language of a traditional trustbuster, saying dealmaking can be “fuel for the fires of innovation.”

The only remaining remnants of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy has been the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t killed several of her prominent antitrust cases against tech giants like Meta and Google. But again, this isn’t because Trump wants to genuinely rein in corporate power, it’s because he wants to maintain leverage over companies that control the flow of online information.

The U.S. hasn’t taken antitrust reform and corporate oversight seriously in a generation, and the impact (especially on the labor and product enshittifcation front) is absolutely everywhere you look. Lina Khan, warts and all, was the closest we got to a real antitrust enforcer in decades. And the press, centrist Dems, billionaires, and Republicans all had a coordinated four year, full-diapered tantrum about it.

The entire Trump lie depends on the false claim that dim authoritarian zealots care about common Americans. That Trump is an actual populist. That he cares about the blue-collar interests of the working and middle class, most of whom have been pummeled for generations by bottomless U.S. corruption and unchecked corporate power.

Trumpism is a transparent farce to anybody with a few brain cells to rub together. But not even six months ago, prominent “antitrust experts” like Matt Stoller (buoyed by a 2023 puff piece in Politico framing him as a top political thinker of the age) were insisting the Trump FTC hiring choices (like the selection of JD Vance advisor Gail Slater to head the Trump FTC antitrust division) meant good things for corporate oversight:

“This is a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on Big Tech,” wrote Matt Stoller of Trump’s pick of Slater in a post on X. Stoller, who runs an anti-monopoly podcast and is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, added in his newsletter, “while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems [Trump] is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival.“

Since then, Trump has illegally fired both Democratic FTC Commissioners. His FTC hires have stood mute as numerous, populist and popularist policies (from the FTC’s effort to make cancelling services easier to the Khan FTC ban on shitty noncompete restrictions) were destroyed. The FCC and DOJ have rubber stamped a long line of shitty mergers, again provided the companies demonstrate satisfactory levels of racism and blind fealty to our idiot king. Most companies have been happy to oblige.

There are some genuine populists embedded within the Trump regime, but they’re never going to overcome the administration’s signature corruption and incompetence to actually accomplish anything. And they’re too feckless to actually do anything as their ideals are trampled underfoot (this story about some DOJ staffers whining as they rubber stamp another T-Mobile merger demonstrates this well).

I really did try very hard to warn people what was coming. Trump 2.0 was always going to be a devastating but deadly clown show that took a hatchet to corporate oversight, labor law, environmental protection, and corporate oversight. It was never subtle. It’s going to kill a lot of people. Anybody who claimed otherwise holds significant responsibility for the widespread suffering and bloodshed to come.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about the behavior of Grok and LLMs in general:

LLMs are just bias engines. That’s literally what they do. That’s how they work. They find patterns (biases) and replicate them. Not all biases are bad. Sometimes you want a machine that can find biases so that you can question them. Sometimes you want a machine that can replicate biases, because assuming the way things have been done is the way they should be done again is a handy rational starting point.

Hopefully it becomes pretty clear to the next generation that social structures and facts are no place for these things. These are areas that require judgement, which is the exact opposite of a bias, and something that LLMs simply aren’t designed to provide.

In second place, it’s AmySox with a comment about UnitedHealth trying to silence critics in the wake of their CEO’s murder:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – John F. Kennedy

United Healthcare has made peaceful revolution against its policies impossible. They have no one but themselves to blame for what follows. Maybe not to the extent of killing, but I would have expected other forms of violence against their policies.

Of course, as I’ve said many times, the purpose of the American healthcare system is no longer to treat sick people, if it ever was; the purpose of the American healthcare system is to funnel money from sick people into the pockets of billionaires. And any attempt to change this meets with failure, since the people who could change it are in the pockets of those billionaires.

Peaceful revolution is impossible. No one should be surprised about what follows.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with an anonymous comment from that same point. this time in response to a comment separating the violence of the murder from the company’s practices:

The problem is that this framing can be perceived to depict that it’s only wrong to violently murder people, but it’s just a neutral act of business to functionally kill millions of people by setting up a systemic denial of life-saving service that they’re actively paying the company to provide.

Why is the violent murder of one person morally more offensive than slowly murdering millions more?

Next, it’s That One Guy with a thought about the Grok MechaHitler fiasco:

‘How dare you bring attention to reality, this is a post-reality country!’

Worth remembering that the person that’s excusing Grok going super-nazi because that’s how a majority of it’s users act like apparently is the same person that sued a company for pointing out that ads were being shown next to pro-nazi content and claiming the report wasn’t factual or realistic.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad with a comment about Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard wasting resources to root out government employees who aren’t MAGA enough:

You know, call me crazy, but I’m starting to think these people aren’t actually interested in improving government efficiency.

In second place, it’s MrWilson with a reply to a BDSM joke about connected devices that you don’t really own:

To be fair, you kind of have to be a masochist to buy into these product rentals.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, though things haven’t picked up too much in terms of funny comments, there are a couple more that earned badges to highlight. First, it’s Doctor Biobrain with a comment about doubting Trump’s claims about people who thank him:

Hey, now! Don’t you be doubting Trump’s Sir Stories. Just last week I had five big strong men with tears streaming from their eyes come up to me on their knees and said “Please, sir. Tell everyone that we really do exist and to stop mocking us for our tears. That’s a medical condition and makes us feel like dogs to hear their disgraceful cackling.” Believe me, it’s true.

Finally, it’s Ben with a comment about UnitedHealth’s law firm and its demand letters:

Time to check the mailbox

Is that a letter incoming from Clare Locke I see.

Paging Ms Streisand. Could Ms Streisand come to the front page, please?

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we saw a new breed of scammers start abusing the DMCA on YouTube, and a new evolution of copyright trolls abusing the DMCA to take down social media accounts and demanding money to reinstate them. We also saw the debate following the Harper’s letter reach new heights of absurdity with a call for strengthening copyright to fight cancel culture. We wrote about how piracy was saving lives in the pandemic, and about the nature of the rapidly fragmenting “splinternet”. The UK got on the bandwagon of blacklisting Huawei, while hysteria about TikTok in the US was getting stupider. And a judge, as expected, got rid of the prior restraint order preventing Mary Trump from publishing her book.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, a top RIAA executive was making some wild claims about the supposed need for stronger copyright in Africa and the Middle East, the Authors Guild wrote a ridiculous letter calling for new SOPA-like notice-and-staydown rules, Rightscorp was trying to defend its strategy of harassing people with phone calls, and the White House was agreeing to terrible things in an effort to push through the TPP. In the UK, the High Court doubled down on preventing people from ripping their own CDs, the controversial data retention law was thrown out a year after its passage, and a new silly educational campaign against piracy was launched. Also, in what would eventually evolve into a now-well-known and influential whitepaper, we published Mike’s call for moving to open protocols instead of closed platforms.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2005, we wondered why RIAA bosses were getting raises after all their high-profile failures, though perhaps it had something to do with the shifty tactics of RIAA accounting. We looked more closely at the constitutional analysis of the copyright awards in the Joel Tenenbaum case, while the Wall Street Journal wrote about the problems of “permission culture”. The ongoing problems with the ACTA negotiations were even turning off some copyright boosters, while EU negotiators were presenting to EU Parliament in secret, but all the efforts at secrecy of course couldn’t stop yet another leak of the text, which yet again revealed all sorts of serious problems.

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Back when the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out, to the surprise of nobody intelligent, fraud schemes around vaccination cards began to pop up. Groups, including some doctors, were illegally handing out vaccination cards without actually vaccinating anyone. One of those doctors, according to charges brought by the DOJ, was Michael Kirk Moore Jr. in Utah.

The charges were filed in January 2023 under the Biden administration after two separate undercover agents went through the scheme to get a fake vaccination card. The plastic surgeon, Michael Kirk Moore Jr., who owns and operates Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah in Midvale, south of Salt Lake City, as well as the business’ office manager, Kari Dee Burgoyne, its receptionist, Sandra Flores, and Moore’s neighbor, Kristin Jackson Andersen, were charged in the case. All four people faced charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government, along with two counts related to improper disposal of government property.

What they were doing was bringing in children whose parents didn’t want them to get the vaccine but needed the vaccine card, providing the parents with a card, and then squirting the shots down the drain, while collecting $50 for the cards. Oh, and because we’re talking about awful people here, they then injected saline into the children themselves so that they would think they’d been vaccinated if anyone asked.

Now, whatever you think about the vaccines themselves, or any mandates that may have been in place, is irrelevant. What these people did, if true, is plainly illegal and a waste of taxpayer-funded vaccines. If the DOJ had the evidence to backup the claims, evidence which came out of these undercover investigations, this would be a slam dunk prosecution. The trial for all of this began recently…

…but will now not proceed as the DOJ is dropping the charges.

The trial proceedings against the four had begun recently. But on Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on social media that ” At my direction @TheJusticeDept has dismissed charges against Dr. Kirk Moore. Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It ends today.”

Also on Saturday, Acting United States Attorney Felice John Viti filed a motion to dismiss the case. The motion stated that “The basis for the motion is that such dismissal is in the interests of justice.”

The lawlessness here is stunning. Again, whatever you think of vaccines or mandates doesn’t change that what the government accused Moore of is illegal. And he most certainly didn’t “give his patients a choice” when you consider that his patients included young children that he lied to and injected with a saline solution. The interest of justice is to do, you know, justice. It is not to take plainly illegal behavior and actively leave it unaddressed for the most vague of reasons.

But, you are surely wondering, why is the DOJ actually doing this, given its vague reasoning. Well…

Media outlets have noted that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US health secretary and ardent anti-vaccine advocate, has championed Moore. In April, Kennedy wrote on social media that “Dr Moore deserves a medal for his courage and his commitment to healing!”

In a social media reply Monday afternoon, Kennedy publicly thanked Bondi for dismissing the case, writing in a nonsensical post: “Thank you, @AGPamBondi, for standing up for informed consent.”

And so it appears that someone favored by RFK Jr., himself a noted anti-vaxxer, has been gifted the status of being above the law, purely because he has friends in government. The law and order party appears to be at work again, showing us just how cynical such self-given monikers are.

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Donald Trump admitted yesterday that he called Rupert Murdoch and demanded the Wall Street Journal kill its story about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. When Murdoch couldn’t deliver, Trump promised to sue the media company and gleefully looked forward to putting Murdoch on the witness stand. Update: Just as this story was going live, it was reported that he had, in fact, sued. We’ll write about the details of the lawsuit as they become clear.

This is the exact type of behavior that Trump’s supporters spent years claiming represented “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” when they falsely accused the Biden administration of doing far less.

I understand that we live in an era of blatant hypocrisy where “it’s okay if a Republican does it” is the norm, but I wanted to call out how directly similar this scenario is.

For the past few years, we covered the Missouri v. Biden (later, Murthy v. Missouri) case through all its twists and turns. The underlying claim in the case from the states, and a few social media users who had their accounts restricted in some form or another, was that there was a huge First Amendment violation by the Biden administration because it had spoken to social media companies asking them about their policies regarding fighting disinformation on things around Covid.

The case was built on out-of-context communications and outright lies, but Trump-appointed Judge Terry Doughty ruled that the Biden administration asking social media companies to explain their editorial policies was “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

The Supreme Court dismissed the case for lack of standing, but the legal standard the Trump-supporting MAGA lawyers presented is crucial here. Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga argued that any government “ask” to media companies about their editorial choices violates the First Amendment:

JUSTICE KAGAN: So, I mean, what about that? I mean, you know, take a — an example where — I mean, these platforms, they’re compilers of speech, and some part of the government, let’s call it part of the law enforcement arm of the government, says you might not realize it, but you are hosting a lot of terrorist speech, which is going to increase the chances that there’s going to be some terrible harm that’s going to take place, and we want to give you this information, we want to try to persuade you to take it down.

Are — are — the government can’t do that?

MR. AGUINAGA: The government can absolutely do that, Justice Kagan.

JUSTICE KAGAN: They’re taking —

MR. AGUINAGA: Terrorist activity, criminal —

JUSTICE KAGAN: — they’re — they’re asking them to take down the speech.

MR. AGUINAGA: Terrorist activity, criminal activity, that is not protected speech. Absolutely, the government can inform the — the

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, that might — might be protected speech. I mean, terrorists engage in, you know, things that come under the First Amendment. I mean, let’s say they’re just recruiting people for their organizations.

MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor, if it’s First Amendment speech, protected speech, then I think we’re in an entirely different world.

More directly, when Justice Kavanaugh asked about government officials telling media companies they should take down “factually erroneous information,” Aguinaga said that crosses the constitutional line:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And one thing that I think I want to square up with you is if someone calls and — or contacts the social media company and says what you have there, this post, has factually erroneous information, so not a viewpoint that we disagree with, factually erroneous information, and the social media company says, we’ll take a look at that and — and you still think that’s significant encouragement that qualifies as coercion, if they take it down in response to concluding that it, in fact, is factually erroneous?

MR. AGUINAGA: No, Your Honor. If there’s no ask from the government*, if the government’s just saying here’s our view of the statement —*

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Okay. And we think it should be — it should be taken down, it’s up to you, but we think it should be taken down*.*

MR. AGUINAGA: I think that’s a harder case for me. I guess, you know, if you think it is a close case decide it under the First Amendment.

So by the legal standard Trump’s own lawyers established, any government request to suppress media coverage violates the First Amendment. Now let’s see how Trump himself measures up.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that Trump and Epstein had a very close relationship, focusing on a supposed birthday card Trump allegedly created for Epstein. Trump’s response was his usual cry of “fake news!” about anything he dislikes but—more importantly—involves him admitting he had directly pressured Murdoch to kill the story:

If you can’t see the image, here’s the text of Trump’s rambling:

The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued. Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so. The Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, was told directly by Karoline Leavitt, and by President Trump, that the letter was a FAKE, but Emma Tucker didn’t want to hear that. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly. The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist. President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal. It has truly turned out to be a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag” and, writing defamatory lies like this, shows their desperation to remain relevant. If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for “TRUMP” to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!

This isn’t just government pressure—it’s a sitting president threatening to weaponize the courts against media for editorial decisions over what he claims is “erroneous information.” By Trump’s own supporters’ legal standard, this is a textbook First Amendment violation. Perhaps the most massive attack against free speech in the history of the United States. (Update: as noted above, it’s now being reported that the lawsuit has been filed, which we’ll cover in a follow-up story).

He didn’t just ask them not to publish the thing, he told them he would sue them if they published and has now said he’s going to sue Murdoch’s “ass off.”

Compare this to what the Biden administration actually did: some officials sent less than polite emails to social media companies asking about their misinformation policies. No threats. No lawsuits. No demands for specific content removal. Yet Trump’s supporters called that “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

Trump is doing exactly what the MAGA world spent years accusing Biden of doing, except with explicit threats and promised retaliation. And it’s crickets from the free speech warriors who spent four years screaming about government pressure on media.

The inevitable defense will be “but this was fake news, so of course he can do that.” But Biden officials also believed they were pointing to misinformation—and they never threatened personal lawsuits against media executives for editorial decisions.

Again, I get it. We judge the MAGA world on a curve. Everyone expects them to be authoritarian hypocritical censorial asshats, so it’s not news when they are.

We’ve normalized authoritarian behavior by expecting it from Trump, but this deserves attention. A sitting president threatening to sue media companies and their owners for editorial decisions isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s the kind of direct government coercion that actually violates the First Amendment.

And yes, part of the problem is that the media keeps capitulating every time Trump does this. CBS and ABC each paid millions of dollars to Trump over bogus lawsuits. So did Meta. This has only emboldened Trump. Media capitulation and kowtowing has taught Trump that he can bully and sue media companies to silence them. All of this is an actual First Amendment violating attack on speech.

The silence from Trump’s supposed free speech defenders says everything about how seriously they actually take the principles they claim to champion.

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This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society. You can read the first post and second post in the series.

In policy circles, creative industries have become the loudest voices in copyright debates. The problem? They are often mistaken for representing creativity itself, or even protecting individual creators and culture. But let’s get one thing straight: creativity is very different from the creative industries—as different as music is from the music business. Think The Beatles vs. Bad Boy Records: not the same vibe!

The creative industries are an economic concept, an invention of the British government in 1997 under Tony Blair. This was when the Creative Industries Task Force was born, bringing together sectors like advertising, design, fashion, film, music, and software—all under one umbrella. We’re talking about a vast range, from opera and ballet to architecture, advertising and video games. This is way beyond what most people think of as “culture.” And let’s not even talk about the hodgepodge concept of IPR-intensive industries waved by the Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO), which covers pretty much any company that filed patents or geographical indications, from McDonalds to the wonderful vendors of Prosciutto di Parma.

Who’s Who in the Creative Industry?

When talking about the creative industries, it’s important to differentiate between the players involved. There are rightsholders, who may be those producing and distributing content, or sometimes simply financial investors—think Scooter Braun vs. Taylor Swift. Then there are the creators themselves, who often don’t even own the rights to what they’ve created. And of course, there are all the other people who work in the industry—from “creatives” to those in support roles, just like in any other industry.

This complexity becomes crucial when considering AI. As we’ve seen with the Hollywood writers’ strike, the creative industry is already embracing AI, viewing it as either a new creative tool or a cost-cutting measure that could replace human jobs. That’s the “industries” part of the label—a business-driven focus that doesn’t necessarily align with the interests of individual creators or the broader value of creativity.

AI, Authenticity, and the Human Touch

The real challenges posed by AI aren’t limited to copyright or creative rights—they’re about the future of work and how we value human contribution in an automated world. To understand the human creator’s role, let’s take a look at the evolution of electronic dance music (EDM). As Douglas Rushkoff describes, EDM started with anonymous techno raves, with the DJ barely visible or hidden entirely. Over time, the DJ became the centerpiece, part of the spectacle—because humans relate to humans. This dynamic isn’t going to change with AI.

Or, as Dan Graham, owner of Gothic Storm Limited and Founder of the Library of the Human Soul, puts it: “We’re suckers for a backstory and authenticity. We hate knock-offs, even if they’re perfect. Fake Rolexes, forged artwork—it doesn’t matter how good it is, the real thing is always worth more, because we care.” AI might make flawless imitations, but the value of human creativity, authenticity, and connection remains unmatched.

So, while AI will certainly change the creative industries, it won’t replace the core of creativity—the human spirit, storytelling, and the authenticity we all crave as fans.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.

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The DHS has been hyping assault stats for weeks, making it sound like there’s an actual war on ICE officers. The reality was much more underwhelming: the 700% increase touted in press releases reflected a mere 69 more assaults on officers than during the same period in 2024. Hardly worth remarking on, especially since ICE enforcement activities have exponentially exploded during the same time period as the agency does everything it can (legal or not) to hit Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s 3,000-arrests-per-day quota.

But anything opposed to ICE must be portrayed as dangerous, if not a direct, literal assault on the law and law enforcement officers. Presenting context-free stats and referring to any protest as “violent” aids and abets Trump’s martial law plans for the nation by justifying the administration’s decision to send a few thousand soldiers to Los Angeles, California.

It’s only going to get stupider and more dangerous. Dell Cameron of Wired was given access to a recent bulletin issued to law enforcement by the DHS. The document was obtained via a public records request by nonprofit group, Property of the People. (The group has yet to post the document at its site, however, so we can’t actually see it for ourselves at the moment. But click through anyway, because it may be posted by the time this post has been published on Techdirt.)

The bulletin apparently kicks off by blaming the media for inflaming hatred towards ICE and creating an atmosphere conducive to “embracement of anti-ICE messaging.” Noem’s DHS would never, under any circumstances, suggest it might be Trump’s policies, as well as ICE officers’ insistence on hiding everything but their eyes during raids, that might be causing this, um, “embracement” of anti-ICE sentiment.

After making far more credible points about a small minority of protesters who may be armed with anything from glass bottles to rocks to “paint-filled fire extinguishers,” the bulletin moves on to portray pretty much anything anti-ICE protesters do as “violent tactics.”

[T]he guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear—like masks, flashlights, and cameras—as potential precursors to violence, telling officers to prepare “from the point of view of an adversary.”

Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.”

If the DHS actually believed these assertions, it could just be dismissed as paranoid ravings from an agency headed by someone who desires the same white-centric nation most of Trump’s administration does. And, of course, that will always be partly true as long as Kristi Noem heads the agency.

But it’s far more likely the DHS doesn’t actually believe the bullshit it’s spouting, but recognizes the purpose it serves. And one of those purposes is premeditated justification of engaging in unprovoked violence against protesters. It also appeals directly to the “us vs. them” mentality so many law enforcement officers at every level possess. This bulletin tells them they’re right to direct violence at anyone using more than their feet to move around, as well as anyone seeking to document the violence cops are perpetrating against their fellow citizens.

This is escalation masquerading as an intelligence briefing. Cops seldom need an excuse to start rioting, but this bulletin — one that comes backed with the implied law enforcement expertise of the Department of Homeland Security — gives them plenty of excuses to start cracking heads and violating rights just in case they need something more than “just because” when protesters start inconveniencing ICE’s kidnapping squads.

And every situation needlessly escalated and every unnecessary confrontation provoked might result in a violent reaction, which will keep that snowball rolling until might is the only right this government is willing to recognize.

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We’ve written before about how attacks on free speech often start with unpopular speakers who lack political power. That’s why a new dissenting opinion from Trump-appointed Judge Paul Matey should set off alarm bells for anyone who cares about the First Amendment.

In a case involving an imam’s immigration status, Judge Matey penned a remarkable 39-page dissent arguing that non-citizens have no First Amendment rights at all. Not limited rights. Not restricted rights. No rights whatsoever.

Under the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” U.S. Const. amend. I. This guarantee cannot be invoked by aliens excluded from our borders because an alien “does not become one of the people to whom” the First Amendment applies “by an attempt to enter, forbidden by law.” U.S. ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279, 292 (1904). That is because “[t]o appeal to the Constitution is to concede that this is a land governed by that supreme law, and as under it the power to exclude has been determined to exist, those who are excluded cannot assert the rights in general obtaining in a land to which they do not belong as citizens or otherwise.” Id. So there is no debate that excluded aliens cannot invoke the First Amendment.

This is a federal appeals court judge, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, laying out a roadmap for gutting free speech protections for millions of people living legally in the United States, contrary to basically any prior reading of the First Amendment. And, even worse, claiming there is “no debate” on this point. There has been “no debate” on this topic because nearly every other court has disagreed with Judge Matey.

The case, Qatanani v. Attorney General, involves Mohammad Qatanani, a Palestinian imam who has lived in New Jersey since 1996. After decades of proceedings, an immigration judge granted him permanent resident status. The Board of Immigration Appeals tried to reverse that decision eleven months later—well past the normal 30-day appeal window—and the majority correctly found they lacked authority to do so, given the delay.

But Judge Matey’s dissent goes far beyond the procedural questions. He explicitly argues that “Qatanani is not part of ‘the people’ the First Amendment protects” and that non-citizens cannot “claim its protection.”

His reasoning? A convoluted “originalist” argument claiming that because the First Amendment refers to “the people,” it only applies to those who are “part of a national community” with sufficient “allegiance” to the sovereign. Non-citizens, he argues, owe only “temporary allegiance” and therefore get only “temporary protection”—protection that can be withdrawn whenever the government decides they’ve become “dangerous.”

Judge Matey’s interpretation flies in the face of a century of Supreme Court precedent.

In Bridges v. Wixon (1945), the Supreme Court explicitly held that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” The Court has consistently recognized that while the government has broader powers over immigration decisions, the First Amendment still constrains how it treats non-citizens who are physically present in the United States.

Judge Matey tries to get around the clear statements in Bridges, claiming that it’s just dicta and limited in its scope to only “lawful resident aliens.”

Wixon does not resolve whether the First Amendment applies to all resident aliens, much less unauthorized aliens. At most, its dicta suggests that lawful resident aliens, what we today could call LPRs, can potentially invoke the First Amendment in some criminal prosecutions.

Note all the caveats: Matey suggests that Bridges “does not resolve” the question, that its holding “suggests” lawful resident aliens “can potentially” invoke First Amendment protections “in some criminal prosecutions.” This isn’t careful legal analysis—it’s systematic minimization of clear precedent with insinuation to get to a desired result.

Even the more restrictive cases Matey cites don’t support his sweeping conclusion. Kleindienst v. Mandel involved excluding someone from entering the country—not stripping speech rights from someone already here. Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, which was decided at the height of McCarthyite “Red Scare” nonsense, involved deportation proceedings, but still recognized that resident aliens have constitutional protections, even if those protections are weighed differently in immigration contexts. As for Turner v. Williams, which Judge Matey relies on heavily, that ruling (part of an early 20th century panic about “anarchists”) makes clear that it is not “depreciating the vital importance of freedom of speech… or as suggesting limitations on the spirit of liberty” rather, it simply argues that Turner’s advocacy for anarchism was an attempt to overthrow the government, which leaves him open to deportation not because of his speech, but his incitement.

In many ways, this is an extension of the kinds of nonsense ahistorical “originalist” arguments now being made against birthright citizenship, with hallucinated claims that birthright citizenship only applies to people who were born here “lawfully.”

If Judge Matey’s view became law, the government could:

Arrest non-citizens for political speech that would be fully protected if spoken by citizensPunish lawful permanent residents for attending protests or criticizing government policiesStrip First Amendment protections from the millions of non-citizens who live, work, and contribute to American communities

As the Cato Institute explains

Every restriction on the free speech rights of noncitizens is also a restriction on the free speech rights of Americans. For one thing, free speech is a protection for listeners as much as it is for speakers, and in that way, it undermines everyone’s right to hear when the government shuts down anyone’s right to speak freely.

The threat to US citizens becomes even more acute when they know a noncitizen. Should you bring a noncitizen family member or friend to a protest? Would you feel as confident protesting the abuses of the US government or an allied foreign government if you were married to a legal permanent resident? Should you share articles critical of the administration’s foreign policy with them? What happens if they reshare, comment on, or like your post?

I know noncitizen researchers who study trade, immigration, national security, and other matters of intense public interest and debate. Should they and their employers be concerned about publishing research that Secretary of State Marco Rubio could deem “adverse to the foreign policy interest of the United States”? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

The chilling effects of such a stance would be vast and would cover plenty of expression by citizens beyond just non-citizens.

And, of course, Judge Matey’s dissent isn’t just theoretical musing. The Trump administration is already moving to deport students and researchers for their political speech.

If courts adopt Judge Matey’s reasoning, these deportations could proceed without any First Amendment analysis at all. The government could simply argue that because these individuals aren’t citizens, their speech—no matter how peaceful or protected it would be if spoken by a citizen—is irrelevant to their immigration cases.

Yes, of course, that’s what Matey and the Trump administration want, but it would be an attack on the free speech First Amendment principles this country was built on.

Indeed, what makes Judge Matey’s dissent particularly alarming is how it reveals the broader strategy of the current administration’s approach to free speech. Rather than directly attacking the First Amendment rights of citizens (which would face immediate constitutional challenges), this approach systematically strips those rights from non-citizens first.

This is the classic authoritarian playbook: start with the most vulnerable populations, normalize the restrictions, then expand them. Today it’s non-citizens who “don’t deserve” First Amendment protections. Tomorrow it could be naturalized citizens whose loyalty is questioned. Then citizens who associate with the “wrong” people or express the “wrong” views.

This connects to an even more disturbing pattern: Donald Trump is already talking about stripping citizenship from Americans whose speech he dislikes. Matey’s reasoning provides the perfect complement to this threat. Strip someone of citizenship, and under Matey’s logic, they lose all First Amendment protections entirely. It’s a two-step process to eliminate constitutional rights for anyone: first denaturalize, then punish for their speech. The (desired) end result is tremendous chilling effects on speech.

Fortunately, the majority in Qatanani rejected this approach entirely, focusing instead on the proper procedural limits on immigration agencies and ignoring the First Amendment issue altogether. But the fact that a federal judge felt comfortable writing such a sweeping attack on established First Amendment law should concern everyone.

Judge Matey’s dissent represents exactly the kind of thinking that turns immigration enforcement into a tool for political persecution. When judges start arguing that the Constitution simply doesn’t apply to entire classes of people based on their citizenship status, we’re not talking about immigration law anymore.

We’re talking about out-and-out authoritarianism and speech suppression.

The First Amendment doesn’t protect Americans. It protects people in America. Judge Matey’s effort to rewrite that fundamental principle should be rejected as thoroughly as his colleagues rejected his broader legal reasoning.

Because once we accept that some people don’t deserve constitutional protections, it becomes much easier to argue that others don’t deserve them either.

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The Trump administration’s maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it.

To make things even worse, undocumented migrants aren’t even being sent back to the countries they came from. Instead, planes full of deportees are being sent to places like war-torn South Sudan or, more often, a maximum security concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran government.

Those being deported have reason to fear for their safety when the only options are some of the worst places on earth. Normally, that would allow them to petition courts for removal to their home country or, at least, somewhere less hideous than a country currently hosting a war or a maximum security prison run by a sadistic government.

Even if the Trump administration was willing to entertain these petitions (and it definitely isn’t), it no longer has to concern itself with the well-being of the people it deports. The Supreme Court decided late last month that there’s nothing wrong — constitutionally or otherwise — with engaging in human trafficking of deportees… at least not not that it’s the Trump administration doing it.

The government has always had the power to send deportees to countries they’re not actually from. But the government is supposed to — right up until SCOTUS said otherwise — allow deportees to assess their survival chances in yet another foreign country and give them an opportunity to be deported somewhere less dangerous or, preferably, to the country they came from.

Acting ICE director Todd Lyons — with the backing of the DHS — says any form of due process will be extremely limited, if not ignored completely.

Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.

People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.

Why is this expedited removal process so extremely necessary migrants will only have less than a day to assess their survival chances in whatever country the US chooses to dump them in? Well, if you believe DHS head Kristi Noem (and you definitely shouldn’t), it’s the only way to keep this country safe.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, whose agency oversees ICE, confirmed on “Fox News Sunday” that the agency had the policy in place. The memo is “incredibly important to make sure we get these worst of the worst out of our country,” she said.

But that’s not what’s happening. It wasn’t even happening nearly a decade ago, when Trump took his first run at eliminating non-white people from the United States. Back in 2017, ICE couldn’t find enough dangerous criminals to deport, so it basically began falsifying arrest numbers to keep the administration’s top bigots satiated.

This time around, there’s been a whole lot more deportation. And with White House advisor Stephen Miller expecting ICE to perform 3,000 arrests a day (the closest it’s come to this point is still several hundred arrests short of that mark), moving a few numbers around isn’t going to work. To accomplish this, ICE has to basically expel every migrant officers come across, which is why nearly two-thirds of people arrested by ICE have no criminal record at all, and nearly every person arrested (93%) by ICE has never been convicted of any violent offenses.

This isn’t the “worst of the worst” being given what they supposedly deserve. This is thousands of people who work hard, pay taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the white people who seem believe they’re operating at a higher human level than people whose skin is darker than theirs.

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When last we checked with CBS/Paramount, company executives had just paid Trump $16 million in bribe money to settle a completely baseless lawsuit, effectively purchasing regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. It was arguably one of the biggest acts of corporate cowardice in recent memory, resulting in many CBS journalists and executives fleeing for the exits.

So we’re clear what happened here: Larry Ellison, a billionaire Trump ally, used his own money to buy CBS and install his son as the boss. There are hints they’re then going to merge what’s left of CBS with Bari Weiss’ Free Press, which will effectively turn CBS into another right wing, Trump-friendly propaganda mill much like Fox News. Trump gets $16 million in bribe money simply for being king.

The only question now is whether anybody involved in this bribery scheme faces any accountability for it. California lawmakers have made some noise about investigating the settlement for possibly violating state bribery laws, but I’ve not seen any meaningful traction on that.

Elsewhere, Dem Senators Chuck Schumer and Ed Markey are trying to leverage the Epstein scandal to “pressure” Trump’s FCC into dropping its “investigation” into CBS.

Quick refresher: Trump had FCC boss Brendan Carr open an “investigation” into CBS that (falsely) claimed that mundane 60 Minutes edits of an election season Kamala Harris interview violated the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy. That policy, rarely enforced anymore, says violations must involve clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”

Now that Trumps and Ellisons got what they wanted, this fake FCC investigation would have been closed before long anyway. Its only function appears to be to try and create additional pressure on CBS to sell the company to his billionaire friends, extort some additional cash for the king, and create a false narrative in the media that existing CBS journalism was being unfair to Republicans (to set the stage for what comes next: turning the channel into yet another right wing propaganda network).

Schumer and Markey in their statement zeroed in on the fact that Fox News routinely does actually misleading edits to make the president look good — including past comments he’s made about Jeffrey Epstein. They join a long list of bipartisan folks (including Republican former FCC Commissioners) who have been urging Carr to stop being a weird, First Amendment trampling zealot:

“The FCC should stop its partisan investigations into the news media and cease interfering with independent journalism altogether. To be clear, the FCC should not investigate or pressure either CBS or Fox. Editorial discretion lies at the heart of press freedom and should not be subject to government interference..”

So they’re right here, of course. The CBS edits really were minor. Fox News routinely engages in edits to mislead its audience on a daily basis (because it’s a propaganda outlet, not a news channel). The FCC investigation of CBS was a sham, and Trump Republicans are hypocrites who are leveraging government to attack journalism and the First Amendment. That’s all true.

That said, Schumer and Markey certainly know the FCC investigation was already likely to end regardless. They don’t really think Brendan Carr cares what they think, or is worried about real congressional backlash. They just wanted to find another public avenue to leverage the Epstein scandal to erode public Trump support. Which again, is fine; it’s a Trump weak spot right now Dem messaging should exploit.

The problem is that they didn’t use the opportunity to meaningfully highlight what the broader goal of Republicans was here: which is to genuinely destroy what’s left of shaky U.S. corporate journalism (and informed consensus) and replace it with wall to wall right wing-friendly infotainment and propaganda.

Yes, they’re extorting private companies and weaponizing government, but why do you think that is? If you’re a powerful Dem Senator, shouldn’t you maybe mention this?

I don’t really think most older Dems really understand the modern media and information environment they operate in. I’ve yet to see any Democrats capable of messaging on media policy. There’s a lot of empty Dem lip service given to journalism and the First Amendment, but the party has no coherent media reform proposals, outside of rubber stamping mergers and dreaming of a “Joe Rogan for the left.”

There’s a lot the Dem leadership could do, including relentlessly supporting public media (which again this week took another devastating blow from Republican policy), finding creative new ways to help fund real independent journalism, relentlessly advocating for greater media literacy in education standards to combat propaganda (see: Finland), and fighting to reforge media consolidation limits.

But rich Americans of every partisan ideology don’t really want a press that routinely critiques wealth and power; it’s the burr at the heart of geriatric Dem dysfunction and inaction on media reform.

Republicans meanwhile are busy buying up companies and converting them into giant bullhorns for right wing ideology. All the money in media right now involves telling young, angry right wing white men what they want to hear (just ask Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss). From AM radio to broadcast TV (Sinclair) to cable news (Fox) to the internet, Republicans have effectively won the modern information war.

It’s an effort built on the back of a generation of false claims of U.S. media “liberal bias,” (and more recently “censorship of Conservatives“). It’s the ultimate culmination in the right wing’s war on reality-based informed consensus. It’s deadly. It’s been incredibly effective. And Dems that value a functioning republic, hopeful for a path out of authoritarianism, need to get their heads out of their collective ass.

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Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption of which will lead to sickness, misery, and death. I’ve called him plainly incompetent, ignorant of how science works, and incapable of leading the agency in which he’s been put in charge.

But what if all of that is wrong and he’s just a grifting charlatan? I have to wonder if that is the case, reading about his public admiration for Mom’s Meals, a company that delivers cheap, ready-made meals for people on Medicaid and Medicare.

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.

He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.

“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.

That whole “without additives” is doing a great deal of vague work for Kennedy. Look, as the saying goes, even a broken Kennedy is right twice a day, and his public and vocal crusade against ultra-processed foods is not without merit. He’s called such food “poison” in past weeks and, while he’s being a bit dramatic in saying so, he’s not wrong that American diets are generally trash and contribute to a bunch of health concerns. And, to the point, ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.

Which makes it more than a bit jarring to see him pimp this company that makes food which is, you guessed it, ultra-processed.

The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.

“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”

Now, to be clear, Mom’s Meals’ food products do not contain the artificial food coloring that Kennedy has also railed against. But that is a far cry from claiming that these meals don’t have any additives and aren’t processed foods. They absolutely are, though I expect Kennedy to play word games as to what “ultra-processed” means. It’s his way.

But the end result of all of this is we can believe one of two realities. Either Kennedy is a combination of so poor a communicator and so incompetent on matters of health to make all of this yet another blunder in his role at HHS…or he’s just completely full of shit and doesn’t actually care about any of this further than what it does for his own grasp on power and/or money.

Either way, well, it’s pretty freaking terrible and a flat-out lie to say this company makes the kind of food Kennedy himself has advocated for all these years.

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

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

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

a16z-Backed AI Site Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise (404 Media)Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People (404 Media)Ofcom head says age checks are ‘really big moment’ for children’s online safety (The Guardian)New online safety rules not ‘the end of the conversation’, says minister (BBC)Commission’s guidelines for online child safety target platforms of all sizes (Euractiv)I met the sextortion scammers destroying young lives for £1 a day (The Times)“Why me?” On shame, self-blame, and feeling so. damn. Stupid. (Blockparty)If It Breaks Wikipedia, It’s Probably Bad Policy (InternetExchange)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund and by our sponsor, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership. In our bonus chat Mike talks with DTSP Executive Director David Sullivan to talk about their new Safe Framework Specification, which is an official ISO standard (available for free download) which will help everyone better understand best practices and concepts around online trust & safety work.

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