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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.

In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.

When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”

Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.

By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.

Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.

In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.

Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”

In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.

But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.

Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”

That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.

The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”

When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)

D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.

It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.

That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.

The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”

But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”

During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.

Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”

Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.

In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.

In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”

The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”

After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.

Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”

He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”

When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”

Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”

According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.

“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.

In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.

“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.

Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.

The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.

With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.

The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”

Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.

In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”

Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.

Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.

“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.

Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”

Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.

Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.

Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.

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We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous attempts by government officials to intimidate judges over the years, but the Department of Justice’s new misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg might take the cake for sheer absurdity. As Steve Vladeck breaks down in exhaustive detail, the DOJ is essentially arguing that a federal judge committed “misconduct” by privately expressing concerns to the Chief Justice that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.

Spoiler alert: those concerns turned out to be entirely justified.

The complaint centers on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a March Judicial Conference meeting about “concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.” And these concerns were not even Boasberg’s own personal feelings. He was expressing what he was hearing from other judges on the court where he sits.

As Vladeck methodically demonstrates, DOJ’s theory collapses under scrutiny for four separate reasons.

First, the comments weren’t public. They were made at a private meeting of the Judicial Conference, and only became known because someone leaked a confidential memo summarizing the meeting. Vladeck nails why this matters:

Suffice it to say, DOJ never explains how a private comment at a private meeting that was made public only because a confidential memorandum memorializing the meeting was leaked could possibly violate Canon 3(A)(6). The best it can offer is the claim that, because the memorandum has become public, the comments they memorialize were illegitimate. But that’s true of anything a federal judge says in private. On that reading, a federal judge would violate Canon 3(A)(6) simply by discussing a pending case with a clerk or colleague—because that discussion might one day be made public.

Under DOJ’s logic, any private conversation a judge has could retroactively become “misconduct” if someone decides to leak it later. That’s not how judicial ethics work. That’s not how anything works.

Second, as noted above, Boasberg wasn’t pushing his own agenda—he was literally doing his job. As the D.C. Circuit’s district judge representative on the Judicial Conference, part of his role is to communicate his colleagues’ concerns to the Chief Justice. Vladeck notes that these appear to be “radical mischaracterizations of what actually happened,” and that Boasberg was simply “relaying concerns raised by his colleagues to the Chief Justice, almost certainly in response to a specific prompt that he do so.”

Third, and this is the kicker, Boasberg’s concerns were completely justified. Despite DOJ’s claim that “the Trump Administration has complied with every court order,” Vladeck points out that this is “quite obviously not true.”

Indeed, we all talked about how they were directly flouting judicial orders, and Boasberg himself wrote an opinion back in April (after he’d raised these concerns) finding probable cause that DOJ lawyers and government officials acted in “willful disregard” of a temporary restraining order when human trafficked Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag.

Let’s be clear about the timeline: a judge expressed valid private concerns that the government might not follow court orders, the government proceeded to violate court orders (including one from this very judge!), and now DOJ is claiming the judge committed misconduct for… being right?

And fourth, even if none of the above were true, there’s still no violation here. Boasberg didn’t say he was predisposed to rule against the government in specific cases. He didn’t prejudge any particular policies. He raised institutional concerns about governmental compliance with court orders—which is exactly the kind of thing members of the Judicial Conference should be discussing.

Vladeck identifies the real audiences for this charade. It’s not actually about disciplining Boasberg—the complaint is “laughably preposterous” and will almost certainly be dismissed. Instead, it’s about sending a message:

The first audience is other district judges—including those perhaps without the reputation and stature (and backbone) of Chief Judge Boasberg. Even frivolous judicial misconduct complaints come at a cost—especially when they’re filed not by private litigants, but by the U.S. Department of Justice. If the Chief Judge of the D.C. district court can come in for such treatment for doing nothing more than conveying his colleagues’ concerns to the Chief Justice at a meeting at which that’s his job, perhaps other judges will think twice the next time they want to publicly reprimand the government or otherwise say anything that could be construed in any way as reflecting comparable concerns about the behavior of the current Department of Justice.

This is straight-up judicial intimidation. File a bogus complaint against one prominent judge to cow the rest into silence. Remember that this is all happening against the backdrop of the Trump admin attacking a bunch of judges for daring to try to uphold the Constitution against a government determined to tear down the Constitution.

The second audience, according to Vladeck, is Trump supporters, who get fed misleading headlines about “biased judges” without the context showing how legally frivolous this complaint actually is. Indeed, Vladeck also calls out that this story “leaked” to MAGA mouthpiece, The Federalist, which clearly was given access to the confidential memo that an attendee had written up summarizing what was said that spurred this complaint… but did not publish it, suggesting that if we saw the full memo, in context, it would be clear how it was being misrepresented here:

Indeed, the fact that The Federalist appears to have obtained that confidential memo but has not published it seems to strongly suggest, among other things, that the memo is not only entirely benign, but that it may provide even further context for Boasberg’s remarks.

Also notable: The Federalist entirely avoided giving the (kinda important!) context that Boasberg was sharing the views he heard from other judges, rather than just expressing his own opinion.

Perhaps most galling is Attorney General Bondi’s tweet claiming Boasberg’s comments “have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.”

The lack of self-awareness here quite something. What’s actually undermining judicial integrity is the Department of Justice filing baseless misconduct complaints against judges who dare to hold the government accountable when it violates court orders.

As Vladeck puts it:

In fact, the only thing undermining the integrity of the judiciary here is the Department of Justice filing a patently baseless and profoundly misleading misconduct complaint against a federal judge who did nothing more than diligently discharge his duties.

Federal judges aren’t supposed to be government cheerleaders. Part of their job is identifying systemic problems with how the legal system is functioning—including when the government isn’t complying with their orders. Encouraging judges to stay silent about such issues doesn’t strengthen judicial integrity; it eviscerates it.

The separation of powers isn’t supposed to be a one-way street where judges quietly rubber-stamp whatever the government wants to do. It’s supposed to involve actual checks and balances, which sometimes means judges pointing out when the other branches are acting lawlessly.

You know, that whole constitutional framework thing we’re supposed to have.

This complaint will almost certainly fail. But the damage is already done. Other judges are watching, and some might think twice before calling out government misbehavior in the future.

That’s not how a functioning democracy is supposed to work. But then again, intimidating judges into silence probably isn’t the behavior of an administration that’s particularly committed to democratic norms in the first place.

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First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was “allowed” to do whatever Trump’s DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do… like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never been seriously threatened by anyone anywhere since its inception.

Whoever didn’t get fired for not being all-MAGA, all the time decided it was time to call it a career. Anyone who forgot to lie to courts or failed to push abject bullshit past federal judges was shown the door. And with the Civil Rights division (or CRT in DOJ parlance) down to just the Trump loyalists, it would have made sense to do as little as possible with these extremely limited resources.

But Trump wants more stuff to be done and he’s quickly running out of people with the civil rights litigation experience to do it, as Eric Katz reports for Government Executive.

The Justice Department is soliciting staff within its Civil Rights Division to take reassignments to fill vacancies in areas related to education, employment and voting, with leaders citing the “deep need” created by significant vacancies.

The requests come as the division has shed hundreds of employees—or more than 60% of its workforce—since January and the Trump administration has assigned attorneys to tackle new priorities. The department is now scrambling to fill vacancies it has incentivized employees to leave through the extended paid leave program known as “deferred resignations,” early retirement and other offers.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with a suddenly renewed interest in investigating abusive law enforcement agencies or otherwise trying to restore and uphold a whole lot of severely bruised civil rights. No, this scramble for litigators is entirely propelled by the Trump administration’s undying interest in making America worse again.

This version of the DOJ CRT is missing nearly three-quarters of its legal team thanks to Trump. And somehow the DOJ thinks the priorities of the Trump administration will attract some litigators who have left as well as convince others doing less heinous things (maybe!) this shift in focus will be good for their careers, even if it won’t do much for their souls.

The head of CRT, Harmeet Dhillon, has a list of priorities that all sound pretty good in theory: education, employment, and voting. In practice, it’s an absolute horror show.

In May, for example, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche created the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to investigate any recipient of federal funds that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, allows antisemtism—which the administration has increasingly defined as college campuses that enable protests against the Israeli government—supports transgender women playing women’s sports or other perceived violations of administration policy.

[…]

Under its new mission statement, the voting section is now focused on ensuring accurate voter databases and eliminating fraud. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said in a report he issued last week on the changes taking place at CRT that the section has gone “from protecting voting rights to restricting voting access.” The employment section has recently shifted away from pursuing cases in which organizations allegedly engaged in race-based pay discrimination.

Yep, these positions are open to anyone willing to help the DOJ censor students, mistreat transgender kids, support voter suppression efforts, and let companies get away with paying people less just because they aren’t white.

There’s nothing involving civil rights happening here, at least not in a positive way. Instead, the DOJ is hoping there are still enough lawyers left in the building to assist Trump in ideological lawfare efforts that most voters — even many of his own — don’t support.

This is an entire administration consumed with a undying passion for punching down. No one here is seeking to elevate anyone but themselves. The only thing we might be able to enjoy — at least for the time being — is that they’ve fired so many people they don’t have enough people left to help them with their punching.

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The Trump administration is once again warning states that they risk losing billions of dollars in historic infrastructure bill grants — if they attempt to make the taxpayer-subsidized broadband actually affordable.

That’s the updated guidance coming out of the Trump National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is tasked with coordinating the looming $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.

We’ve already noted how Republicans (who voted against this program repeatedly, then whined about it taking too long) have introduced massive new delays by redirecting billions in BEAD dollars away from local fiber ISPs and toward Elon Musk’s congested, expensive satellite broadband service, Starlink.

But Republicans were also incensed by the fact that the original BEAD program, as crafted by Congress, included provisions trying to ensure that ISPs that take taxpayer money at least make a fleeting effort to offer one tier of service that’s affordable to low-income Americans.

The updated NTIA guidance still includes language suggesting that big ISPs should provide a “lower cost” broadband tier, but it lets companies like AT&T and Comcast dictate what “low cost” actually means, rendering it effectively useless, according to Ars Technica:

“The Trump administration points to the latter language in its argument that ISPs alone must choose the price of the low-cost option. The new version of the BEAD FAQ says that states may not require specific rates for the low-cost service option (LCSO), even when required by state law.”

This is the Trump administration directly pandering to big shitty telecom giants like Comcast, who have bristled at the idea of being forced to make broadband affordable, even if it’s only to poor Americans. It’s also a roundabout way to pre-empt the handful of states that have been looking at new state laws requiring that U.S. telecom giants make broadband affordable to poor people.

States that balk at eliminating affordability requirements, or the requirement that they slather Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk with billions of dollars, risk missing out on billions of dollars in historic broadband subsidies. The punishments also will likely curtail state leaders from openly calling out how corrupt and buffoonish this all is, lest they also want to risk losing funds.

Republicans have taken a hatchet to broadband affordability programs across the board, including killing the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 broadband discount for low-income Americans — as well as killing a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.

The Trump admin also illegally dismantled the Digital Equity Act, which was a bare-bones effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband upgrades. And they’ve effectively destroyed what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight, ensuring that U.S. ISPs face zero meaningful penalties should they rip you off.

As with most everything the Trump administration does, corruptly pandering to big telecom is pretty far from any sort of “populism,” and only ensures that U.S. broadband — even if you’ve paid for it via your tax dollars — remains equal parts inferior and expensive.

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One of the more frustrating parts of the RFK Jr. experience is nailing down his views. Part of that is because he tends to keep quite vague about those views, especially when it comes to vaccines, depending on who he is talking to. When he’s running an anti-vaxxer organization, his views are specific and clear. Sitting in front of Congress in a confirmation hearing to run HHS, however, causes him to speak in generalities and non-committal answers. The other problem here is that RFK Jr. also just seems to lie a lot.

For example, way back in November of last year, after his HHS nomination, Kennedy did an interview with NPR. He was, of course, asked about his long anti-vaxxer history and what he planned for vaccines if confirmed to run HHS. Here was his response.

Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”.

He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.

And in previous hearings before Congress, Kennedy has specifically claimed he is not anti-vaccine.

So are we clear? Kennedy says he is not anti-vaccine, has never been anti-vaccine, and is not going to take vaccines away from anyone.

Fast forward through thousands of words about Kennedy that indicate the opposite to the present, where Kennedy is once again doing his anti-vaccine routine and is pulling the funding and contracts for mRNA vaccines for respiratory diseases. You know, like COVID, or influenza.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced in a statement Tuesday that $500 million worth of vaccine development projects, all using mRNA technology, will be halted.

The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections.

Now, it should be emphasized that it’s only mRNA vaccines that are being defunded… for now. There are actually four different kinds of vaccines out there, with mRNA being but one. And there is some reasonable opinion out there that mRNA technology may have been over-hyped during the pandemic, though for obvious reasons, since it represented the light at the end of a death-tunnel. Though there’s also plenty of evidence that mRNA has the potential for some pretty big health breakthroughs. That’s how you get the same vaccine researcher, Adam Finn at the University of Bristol in the UK, to say both of these things.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but Prof Finn argues we “overhyped” mRNA vaccines during the pandemic to the exclusion of other approaches, and now there is a process of adjusting.

“But to swing the pendulum so far that mRNA is useless and has no value and should not be developed or understood better is equally stupid, it did do remarkable things,” he says.

If you want a little bit of the gory medicine here, I’ll try to make it quick and simple. The advantage of mRNA technology is the speed with which you can produce iterative shots for variants of viruses. Other types of vaccines, such as inactivated or attenuated vaccines, tend to be more effective and preventing illness and keeping people from becoming contagious because they give the body’s immune system more, oh, let’s call it “virus meat” than the mRNA vaccine, which only provides instructions for the body to build specific proteins. So if you have a virus that remains fairly static, such as measles, an attenuated vaccine works great, because it offers more and longer protection and you don’t have to worry about the virus changing to evade your vaccine.

But if we’re talking about COVID, which branches into variants rapidly, you lose some of the effectiveness of an attenuated vaccine and make yourself far less nimble to combat those variants. There is utility in mRNA technology, in other words, as there is in the other flavors of immunization. Nuance is what is needed here, with granular decision making on using different vaccine technology depending on the illness.

From Kennedy, however, we get only this.

Kennedy said in the Tuesday statement that he wants the health department to move away from mRNA vaccines, calling on the department to start “investing in better solutions.” He provided no details on what those technologies might be.

He’s a proven liar, so I doubt that there will be much investment in solutions that involve other types of vaccines. He’s already railed against those other vaccination technologies, too, after all.

But if America really wants to invest in solutions that will move healthcare in the country forward, I would like to suggest we start with investing in some cardboard boxes. That way Kennedy will have something with which to clean out his office so we can send him on his way.

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Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of the latest misguided attempts to protect children online, internet users of all ages in the UK are being forced to prove their age before they can access millions of websites under the country’s Online Safety Act (OSA).

The legislation attempts to make the UK the “the safest place” in the world to be online by placing a duty of care on online platforms to protect their users from harmful content. It mandates that any site accessible in the UK—including social media, search engines, music sites, and adult content providers—enforce age checks to prevent children from seeing harmful content. This is defined in three categories, and failure to comply could result in fines of up to 10% of global revenue or courts blocking services:

Primary priority content that is harmful to children: Pornographic content.Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for: suicide;self-harm; oran eating disorder or behaviours associated with an eating disorder.Priority content that is harmful to children: Content that is abusive on the basis of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability or gender reassignment;Content that incites hatred against people on the basis of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability or gender reassignment;Content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for serious violence against a person;Bullying content;Content which depicts serious violence against or graphicly depicts serious injury to a person or animal (whether real or fictional);Content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for stunts and challenges that are highly likely to result in serious injury; andContent that encourages the self-administration of harmful substances.Non-designated contentthat is harmful to children (NDC): Content is NDC if it presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK, provided that the risk of harm does not flow from any of the following: the content’s potential financial impact;the safety or quality of goods featured in the content; orthe way in which a service featured in the content may be performed.

Online service providers must make a judgement about whether the content they host is harmful to children, and if so, address the risk by implementing a number of measures, which includes, but is not limited to:

Robust age checks: Services must use “highly effective age assurance to protect children from this content. If services have minimum age requirements and are not using highly effective age assurance to prevent children under that age using the service, they should assume that younger children are on their service and take appropriate steps to protect them from harm.”

To do this, all users on sites that host this content must verify their age, for example by uploading a form of ID like a passport, taking a face selfie or video to facilitate age assurance through third-party services, or giving permission for the age-check service to access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. 

**Safer algorithms:**Services “will be expected to configure their algorithms to ensure children are not presented with the most harmful content and take appropriate action to protect them from other harmful content.”**Effective moderation:**All services “must have content moderation systems in place to take swift action against content harmful to children when they become aware of it.”

Since these measures took effect in late July, social media platforms Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, and X all introduced age checks to block children from seeing harmful content on their sites. Porn websites like Pornhub and YouPorn implemented age assurance checks on their sites, now asking users to either upload government-issued ID, provide an email address for technology to analyze other online services where it has been used, or submit their information to a third-party vendor for age verification. Sites like Spotify are also requiring users to submit face scans to third-party digital identity company Yoti to access content labelled 18+. Ofcom, which oversees implementation of the OSA, went further by sending letters to try to enforce the UK legislation on U.S.-based companies such as the right-wing platform Gab.

The UK Must Do Better

The UK is not alone in pursuing such a misguided approach to protect children online: the U.S. Supreme Court recently paved the way for states to require websites to check the ages of users before allowing them access to graphic sexual materials; courts in France last week ruled that porn websites can check users’ ages; the European Commission is pushing forward with plans to test its age-verification app; and Australia’s ban on youth under the age of 16 accessing social media is likely to be implemented in December.

But the UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn’t one, and it’s high time for politicians to take that seriously. The Online Safety Act is a threat to the privacy of users, restricts free expression by arbitrating speech online, exposes users to algorithmic discrimination through face checks, and leaves millions of people without a personal device or form of ID excluded from accessing the internet.

And, to top it all off, UK internet users are sending a very clear message that they do not want anything to do with this censorship regime. Just days after age checks came into effect, VPN apps became the most downloaded on Apple’s App Store in the UK, and a petition calling for the repeal of the Online Safety Act recently hit more than 400,000 signatures.

The internet must remain a place where all voices can be heard, free from discrimination or censorship by government agencies. If the UK really wants to achieve its goal of being the safest place in the world to go online, it must lead the way in introducing policies that actually protect all users—including children—rather than pushing the enforcement of legislation that harms the very people it was meant to protect.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea—the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found that social media is neither good nor bad for most teens. It’s also good for some—especially those who are in need of finding community or like-minded individuals. It is, also, not so great for a small group of kids, though the evidence there suggests that it’s worst for those dealing with untreated mental health issues, which causes them to use social media as an alternative to help.

There remains little to no actual evidence that an outright ban will be helpful, and plenty to suggest it will be actively harmful to many.

But now Australia has decided to double down on the stupid, announcing that YouTube will be included in the ban. This escalation reveals just how disconnected from reality this entire policy framework has become. We’ve gone from “maybe we should protect kids from social media” to “let’s ban children from accessing one of the world’s largest repositories of educational content.”

Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge.

The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last week to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site.

This is painfully stupid and ignorant. The claim that 37% of minors reported seeing harmful content is also… meaningless without a lot more context and details. What counts as “harmful”? A swear word? Political content their parents disagree with? A video explaining evolution? What was the impact? Is this entirely self-reported? What controls were there? Just saying 37% is kind of meaningless without the details.

This is vibes-based policymaking dressed up in statistics. You could probably get 37% of kids to report “harmful content” on PBS Kids if you asked them vaguely enough. The fact that Australia’s internet regulator is using this kind of methodological garbage to reshape internet policy tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they’ve thought this through.

But also, YouTube is not just effectively the equivalent of television for teens today—it’s often far superior to traditional television because it’s not gatekept by media conglomerates with their own agendas. The idea that you should need to be 16 years old to watch some YouTube programs is beyond laughable, especially given the amount of useful educational content on YouTube. These days there are things like Complexly, Khan Academy, Mark Rober, and plenty of other educational content that kids love and which lives on YouTube. Kids are learning calculus from 3Blue1Brown, exploring history through Crash Course, and getting better science education from YouTube creators than from most traditional textbooks. This isn’t just entertainment—it’s democratized education that bypasses the gatekeeping of traditional media entirely.

This isn’t just unworkable—it’s the construction of a massive censorship infrastructure that will inevitably be used for purposes far beyond “protecting children.” Once you’ve built the system to block kids from YouTube, you’ve built the system to block anyone from anything. And that system will be irresistible to future governments with different ideas about what content people need to be “protected” from.

And the Australian government already knows that age verification tech is a privacy and security nightmare. They admitted as much two years ago.

Of course, kids will figure out ways around it anyway. VPNs exist. Older friends exist. Parents who aren’t idiots exist—and they’ll help their kids break this law. The only thing this accomplishes is teaching an entire generation that their government’s laws are arbitrary, unenforceable, and fundamentally disconnected from reality. It’s teaching kids to have less respect for government.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. Australia is part of a broader global trend of governments using “protect the children” rhetoric as cover for internet control. The UK’s porn age verification disaster, the US Kids Online Safety Act, similar proposals across Europe—they all follow the same playbook. Identify a genuine concern (kids sometimes see stuff online that isn’t great for them), propose a solution that sounds reasonable in a headline (age limits!), then implement it through surveillance and censorship infrastructure that can be repurposed for whatever moral panic comes next.

The end result will be that Australia has basically taught a generation of teenagers not to trust the government, that their internet regulators are completely out of touch, and that laws are stupid. But it goes deeper than that. This kind of blatantly unworkable policy doesn’t just breed contempt for specific laws—it undermines the entire concept of legitimate governance. When laws are this obviously disconnected from technological and social reality, it signals that the people making them either don’t understand what they’re regulating or don’t care about whether their policies actually work. It’s difficult to see how that benefits anyone at all.

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The recently passed budget bill throws nearly $200 billion at something that doesn’t actually seem to be that much of a problem: undocumented migrants. Law-abiding, hardworking taxpayers are the targets of choice for ICE, which has a 3,000-per-day arrest quota it will never meet, even though it’s now spending most of its time raiding large businesses and hanging around courts handling immigration cases.

It’s not just the lack of enough violent criminals to fulfill the administration’s morbid fantasies. There also aren’t enough ICE agents on hand to do all of this dirty work. Well, now that Trump’s budget contains enough money to turn a monstrosity into a never-ending string of atrocities, ICE is hoping throwing a bunch of its new money at the problem will help turn things around.

ICE is offering candidates (qualified or otherwise) $50,000 signing bonuses and $10,000 bonuses every year for the first five years. While this certainly will entice plenty of bigots to apply for the opportunity to lean against courtroom hallway walls waiting for the next unlucky victim to punish for daring to follow the law, it’s definitely going to do a bit of decimation to the ranks of bigots who already have been fitted for uniforms.

Here’s how that’s playing in Utah, a decidedly red state that’s headed by a governor who has gone out of his way to make sure everyone knows he’s gone full MAGA. Governor Spencer Cox may be a big fan of Trump and his “big beautiful bill,” but local law enforcement seems extremely perturbed the government is making the routine rights violators in their employ an offer they’re unlikely to refuse.

“It’s completely, in my opinion, foul play and unprofessional,” said Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith about deputies being recruited by ICE. ABC4 is told deputies are receiving emails from the federal agency to recruit them to join.

[…]

“With offers like that to go along with other perks of working for the federal government, how can a local department compete?” Sheriff Smith expressed.

It’s actually none of those things, Sheriff. Bigotry on main in the new hot federal business and business is good. Even the failure to meet an arrest quota for more than 100 days straight can’t keep Congress and the man standing astride his prostrate enablers from paying the underachievers at ICE even more money to keep failing to meet presidential standards in perpetuity.

Sheriff Smith is wrong that this is either “foul play” or “unprofessional.” But he’s way less wrong than the DHS is in its defense of its poaching efforts:

“ICE is recruiting law enforcement, veterans, and other patriots who want to serve their country and help remove gang members, child pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, and drug traffickers. This includes local law enforcement, veterans, and our 287(g) partners who have already been trained and have valuable law enforcement experience.“

If ICE is actually removing criminal migrants from this country, it’s only because tons of local law enforcement agencies are doing all the heavy lifting for them. Those willing to honor ICE detainers have already performed arrests, which means those slated for removal just sit in jail cells until ICE comes to pick them up. That means ICE doesn’t have to do any of the work that goes into law enforcement work — you know, things like performing investigations, securing signed warrants from judges, and gathering evidence to support their cases.

Almost every federal law enforcement agency has had dozens, if not hundreds, of employees voluntold they’re now in the mass deportation business — a number that now includes 200 air marshals who will no longer be sitting in planes waiting for terrorists, but rather sitting in planes loaded with deported migrants.

ICE is obviously hoping to raid local stockpiles for law enforcement “talent.” And while local law enforcement officials are welcome to get mad about it, there’s really nothing they can do about this turn of events other than go public with their bitching.

Surprisingly, one of the bitchiest is the man now settling for being the Donald Trump of Florida, now that the Donald Trump who also spends a great deal of time in Florida has once again taken over the office of President.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is encouraging sheriffs and police chiefs in the state to fight to keep staff members as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeks to recruit Florida officers who recently completed immigration enforcement training.

[…]

“Sheriffs losing deputies who are in this fight, to just wear a different jersey basically, but still be in the fight, that doesn’t necessarily add to what we’re doing. It’s just moving someone over,” DeSantis said during an appearance at the Florida Highway Patrol Troop D Headquarters in Orlando. “So, I think there is frustration from that.”

What’s not included in any on the angered governor’s comments to Florida Highway Patrol was any offer to increase local salaries, to offer signing/loyalty bonuses, or to do anything at all to convince local officers not to partake of the greener, lusher grass on the ICE lawn. You’d think he might have tried a little harder, especially since he’s recently passed laws entirely intended to turn his fiefdom into the Little ICE That Could.

Lots of people are going to be attracted to the promise of a $50,000 bonus, even those who aren’t already all in on making America worse. Everything is fungible when money’s being thrown around, especially whatever little bit of morality or ethics has managed to survive an occupation seemingly designed to remove those qualities from the people doing this work. And I guarantee most of the people now complaining about losing their guys to the offer being made by Mr. Art of the Deal voted for the guy who’s now pricing them out of their own business.

Suck it, sheriffs, Mr. DeSantis, etc. This is what you wanted. No one wants to hear you complain now that you have, but not in the way you might have hoped to.

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Just days after a jury found Tesla partially liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and ordered the company to pay over $200 million, Elon Musk took to Twitter with a bold proclamation: “Teslas can drive themselves!”

The timing couldn’t be worse. Because thanks to a devastating article by Electrek’s Fred Lambert that digs deep into the trial transcripts, we now know just how far Tesla went to hide the truth about what happened in that crash. The company systematically withheld evidence, misled police investigators, and actively obstructed efforts to understand how its technology failed—behavior that looks suspiciously like criminal obstruction of justice, yet somehow apparently carries no criminal consequences.

This isn’t just about one lawsuit. It’s about how Tesla’s behavior threatens to undermine public trust in autonomous vehicle technology at precisely the moment when that trust is most crucial.

Let’s be clear: self-driving technology has enormous potential to save lives. Human drivers cause roughly 94% of serious traffic crashes, according to a decade-old study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even imperfect autonomous systems could dramatically reduce that toll, and we shouldn’t hold them to an impossible standard of perfection.

But here’s the problem: overselling what these systems can actually do—and then covering up when they fail—threatens to poison public acceptance of the technology entirely. If people lose trust because companies like Tesla made promises they couldn’t keep, we could end up rejecting technology that might otherwise save thousands of lives.

The aviation industry figured this out decades ago. When planes crash, investigators swarm the scene, companies cooperate fully with authorities, and the entire industry learns from failures. That transparency has made flying extraordinarily safe. But Tesla’s approach in this Autopilot case shows the exact opposite mentality.

The Electrek story, based on trial transcripts from the recent case, reveals a pattern of deception that’s genuinely shocking. Here’s what Tesla did:

Within three minutes of the fatal crash, the Model S automatically uploaded a complete “collision snapshot”—video, sensor data, everything—to Tesla’s servers, then deleted the local copy. Tesla was the only entity with access to the critical evidence.

Within about three minutes of the crash, the Model S uploaded a “collision snapshot”—video, CAN‑bus streams, EDR data, etc.—to Tesla’s servers, the “Mothership”, and received an acknowledgement. The vehicle then deleted its local copy, resulting in Tesla being the only entity having access.

When police investigators tried to get the data, Tesla’s lawyer literally scripted their evidence request. As the homicide investigator testified:

“He said it’s not necessary. ‘Write me a letter and I’ll tell you what to put in the letter.'”

But the lawyer deliberately crafted the letter to avoid sending the actual crash data, instead providing infotainment logs and owner’s manuals.

McCarthy specifically crafted the letter to ommit sharing the colllision snapshot, which includes bundled video, EDR, CAN bus, and Autopilot data.

Instead, Tesla provided the police with infotainment data with call logs, a copy of the Owner’s Manual, but not the actual crash telemetry from the Autopilot ECU.

Tesla never said that it already had this data for more than a month by now.

When police brought the car’s computer to a Tesla service center for help extracting data, Tesla technicians falsely claimed the data was “corrupted”—even though they had the complete dataset sitting on their servers the entire time.

For years, Tesla told courts and plaintiffs that the crucial collision data “didn’t exist.” Only when forensic experts finally gained access to the car’s computer and found metadata proving Tesla had the data all along did the company finally admit what it had done.

As Electrek reports:

The automaker had to admit to have the data all along.

During the trial, Mr. Schreiber, attorney for the plaintiffs, claimed that Tesla used the data for its own internal analysis of the crash:

“They not only had the snapshot — they used it in their own analysis. It shows Autopilot was engaged. It shows the acceleration and speed. It shows McGhee’s hands off the wheel.”

Yet, it didn’t give access to the police nor the family of the victim who have been trying to understand what happened to their daughter.

Just reading through the summary Electrek wrote about the timeline is horrifying and raises obvious questions about why there’s no criminal liability here:

Tesla had the data on its servers within minutes of the crashWhen the police sought the data, Tesla redirected them toward other dataWhen the police sought Tesla’s help in extracting it from the computer, Tesla falsely claimed it was “corrupted”Tesla invented an “auto-delete” feature that didn’t exist to try explain why it couldn’t originally find the data in the computerWhen the plaintiffs asked for the data, Tesla said that it didn’t exist**Tesla only admitted to the existence of the data once presented with forensic evidence that it was created and transfered to its servers.

When the collision data finally came to light, it painted a damning picture. Electrek’s summary of the forensic analysis is quite something:

Autopilot was activeAutosteer was controlling the vehicleNo manual braking or steering override was detected from the driver**There was no record of a “Take Over Immediately” alert*, despite approaching a T-intersection with a stationary vehicle in its path.Moore found logs showing Tesla systems were capable of issuing such warnings, but* did not *in this case.**Map and vision data from the ECU revealed:*Map data from the Autopilot ECU included a flag that the area was a ***“restricted Autosteer zone.”***Despite this, the system allowed Autopilot to remain engaged at full speed.

That last point is crucial. Tesla knew this wasn’t an appropriate place for Autopilot to operate, but the system didn’t disengage or warn the driver. The NTSB had specifically warned Tesla to “incorporate system safeguards that limit the use of automated vehicle control systems to those conditions for which they were designed.”

Tesla appeared to ignore that recommendation.

The jury found that the driver in this case bears primary responsibility—he admitted to being distracted and not using Autopilot properly. The jury assigned him 67% of the blame. But they also found Tesla 33% responsible, and that matters.

As Electrek notes:

However, there’s also no doubt that Autopilot was active, didn’t prevent the crash despite Tesla claiming it is safer than humans, and Tesla was warned to use better geo-fencing and driver monitoring to prevent abuse of the system like that.

This case (unlike some other stories about autonomous vehicles) isn’t about punishing innovation or holding technology to impossible standards. It’s about holding companies accountable when they oversell their capabilities and then actively obstruct efforts to learn from failures.

Tesla’s behavior in this case—the years of lies, the misdirection of police, the withholding of critical evidence—represents everything wrong with how some tech companies approach safety and accountability. It’s the opposite of what we need to build public trust in autonomous vehicles.

Self-driving technology can eventually make our roads safer. But getting there requires companies that are transparent about their systems’ limitations, cooperative with safety investigations, and committed to continuous improvement based on real-world data.

Tesla’s cover-up in this case shows a company more interested in protecting its stock price (the biggest source of Elon’s wealth) than protecting lives. And Musk’s tweet claiming “Teslas can drive themselves” just days after this devastating evidence came to light shows he’s learned nothing.

If we want autonomous vehicles to fulfill their life-saving potential, we need companies that act more like airlines after a crash investigation (full transparency, immediate cooperation, system-wide improvements) and less like Tesla in this case (cover-ups, obstruction, and doubling down on dangerous claims).

The technology itself isn’t the problem. The corporate culture that prioritizes PR over safety is.

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The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans.

After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027.

In a statement, the CPB said the cuts, which “excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades,” were impossible to survive:

“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”

Public donations in recently weeks, estimated to be around $20 million, weren’t enough to save the organization.

As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).

One of the real harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Or “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).

U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and affluent corporate ownership more broadly) positively adore an ignorant and befuddled electorate, easily distracted by propaganda, controversy, and shallow infotainment.

A confused, angry, misinformed and distracted electorate means less informed consensus, which means less organized resistance to their unrelenting pursuit of consolidated power and shitty, unpopular policies that only ultimately serve a small sliver of the the extraction class.

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This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn’t like out of the video game industry—put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to demand that processing companies stop working with the likes of itch.io and Steam over games on those platforms the group has decided are unacceptable. Couched in the claim that the group was primarily going after games that focused on horrid things like “rape” and “incest,” the end result was those two platforms delisting or deindexing all kinds of adult games that either don’t include that type of content or—and here’s why free speech is tricky—approach those topics not to promote them, but to grapple with the horrors of them in an artistic manner.

Notably, far from any cries that these platforms be more focused in their approach, Collective Shout merely cheered on the fallout, illuminating what the actual goal is here: to make game platforms more puritanical through bully campaigns. These are, it seems, the same people going on book-banning crusades that ensare such smut as Calvin & Hobbes comics.

Well, pressure campaigns can work in both directions, as it did in this case. Credit card companies began getting flooded with calls and emails from the public complaining about these puritanical attempts to suppress video games. It’s only been a few days of this, but apparently it’s gotten bad enough that Mastercard put out some messaging pushing back on the idea that it had demanded these changes of gaming marketplaces.

Mastercard has broken its silence after being thrust into the middle of a gaming culture war between anti-porn advocates and anti-censorship activists. While Valve previously laid blame for a recent purge of adult sex games from Steam at the feet of “payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” Mastercard released a statement on Friday denying any responsibility for a new wave of censorship that’s recently led some gamers to flood payment company call centers with complaints.

“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company wrote in a statement published on its website on August 1. “Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

Got it? Mastercard is not involved in the evaluation of games or their content and has not instituted any new rules beyond those that have always existed, namely that payment may only be collected and processed for “lawful purchases.” Summarizing that statement in plain language would look something like: “Nothing has changed on our end. If a purchase is legal, it’s fine by us.”

Now, that’s demonstrably false, of course. Mastercard has built a prudish reputation for itself in multiple instances, be it pressuring OnlyFans a couple of years back, banning VPN providers, as well as its crusade against Wikileaks.

But this is slightly different. In this case, according to Valve at least, Mastercard is just playing word games.

“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks.  Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution.  Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”

Rule 5.12.7 states, “A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.”

It goes on, “The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.”

So, two things to say here. The first is that, whatever your moral stances may be and no matter how they align with Mastercard’s rules above, that rule is a far cry from “if it’s lawful, it’s all good.” Instead, it’s more like “If it’s lawful, it’s all good…unless we determine it’s either offensive or isn’t artistic enough for our tastes.”

Now I could carve out examples of how Mastercard doesn’t come close to enforcing its own rule in the video game space all day. After all, I’m pretty sure I’ve “mutilated a person or body part” in roughly a zillion video games and that the NPCs in question didn’t give me consent to do so. That’s called combat and it’s in a ton of games that you can purchase with a Mastercard. But let’s take a more extreme example within the rule: bestiality. It’s one of those things that sounds like an obvious thing to say: you can’t use a Mastercard to buy a good, service, or image that includes bestiality. But I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 with my own Mastercard on Steam and, as is famously known, the game has a mildly explicit scene in which you, to borrow a headline, “Bang The Bear.” This isn’t to say that BG3‘s scene should be labeled “bestiality” (the bear is actually a druid that transforms into a bear), but it certainly could be.

But the second point is more fun to make compared with highlighting Mastercard’s lies and hypocrisy. Mastercard claimed innocence over the adult games purge by stating it didn’t directly talk to game marketplaces about any of this. But, while that is likely true in a technical sense, all it’s doing is pointing out that the company isn’t even secure enough in its own rules to enforce them directly and publicly and instead are laundering its morality stances through its network of partner processing companies.

The end result is the same: run afoul of these rules from Mastercard and enforced by Mastercard through its processor network and a game marketplace can lose its payment processing partnerships with Mastercard’s network. It’s a complete non-denial and, honestly, of no material use. The outcome is the outcome and it’s clear that Mastercard’s network is in fact doing all of this at Mastercard’s request.

And all for some Aussie puritans that want to foist their morality on everyone else? C’mon, credit card companies. What’s the point of amassing hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap if you can’t tell some zealots to fuck all the way off once in a while?

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As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn’t an example of a constitutional coup. It’s actually an exercise in sedition, if one were to avoid putting a finer point on it.

The mechanism is breathtakingly brazen: declare a fake national emergency, invoke emergency trade powers designed for genuine crises, bypass Congress entirely, and conduct billions of dollars in international agreements through personal presidential decree. When Japan agrees to invest $550 billion based on Trump’s “Strategic Trade Agreement,” they’re being asked to legitimize constitutional fraud that exists only through Trump’s personal authority rather than constitutional process.

Our allies aren’t stupid. They understand perfectly that what Trump is doing is illegal. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”—not the president. Foreign governments have constitutional lawyers who can read Article I, Section 8 as clearly as anyone. They know there is no emergency, no “unusual and extraordinary threat” that justifies bypassing Congress to negotiate trade policy through executive decree. They must be horrified by how few Americans seem to care that their government operates through systematic constitutional violation.

They’re also not holding out hope that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its expansive view of executive authority, will do much to stop this constitutional arson. Foreign leaders understand that when courts create doctrines of presidential immunity and presumptive constitutionality, they’re watching American institutions actively eliminate their own constraints rather than enforce them.

Congress could terminate these fraudulent emergencies at any time under the National Emergencies Act. Instead, Republican leaders have chosen to become active accomplices in constitutional destruction. They literally suspended the flow of time itself—declaring that calendar days would not constitute calendar days—to avoid voting on Trump’s fake emergency tariffs. When that proved insufficient, Speaker Mike Johnson simply shut down the People’s House entirely to prevent oversight votes. Senator Markwayne Mullin confessed the conspiracy on the House floor: “What we’re simply trying to do here is give President Trump cover.”

This demonstrates what a fundamentally unserious country we’ve become, with a political economy increasingly designed toward the maintenance of Trump’s personal power rather than constitutional governance. These vulgar arsonists in Congress have voluntarily transformed from co-equal branch into presidential protection service, abandoning their constitutional duties to serve one man’s authority. Every avoided vote, every suspended timeline, every shutdown of democratic process serves the same seditious purpose: eliminating constitutional constraints on executive power.

Foreign governments make contingency plans that don’t depend on American institutional reliability because American institutions have demonstrated they are no longer reliable. When your legislature suspends time to avoid constitutional duties, when your president conducts policy through fake emergencies, when your courts create immunity doctrines that make accountability impossible—you signal to the world that constitutional government has ceased to function.

Every trade deal negotiated through fake emergency powers establishes irreversible precedent that the presidency can operate beyond constitutional constraint by simply declaring emergencies. Trump has converted emergency powers designed to protect the republic into tools for dismantling republican government itself, while Congress provides the accelerant and courts provide the legal cover.

This is sedition: the systematic subversion of constitutional government by those sworn to preserve it. The American republic is being destroyed by constitutional arsonists who have discovered that the most effective way to eliminate democratic constraints is to declare them emergencies that require bypassing democracy itself. Our allies watch in horror as we demonstrate the complete transformation of American governance from constitutional republic to personal rule.

The United States is today one of the most corrupt countries in the world, as a result of the results of our election last November.

The center cannot hold when those charged with holding it have chosen to burn it down instead.

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln

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

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Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of bigotry that serves as the GOP’s platform.

No one in the administration cares about what they’re doing to the people they’re dehumanizing, much less what damage they’re doing to the reputation of the United States. True, this nation has never been perfect, but it has at least occasionally striven to subdue the worst impulses of its leaders and their constituents.

Now, we’re just another shitty nation with a deliberately broken moral compass. Trump could have made an effort to return deported people to their home countries or countries willing to take them if it was truly too dangerous for them to return to their homelands. Instead, it deliberately chose some of the worst places on earth to send people, backing this mass ejection with the perhaps too on-the-nose citation of the Alien Enemies Act and paying authoritarians handsomely for subjecting hundreds of deportees to torture.

Trump — the self-proclaimed artist of the deal — is selling the nation’s soul and demanding nothing in return but sadism-by-proxy. As Venezuelans falsely portrayed as Tren de Aragua gang members are finally being returned to their actual home countries, if not back to the United States to finally avail themselves of the due process rights they’ve always had, they’re letting everyone know the backdrop for DHS sadist-in-chief Kristi Noem’s photo ops is every bit as horrible as even our own State Department has been saying for years.

Another victim of this administration’s deliberate cruelty and dehumanization has spoken out following his release from El Salvador’s torture prison, CECOT. Reyes Barrios — like so many others — was labeled a gang member by DHS/ICE simply because he had a couple of tattoos. (And despite intel from actual law enforcement experts who have repeatedly made it clear in guidance ICE is now deliberately ignoring that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua doesn’t have the rich history of self-identification via tattoo that, say, El Salvadoran gang MS-13 does.)

While it would be dangerous enough to simply be housed with actual foreign gang members who have been arrested locally, the people who appear to be most interested in harming deportees aren’t foreign gang members. Well, at least not the ones in tattoos. Instead, the real threat is the gang that roams more freely through CECOT than even the most powerful MS-13 members.

“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”

[…]

Reyes Barrios’ time in CECOT was marked by psychological abuse and “countless” beatings from guards, who hit, kicked, and used police batons on detainees while their hands were cuffed behind their backs, he said.

Once, after he showered at the incorrect time, guards punished Reyes Barrios by sending him to “the Island,” a 2-by-1-meter cell with a cement bed and a toilet, he said. He spent about four or five hours there, alone in the darkness.

Barrios was, unbelievably, more fortunate than others dumped into CECOT by a gloating Trump and the equally abhorrent leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.” You can see why Trump admires Bukele. And you can see how both men truly enjoy the ongoing abuse of hundreds of people who made the apparent mistake of trying to escape the horrors of their homelands and/or scrape out a life worth living in a nation that has attempted to position itself as just such a beacon of hope. Making America great again apparently means destroying every worthwhile thing this nation has ever stood for. And because it’s happening to people too many people in power (and too many people who insist on voting for them) don’t consider to be actual human beings, the people who enact, aid, and abet this cruelty can’t be convinced they’re actually part of the problem.

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Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power.

This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove us toward digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures. Through bullying, threats, and coercion, Trump moved to turn the chokepoints of the centralized internet to his advantage. The MAGA world discovered that when digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions will follow.

But here’s what the oligarchs don’t want you to understand: the same underlying technologies enabling this power concentration can be architected to resist it. The key isn’t begging for better billionaires or smarter regulations—it’s recognizing that decentralization isn’t a technical preference, it’s a democratic necessity.

The same authoritarian capture that took over centralized social media is already threatening AI systems as well. Just as we’ve watched Musk morph Twitter’s algorithms into X’s non-stop amplification of his personal political preferences, we’re seeing AI systems designed to reflect the biases and political agendas of their corporate owners. But this pattern isn’t inevitable. We need to understand that AI doesn’t have to be another tool of oppression. Designed correctly, it can be a weapon of liberation.

How Concentration Breeds Control

The concentration of digital power wasn’t an accident—it was the inevitable result of Wall Street incentives that rewarded greater centralized control over user empowerment.

Here’s how it happened: investor demands required tool builders to seek ever-greater returns, which meant transitioning from building user-empowering tools to controlling infrastructure. The most successful companies stopped building ever more useful services and started focusing on how to better extract rents from digital chokepoints—the equivalent of privatizing roads, then charging tolls.

These companies colonized the open internet, turning their services into necessary but proprietary infrastructure. They erected barriers to entry, barriers to exit, and tollbooths for everyone else, with your attention as the price of admission.

The result is what Cory Doctorow famously called the enshittification curve: platforms start by empowering users, evolve to capture them, and end by exploiting them. Wall Street’s demand that only investors matter as stakeholders strips away user agency with each step and hands it to corporate overlords.

And corporate overlords, it turns out, are natural allies for authoritarians. When you control the digital infrastructure that shapes how people communicate, learn, and organize, you become an attractive partner for anyone seeking political control. The promise of regulatory capture, government contracts, and protection from competition makes the bargain irresistible.

This convergence wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice made by people who confused convenience with empowerment, scale with value, and engagement with democracy.

The consequences are everywhere: platforms that enabled the Arab Spring and #MeToo are now coordinating genocides and undermining trust in elections. Tools that connected marginalized communities are promoting fascist agendas. And the tech oligarchs who built these systems are now literally standing behind authoritarians at inaugurations.

Digital Infrastructure Is Democratic Infrastructure

Most people still don’t understand the core insight: digital infrastructure and democratic infrastructure are the same thing.

Democracy is the ultimate decentralized technology. It distributes power away from kings and aristocrats to the people—imperfectly, through struggle, but fundamentally. The early internet promised to do the same for information, communication, and commerce. Anyone could publish, reach audiences, and break down barriers between producers and consumers, experts and amateurs, the powerful and powerless.

But Wall Street’s demand for exponential returns required fencing off the digital commons. The billionaires rebuilt the old gatekeeping systems in digital form, turning tools of value creation into mechanisms of value extraction. They offered convenience in exchange for control, scale in exchange for agency, connection in exchange for confinement within their walled gardens.

As Taiwan’s former digital minister, Audrey Tang, explained, democracy and digital freedom aren’t separate concepts—they’re the same thing. When digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions follow the same pattern. When we surrender control over our digital lives, we surrender control over our political lives.

The concentration of digital infrastructure inevitably leads to the concentration of political power. That’s why the battle for decentralization is fundamentally a battle for democracy itself.

The Path Forward: Protocols, Not Platforms

The solution isn’t building better platforms—it’s making platforms an obsolete concept.

Platforms concentrate power; protocols distribute it. Platforms extract value from users; protocols enable users to create value for themselves. Most importantly: platforms can be captured by bad actors, but protocols resist capture by design.

This resistance isn’t theoretical. We’re seeing it emerge across multiple projects—from the AT Protocol to ActivityPub to nostr. The key insight is architectural: when you separate identity, data storage, and algorithmic curation into different services, no single entity can control the whole system. Users can choose their own moderation services rather than trusting corporate decisions. They can customize their information diet rather than accepting engagement-maximizing feeds. They can control their own data and move between services without losing their social connections.

They have choice. They have transparency. They have their own intentions controlling things, rather than some unseen entity driven by unaligned incentives.

The same architectural principles apply to AI—perhaps the most critical battleground for digital power today. Centralized AI services don’t just mine your data for corporate benefit; they can shape your thinking, limit your capabilities, and make you dependent on their infrastructure. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

We’re already seeing the emergence of open source models, opportunities to control your own system prompts (as DuckDuckGo recently introduced), and smaller distilled models that work in decentralized environments. Projects are emerging to give people more power over their own data, letting you decide how AI can interact with your information, rather than the AI system slurping up everything it can about you.

This isn’t about technical preferences—it’s about the difference between renting someone else’s vision of how you should think and work versus building your own.

The Technological Poison Pill

The beauty of truly decentralized systems is that they’re extremely resistant to capture.

This is what I call the technological poison pill: systems architected so that growth makes them harder to capture, not easier. Traditional centralized platforms become more valuable targets for authoritarians as they scale. Properly designed protocols become more resilient against capture as adoption increases.

Protocol-based systems demonstrate this principle by distributing different functions across services that no single entity controls. Even if one implementation gets captured by bad actors, users can retain their data, connections, and digital identity while moving to alternative services. The architecture makes takeover attempts self-defeating—the very structure that creates value also prevents consolidation of control.

The same principle applies to AI infrastructure. When you control your own models, data, and computational resources, no corporation can unilaterally change terms of service or start mining your conversations. The more people control their own AI infrastructure, the less valuable centralized AI services become as tools of control.

Breaking the Helplessness Loop

The concentration of digital power has trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords—and that learned helplessness may be more dangerous than the concentration itself.

Every week brings demands that tech giants “do better” or that governments “crack down” on platforms. But this approach assumes we need permission from powerful entities to fix the internet. It transforms what should be user empowerment into a performance of powerlessness.

This helplessness isn’t accidental—it serves the interests of concentrated power. The more we believe we need tech giants to solve our problems, the more indispensable they become. The more we focus on regulating existing platforms instead of building alternatives, the more we entrench their dominance. The more we beg politicians to save us, the more attractive these companies become as partners for authoritarians seeking control.

The tech oligarchs standing behind Trump at his inauguration represent the logical endpoint of this dynamic: when digital infrastructure owners become kingmakers, democracy becomes a performance staged on their platforms.

But this endpoint isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of choices we can still change.

The Choice Before Us

The underlying infrastructure that enabled our current digital dystopia can enable something radically different: a genuinely democratic digital ecosystem where users control their own experiences, data, and tools.

But this future requires active choice. It means learning new tools, supporting new protocols, and building new habits. It means moving beyond the comfortable convenience of corporate platforms and taking responsibility for digital sovereignty.

The alternative is continued concentration of power in the hands of billionaires who literally stand behind authoritarians at inaugurations, viewing democracy as an obstacle to their vision of control.

Yes, decentralization creates challenges—technical complexity, potential for abuse, fragmentation. But these aren’t arguments against decentralization; they’re arguments for designing it thoughtfully. Democratic institutions have always grappled with similar tensions between distributed power and effective governance. The solution isn’t to abandon democratic principles but to architect systems that embody them while addressing their practical challenges.

The same principle applies to digital infrastructure. Tradeoffs exist, but they don’t justify accepting concentrated control any more than political tradeoffs justify accepting authoritarianism. We can build decentralized systems that address concerns about complexity and abuse without centralizing power in the hands of corporate oligarchs.

Digital Democracy or Concentrated Control?

The choice before us is stark: do we build democratic digital infrastructure, or do we accept permanent concentrated control?

Digital democracy means building systems that embody democratic values—transparency over opacity, user agency over corporate control, distributed power over centralized authority. It means using AI as a tool of personal liberation rather than corporate surveillance. It means supporting protocols that resist capture rather than platforms that court it.

Most importantly, it means rejecting the learned helplessness that treats concentrated tech power as inevitable rather than recognizing it as a temporary arrangement we can change.

The tools exist. Open protocols are maturing. AI models are being democratized. Decentralized infrastructure is becoming viable. The question isn’t technical capability—it’s political will.

Will we choose the difficult work of building democratic digital infrastructure? Or will we continue asking permission from oligarchs and authoritarians?

The battle for the open internet and the battle for democracy aren’t separate fights—they’re the same fight. The future of our digital lives is the future of democracy itself.

We can accept concentrated control over our digital lives, or we can build democratic infrastructure of our own. The choice is ours, but the window for making it won’t stay open forever.

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The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the radical concept that people of different backgrounds might have something to contribute.

According to a draft memo obtained by Fox News, the Navy is establishing a “Naval Higher Education Review Board” tasked with removing any materials “deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter progression.” The board will focus particularly on—brace yourself—the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English.

The memo is worth quoting directly, because the language reveals how thoroughly this administration misunderstands both education and military effectiveness. It talks about the necessity of “remov[ing] materials and practices deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter” and says:

A particular emphasis will be applied on the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English. Faculty recruitment and selection processes will be reviewed to ensure merit-based selection that leads to preparing our future officers for leading in Peace Through Strength and then success in combat when the Nation calls.

Notice what’s missing here: any explanation of how studying history or literature could possibly undermine military readiness. The assumption seems to be that learning about the complexities of human society somehow weakens future officers, rather than preparing them for the complex operational environments they’ll actually face.

But here’s the thing about this supposed “warrior ethos”: when you actually look at what the Trump administration considers tough-guy behavior, it’s basically a master class in being scared of literally everything.

A Warrior’s Guide to Being Terrified

Let’s examine what the “warrior ethos” looks like in practice under this administration:

Warrior Move #1: Be So Scared of CBS News That You Extort Them for $16 Million Nothing says “fearless leader” like forcing a news organization to pay what amounts to a protection racket fee because they edited an interview with your opponent—who you beat in the election—in ways you didn’t like. Trump’s demand that CBS pay as part of a settlement shows the true warrior spirit: if you can’t handle a free press, just threaten people until they pay you to go away.

Warrior Move #2: Transportation Secretary Too Frightened of NYC Subways to Ride Them Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, apparently finds the New York City subway system so terrifying that can’t stop talking about how terrifying and scary it is. This is the same subway system used daily by millions of ordinary New Yorkers, including children going to school. But hey, nothing embodies the warrior ethos like being more scared of public transit than a 12-year-old with a MetroCard.

Warrior Move #3: Be So Intimidated by TikTok That You… Wait, Actually, Never Mind That One The administration’s flip-flopping on TikTok—from “existential threat that must be banned immediately” to “actually it’s fine now“—perfectly captures the strategic brilliance of the modern warrior ethos: be inconsistent enough that nobody knows what you actually stand for.

Warrior Move #4: Cower in Fear of Trans People Using Bathrooms Nothing demonstrates battlefield courage quite like being absolutely terrified that someone might use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. The administration has made restricting transgender rights a top priority because apparently, the greatest threat to American military readiness is the possibility that a trans person might pee in peace. Real warriors, as we all know, spend most of their time obsessing over other people’s bathroom choices and genitals.

Think about the operational absurdity here: these are the same people who claim they want military officers, based on “meritocracy,” prepared for complex global conflicts, but they’re prioritizing policies that actively drive qualified personnel out of the service over… bathroom anxiety.

Warrior Move #5: Be So Scared of Accurate Data That You Fire People Who Collect It The administration’s pattern of removing officials who produce economic data they don’t like—like firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief—shows true warrior spirit: if reality doesn’t match your narrative, just eliminate the people whose job it is to document reality. Because nothing says “strong leadership” like being threatened by… math.

Warrior Move #6: Tremble at the Thought of Foreign Students Learning Things The warrior ethos apparently includes being so intimidated by international students that you want to kick them out of American universities. Because clearly, the best way to maintain American dominance is to prevent talented people from other countries from getting educated here, potentially staying here, and contributing to American innovation. Strategic brilliance.

Warrior Move #7: Be Defeated by Windmills (Literally) Trump’s ongoing war against wind energy—claiming windmills cause cancer, kill birds, and are generally terrifying—perfectly encapsulates the warrior mindset. Don Quixote fought windmills as a delusion; Trump fights them as policy. At least Don Quixote had the excuse of being fictional.

Warrior Move #8: Run Away from Public Media The warrior ethos includes being so threatened by NPR and PBS that you need to defund them entirely. Because apparently, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of tough guys quite like… thoughtful journalism and educational programming. Clearly, “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered” represent an existential threat to American military readiness.

Warrior Move #9: Eliminate Books Because Words Are Scary The Naval Academy previously purged nearly 400 books from its library, covering topics like civil rights, the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ issues, and feminism. Because apparently, learning about American history and understanding different perspectives is too dangerous for future military officers. Nothing says “prepared for combat” like being unable to handle a book about the Civil Rights Movement.

Warrior Move #10: Replace Diversity with “Merit” (But Only Our Definition of Merit) The memo calls for “merit-based selection” while simultaneously demanding that military academics be restructured to eliminate civilian influence and focus solely on what they define as appropriate warrior content. Merit, in this context, apparently means “thinks exactly like us and is scared of the same books we are.”

The Real “Corrosive” Problem

Here’s what’s actually happening: the Trump administration is so threatened by the idea that America’s military might benefit from officers who understand the full complexity of American history, society, and the world they’ll be operating in, that they’re willing to gut educational institutions to prevent it.

The memo talks about addressing “imbalances in civilian-dominated governance that weaken the Academy’s military mission”—but civilian oversight of the military is literally a foundational principle of American democracy. The idea that civilian input into military education is somehow corrupting reveals (not for the first time) a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how democratic institutions are supposed to work.

And let’s be clear about what “DEI programs” actually were at the Naval Academy: they were efforts to ensure that the military could draw from the full talent pool of American citizens, rather than limiting themselves to a narrow demographic slice. The idea that this somehow undermines military effectiveness is contradicted by, well, reality. Diverse teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones in complex scenarios—exactly the kind of challenges military leaders face.

The Irony of “Warrior Ethos”

The most ridiculous part of all this is that the people claiming to champion a “warrior ethos” are displaying the exact opposite of what that might actually mean. Real “warriors” aren’t afraid of books. They don’t need to silence critics or eliminate diverse perspectives to feel secure. They don’t demand protection money from news organizations or avoid public transportation out of fear.

Real strength comes from being able to engage with challenging ideas, to learn from different perspectives, and to adapt to complex situations. The Trump administration’s version of strength looks more like fragility dressed up in insecure tough-guy language.

The Naval Academy has produced military leaders who successfully fought fascism, integrated the military, and protected democratic values around the world. They did this not despite understanding the full complexity of American society and history, but because of it.

Now we’re supposed to believe that future officers will be stronger if they’re shielded from learning about civil rights, protected from diverse perspectives, and trained to see civilian oversight as a threat rather than a feature of democratic governance.

That’s not a warrior ethos. That’s authoritarian fragility with a military costume on.

What This Actually Accomplishes

The real goal here isn’t to create better military leaders—it’s to use military institutions as political weapons. By purging educational content and restructuring governance, the Trump administration hopes to ensure that military institutions reflect their political priorities rather than serving the broader American public.

This undermines both military effectiveness and democratic norms. When you politicize military education, you create officers who are loyal to a particular political faction rather than to the Constitution and the American people. When you eliminate diverse perspectives from military leadership development, you create blind spots that enemies can exploit.

This approach makes America less safe, not more. Military leaders who don’t understand the full complexity of the societies they serve and the world they operate in are less effective, not more.

But then again, none of this is actually about military effectiveness. It’s about using the language of “warrior ethos” to justify political purges and authoritarian control.

And if that’s what passes for “strength” in the Trump administration, it explains a lot about why they’re so terrified of everything else—from windmills to bathroom choices to the basic concept of civilian expertise. Real strength doesn’t require purging books or eliminating perspectives. But real authoritarianism absolutely does.

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Section 706 of the Telecom Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”

For decades, the FCC has tap-danced around this mandate. Corruption and regulatory capture has resulted in a U.S. telecom sector that’s barely competitive, highly consolidated, and dominated by a handful of regional telecom monopolies. Those monopolies don’t have to try very hard to expand access, lower prices, or improve speeds. The FCC has been historically feckless about doing anything about it.

Every so often the FCC tries to do the absolute bare minimum to improve on this dynamic. Like during the Biden administration, when the Biden FCC last year boosted the definition of broadband to a still pathetic 100 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream, pledged to hold gigabit access as a future goal, and made a thin pledge to maybe take a closer look at why U.S. broadband is so expensive.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is killing all of that.

In a flimsy explanation, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr claims that having meaningful standards and ensuring that broadband is affordable are “extraneous” matters. To further prop up his agency’s apathy, he points to the recent Loper Bright Supreme Court ruling that curtail the FCC’s authority to do anything that might upset a big U.S. corporation:

“The Carr FCC’s proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, “we believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text,” the proposal said.”

We’ve noted repeatedly how this is the legal and logical incoherence at the heart of Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC. Carr wants to wield FCC authority like a tyrant, leveraging often completely nonexistent agency power to force TikTok to sell itself to Trump’s buddies, bully telecom companies into being more racist, or cajole media companies into softening their journalism of our idiot king.

The problem is, only one side can “win” this standoff, and it’s corporate power. Carr can saber rattle and threaten all he likes, but the primary agenda of Trump 2.0 (outside of the racism) is delivering the final killing blow to federal consumer protection, regulatory autonomy, and corporate oversight.

If you’re an amoral billionaire or corporation with zero interest in a habitable planet, any sort of equality, or functioning democracy, the project is going very well. If you’re an actual resident of the United States, interested in things like labor rights, clean drinking water, or evenly available and affordable broadband access, you are in very, very serious trouble.

Companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon want a federal government that just mindlessly rubber stamps their harmful mergers, then turns a blind eye to all of the harms of consolidation and market failure. And while U.S. regulators were already terrible at taking meaningful action to stop this, Trump 2.0 is making all of our regulatory capture and corruption problems immeasurably worse.

Our broken, consolidated corporate press doesn’t much want to talk about it, but U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight is effectively dead, the impact will reverberate for decades, and a significant portion of the damage of the second Trump Presidency will be permanent.

Even under an ideal situation where Trump authoritarianism is conquered and some sort of sensible alternative takes office, restoring oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T — both bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance networks — is never going to be a priority in a Congress that’s now too corrupt to function, under a broken court system that treats corporate power as an unimpeachable deity.

If the FCC was a serious agency, there’s plenty it could do to improve broadband access. It could take aim at monopoly power. It could encourage municipal broadband and local cooperatives. It could impose real penalties for service quality and privacy violations. It could implement and enforce consistent standards demanding better of our regional monopoly giants.

With only the occasional short-lived exceptions, at every opportunity the U.S. does the exact opposite, in blind service to telecom monopoly power.

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Trump — perhaps more than other presidents — often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God’s personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given him so much and asked for literally nothing in return.

The evangelical crowd cheers Trump on as he sides with Israel’s genocide, something that becomes a bit more conflicted when entities like “Jews for Jesus” mix white evangelical traits with a far older religion that generally tends to reject the supposed existence of Jesus Christ.

While evangelicals do like to throw themselves on the cross on a regular basis, it’s not self-sacrifice. It’s self-service. Christians in America do love to portray themselves as persecuted, as though the mere existence threat of death metal human equality or a swear word within hearing distance is the exact equivalent of being thrown to the lions like they were back in the good old days. (They mostly weren’t, not even then.)

Trump is one of them, at least in terms of converting self-pity to an idiot’s interpretation of selflessness. And he definitely wants those votes. Conveniently, most evangelical Christians absolutely adore periodic ceremonial events, including those overseen by the same government they swear to Gawd might be persecuting them every time their preferred candidate loses an election and/or some minority scores a free lunch at school.

All in all, Christians have it pretty good in the United States. Most people treat them as mildly annoying at worst. And most Americans (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) consider self-proclaimed Christians to be good neighbors, non-molesters of children, and potential sources of unsolicited marital advice.

And, because no one needed this more than Trump — a Christian hero despite his long history of sexual harassment, sexual assault, multiple marriages, sexualization of his own children, cheater at golf, and the proverbial rich man who, as the Bible says, would find it exceedingly difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven — Trump has delivered. We’re getting more religious “freedom” added to our alleged “separation of church and state”, whether we wanted it or not.

The Trump administration released guidance on Monday reminding federal agencies that religious expression in the workplace is protected by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act — guidance that protects employees and supervisors seeking to recruit fellow federal workers to their religion.

Such expressions are protected as long as they do not cross into harassment, the guidance says. Wearing religious symbols and staging them in office cubicles is also protected, the guidance says, as are hosting prayer groups in empty offices and posting about religious events on office bulletin boards.

An agnostic (in the political and religious sense of the word) reaffirmation of religious rights is to be commended. This ain’t that, though. While it might be taken to mean that every other employee can throw down on a rug up to five times a day while facing Mecca without interference from their federal employers, I can absolutely guarantee you this only means anyone mildly criticizing someone for hassling their fellow employees daily about their weekly Bible study will be protected by this new guidance.

The guidance doesn’t seem to add much to what already exists in terms of protection of religious expression in the workplace. But what it does add definitely crosses the line. Listed as examples of protected expression by federal employees are these (and only these) examples:

A park ranger leading a tour through a national park may join her tour group in prayer.

A doctor at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital may pray over his patient for her recovery.

While it does seem weird that a park ranger wouldn’t just hang back a bit and wait for the tour to finish praying (rather than joining them and giving them an implicit governmental blessing of their religious expression), it’s goddamn frightening that this “affirmation” of religious protections gives medical professionals (perhaps due for a scare quote…) permission to pray to their preferred god in hopes of securing a patient’s recovery. Hopefully, this is something a VA doctor might do in addition to providing actual, science-based treatment, rather than in lieu of anything stronger than some empty words hurled in the general direction of a power whose innate “higherness” has yet to be scientifically demonstrated.

That’s the bad news. The good news anyone of any religion can do a bunch of religious stuff at work without violating this guidance. Sure, there’s some vague stuff said about crossing the line into harassment, but the government bears the burden of proving this. And the fact that it’s the government loosening the reins on religious restrictions, that battle is more uphill than it ever was.

So… you know what to do, government drones? Pick literally any religion (if you don’t already have a preference) and litter cubicles, break rooms, and coworkers’ minds with its attendant detritus. I foresee a huge uptake in non-mainstream religions by government workers, who are now free to ask fellow workers if they’ve heard the good news about Satan or perhaps drape a holocaust cloak across their cubicle wall to inform others they’re not only adherents to the power of fire, but possibly willing to bodily wield it if need be.

Maybe you can just ask the names and sexes of fellow coworkers’ firstborn children because, according to your religion, Paimon will always need a willing (or even unwilling) male host. Those of you uncomfortable with small talk may just want to practice Santeria during allotted break times and/or spread salt around the entirety of the agency campus to help limit demon summoning-related chaos. If nothing else, a pithy ode to the greater of all evils is perhaps all that’s needed to brighten up a dull office:

Let’s just hope this Godsucker-pleasing performance results in a melting pot of every religion Trump has never considered real, much less realized actually exists. Christianity is — at best — running neck-and-neck with Islam. Only a white guy with a shit tan would have pushed this thing through without thinking it through. But that’s Trump for you: a guy who shoots first and fires people who ask questions later.

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Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It’s turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted it would be.

Let’s start with the most obvious sign that this law is working exactly as poorly as critics warned: VPN usage in the UK has absolutely exploded. Proton VPN reported an 1,800% spike in UK sign-ups. Five of the top ten free apps on Apple’s App Store in the UK are VPNs. When your “child safety” law’s primary achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you’ve missed the mark just a tad.

But the real kicker is what content is now being gatekept behind invasive age verification systems. Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government ID to access:

Reddit communities about stopping drinking and smoking, periods, craft beers, and sexual assault support, not to mention documentation of warSpotify for music videos tagged as 18+War footage and protest videos on XWikipedia is threatening to limit access in the UK (while actively challenging the law)

Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it.

The Wikipedia situation is particularly telling. When an educational encyclopedia that hosts over seven million articles and sees five edits per second calls your law unworkable, maybe it’s time to reconsider?

And this is all after a bunch of other smaller websites and forums shut down earlier this year when other parts of the law went into effect.

This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.

The only websites with the financial capacity to work around the government’s new regulations are the ones causing the problems in the first place. And now Meta, which already has a monopoly on a number of near-essential online activities (from local sales to university group chats), is reaping the benefits. Thousands of hamster enthusiasts are likely flooding onto Instagram as we speak, ready to be redirected into black holes of miscellaneous “content” they never asked for in the first place. The exact nature of this content is of no corporate concern. The only service rendered is to advertisers, whose pleas are helpfully interspersed between posts and videos. The people running the platform do not care what you logged on for and whether you got it.

Compare this to the beleaguered Hamster Forum. No venture capital is involved – the website was run by passionate hobbyists. They clubbed together with the express purpose of disseminating rodent intel to the people who searched for it. If its users really do move over to Instagram, they’ll find their photos and advice trapped behind a login wall, where they will only benefit other net contributors to Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Their pets will make Meta richer – cute videos are an asset if you’re trying to suck consumers into an infinite behavioural loop that only benefits you. Perhaps most unfairly, the forum’s hamster owners will have to live on the terms of people who are totally indifferent to the value of their time and knowledge.

The age verification process itself is a privacy nightmare wrapped in security theater. Users are being asked to upload selfies that get run through facial recognition algorithms, or hand over copies of their government-issued IDs to third-party companies. The facial recognition systems are so poorly implemented that people are easily fooling them with screenshots from video games—literally using images from the video game Death Stranding. This isn’t just embarrassing, it reveals the fundamental security flaw at the heart of the entire system. If these verification methods can’t distinguish between a real person and a video game character, what confidence should we have in their ability to protect the sensitive biometric data they’re collecting?

But here’s the thing: even when these systems “work,” they’re creating massive honeypots of personal data. As we’ve seen repeatedly, companies collecting biometric data and ID verification inevitably get breached, and suddenly intimate details about people’s online activity become public. Just ask the users of Tea, a women’s dating safety app that recently exposed thousands of users’ verification selfies after requiring facial recognition for “safety.”

The UK government’s response to widespread VPN usage has been predictably authoritarian. First, they insisted nothing would change:

“The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.”

But then, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle deployed the classic authoritarian playbook: dismissing all criticism as support for child predators. This isn’t just intellectually dishonest—it’s a deliberate attempt to shut down legitimate policy debate by smearing critics as complicit in child abuse. It’s particularly galling given that the law Kyle is defending will do absolutely nothing to stop actual predators, who will simply migrate to unregulated platforms or use the same VPNs that law-abiding citizens are now flocking to.

Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activity linked to their real identities. It drives users toward less secure platforms and services. It destroys small online communities that can’t afford compliance costs. And it teaches an entire generation that bypassing government surveillance is a basic life skill.

Meanwhile, the actual harms it purports to address? Those remain entirely unaddressed. Predators will simply move to unregulated platforms, encrypted messaging, or services that don’t comply. Or they’ll just use VPNs. The law creates the illusion of safety while actually making everyone less secure.

This is what happens when politicians decide to regulate technology they don’t understand, targeting problems they can’t define, with solutions that don’t work. The UK has managed to create a law so poorly designed that it simultaneously violates privacy, restricts freedom, harms small businesses, and completely fails at its stated goal of protecting children.

And all of this was predictable. Hell, it was predicted. Civil society groups, activists, legal experts, all warned of these results and were dismissed by the likes of Peter Kyle as supporting child predators.

Yet every criticism, every warning, every prediction about this law’s failures has come to pass within days of implementation. The only question now is how long it will take for the UK government to admit what everyone else already knows: the Online Safety Act is an unmitigated disaster that makes the internet less safe for everyone.

A petition set up on the UK government’s website demanding a repeal of the entire OSA received many hundreds of thousands of signatures within days. The government has already brushed it off with more nonsense, promising that the enforcer of the law, Ofcom, “will take a sensible approach to enforcement with smaller services that present low risk to UK users, only taking action where it is proportionate and appropriate, and will focus on cases where the risk and impact of harm is highest.”

But that’s a bunch of vague nonsense that doesn’t take into account that no platform wants to be on the receiving end of such an investigation, and thus will take these overly aggressive steps to avoid scrutiny.

The whole thing is a mess and yet another embarrassment for the UK. And they were all warned about it, while insisting these concerns were exaggerations.

But this isn’t just about the UK—it’s a cautionary tale for every democracy grappling with how to regulate the internet. The OSA proves that when politicians prioritize looking tough over actually solving problems, the result is legislation that harms everyone it claims to protect while empowering the very forces it claims to constrain.

What makes this particularly tragic is that there were genuine alternatives. Real child safety measures—better funding for mental health support, improved education programs, stronger privacy protections that don’t require mass surveillance—were all on the table. Instead, the UK chose the path that maximizes government control while minimizing actual safety.

The rest of the world should take note.

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

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.

“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.

These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”

Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.

Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.

Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.

Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.

He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.

For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.

“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”

To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.

Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.

To examine those claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 men on the list of detainees first published by CBS. Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, including the fact the Trump administration knew at least 197 of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and at least 166 have tattoos, which experts have told us are not an indicator of gang membership.

When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.

He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.

“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”

The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.

Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.

“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.

Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.

They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”

The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”

Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”

Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.

The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.

Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”

Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”

Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.

About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.

Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.

This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.

Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.

Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”

In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.

The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.

Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”

During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”

That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.

As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.

Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”

But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.

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We’re becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn’t want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder for firing squads.

You’re getting the government you deserve, even if you claim you didn’t vote specifically for whatever new insanity might be hurting you personally at this moment in time. You wanted a demagogue and you got one — a man so incapable of handling the slightest bit of bad news, he feels compelled to go full Stalin the moment a factoid puts a slight dent in his self-perception as the Greatest Human Being Who Has Ever Walked The Face Of The Earth.

His party — and his enablers — spent years screaming into the faces of anyone questioning their mere humanity that “facts” were more important than “feelings.” But that was never true. Only facts that allowed them to be inhumane towards their fellow human beings mattered. All other facts should be ignored, buried, or misrepresented. And their top dude – King Shit himself — feels the same way. When the facts aren’t the facts he likes, they become subservient to his feelings.

So, when Department of Labor employment stats reflected the reality of six months of absolute financial psychopathy from President Trump, Trump decided the best response was to shoot the messenger. We can only take solace in the fact that he didn’t do this literally.

Behold the power of your Golden Calf, “we didn’t vote for this” asshats!

President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.

In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.

This reporting downplays the pure un-hingedness that is Trump’s actual social media post. The obvious outcome of massive tariffs (some threatened, some deployed) and the ejection of thousands of tax-paying, hardworking employees of US companies whose jobs will never be filled by the same white people claiming these jobs were “stolen” from them resulted in an outcome that would have been obvious to anyone who’s ever spent more than 5 minutes paying attention in an Economics class.

Job growth slowed because US manufacturers are finding that everything that isn’t uncertain is now certainly more expensive. And the ejection of more than 100,000 people from the work force via mass deportation efforts has left more holes than natural-born Americans willing to fill them.

Of course, Trump will never take the blame for anything that’s directly his fault. So he went to his own social media service to perform a public execution of the person bearing the inevitable bad news.

I’m going to quote it in full because I’m absolutely daring the Trump supporters who read this site to wade into the comment section with their defense of whatever the fuck this is:

I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This absolute coward and loser thinks job numbers are a political operation meant to make him look bad. But the numbers are what they are. While presidents have always been willing to apply spin to job numbers, no one until Trump has been willing to fire a Labor official simply for reporting facts.

Most GOP members are abject cowards. But at least a couple of them stepped up to criticize (however mildly) this transparently authoritarian action by Donald “My Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts” Trump:

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.

North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”

The biggest problem isn’t that Trump did this, although it is actually a serious problem. The biggest problem is that Trump did this despite it being immediately apparent this was done solely to punish someone for daring to publish facts that undermined the administration’s narrative on tariffs, mass deportation, and the alleged benefits of shitting the international bed on a regular basis.

But all the firings in the world won’t change the facts: the Trump administration is eviscerating everything that makes America great. And while it works towards the goal of creating a perpetual fascist state for Trump and his acolytes, it will steadily destroy everything that makes America operable. Trump will break this country and then declare his love for its corpse while fondling an American flag.

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Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced their reputation as the Nazi bar.

Last week, we got a perfect demonstration of what happens when you build your platform’s reputation around welcoming Nazis: your recommendation algorithms start treating Nazi content as more than worth tolerating, to content worth promoting.

As Taylor Lorenz reported on User Mag’s Patreon account, Substack sent push notifications to users encouraging them to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” a newsletter that “describes itself as ‘a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.'”

As you can see, the notification included the newsletter’s swastika logo, leading confused users to wonder why they were getting Nazi symbols pushed to their phones.

“I had [a swastika] pop up as a notification and I’m like, wtf is this? Why am I getting this?” one user said. “I was quite alarmed and blocked it.” Some users speculated that Substack had issued the push alert intentionally in order to generate engagement or that it was tied to Substack’s recent fundraising round. Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.

“I thought that Substack was just for diaries and things like that,” a user who posted about receiving the alert on his Instagram story told User Mag. “I didn’t realize there was such a prominent presence of the far right on the app.”

Substack’s response was predictable corporate damage control:

“We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused.”

But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.

There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.

As Lorenz notes, the Nazi newsletter that got promoted has “746 subscribers and hundreds of collective likes on Substack Notes.” More troubling, users who clicked through were recommended “related content from another Nazi newsletter called White Rabbit,” which has over 8,600 subscribers and “is also being recommended on the Substack app through its ‘rising’ leaderboard.”

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature working exactly as designed. Substack’s recommendation systems are doing precisely what they’re built to do: identify content that performs well within the platform’s ecosystem and surface it to potentially interested users. The “error” isn’t that the algorithm malfunctioned—it’s that Substack created conditions where Nazi content could thrive well enough to trigger promotional systems in the first place.

When you build a platform that explicitly welcomes Nazi content, don’t act surprised when that content performs well enough to trigger your promotional systems. When you’ve spent years defending your decision to help Nazis monetize their content, you can’t credibly claim to be “disturbed” when your algorithms recognize that Nazi content is succeeding on your platform.

The real tell here isn’t the push notification itself—it’s that Substack’s discovery systems are apparently treating Nazi newsletters as content worth surfacing to new users. That suggests these publications aren’t just surviving on Substack, they’re thriving well enough to register as “rising” content worthy of algorithmic promotion.

This is the inevitable endpoint of Substack’s content moderation philosophy. You can’t spend years positioning yourself as the platform that won’t “censor” Nazi content, actively help those creators monetize, and then act shocked when your systems start treating that content as editorially valuable.

This distinction matters enormously in terms of what sort of speech you are endorsing: there’s a world of difference between passively hosting speech and actively promoting it. When Substack defended hosting Nazi newsletters, they could claim they were simply providing infrastructure for discourse. But push notifications and algorithmic recommendations are something different—they’re editorial decisions about what content deserves amplification and which users might be interested in it.

To be clear, that’s entirely protected speech under the First Amendment as all editorial choices are protected. Substack is allowed to promote Nazis. But they should really stop pretending they don’t mean to. They’ve made it clear that they welcome literal Nazis on their platform and now it’s been made clear that their algorithm recognizes that Nazi content performs well.

This isn’t about Substack “supporting free speech”—it’s about Substack’s own editorial speech and what it’s choosing to say. They’re not just saying “Nazis welcome.” They’re saying “we think other people will like Nazi content too.”

And the public has every right to use their own free speech to call out and condemn such a choice. And use their own free speech rights of association to say “I won’t support Substack” because of this.

All the corporate apologies in the world can’t change what their algorithms revealed: when you welcome Nazis, you become the Nazi bar. And when you become the Nazi bar, your systems start working to bring more customers to the Nazis.

Your reputation remains what you allow. But it’s even more strongly connected to what you actively promote.

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We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.

The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) or G/O Media aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.

This sort of behavior has been particularly problematic at the DC gossip rag Politico, where ownership continues to implement “AI” systems that don’t really work all that well, constantly introduce new errors human editors have to correct, and engage in “behavior” that violates editorial standards. All without the input and knowledge of actual journalists or editors.

This rundown on the Politico AI mess by Brian Merchant is worth a read. He documents how in one instance, Politico Editorial staff were told just an hour before a new AI product was introduced, given zero chance to ask questions about how it would work, why it was there, or why it was being launched. The tech then immediately proceeded to make a bunch of embarrassing, rookie mistakes:

“The AI promptly generated a post that misspelled Kamala Harris’s mother’s name. The entry was taken down without comment or correction from an editor, in apparent violation of Politico’s editorial standards. Weeks later, Politico’s management deployed the AI tool again, this time in an even higher-profile setting: The vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. The feature again trampled editorial guidelines, this time transcribing verbatim Vance’s comments about “illegal immigrants”—a term that Politico writers are not allowed to use, and editors are not supposed to publish.”

Politico management introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers. It’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. Apparently the “AI” sucks at doing that, as well:

“It’s wholly behind the paywall, but when we have asked it things, it’s giving us back some pretty glaring errors,” [Politico journalist Ariel] Wittenberg says. “I asked it about ‘The Impact of President Biden’s Oil Policies,’ and it wrote me a whole page-and-a half thing, and every single policy it mentioned was a policy of Trump’s. And it cited real stories at the very bottom, from our members, the implication being that if someone is reading this, and it’s erroneous, not only does our AI not know the difference between Biden’s policies and Trump’s, but maybe the authors of the cited articles didn’t, either.”

Great stuff! This reflects the same experiences with other major media outlets that expect LLMs to genuinely understand their own outputs. You’ll recall that Apple had to pull its AI news synopses system because the AI routinely introduced glaring mistakes; VC “AI” marketing has many execs believing we’re just a few steps from full sentience, when these systems are still struggling with the very basics.

We’ve seen the same nonsense over at Microsoft, which was so keen to leverage automation to lower labor costs and glom onto ad engagement that they rushed to implement AI across the entirety of their MSN website, never really showing much concern for the fact the automation routinely produced false garbage. Google’s search automation efforts have been just as sloppy and reckless.

Again, the “automation” in this instance is also a direct reflection of the quality of Politico’s ownership, who likes Trump and actively embraces lazy “both sides” journalism that buries the truth in pursuit of fake ideological objectivity. It’s not any sort of coincidence that owners who don’t care about journalism, transparency, labor, or factual reality introduce broken tools that harm all four.

In this case, the introduction of the new automation wasn’t just rushed and lazy, it was in direct violation of the editorial union’s contract struck just last year. So union employees have since been battling with Politico via arbitration:

We’re taking @politico.com to arbitration this week for its unethical use of AI and we’re asking for your support! bit.ly/PENGuild

— PEN Guild (@pen-guild.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T19:29:36.498Z

A lot of affluent media owners have also just completely drunk the marketing Kool-Aid on modern “AI” as just a few skips away from full sentience; they genuinely believe modern LLMs are more capable than they actually are. And they’re soo keen on using this emerging technology to cut corners, “save money” and undermine and replace pesky unionized labor, they’re blind to the fact it often doesn’t work.

The CEO of Politico Owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, recently introduced a company wide mandate that every single employee in the organization has to not only use AI, but consistently file reports justifying why they don’t. This sort of stuff goes way past useful technological adoption and teeters into delusional religion, and the technology becomes a window into very ordinary human failures.

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults:

And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn’t find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE’s assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on the failure to push to trial, they note that a lot of the footage contradicted the testimony of the officers. The claims of assault turned out to be descriptions of the officers assaulting the protesters.

Remember this the next time someone comes into the comments clutching their pearls about assaults on our brave dedicated federal officers, bravely dedicated to assaulting people and lying about it.

In second place, it’s a simple anonymous comment about Axios’s approach to covering Trump:

Treating fact and fiction as equal sides is bias favoring fiction.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about copyright and AI:

The message here isn’t so much “support AI everything” as “‘limiting AI-generated free speech’ is a strict subset of ’limit free speech”.

If the AI thing isn’t substantially similar to any extant copyrighted work, or its derivation from copyrighted works is fair use, then it’s usually okay. It might be slop, it might be in poor taste, etc. but we shouldn’t sacrifice free speech on the altar of “but I don’t like that speech”, or you open up the option of censorship for whoever’s in power, which is currently more obviously a bad idea than usual.

Next, it’s iria64 with a comment about the installation of a “Bias Monitor” at CBS:

They should just call it what it is… “Political Officer”

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Strawb with a comment about Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters and his defensive response after broadcasting nudity to a meeting:

Why am I not surprised he doesn’t know what a naked woman looks like?

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about the DHS using the Bible to pretend god hates migrants:

And God better keep pushing that narrative or Trump will sue him.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a reply from settsu to a comment about welfare handouts being popular among people who don’t pay taxes:

9 out of 10 billionaires heartily agree!

Finally, it’s another (this time anonymous) comment about Ryan Walters:

Hoist by his own pornhub.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee spent over five hours asking mostly pointless questions of tech CEOs, and the notion of a TikTok ban rose to prominence then started moving forward quickly. We also saw the Internet Archive’s initial response to the publisher lawsuit against it, while one Canadian publisher decided it would be a good time to go to ward against libraries in general.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we saw some surprising criticism of the FBI’s push for encryption backdoors which then underwent some initially suspicious editorial oddities. The White House finally published an answer to the petition to pardon Edward Snowden, and we flagged a warning from Ron Wyden about the DOJ. Hollywood was ramping up its demands in the wake of the USTR getting fast track authority, a judge was asking questions about Malibu Media’s practices, and Warner Music was trying to muddy the waters around the Happy Birthday copyright. This was also the week that James Woods filed a $10 million lawsuit against a random Twitter user.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the RIAA was defending its very expensive lawsuit tactics, ASCAP’s boss was turning down a debate with Larry Lessig and bizarrely calling it an attempt to silence him, Paramount was sending more bogus DMCA takedowns to fans who caught footage of a film shoot, and US Copyright Group was caught red-handed copying a competitor’s website. We were pleasantly surprised to see jailbreaking smartphones and noncommercial videos among the newly issued DMCA exemptions, then took a look at the things that didn’t make the cut. Also, we saw a grimly funny story of how copyright was finally destroying player piano music a century later.

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