Oct. 12

Pope Leo XIV (Photo via Vatican Media).

Invisible Threads, "Never Sell Out Your Authority": Pope Leo XIV's Warning About Press Freedom, Kate Woodsome, right (Georgetown University professor and former Pulitizer Prize winner at the Washington Post), Oct. 12, 2025. The first American pontiff calls for a "virtuous circle" between citizens and the press. Here's what's breaking — and how we can fix it. This article explores threats to democracy and journalism. Here are three ways to engage with difficult information while staying empowered:

Pope Leo XIV was preaching to the choir when he told global news executives on Oct. 9 that press freedom is “a pillar that upholds the edifice of our societies.” But he offered them as much warning as pep talk.

Speaking at the Vatican to a consortium of news agencies spanning The Associated Press to Japan’s Kyodo News, the pope urged media leaders to “never sell out your authority” while calling on citizens to actively support journalism as “a public good that we should all protect.” He framed this as “a partnership between citizens and journalists” that creates “a virtuous circle that benefits society as a whole.”

Then came the warning. “We are not destined to live in a world where truth is no longer distinguishable from fiction,” Pope Leo said. But that fate requires vigilance. “Algorithms generate content and data at a scale and speed never seen before. But who controls them? Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” Communication, he insisted, must be freed from “unfair competition and from the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.” The stakes: ensuring “that technology does not replace human beings, and that the information and algorithms that govern it today are not in the hands of a few.”A pope shaped by two Americas

The messenger matters as much as the message. The first American pontiff in history brings unique insight to these challenges. Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood in 1955, he spent decades doing missionary work in Peru and became a naturalized Peruvian citizen, making him the first pope with dual U.S.-Peruvian citizenship.

His U.S. roots and extensive Latin American experience give him insight into the tensions between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses, between a free press and those who seek to discredit it. When he was elected pope in May, he chose the name Leo XIV in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who developed modern Catholic social teaching during the Second Industrial Revolution — parallels with today’s challenges of artificial intelligence and technological disruption.

This background shaped his address, which recognized threats both ancient and unprecedented: the timeless tendency of those in power to abuse it, of corporations to chase profit over truth, of frightened people to seek certainty from false prophets.

Pope Leo urged journalists to “never sell out your authority.” But authority requires more than courage. It requires the material, physical and psychological conditions that make courage sustainable.

The press cannot uphold democratic societies if journalists are dead, traumatized, broke or burned out. We cannot earn public trust if misinformation and fear dominate the attention economy. Healthy journalism requires healthy journalists. A healthy democracy requires both.

Egberto Off The Record, Commentary: Saving democracy via Independent Journalism: Muckrakers Must Rise Again, Egberto Willies, Oct. 12,  2025. Patrick Lovell and Egberto Willies warn that billionaire media consolidation poses a threat to U.S. democracy. They show why independent journalism must survive corporate and authoritarian power.

In this robust dialogue between progressive journalist Egberto Willies, right, and filmmaker Patrick Lovell, the two independent media voices expose the accelerating capture of information channels by billionaire interests and the growing authoritarian threat in America.

Willies warns that as billionaires buy up major media platforms—such as Paramount, TikTok, CBS, and others—the public’s access to the truth becomes throttled. At the same time, propagandists like Stephen Miller push fascistic concepts, including “plenary authority.” The discussion highlights the importance of independent, community-based journalism in countering elite control and preserving democracy.

The pair connect Stephen Miller’s “plenary authority” slip to Project 2025’s push for a unitary executive, warning of creeping authoritarianism.

They emphasize collaboration among independent creators as an antidote to censorship and billionaire gatekeeping.

The conversation between Willies and Lovell (a producer, investigative journalist and creator of The Con interviews) reveals a stark truth about modern America: control over media is control over democracy itself. Their exchange—part critique, part call to arms—exposes how billionaire domination of traditional and digital media ecosystems has turned public discourse into a managed commodity. Willies warns that the “plenary authority” mentality driving Donald Trump’s allies is not only political but informational—an attempt to monopolize what people see, hear, and believe.

At the heart of their dialogue is the recognition that independent media functions as the last frontier for civic resistance. As Larry Ellison acquires Paramount, as Elon Musk manipulates X (formerly Twitter), and as right-wing billionaires infiltrate Substack and other content platforms, the line between news and propaganda grows dangerously thin. Corporate algorithms are designed not to inform but to pacify—to deliver narratives that protect capital, not communities. Willies’s insistence that “we will be throttled” if we rely solely on these systems is both prophetic and practical: the infrastructure of communication has become an invisible weapon of social control.

Willies and Lovell advocate a revival of muckraking journalism reminiscent of the Progressive Era, when investigative reporters challenged monopolies and political corruption with pen and press. Yet today’s muckrakers face digital barriers rather than printing costs—algorithmic suppression, de-platforming, and data gatekeeping.

To combat these, Willies stresses the importance of building direct relationships with audiences through newsletters, email lists, and independent websites. These mechanisms, more immune to billionaire interference, restore the human connection between journalists and citizens. In his view, true media democracy emerges from community interdependence, not corporate convenience.

Lovell, for his part, situates this within a broader historical struggle against tyranny. Drawing parallels between Trump’s transactional corruption and the aristocratic systems the United States once rebelled against, he underscores how today’s billionaire class mirrors the feudal lords of old—extracting wealth, shaping laws, and wielding armies of lobbyists instead of knights. The new weapon of domination is media ownership, which allows them to craft reality itself.

This conversation captures a defining moment in American history. The consolidation of media, the normalization of authoritarian rhetoric, and the monetization of misinformation represent not isolated trends but a coordinated erosion of public agency. Willies’s warning that “we will be throttled” if we do not act should echo across every newsroom, podcast, and living room. The struggle for truth is no longer metaphorical—it is infrastructural.

Drop Site News, The Free Press Called Out "Incomplete" Reporting on Gaza's Starving Children. Here's the Complete Story, Maha Hussaini and Ryan Grim, right, Oct. 12, 2025. CBS's Bari Weiss touted Free Press article as the "ground truth." Drop Site spoke to the actual families.

In August, The Free Press (FP), a news organization acquired Monday by Paramount for roughly $150 million, announced that it had conducted an investigation into the cases of a dozen Palestinians whose photographs were published in mainstream U.S. media outlets as examples of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza. That investigation, which the FP used as evidence the famine in Gaza is overblown, was woefully incomplete.

On Monday, FP founding editor Bari Weiss, left, was named editor in chief of CBS News, and pledged in an email to staff to bring a sense of journalistic rigor to the newsroom. In an unusual setup, Weiss will be reporting directly to Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison rather than up through the news division. If the FP probe into the dozen Palestinians is any indication of what’s to come, the editorial standards at CBS News may be about to collapse.

The Free Press claimed dereliction on the part of the mainstream media. “We did something so simple it’s shocking that no other journalist bothered to do it,” announced FP reporter Olivia Reingold, describing how she and her colleague Tanya Lukyanova used Google to search for news articles and interviews about the children featured in photographs. “[I]n every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action,” the outlet reported.

“In leaving out that context, the outlets presented an incomplete story,” The Free Press wrote in an editorial defending their coverage. “We are proud of the report and the reporters who tracked it down. In doing so, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service.”

The investigation represented journalism at its finest, the outlet argued. “In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth,” reads the editorial, calling the Google-based investigation “sober, meticulous work.” Weiss and other FP writers even touted the article as an example of the virtues of their approach to journalism in a series of lectures.

David Ellison, heir to the fortune of his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is said to have been attracted to Weiss and The Free Press specifically for the outlet’s pro-Israel stance. Dylan Byers, who broke news of the FP sale for Puck, reported that Ellison was “smitten by Bari’s unwavering support of Israel and preoccupation with the rise of antisemitism—issues that are as near and dear to David’s father, Larry, as they are to Paramount’s outgoing owner.”

Facing blowback for minimizing the famine in Gaza, The Free Press responded by saying that critics of the article, including Drop Site, are “journalists who oppose actual journalism.”

Weiss added: “You’ll notice one important aspect about the uproar: No one is disputing the facts in our piece.”

Well, we are. The Free Press claims in its investigation to have looked at the cases of 12 Palestinian’s photographs, as well as the child, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyouba Al-Mutawaq who appeared prominently in a New York Times article—and whose story they questioned in a previous Free Press article. Yet instead of reporting on the 12 Palestinians they claimed to have looked into, the article in fact only addresses nine, or arguably ten, an inexplicable discrepancy, and doesn’t provide original reporting on any of the cases.

Drop Site asked FP reporter Reingold and editor Weiss if the outlet attempted to contact any of the people or their family members whose health conditions they reported on. Neither responded to a request for comment.

The FP article probed the cases of nine Palestinians: Maryam Dawas, Youssef Matar, Hamza Mishmish, Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, Mosab al-Debs, Atef Abu Khater, Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa, Karam Khaled Al-Jamal, and Osama Al-Raqab. It also references another unnamed case, saying the Washington Post published an outdated photo of a malnourished child, which Drop Site identified as eight-year-old Jana Ayad.

For Drop Site, Gaza-based journalist Maha Hussaini looked into the backstories of those cases highlighted by the Free Press to examine whether the claim—namely that starvation did not drive their deteriorating health condition—was accurate. Hussaini tracked down families of three of them before her reporting was cut short by her own forced displacement from Gaza City amid a concentrated Israeli military offensive. 

What she found is that their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with; those Palestinians were managing their conditions before the restrictions took hold, but the starvation drove their decline. Additionally, it is difficult to separate their underlying health difficulties from the conditions under which their mothers lived while pregnant and in the first weeks and months of their lives.

The fact that so many children in Gaza have such pre-existing conditions by no means exonerates the Israeli siege, but rather is further evidence of its harm. While Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, Israel began severely restricting the amount of aid allowed into Gaza in October 2023. On March 2 of this year, Israel cut off all entry of food, medicine, fuel and other supplies, only partially lifting the blockade in late May, while continuing extreme restrictions.

By the summer, starvation was widespread. By late August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s leading expert on food crises that is used by the UN, declared the governorate of Gaza to be in the grip of the most extreme form of famine, the severity of conditions in North Gaza governorate to be similar or worse, and the thresholds for famine in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates soon to be crossed.

Oct. 11

 

David Ellison, who now controls CBS and serves as strong ally of President Trump and his MAGA movement (Graphic by Lincoln Square Media).

Status,  'We Just Got Elon Musk-ed,' Jon Passantino, Oct. 11, 2025. Bari Weiss’s first major move as CBS News chief has staffers on edge—ordering every journalist to submit a written memo justifying their work, in an apparent Elon Musk-style loyalty test.

Bari Weiss, right, is taking a page out of Elon Musk’s playbook. Days after taking over as editor in chief of CBS News, Weiss sent the network’s journalists an email Friday that set off alarm bells. Every staffer, she said, must write for her a memo by Tuesday detailing how they spend their working hours, what they’ve produced, what’s broken, and how they’d fix it.

In her memo, The Free Press founder framed the directive as a way to get acquainted with her new troops. “CBS News is a big place with functional titles and reporting structures that I'm learning. But more than the hierarchical niceties, I'm eager to get to know you,” she wrote.

“I'm not looking for a JD or words like synergy,” she continued. “I want to understand how you spend your working hours-and, ideally, what you've made (or are making) that you're most proud of. I'm also interested in hearing your views on what's working; what's broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt-it will help me.”

But her closing line came with a change in tone that suggested something else: “The goal is simple: I want to familiarize myself with you—and I want you to do the same with me—to know that we are aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this play before—from Elon Musk. When The Tesla-billionaire’s short-lived and disastrous Department of Government Efficiency demanded federal workers email him lists of their accomplishments to justify their jobs, the move was merely a pretense to fire those he saw as expendable. Those who failed to do so, were told they would be fired. Weiss now appears to be running a similar experiment inside a newsroom.

For many staffers of the storied outlet, the intent of the memo was clear. “We just got Elon Musk-ed,” one told Status. Another was more blunt: “It is a little bit like singing for your supper.”

Of course, any new leader would understandably want to take stock of their newsroom and understand how it operates. But demanding written justifications from every staffer isn’t the way to do it—not in a profession built on trust, independence, and collaboration. Weiss’ version of a listening tour will also surely bury her in paperwork. Compared with the few dozen who work at The Free Press, CBS News employs hundreds of people. A memo from each would amount to a full-time job just to read them.

Hours after Weiss’ memo landed in inboxes, the Writers Guild of America, which represents many CBS News employees, urged staffers to not respond to the request. “We are aware that Bari Weiss sent an email asking CBS employees to provide information about their jobs and feedback about CBS News,” the union wrote to members. “Many of you have expressed concern to us about the purpose of the email, and we share those concerns.”

“That is why we sent the company an immediate demand to provide information about the email by Monday,” the WGA continued. “We suggest that you refrain from responding until we are able to share the information that we receive so that you can make an informed decision by the Tuesday deadline.”

While Weiss was installed by Paramount owner David Ellison less than a week ago, outlining to staff what she described as 10 principles that will guide her leadership while condemning what she described as an “America-loathing far left” and “history-erasing far right,” many inside CBS are still trying to decode what that means.

Now, with Friday’s memo, Weiss has made her intentions unmistakable. While characterizing her mandate as a get-to-know-you exercise to ask journalists to self-justify their jobs in writing, she’s positioning herself to audit the newsroom from the inside out, raising fears of terminations for those who do not adhere to her “anti-woke” worldview. Musk demanded “hard-core” dedication from Twitter employees before gutting the company. Weiss seems to be testing who inside CBS will align with her vision for the network.

That should worry the journalists she now leads. The question at CBS is no longer what kind of newsroom she’ll run, but seemingly who will be left to run it with her.

Politico, Trump administration has failed to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Africa, Josh Gerstein, Oct. 10, 2025. Three African nations won’t accept the Salvadoran native, who was already deported illegally once and then brought back to the U.S.Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks during a rally.

The Trump administration has made haphazard and, so far, ineffectual attempts to find a country willing to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s deported again from the U.S., according to testimony and evidence presented in federal court here Friday.

A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified that efforts to get the African countries of Uganda and Eswatini to accept the high-profile deportee have foundered in recent days.

Another potential destination, Ghana, also seemed to fizzle Friday as that country’s foreign minister said unequivocally on X that Ghana would not agree to receive Abrego.

Abrego is originally from El Salvador. He entered the U.S. illegally and lived in Maryland for more than a decade before he was arrested in March and deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison. Courts declared that deportation illegal because it violated a 2019 order from an immigration judge who barred the U.S. from sending him there due to potential persecution by a local gang.

The Trump administration returned Abrego to the U.S. in June under court order. Federal prosecutors simultaneously charged him with human smuggling in Tennessee — charges Abrego denies.

The administration, in the meantime, has said it wants to deport Abrego again, this time to some other country. But Abrego’s lawyers argued during Friday’s hearing that the administration is dragging its feet in those deportation efforts in order to keep Abrego in immigration jail and pressure him to plead guilty.

The meager and unsuccessful deportation efforts could lead to Abrego being released from immigration detention within days, if U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis concludes the government hasn’t shown it’s making a sincere and substantial effort to find a destination for Abrego.

Abrego told the administration in August that he would accept deportation to Costa Rica. One of his lawyers, Andrew Rossman, said Friday that the administration’s scattershot attempts to identify African countries instead show that the administration is intent on refusing the Costa Rica offer.

“We now know they are 0 for 3. Three strikes and you’re out. They have spun the globe and picked various places … to fail on purpose by selecting places that would be completely unpalatable for Mr. Abrego,” Rossman told Xinis. “What we’ve been getting in this courtroom is a lot of run-around.”

The appearance that arrangements for Abrego’s deportation were being intentionally or unintentionally fumbled by the administration was underscored by the testimony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement official John Schultz, who said lower-level personnel at his agency erred by formally notifying Abrego Thursday that the U.S. government intended to send him to Ghana.

New York Times, Among Portland Protests, It’s Frogs and Sharks and Bears, Oh My! Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Oct. 11, 2025. Images of anarchists clad in black gave the city a bad name in 2020. Now, demonstrators in Portland are poking fun at President Trump’s apocalyptic talk with colorful animal suits.

Exceedingly aware that the black garb worn by demonstrators in 2020 informed President Trump’s apocalyptic view of Portland, Ore., protesters this year have gone to the frogs — and unicorns, raccoons, sharks, bears, dinosaurs and the hot animal of this particular pop culture moment, a capybara.

“It was just to contrast the narrative that we are violent extremists,” said Seth Todd, 24, whose appearance at Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility early in the summer as a bulbous green frog started the trend. “The best way to show that for me is being in a frog costume.”

New York Times, Diane Keaton, a Star of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘First Wives Club,’ Dies at 79, Anita Gates, Oct. 11, 2025. She brought an unconventional personality to scores of roles on television and in movies ranging from zany comedies like “Sleeper” to piercing dramas like “The Godfather.”

Diane Keaton, the vibrant, sometimes unconventional, always charmingly self-deprecating actress who won an Oscar for Woody Allen’s comedy “Annie Hall” and appeared in some 100 movie and television roles, an almost equal balance of them in comedies like “Sleeper” and “The First Wives Club” and dramas like “The Godfather” and “Marvin’s Room,” has died. She was 79.

Ms. Keaton was 31 and a veteran of eight films, most of them comedies, when she starred as the title character in “Annie Hall” (1977), a single woman in New York City with ambitions, insecurities and definite style. Annie is known for cheerful psychiatric breakthroughs, fashions that look like men’s wear, questionable driving skills and lingering hints of an all-too-wholesome Midwestern upbringing.

Oct. 10

Mediaite, ‘We’re Now a Conservative Opinion Page,’ Declares Washington Post Columnist, Charlie Nash, Oct. 10, 2025. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen boasted on Thursday that the newspaper was “now a conservative opinion page,” after receiving complaints over an article titled, “Yes, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”

After Thiessen’s article went viral on social media, Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz noted that it “was written by @marcthiessen who is a (welcome) outlier at the Washington Post.”

Thiessen responded, “Thanks Mark. But not such an outlier any more! We’re now a conservative opinion page.”

Thiessen’s article was warmly received by President Donald Trump, who wrote in a Truth Social post, “Thank you Washington Post. Wow!!!”

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius also praised Trump’s Gaza peace plan on MSNBC, Thursday, declaring, “Joe Biden could never do that. And Donald Trump was able to do it.”

For more than a year, the Washington Post has received criticism from staffers and readers alike over its apparent shift in identity.

In February, Post owner Jeff Bezos, left, announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to the “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

Hours after making the announcement, Bezos dined with President Donald Trump.

Months prior, during the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, the newspaper announced it was returning to its “roots of not endorsing presidential candidates” – having previously endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008.

Several members of the Washington Post editorial board resigned over the news, with the newspaper’s opinion editor resigning just a few months later. Since then, the newspaper has appeared to shift into more of a conservative direction.

In March, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the Washington Post for “finally learning.” In July, veteran Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson wrote a scathing resignation letter, accusing the newspaper of “killing” and censoring his articles for being “too opinionated.”

New York Times, How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland, Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Oct. 10, 2025. President Trump and his administration are amplifying the voices of pro-White House podcasters and streamers eager to ratify the president’s description of Oregon’s largest city as a “hellscape.”

In the fight over deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.

But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.

On Thursday, the repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit questioned a district court’s finding that the protests in Portland were likely too minor to justify the National Guard deployment. The appeals court judges instead cited federal reports of demonstrators spitting on federal officers and shining flashlights in their eyes, behavior that has been captured, amplified and sometimes even prompted by pro-Trump personalities eager to counter local police.

“The Portland Police Chief did an interview today attacking independent journalists for exposing the violent terrorists that he allows to run the city,” Benny Johnson, a popular pro-Trump podcaster, wrote Tuesday on social media after accompanying Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in Oregon. “He’s humiliated and knows Portland is under siege.”

To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. The portrayals of a city on fire have angered protesters.

And sometimes, left-wing activists have risen to the bait, leading to scuffles and injuries conservative streamers then promote on the internet. One right-wing commentator, Katie Daviscourt, said she received a black eye when a demonstrator hit her with a flag pole.

“Certainly over the last 10 days, the energy level has gone up, the amount of conflicting points of view have increased greatly,” Chief Bob Day of the Portland Police Bureau said at a news media briefing Tuesday. “And this has created an environment that’s equally, if not more, challenging for us.”

Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.

Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.

“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action.

Mr. Tardio, 41, said he was not sure which side the people involved were supporting.

“In the beginning it looked like people on the right are the ones instigating, but in the following evenings it looked like people on the left,” he said. “People are absorbing information on social media quicker than reality.” Nobody can keep up, he added.

 

New York Times, M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment, Vimal Patel, Oct. 10, 2025. The Trump administration offered nine universities benefits in exchange for signing an agreement to protect conservative voices, among other things. M.I.T. was the first to refuse.

M.I.T. became the first university to reject an agreement that would trade support for the Trump administration’s higher education agenda in exchange for favorable treatment.

The proposal, called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” was sent to nine universities and would require colleges to cap international student enrollment, freeze tuition for five years, adhere to definitions of gender and prohibit anything that would “belittle” conservative ideas.

In a letter on Friday to the Trump administration, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, wrote that the university has already freely met or exceeded many of the standards outlined in the proposal, but that she disagrees with other requirements it demands, including those that would restrict free expression.

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Dr. Kornbluth wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, said in a statement that “any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving its students or their parents — they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats.”

“The best science can’t thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry, and the pursuit of truth,” she added. “President Trump encourages universities to join us in restoring academic excellence and common sense policies.”

The White House has said it wants responses from the universities by Oct. 20. The other eight colleges are the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

The compacts have been deeply unpopular among faculty members, who view them as yet another political intrusion into the affairs of academia. They argue that the Trump administration is threatening the independence of American higher education by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding to force top universities to adopt its agenda.

At a politically sensitive moment, as schools are trying to avoid being singled out by the administration, most of the universities’ responses have been noncommittal.Editors’ Picks3 Smart Recipes That Will Change the Way You Make MeatballsNegotiating the End of UsCan I Take Batteries on a Plane? What to Know Before You Fly.

“Brown’s course of action should and will be informed by the perspectives of our community,” Christina Paxson, its president, said in a message to the community on Friday.

Some schools, like the University of Virginia, have turned to the time-tested higher education strategy of delaying controversial decisions by creating a committee.

Others expressed what appeared to be concern about the compact but did not shut the door on signing it.

“I am deeply committed to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values and will always defend our fierce independence,” Dartmouth’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, wrote last week.

“You have often heard me say that higher education is not perfect and that we can do better,” she wrote. “At the same time, we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s president hit a similar note.

“The long-standing partnership with the federal government in both education and research has yielded tremendous benefits for our nation,” J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s president, said in a message on Sunday.

“Penn seeks no special consideration,” he continued. “We strive to be supported based on the excellence of our work, our scholars and students, and the programs and services we provide to our neighbors and to the world.”

Perhaps the most enthusiastic response came from the University of Texas at Austin, which is in a state that has aggressively tried to control what professors can teach in the classroom on sensitive topics like gender.

The chair of the system’s board, Kevin Eltife, a former Republican state lawmaker, said he was honored that the Austin campus was selected. “We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” Mr. Eltife said in a statement last week.

Oct. 9 

New York Times, Alex Jones Asks Supreme Court to Halt $1.4 Billion Payment to Sandy Hook Families, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 9, 2025. A judge ordered Jones to pay as a result of a defamation lawsuit that he is now asking the Supreme Court to review.

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to put on hold $1.4 billion in damages a judge ordered him to pay some of the families who lost children in a shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The families were awarded the money after suing Mr. Jones for defamation. For years on his Infowars show and website, Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax and that family members of the victims were actors in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation. Twenty children, all of them first graders, and six educators died in the shooting.

The request to the justices is the latest development in the long-running litigation, as Mr. Jones seeks to put off any payout to the families. Mr. Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have separately asked the Supreme Court to review his appeal in the case. At their closed-door conference on Friday, the justices will consider whether to take the case.

Mr. Jones’s lawyers told the justices that he should be afforded special First Amendment considerations because of his large audience of viewers and listeners.

“Failure to reverse this case will mean all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions, as Jones was and therefore refrain from publishing for fear of being hauled into court there facing a ‘trial by sanction,’” his lawyers told the court in their Thursday filing.

During the defamation trial in Connecticut, the families showed that Mr. Jones ignored demands to stop airing falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting because they increased Infowars’s sales. Witnesses shared stories of harassment by conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, including death and rape threats.

The Sandy Hook families were awarded damages in the Connecticut case in late 2022, and in a separate defamation lawsuit in Texas earlier that year. Mr. Jones and his business declared bankruptcy shortly afterward, and the families have yet to receive any of the money awarded them.

New York Times, Librarian Fired in Books Dispute to Receive $700,000 Settlement, Adeel Hassan, Oct. 9, 2025. County officials in Wyoming fired Terri Lesley, a library director, after she refused to purge children and young adult books that contained sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes.

A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday.

Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards.

The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way. She had worked for the local library system since 1996 and directed the system for about 11 years.

Ms. Lesley found herself in the middle of a dispute in 2021 over which books belonged on the county library’s shelves — a debate that has been playing out across communities and school boards, as so-called book bans have surged in the United States.

In June that year, the library highlighted L.G.B.T.Q. books to mark Pride Month.

Many of those books had been on the shelves in the children’s or young adult’s sections for years before Ms. Lesley heard any complaints, she said.

Some people behind the challenges took issue with the placement of the books. One resident told the county library board that the L.G.B.T.Q. books should be moved to the library’s adult section to protect the emotional, physical and mental health of children, as reported by the Gillette News Record.

But Ms. Lesley resisted the calls to move or remove the books.

Campbell County is among the most conservative areas in a very conservative state, but hundreds of people showed up at a special library board meeting when Ms. Lesley was fired, most of them in support of her, the Gillette News Record reported at the time. There were also a few dozen residents who showed support for the board.

After the news of the settlement, Ms. Lesley’s lawyer, Iris Halpern, said, “We care fundamentally about our constitutional rights and we fundamentally care about our neighbors, even if they’re different than us, and want them to have equal access to our public institutions.”

A county official said that when Ms. Lesley brought suit, a claim was filed with Campbell County’s insurance company. While the county did not comment on the settlement, a lawyer for the insurance company said that the county had settled “early,” before an expensive federal trial. “Nobody won or lost,” the lawyer said in an emailed statement. The lawyer emphasized that there was no admission of fault and that this was the “least inconvenient manner” to end the suit.

Books with gay and lesbian themes have been a flashpoint in schools and public libraries for years. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that parents with religious objections at a public school district in Maryland could opt their children out of classroom instruction about books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes.

Book challenges and removals soared around 2021, fanned by a network of conservative groups that spread lists of book titles they considered objectionable on social media.

States and local governments have been banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to data from the American Library Association and PEN America, the free speech organization.

The restrictions have become so “rampant and common” on books in public schools that in some states, like Florida and Utah, they are now considered a “routine and expected part of school operations,” according to a PEN America report issued last week. 

A separate lawsuit filed by Ms. Lesley that accuses three members of a family of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress will continue.

Oct. 8 

HuffPost, Mike Johnson Crashes Democrats' Epstein Press Event Outside His Office, Arthur Delaney, Oct. 8, 2025. Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego wound up arguing with Johnson for five minutes.

An actual debate broke out in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday after two Democratic senators staged a press conference outside the House speaker’s office.

Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) summoned reporters so they could blast House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) over the government shutdown and for refusing to swear in fellow Arizona Democrat Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election last month to fill her late father’s House seat.

Johnson has kept the House out of session since September in an effort to pressure Senate Democrats into voting for a funding bill that passed the House mostly along partisan lines. Senate Democrats have blocked the bill six times.

After they talked for a few minutes about how not seating Grijalva could delay a vote on legislation to force the release of the government’s files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Johnson popped out of his office to confront the Democrats.

“We’re happy that she got elected. She’s filling her father’s seat. That’s fantastic. We have a long tradition here and a process of how we administer the oath to a member,” Johnson said. “We’re going to do that as soon as we get back to work but we need the lights turned back on so we encourage both of you to go open the government.”

Kelly and Gallego are two of the 44 Senate Democrats who’ve refused to vote for a Republican bill to fund the government into November. Republicans have insisted there can be no negotiation over health care, as Democrats have demanded, until Democrats vote to reopen the government. There’s been no sign of progress since the shutdown started eight days ago.

Johnson said the House Oversight Committee’s efforts to dig through the Epstein files, per subpoenas to the Justice Department and the Epstein estate, were better than the bipartisan legislation coming up under a discharge petition.

“You don’t need an act of Congress for that to happen,” Johnson said of the subpoenas.

“Why are you blocking her?” Gallego asked.

Johnson insisted he wasn’t blocking Grijalva’s swearing-in.

“I know why you’re upset. You’re getting a lot of heat because the government’s closed down,” Johnson said.

After a few minutes, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) joined the dispute, telling the senators to go vote for the House-passed funding bill.

“Get your people in. Stop covering up for pedophiles,” Gallego said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Johnson said.

The fellas were all wagging their fingers at each other. After about five minutes, an aide encouraged Johnson to go back into his office.

“That was fun,” Kelly said, not sounding sincere.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Fox News Wants Meidas Eliminated, Ben Meiselas, Oct. 8, 2025.  It’s time the Murdochs step aside with their lies and propaganda — it’s now the era of the MeidasMighty, led by truth and empathy. It’s Fox versus Meidas. It’s the Murdochs vs. the Meiselas brothers. This is the battle we are in, and this is the battle we are winning. But it won’t be easy. Fox and Murdoch want us destroyed.Subscribed

Yesterday, a news site called Puck, which is highly regarded for covering the media and news industry, wrote an article called “How the Democrats Finally Won the Internet.” Puck cites the rise of Meidas as a major factor in getting the truth out during the Trump shutdown. Fox and Republican propaganda are not working.

The Murdochs read Puck. They read this article. They are very focused on their reputation in media circles for controlling the narrative. Until now, they’ve always been the dominant player in news distribution. This is their biggest nightmare.

Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are absolutely livid.

My sources tell me they’ve been having a tantrum like never before about the article and the fact that they are now losing the information war to an independent startup like Meidas.

They are pissed that they’ve thrown billions of dollars into their digital operation at Fox and now get fewer views and less engagement than the MeidasTouch Network — a network that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

They are terrified about what this means for the future of Fox. They should be. Independent news is the future. And MeidasTouch is leading the way.

My sources tell me that Fox plans to “accelerate its attacks” on Meidas. I asked what that meant and got a vague response that they will “go nuclear,” whatever that means.

Reading between the lines — since Fox News hosts have already essentially called on our hosts to be arrested and investigated by the DOJ — I can only assume it will be more of this, and that they will be coordinating to go after us with Trump. We’ve known for a while that Trump was planning something against us, and now he seems to be coordinating it with Fox. We are ready for the fight. We’ve waited our entire lives for this battle. This is the moment of the MeidasMighty.

We are not scared of Fox or the Murdochs at all. We are not scared of Trump and his regime. We are fighters. We will stand and defend our democracy, the right to free speech, and true, accurate news until the very end. We will keep building the most-viewed news network in the world, and we will keep defeating Fox in the ratings.

My question to you is: are you ready for the fight? Of course you are. I know you are. Are you ready to stand with Meidas and reclaim our democracy? Of course you are! We are in this together, as always — and we will win and hand a better world to future generations.

I feel so inspired by the MeidasMighty community today as Fox is petrified. Let’s keep on growing together. Please subscribe now to this Substack if you can — it’s the best way to help the independent reporting at the MeidasTouch Network continue to grow. The growth of this Substack has allowed us to become one of the top news networks, getting 27 million views every 48 hours on YouTube. Thanks for subscribing! Let’s fight!

Oct. 7

 

False Flag via The Bulwark, MAGA Turns on Trump’s Top Lawyer, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 7, 2025. Todd Blanche discovers that your place is never totally secure in the modern conservative movement. In similar news,you might think that Paramount’s purchase of Bari Weiss’s Free Press for a whopping $150 million would occasion rejoicing in conservative media circles. Instead, I’m detecting a lot of bad feelings about the high price.

It’s hard to imagine a more loyal Trump foot soldier than Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, right. A former defense attorney for Trump, Blanche has played a role in administration controversies big and small. At one point, Trump even appointed him to run the Library of Congress. (It’s still not totally clear who is running it right now.)

Most infamously, Blanche conducted a friendly interview with imprisoned sex trafficker, sex abuser, and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell just before she was suspiciously transferred to a lower-security prison.

And yet, as is often the case in MAGA land, it’s never enough.

Blanche has become the target of a right-wing media campaign pushing for his ouster. His accusers blame him for, among other things, holding up a Maxwell-like arrangement for Tina Peters, a conspiracy theorist and former county clerk in Colorado sentenced last fall to nine years in prison for letting another conspiracy theorist copy hard drives of voter data and post the stolen materials to his website. And in an administration that takes many of its cues from right-wing media, that might spell trouble for even entrenched Trump loyalists like Blanche.

“We now can definitely identify Todd Blanche as the problem,” Emerald Robinson, an anchor for MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell’s LindellTV, said in an InfoWars appearance last week.

I watch this stuff so you don’t have to. In exchange, consider becoming a free or paid Bulwark subscriber!!!Subscribed

No one’s position inside the MAGA movement is ever fully secure. And that holds particularly true for those who serve in Trump’s Justice Department, where each month a new top official seems to be in the crosshairs of activists yearning for prosecutions, accountability or just good old-fashioned liberal tears. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, both at the FBI, have had to manage disappointment and anger over the lack of disclosures around the Jeffrey Epstein files. And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently was the subject of intense criticism for claiming that hate speech wasn’t legally protected.

Blanche, by contrast, had largely skated. Until now.

He has recently been blamed for a host of misdeeds, including holding up “reparations” for January 6th defendants. But the most significant allegation against him comes from Peter Ticktin, a former Trump military-academy chum turned MAGA lawyer who’s now at the center of the get-Blanche campaign.

In Ticktin’s telling, the Justice Department was poised last month to essentially rescue his client Peters from Colorado state prison, where she has started serving her nine-year sentence.

Peters, shown right in an AP file photo, has become a kind of election fraud martyr, thanks in part to interviews from prison where she lays out grievances with prison life, including smelly cups, loud doors slamming, and guards yelling her name too loudly. But because Peters is held on state charges, Trump can’t pardon her, even though he’s demanded her release repeatedly in Truth Social posts.

Ticktin claims the Justice Department was poised to transfer Peters in September to a cozier federal prison. But, in an appearance last week on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, Ticktin alleged that the plan was quashed by Blanche.

“Who’s holding it up on our side?” Bannon asked.

“Todd Blanche!” Ticktin said.

Peters has kept up the pressure herself, issuing a statement on X demanding that the DOJ “send in the marshals” to rescue her.

“Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands?” she tweeted. “Get off your asses and get me out!”

What kind of rinky-dink scheme could have saved Peters?

According to Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, right—an election denier and Peters friend whom Ticktin is attempting (so far unsuccessfully) to represent in an unrelated trial—the plan was for the Justice Department to claim that Peters is a “witness” in an unspecified upcoming case. That, in turn, would create a need for her to be in federal custody. Then Peters would have been transferred to a nicer, camp-style prison.

It all could have worked out, allegedly, had Blanche not intervened!

“Todd Blanche put the kibosh on that,” Byrne said in an appearance on Robinson’s LindellTV show. “Todd Blanche is just a menace.”

Byrne added that Blanche was “blocking everything [Trump] says he wants done” at the Justice Department—a serious accusation in Trump world, where it is held as an article of faith that Deep State actors in the security agencies and DOJ scuttled the president during his first term.

The call to fire Blanche has been picked up by other MAGA influencers, including the popular “Hodge Twins” and InfoWars chief Alex Jones. Happy to pile on, Jones claimed that Blanche had also blocked an investigation into alleged unfairness in the Sandy Hook lawsuits that bankrupted InfoWars.

“You think you got that killed, think again,” Jones said on his show last week, addressing the deep state. “You wait till your little deputy AG’s—” Jones then snapped his fingers and made a whistling noise to suggest Blanche would soon be gone.

Blanche’s Maxwell deposition gambit and other displays of loyalty have no doubt built up a reserve of loyalty on Trump’s part. But Trump has also posted a lot about Tina Peters. And far more modest social media campaigns have gotten other people canned in this administration. Consider the many heads lopped off by Laura Loomer, or how a post from right-wing journalist Julie Kelly apparently prompted the firing of a senior federal prosecutor in Virginia last week.

Perhaps that’s why the Fire Blanche campaign has received so much pushback from top Justice Department officials and other MAGA figures. On Friday, Chad Mizelle—the chief of staff to attorney general Pam Bondi—defended Blanche on X.

“Todd Blanche is crushing the deep state,” he wrote.

Former congressman Matt Gaetz, now a host at One America News, argued that Blanche was “no squish.” But perhaps the strongest defense of Blanche came from former Trump lawyer Alina Habba, now fighting her own battle to remain as the lead federal prosecutor in New Jersey.

Blanche “is one of the GOATs,” Habba tweeted, using the popular acronym for “Greatest of All Time.”

Regarding Paramount’s purchase of Bari Weiss’s Free Press for a whopping $150 million:  

• Right-wing pundit Clint Russell of the “Liberty Lockdown” YouTube channel griped on X that his own videos regularly outpace Weiss’s in terms of viewership, and he doesn’t even have a support staff. Russell groaned that the purchase was “legal bribery.”
• Right-wing activist Laura Loomer—no stranger to attacking other women in right-wing media—was on this train weeks ago. In late September, Loomer tweeted that Weiss was the “Jewish Elizabeth Holmes,” an allusion to the fraudster-CEO of notorious med-tech startup Theranos. Like Russell, Loomer complained that she gets far more online attention than Weiss’s publication does.
• Even alt-conservative podcaster Tim Pool isn’t happy.
• “I don’t understand $150M at all,” Pool tweeted on Monday, saying the price should’ve been slashed by half or even cut down to a third of the reported amount.

Should Paramount have purchased Tim Pool’s podcast and related West Virginia skateboarding empire for $150 million to make the punk-rock Pool the head of CBS News instead? Sound off in the comments!

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The devolution of CBS News, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 7, 2025. A network once revered for fact-based reporting is embracing right-wing pseudo-journalism.

From the pioneering broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite’s trusted voice and Ed Bradley’s impactful reporting, CBS News earned a reputation as one of America’s most trusted news sources. Its flagship program, 60 Minutes, became synonymous with fearless, truth-telling journalism.

More recently, however, things have taken a turn.

In July, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, paid $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit filed by President Trump. In September, CBS News hired a Trump loyalist to serve as its new ombudsman, charged with reviewing news coverage for “bias.”

The most dramatic move came Monday, when Paramount announced that it would hire former New York Times opinion columnist and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss to be the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. She has no experience in broadcast news. Weiss departed the New York Times in 2020, writing in her resignation letter that the publication had become too left-wing and that she faced harassment for having “centrist” views.

In 2021, Weiss, right, founded The Free Press, a publication that is purportedly committed to “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” In a 2023 column, Weiss suggested the progressive movement “demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.” In 2024, Weiss claimed that the “political left… makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project.”

Along with hiring Weiss, Paramount purchased The Free Press for a reported $150 million.

In her initial note to CBS News staff, Weiss said that she was committed to producing journalism that was “fair,” “factual,” and “tell[s] the truth plainly.” A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ work, however, reveals that the publication repeatedly distorted the truth to conform to its right-wing ideological agenda.Falsely accusing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer of covering up child sex trafficking

In a January 2025 article published by The Free Press, writer Dominic Green accuses UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, left, of participating in a cover-up of the “grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls.” The accusation, as Green notes, was popularized by Elon Musk on X. Musk alleged that Starmer ignored the crimes because the perpetrators were Muslim. This fits into The Free Press’ preferred narrative that “political correctness” has run amok.

The Free Press article praises Musk for highlighting the issue and echoes his allegations. Green suggests that Starmer, who was director of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, sought to minimize the issue because the “majority of their crimes were committed in cities with a Labour Party–controlled council and a Labour Party MP who needed Muslim votes.”

Green accuses Starmer of “complicity,” saying that as CPS director, he “failed” to bring “major cases to court.” As a result, England is “shamed before the world.” Underneath a picture of Starmer, The Free Press writes that he has “come under fire for his role in an alleged cover-up of a serial rape scandal.”

While the crimes against English girls are real, the allegations against Starmer levied in The Free Press are baseless. As CPS director, Starmer did not cover up the crimes against English girls — he successfully prosecuted them.

Three days before The Free Press article was published, the Financial Times reported that Starmer “began the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gang during his final year in post, shortly after the scandal in the Greater Manchester town became the first to come to light.” Further, “Starmer launched an overhaul of the way the CPS investigates sexual abuse to ensure more perpetrators are brought to justice. The reforms also paved the way for historic cases to be reviewed.”

Starmer’s work is praised in a 2013 parliamentary report, highlighted by The Banter, produced by a Conservative government:

We would also like to commend the work of the Director for Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC and the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal OBE ... Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecutions and, when he leaves the Crown Prosecution Service this year, he will be missed. His response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localised grooming

Green’s piece briefly notes that he “secured some successful convictions,” without reconciling that with allegations that he was complicit in a cover-up. Instead, Green highlights an instance where CPS prosecutors dropped a case in 2009, believing they could not succeed in court. But Green does not mention that the decision was reversed with Starmer’s support.

“The only way we could bring that case was to admit that we had failed these victims when they had first made a complaint in 2008,” Nazir Afzal, the prosecutor who ultimately secured convictions in the case, said. “Keir was 100% behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.”

Afzal praised Starmer’s leadership on the issue during his tenure, crediting him for helping him succeed. “Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir,” Afzal said.

The Free Press article, meanwhile, concludes by accusing Starmer of “covering the party’s backside at the expense of justice for the victims.”Wrongly accusing the U.N. of inflating civilian casualties in Gaza

A May 2024 article published in The Free Press states that “millions have marched across the world demanding Israel end its ‘genocide’ in Gaza, pointing to the number of civilians killed by the war.” The article, written by Peter Savodnik, claims that the United Nations (U.N.) “now concedes that this number—provided by Hamas—is wildly inaccurate.”

Savodnik’s claim is absolutely false and was directly refuted by U.N. officials.

According to Savodnik, on May 4, the U.N. claimed that around 24,000 civilians had been killed in Gaza. Two days later, Savodnik claims, the U.N. “quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died.”

But this was not true. Savodnik, along with others on the right, was conflating two different data sets. One is the estimated number of civilian fatalities among “an overall death toll.” The other figures are the civilian fatalities among those “whose identities (such as name and date of birth) have been documented.”

U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq made clear at a press conference that although there are two sets of data maintained, the total number of fatalities “remains unchanged.”Unfounded claims that the famine declaration in Gaza was based on manipulated data

In an editorial published in August, The Free Press claimed that an international committee had doctored its metrics to declare famine in Gaza. The Free Press editors wrote that the “United Nations-associated body” had “monkeyed with the metrics for its assessment in Gaza.”

As evidence for this claim, the editors link to an opinion column by Seth Mandel in Commentary Magazine, which relies on an article in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine.

The Washington Free Beacon claims that the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) lowered its standards to issue a “famine classification” for Gaza. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the IPC switched to a less rigorous metric that “has not [been] historically used” for measuring famine: measuring mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) instead of the ratio of height to weight in Gazan children. The article also claims that the IPC moved the threshold for famine to 15% of Gaza’s children experiencing acute malnutrition, down from 30% to “make it easier” to declare famine.

However, the IPC has previously used MUAC to measure famine in other regions, such as Somalia and Sudan. MUAC has been found to be an effective, non-invasive malnutrition measure that can be easier to obtain in difficult conditions because it requires less equipment and training.

Further, the IPC did not lower the famine threshold for Gaza. Instead, the threshold for famine depends on the metric used. When using a weight-height metric, it is 30%, while it is 15% for MUAC. This is because the arm circumference tends to shrink in the later stages of malnutrition. This standard was applied in the reports on Somalia and Sudan.Distorting data about Muslims in Canada

An article published in The Free Press in December 2024, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada,” claims that a study by researcher Robert Brym “found that more than 40 percent of the [Canadian] Muslims surveyed said that suicide bombing targeting Israeli citizens is justified.” But that is not true and is based on a misreading of the data.

The study asked respondents if they agreed with the statement: “There is no justification for Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians.” The study found that 43% of Canadian Muslims agreed with the statement, and therefore believed that the Palestinian suicide bombing of Israeli civilians was not justified. The study found that 30% of Canadian Muslims disagreed.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East wrote a letter to The Free Press, noting the misreporting of the study data and numerous other errors in the article. No corrections were ever made.

 Oct. 6

The Triad via The Bulwark, Commentary: The Washington Post and CBS News are dying. The Bulwark is the future, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 6, 2025. We drink their milkshake.

Hey fam, I have news: Catherine Rampell, right, has joined The Bulwark.I’ve been reading Catherine for years at the Washington Post. The highest compliment I can give is that she always adds value for me. When I read her pieces, I learn something, or see something in a different way, every time.For the last few years she was high on my list of people I knew belonged at The Bulwark.

And when the Post started imploding a year ago, I was pretty sure she’d wind up riding with us.

Why? Because the rise of authoritarianism in America is the defining challenge of this generation and our legacy media institutions have structural problems that made them unequal to the moment.

I’d like to talk about these problems because journalism is one of the load-bearing beams of liberal democracy. It’s going to be a bit of a journey, but I promise that at the end we’ll get back to Catherine Rampell herself.

The Paper. “Modern” journalism begins at Watergate. America had a maturing broadcast news sector alongside a robust print sector. Print journalism was leaving the guild era, in which most practitioners were the products of an apprentice system, and becoming professionalized. There was a small galaxy of highly profitable weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers were transitioning from local, to regional, and in three cases, eventually national businesses.

Watergate set off a period of expansion for the entire industry. Within twenty years there were 24-hour cable news networks, the Washington Post was a national paper at the center of a corporate conglomerate that included real estate holdings and a test-prep empire, and Condé Nast was printing money so fast that a new glossy magazine appeared on the scene every couple of months.

The economics of journalism were solid during this period. Broadcast news was a cash cow. All three evening network newscasts pulled big audiences because there were limited viewing options. The upstart cable networks were supported by a combination of carriage fees plus ads. And newspapers and magazines were the only way for advertisers to reach consumers in the print format: They had a monopoly on that ad medium.

By the early 1990s journalism was in an expansion phase, with media companies leveraging themselves to make acquisitions. And because so many of these institutions had taken on debt in order to grow, the internet arrived at a moment of extreme vulnerability.

The first thing the internet did to journalism was cut the legs out of the classified-ad business. Craigslist changed everything, gleefully doing for free what local newspapers had long relied on as their steadiest revenue source.

The second thing the internet did was befuddle the managers of print media outlets. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, newspapers and magazines had no idea what was happening. Some resisted moving their products online. Others thought that being online would instantly grow their total addressable market and become a new revenue stream.

While print managers worried about near-term strategy, none of them saw the fundamental shift the internet represented: Where print media once had a monopoly on display advertising, the internet expanded the available space for display ads to infinity. This would eventually drive down ad prices per unit, but that was just the small problem.

The big problem was that print media’s monopoly on display advertising disappeared. It now had to compete with the entire internet: AOL and Yahoo homepages; celebrity gossip blogs; home-improvement sites; and most importantly, Google search results and Facebook.

In the span of a decade, print media went from having a monopoly on display ads to being worst-in-class in a crowded business. This was the fundamental disruption the internet unleashed on journalism.

At that point it should have been clear that journalism would have to become reader-supported in order to survive. That print media would have to retrench and cultivate direct a relationship with its audience.The problem was timing.The ’00s were the heyday of “information wants to be free” thinking.

Hell, Chris Anderson, then the editor of Wired, wrote a cover story for his magazine about how “free” was the future.

Anderson is a smart guy. How could he have been so stupidly wrong? Because in that moment, consumers were not willing to pay for stuff the internet.

So people in journalism were grasping for any business case they could find. Lots of smart people tried interesting ideas to make journalism work during that period.

None of them were sustainable. By the 2010s, print journalism was in slow-motion collapse. Newspapers and magazines shut down. Some tried to reorganize through bankruptcy. Others got bought by rich people, to be run as vanity projects.

Which brings us back to the Washington Post. In theory, having a newspaper owned by one of the richest men on the planet seems like a good idea. If the owner is benevolent and civic-minded, then it’s a nice arrangement. Jeff Bezos floats one of the most important journalistic institutions in America, and in return people think well of him. He has no incentive to meddle with the paper because if he did, then people would stop thinking well of him. And besides, what would meddling get him? It’s a low-risk, low-reward game.

But that dynamic only works in a liberal democracy.

Once you move into illiberalism, and authoritarianism, the game shifts. Now, owning the Washington Post poses real costs for Bezos, because if he displeases the regime, the autocrat will come for his businesses. Maybe even for him.

In an authoritarian context owning the Post is a high-risk proposition. Which is why Bezos, left, is remaking the paper to be more acceptable to President Trump. Yes, some people have stopped thinking well of him. But in an authoritarian context, that’s a small price to pay.

The Washington Post is owned by a man who, in an authoritarian context, is journalistically compromised by his business interests. He has employed as the Post’s publisher a man who is journalistically compromised by his own conduct. Which is why the Post has been bleeding talent for a year.

2. Propaganda. In an authoritarian context, all journalism will tend toward propaganda unless it is explicitly formulated as anti-authoritarian.That’s the nature of the beast. Unless an institution is explicitly designed to counter authoritarianism, it will end up aiding the authoritarians. Either on purpose, as is happening at the Post and CBS News (more on this in a minute) or by accident:

Oopsie. Once authoritarianism shows up to the party, there can be only two kinds of media:

• Propaganda that is sanctioned by the regime

• Independent media that exists to see the authoritarian project ended

There is no third way. Eventually, every media institution will have to choose a side.

It is desperately hard for legacy media institutions, which have always existed in the sun-dappled space of liberalism, to recognize this unpleasant reality. It’s even harder for them to choose anti-authoritarianism. They have too much institutional memory, too deep an attachment to the Before Times. And too much to lose.

In a weird way, that’s The Bulwark’s secret sauce: 

• We were born in the now. The fight against authoritarianism is all we’ve ever known as an institution.
• We were built from the ground up to be supported by readers. There is no billionaire behind the scenes. We have only ever been accountable to you guys.
• Because many of us are political apostates, we don’t have baked-in loyalties to anything except liberal democracy. And when you don’t have loyalties, you’re free to (a) say what you really think, but also, (b) change your mind as facts change.

What we’re building here at The Bulwark is the future of journalism.

No chasing pageviews. No corporate ownership. No partisan loyalties. No kabuki theater. No filters. And we’ve built this thing of ours together,with you. Your support is what made it possible for us to go out and get Catherine Rampell. I’ll have more soon on what Catherine will get up to for us but for now I want to express my gratitude. Thank you. That’s just a half-year after we hired Will Sommer away from the same newspaper. Think about that: The Bulwark is now a place people leave the Washington Freaking Post for.

And we’re not done. I’m in full I-drink-your-milkshake mode.We’ve created a virtuous cycle where the bigger our community gets, the more resources we have to get the best writers. And then the community grows even more. You all made this happen. Thank you.

For sharing our work, for telling people about The Bulwark, for attending our live events, for investing in this enterprise. We’re savaging the carcass of the pliant, corporate, both-sides media and building something real. Something true. Something that is going to matter when the time comes for everyone to take their stand.

3. CBS. Look, if you thought I was being hyperbolic when I said that the only choices for media in an authoritarian moment were propaganda or independence, just look at what Paramount did this morning.

You have one of the richest families on earth attempting to grab a share of American media to add to its tech platform holdings.

The Ellisons understand that in an authoritarian context they must transform their media company so that it is acceptable to the regime.

That’s why they are buying Bari Weiss’s Free Press and making her editor-in-chief of CBS News, with a direct report to David Ellison—bypassing the president of CBS News in the org chart.

It’s a preposterous hire that makes sense for one reason: The Ellisons believe it will buy them good will with the Trump administration. If Weiss, right, screws up CBS News, or the news division’s business goes pear-shaped, that hardly matters. She’s a loss leader for the larger project of tech lord consolidation. 

Meidas Touch Network, One of Trump's Favorite White House Reporters Denies Moon Landings, J.D. Wolf, Oct. 6, 2025. Brian Glenn tweeted that he doesn't believe the United States landed on the moon. 

Brian Glenn, a Real America’s Voice host often touted by Donald Trump as one of his favorite reporters, tweeted, “We didn’t land on the moon. Have a nice night,” echoing a fringe conspiracy theory that has been debunked for decades. Glenn is also the boyfriend of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been known for spreading QAnon conspiracy theories. Brian Glenn

His comment comes as the Trump administration is actively promoting plans for America’s return to the moon, a centerpiece of its space policy. The disconnect highlights the uneasy overlap between Trumpworld’s embrace of conspiracy-driven media personalities and the administration’s official initiatives.

Oct. 5 

New York Times, Jane Goodall Taught You How to ‘Look,' Rhonda Garelick, Oct. 5, 2025 (print ed.). The conservationist used her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.

We don’t think of Jane Goodall as a style icon. But we should.

Style is about having a keen awareness of and control over how the world sees you, and about understanding how you see the world — how to notice and respond to all its tiny details. Dr. Goodall, who died this week at 91, was a master at this.

Dr. Goodall grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation: She sat patiently for months in the rainforest of Tanzania, observing the chimpanzees, who initially fled from her in fear. Undeterred, she kept watching, aware that the chimps were watching her, too. Eventually she gained their trust and immersed herself in their society, engaging in a kind of dialogue with them. This method of intense observation and respect led to Dr. Goodall’s simple yet revolutionary discoveries: that “animals, like us, have personalities, minds and emotions,” and that human beings were not the “highlight of creation” — which had been settled wisdom for centuries — but “an animal like the others.”

This work brought Dr. Goodall enduring celebrity, landing her on the cover of National Geographic in 1965, where, at 31, she appeared in what would become her signature look: blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail, notebook on her knees, and a uniform-like outfit of khaki button-down and shorts. In the photo, she sits, bare legs bent up toward her chest, gazing with a warm, engaged smile not at the camera, but at a group of chimpanzees in the foreground. The message was clear: “Don’t look at me. Look at them.”

She was modeling, that is, how to look, how to attend to the natural world. She was using her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.

New York Times, Sean Combs Now Faces Not Just Prison and a Fine, but Shunning, Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs, Oct. 5, 2025 (print ed.). Many who have tracked the music mogul’s career think his reputation has been irreparably damaged by testimony of abusive behavior as a boss and boyfriend.

At a Grammy party five years ago that now seems like the ancient past, music stars like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Cardi B listened in rapt attention as Sean Combs accepted an honorary award and demanded that the Recording Academy do more to recognize Black talent.

“It’s going to take all of us to get this done,” he declared at a podium to a standing ovation that swept through the Beverly Hills ballroom.

It’s doubtful Mr. Combs, also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, will ever enjoy that level of adulation and prominence in the entertainment industry again.

On Friday, he was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for prostitution-related offenses, following a federal trial this summer in which prosecutors accused him of coercing two former girlfriends into participating in elaborate, drug-dazed sexual encounters that could last for days.

A jury acquitted Mr. Combs of the most serious charges against him — sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which could have resulted in a life sentence — but the case still laid bare evidence of brutal domestic abuse, and the two women testified that they felt violated and manipulated by his sexual demands.

Accounting for the year that Mr. Combs has already served since his arrest last September, the onetime music mogul could be free by 2028. But he still faces a hard path to rebuild his career, and many commentators are deeply skeptical that he can regain anything like the status he enjoyed when he wielded a Midas touch in music, fashion and media, and earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a pitchman for consumer brands.

“I’m sure he will find his way to hustle into something that’s meaningful to him, because that’s been his M.O. his whole career,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African American studies scholar who teaches about Black popular culture at Duke. “But the return to what he meant to the culture and what he meant to some of these brands — I think that’s forever gone.”

Oct. 4 

White House Chronicle, Commentary: The AI Tsunami Is Approaching Shore; Jobs at Big Risk, Llewellyn King, Oct. 4, 2025. The Big One is coming, and it isn't an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world's norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.

Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13% since the widespread adoption of AI.

Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.

Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.

But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer's Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?

Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.

AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.

Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”

Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.

Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.

The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.

Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — like in the next year.

Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.

Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.

Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.

By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.

These aren't speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.

As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia recently to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn't hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.

The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday's issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.

Lincoln Square Media Logue: YouTube Pays Tribute to Trump & the Supreme Court Chips Away at Due Process, CJ (Charles) Penneys, Oct. 4, 2025. A government shutdown should be the headline — instead it’s the background noise. 

If you were wondering what counts as governance, it includes inciting an insurrection and receving no punishment for doing so.

• YouTube, once the platform that muted Trump for inciting an insurrection, now cut him a $24.5 million check that mostly bankrolls his dream of a gaudy White House ballroom — democracy’s funeral catered with Google money.
• At Quantico, the commander-in-chief told a hall of generals that American cities should double as combat training zones, because nothing says freedom like using Detroit as a live-fire exercise. The job market lost 32,000 paychecks while the shutdown gagged the official data, leaving workers guessing and Wall Street sweating.
• The Supreme Court kept churning out rulings on its emergency docket, letting Trump’s policies take effect before anyone could blink, because apparently due process is too “woke.”
• By week’s end, Trump had frozen $26 billion for Democratic states, turning the shutdown into a political ransom note while federal workers mowed cemetery grass for free.

What ties it all together is the alchemy of grievance into power. Trump doesn’t need truth when repetition can baptize a lie. He doesn’t need functioning agencies when dysfunction is proof of his own necessity. He doesn’t need courts to rule on the merits when settlements and shadow dockets deliver faster wins. Chaos isn’t a bug in this system — it’s the business model. The destruction itself becomes the credential.

And so the state becomes a stage, every institution an unpaid extra in the one-man show. Tech companies fund the props, generals provide the uniforms, courts supply the scripts, and workers pick up the bill. Governance isn’t about outcomes anymore; it’s about applause lines. And the audience is forced to watch whether it buys a ticket or not.

YouTube coughed up $24.5 million to end Trump’s lawsuit over his 2021 suspension, transforming what was supposed to be accountability into a funding drive for his next vanity project. Of that haul, $22 million is earmarked for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom — a $200 million monument to excess that will outlast his presidency even if democracy doesn’t. The rest of the money trickles to his friends at CPAC and Naomi Wolf, proof that Trump never sues alone, only with a cast of professional grievance merchants. Google didn’t admit guilt, but the check they wrote speaks louder than any press release. A penalty for inciting violence has now become a down payment on chandeliers and catering space; the consequences of insurrection are catered dinners under gilded ceilings.

This is the MAGA twist on justice: Turn accountability into proof of persecution, persecution into lawsuits, and lawsuits into cash. Meta already financed his presidential library in Miami, X cut its check months ago, and now YouTube has bought its way out of the doghouse. Each case becomes a shakedown, with Trump cashing in on the same platforms that once banned him. He’ll call it vindication, spin it as proof that “the fake news” tech overlords admitted fault, and wave around the receipts as trophies. It’s not a settlement, it’s a tribute — the kind mob bosses collect when people know resistance is bad for business. Big Tech, for all its billion-dollar bluster, keeps lining up to pay protection money.

What makes it corrosive is not the payout but the precedent. If the companies that claimed to defend democracy against Trump’s lies are now financing his ballrooms, then democracy isn’t being defended at all — it’s being rented out by the hour. A suspension for undermining the republic has become a cash stream for staging his rallies inside it. Accountability has collapsed into enrichment, punishment into prestige, law into spectacle. Trump doesn’t survive crises; he metabolizes them into monuments. The courtroom that was supposed to restrain him is now underwriting his empire built on grievance and revenge.

New York Times, Charlie Kirk Killing: Journalists at 3 Newspapers Quit Over Edits to a Charlie Kirk Story, Neil Vigdor, Oct. 4, 2025 (print ed.). The publications in Alaska lost significant staffing after the owners made changes to an article that had drawn criticism from a Republican state lawmaker.

Several journalists resigned this week from three newspapers in Alaska after the publications’ corporate owner made significant edits to an article about Charlie Kirk’s death, appearing to yield to pressure from a Republican state lawmaker who had criticized the coverage.

The four journalists, who worked for The Homer News, The Peninsula Clarion and The Juneau Empire, wrote in a joint resignation letter on Monday that they were never consulted about the edits, made by the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group.

“We believe this destroys the credibility the public has placed in us as reporters and editors,” the journalists wrote. “The willingness to acquiesce to a public official’s editorial demands and have conversations with her about the direction of our coverage is a betrayal not just of the journalists who work for Carpenter Media, but of the company’s integrity as a purveyor of news.”

The letter was signed by Chloe Pleznac, the Homer News reporter who wrote the article; Erin Thompson, the regional editor of the three newspapers and the one who approved the story; Jeff Helminiak, a sports and features editor for The Peninsula Clarion; and Jake Dye, a reporter for the same publication.

The resignations, which they said would take effect on Oct. 13, were accepted immediately and left two of the newspapers with one reporter each, and a third without any journalists on staff, they said.

The article at the center of the revolt chronicled a Sept. 17 vigil in Homer, Alaska, for Mr. Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and a right-wing ally of President Trump’s who was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. The story ran online on Sept. 23 and in print on Sept. 25 in The Homer News, according to Ms. Pleznac.

Its description in the second paragraph of Mr. Kirk — whom the article called a “Christian-Nationalist icon” and defender of “often racist and controversial views” — had struck a nerve with one of the vigil’s co-organizers.

In a letter to the corporate owners of the papers, Sarah Vance, a Republican state representative, assailed the coverage as “hate-baiting at its worst” and suggested that advertisers were planning to boycott the publications. Her criticism was not dissimilar to the political pressure other conservatives have exerted on media companies to punish those whose commentary about Mr. Kirk they deem objectionable, most notably the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who was temporarily taken off the air after remarks he made on his show in the wake of the shooting.

Soon after publication, something peculiar happened.

“The story just disappeared,” Ms. Thompson, 44, said in an interview on Thursday. “We were all flabbergasted.”Editors’ PicksSex in a Power SuitThe Case for Laughing With Strangers in the DarkShould I Tell an Acquaintance That Her Husband Is Leading a Double Life?

Several hours later, the story was reposted online, with some significant changes to its structure and description of Mr. Kirk, who was 31 years old and played an instrumental role in Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.

In the revised version, the second paragraph appeared about 12 paragraphs into the article stating that Mr. Kirk’s views “have been tied by many to a rise in Christian nationalism across the U.S.” In describing Mr. Kirk’s frequent visits to college campuses, the article said that he had regularly defended his criticism of the Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as his opposition to gun control and affirmative action.

Gone from the article was a line stating that Mr. Kirk had perpetuated “conspiracy theories, including Covid-19 and climate misinformation, as well as replacement theory,” which posits that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.

In a statement on Thursday, Carpenter Media Group, which is based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and owns more than 250 media properties, said that the journalists’ resignation letter had contained a number of inaccuracies. It did not specify what they were.

“CMG made the decision to edit a piece of content that fell well short of our standard and the standards of unbiased community journalism,” the company said. “We stand firmly by that decision. Our primary responsibility is to the communities we serve, and we will continue to ensure that our publications reflect fairness, accuracy, and respect for these communities.”

All three community newspapers are relatively small. As of 2023, The Homer News, a weekly newspaper, had a print circulation of about 1,205 copies, according to a media kit. It covers Homer, a city of about 6,000 people on the Kenai Peninsula. The journalists said the story also ran on the website of The Peninsula Clarion, in Kenai, Alaska, about 80 miles north of Homer.

Gregory Knight, an aide to Ms. Vance, said she had not asked the media company to make changes to the story. He provided a statement from Ms. Vance saying that she did not expect her complaint to contribute to the resignations.

“My concern has always been singular and straightforward; I want The Homer News to uphold the highest standards of journalism, to provide reporting that is fair, accurate, and free from bias,” Ms. Vance’s statement said. “I place tremendous value on truth and on the vital role that local media plays in keeping residents informed and connected. That commitment to integrity in reporting is the only reason I spoke up.”

Kelly McBride, senior vice president and head of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit focused on raising the standards of journalism, said in an interview on Thursday that she was troubled by the way the story was changed.

“That’s a bad practice because it undermines the independence of the journalists,” Ms. McBride said.

Ms. McBride said that news organizations need to be clear about what their standards are and have consistent policies in place when those are not being met.

She said that there were some similarities in the way the company that owns the papers had responded and Mr. Kimmel’s suspension.

The owner of the publications did “exactly what ABC did,” she said. “They capitulated.”

Ms. Pleznac, 25, who said she had worked in Alaskan public radio newsrooms since she was 18, referred to the resignation letter on Thursday when asked for comment.

The other two journalists who resigned did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Thompson said that one of her managers had told her the context about Mr. Kirk’s views was presented too high in the article. “They smoothed out the edges,” she said.

She said that initially she had not planned to resign, but could not “see a path forward to do my job in an honest and straightforward way, using my best judgment.”

Oct. 3 

New York Times, Partisan Language Inserted Into Education Dept. Workers’ Automated Emails, Eileen Sullivan and Michael C. Bender, Oct. 3, 2025 (print ed.).The out-of-office responses from the accounts of employees on furlough cast blame for the shutdown on Democrats.

Some furloughed workers at the Department of Education expressed shock on Thursday to find that their out-of-office email messages had been changed without their knowledge to reflect the Trump administration’s view that the government shutdown was the fault of “Democrat Senators.”

“Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations,” the emails said. “Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.”

One Education Department employee, who like another worker interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they wanted to change the language but worried that logging into the system might violate a federal law that prohibits furloughed employees from working.

The language apparently inserted into the emails, which the system automatically sends in response to incoming correspondence, echoes messages plastered on a number of government websites and social media accounts since the government ceased most operations on Wednesday. Congress has been unable to agree on how to fund the government, and congressional Democrats refuse to agree to a spending plan that does not restore funding for Medicaid and extend health insurance subsidies.

Some agencies updated their websites on Wednesday with boldface messages announcing the shutdown and laying the blame on Democrats. In some cases they referenced the “radical left,” echoing Republican talking points. Notably, the Education Department’s website has not been among those casting blame on Democrats.

Multiple agencies directed federal workers to include similarly partisan language in their out-of-office email responses notifying senders that they would not be able to write back until the government reopened.

But the language inserted into the Education Department staff responses appeared to be the first example of the administration overriding an employee’s automatic reply.

In response to a request for comment, an automatic reply from an Education Department spokeswoman, Madi Biedermann, did not include the politically charged language. Instead, it read, “Thank you for your email. There is a temporary shutdown of the U.S. government due to a lapse in appropriations.”

About an hour later, Ms. Biedermann sent another response referencing the continuing resolution that would have funded the government: “The email reminds those who reach out to Department of Education employees that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean C.R. and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said he had heard from constituents who were outraged that partisan rhetoric was being foisted onto government agencies.

New York Times, Trump Offered Universities an Invitation for a Deal. Some See a Trap, Anemona Hartocollis, Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder, Updated Oct. 3, 2025. Trump officials want universities to sign on to conservative priorities to get special treatment. Some in higher education say agreeing would end academic freedom.

The Trump administration promised a select set of universities what the government said would be a great deal.

In exchange for agreeing to a list of demands, like limiting international students and protecting conservative voices, universities would get a leg up on grants, potentially beating out the competition for billions in federal funds.

At least one institution, the University of Texas, said it would be eager to sign up.

But to others in higher education, the Trump administration’s latest effort to use federal funding as leverage to push universities to conform to its own political policy agenda has provoked outrage.

They see it as another threat against their independence as the government attacks higher education over what it perceives as endemic liberal bias, and as a remarkable push to grab power for the executive branch.

“This is a real inflection point,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Under the compact, a mix of nine public and private universities would receive favorable terms for government aid if they agreed to conditions like banning consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, capping international undergraduate enrollment, requiring that applicants pass admissions examinations and suppressing grade inflation. Universities with large endowments would be asked to waive tuition for students interested in the hard sciences.

While some of the ideas might be broadly embraced, like tamping down tuition increases, Dr. Zimmerman said, he was troubled by the idea that the federal government would be telling universities how to do it.

“The parts of the order that drive me crazy are the ones that I actually agree with, like we should have ideological diversity, we shouldn’t stigmatize conservative thought — I’m down with all that,” Dr. Zimmerman said. “Keeping tuition down — that seems fine, in fact laudable. But the federal government being the determinant of that is terrifying.”

The institutions approached by the administration included the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia. Most would not say Thursday whether they would agree to the terms.

But within hours of the Trump administration’s offer, the compact was inflaming divisions in higher education.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said the requirement that universities monitor the speech of employees could violate the First Amendment.

“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow,” Tyler Coward, FIRE’s lead counsel for government affairs, said in a statement. “That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.”

And the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, which represent faculty members, argued that the government’s demands on universities were hypocritical.

“They would reward campuses that toe the party line and punish those that cherish their independence,” a statement from the groups read. “In doing so, it would commit the very viewpoint discrimination it claims to redress.”

They referred to the compact as a “loyalty oath.”

And the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a vocal political enemy of the president, vowed to strip state funding from any California university that signed on to the deal, saying in a statement Thursday that “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”

In contrast, Kevin Eltife, the chairman of the Board of Regents for the University of Texas, said the proposal appeared to complement Republican policies in the state of Texas.

“Higher education has been at a crossroads in recent years,” he said in a statement, noting that Texas leaders had implemented “sweeping changes for the benefit of our students and to strengthen our institutions to best serve the people of Texas.”

Some of those changes include banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices on every state university campus and strengthening the influence of the regents, who are appointed by the governor.

Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, said the document seemed to him like a naked exercise of power, lacking internal coherence. He said that if institutions agreed to the compact, it would set “a horrible precedent to cede power to the federal government.”

The compact is part of an emerging trend inside the administration to skirt traditional lawmaking and government spending protocols in Washington.

Instead of negotiating with Congress to overhaul federal policy, the administration has increasingly reached out directly to institutions and school systems, seeking their sign-off on pledges to adopt portions of the Trump administration’s agenda — often under the threat of losing federal funding.

In April, the Education Department ordered local school officials to sign pledges attesting that they had eliminated all programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which the administration has argued unfairly discriminate against white Americans.

That move was blocked by Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the Federal District Court in New Hampshire, who ruled that the government had failed to adequately define “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She also said the policy threatened to restrict free speech in the classroom and overstepped the executive branch’s legal authority over local schools.

The administration has also used signed pledges to prioritize funding for groups to develop or expand artificial intelligence courses and certification programs.

Dr. Zimmerman argued that the compact was another example of a split screen in the Trump administration’s priorities. Government officials are on the one hand seeking to reduce federal power over education by gutting the Department of Education, while “at the same time they’ve been orchestrating an unprecedented centralization of power.”

New York Times, Duke Was Paring Back Diversity Programs. Trump Targeted It Anyway, Vimal Patel, Oct. 3, 2025. Duke University kept a low profile. But it is the alma mater of Stephen Miller, a top Trump official who often criticized the school while he was a student.

The Trump administration had for months been expanding its nationwide attack on higher education. But Duke still made for an odd target.

Leaders of the school, North Carolina’s largest private university, embraced a stealth strategy as other elite colleges fell into the Trump administration’s cross hairs, avoiding showy standoffs with the government for interfering in academic affairs. The campus is a relatively conservative place, protests over the war in Gaza were muted and it had begun dialing back some diversity efforts.

The Trump administration came for it anyway.

In late July, Trump officials announced they would investigate Duke over the criteria its student-run law journal used to select editors. They also accused the university’s health system of “systematic racial discrimination,” without citing any specific incident.

Duke’s turn on the hot seat provides a window into how the administration’s priorities broadened in recent months, from a focus on antisemitism to efforts to stamping out diversity measures.

It also highlights how the administration has sown confusion and fear in higher education as it chooses its targets — and its favorites.

Even as the administration has picked out one set of elite institutions it disfavors for drastic funding reductions, it asked others this week to sign a compact agreeing to certain demands in return for preferential treatment.

The schools picked for punishment or favor can seem to have little in common. But while the choice of one school over another may seem haphazard, Duke’s case in particular has raised concerns among the president’s critics that the administration’s politics are often personal.Why Duke?

Some at Duke’s sprawling Gothic campus in Durham speculate that Stephen Miller, President Trump’s confidante, played a role in earmarking the school for funding cuts.

Mr. Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Duke in 2007. Now, he oversees the White House policy operation, and no significant measure emerges from the West Wing without his awareness, input or direction, including a federal investigation into his alma mater. Two senior administration officials, however, said Mr. Miller was not the driving force behind the investigation.

But Mr. Miller has been interested in details, the officials said, and his own critiques of Duke are nearly two decades in the making. A former columnist at the school’s student newspaper, he was president of the university’s chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative-leaning group. In his writings, he frequently decried political correctness and criticized his school for its “monolithic academic environment.”

 

September

Sept. 30

Associated Press, Federal agents grab and shove journalists outside NYC immigration court, sending one to hospital, Michael R. Sisak, Sept. 30, 2025. Federal agents grabbed and shoved journalists in a hallway outside a New York City immigration court on Tuesday, sending one to the hospital in the latest clash between authorities enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and members of the public seeking to observe and document their actions.

A visual journalist identified as L. Vural Elibol of the Turkish news agency Anadolu hit his head on the floor at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pushed one journalist off a public elevator and shoved another journalist to the floor, according to video and witnesses.

A bystander held Elibol’s head and a nurse treated him until an ambulance arrived, witnesses said. Video showed him in a neck brace as paramedics wheeled him out of the building on a stretcher. The other journalists, amNewYork police bureau chief Dean Moses and Olga Fedorova, a freelance photographer whose clients include The Associated Press, were not seriously injured.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended the agents’ actions, saying they were being “swarmed by agitators and members of the press, which obstructed operations.”Related StoriesElected officials arrested in NYC protest over immigration facility conditionsElected officials arrested in NYC protest over immigration facility conditionsICE officer who shoved woman to floor in NYC court is disciplined in rare rebuke from fedsICE officer who shoved woman to floor in NYC court is disciplined in rare rebuke from fedsICE is showing up at family reunification interviewsICE is showing up at family reunification interviews

“Officers repeatedly told the crowd of agitators and journalists to get back, move, and get out of the elevator,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rioters and sanctuary politicians who encourage individuals to interfere with arrests are actively creating hostile environments that put officers, detainees and the public in harm’s way.”

Moses said the situation escalated when masked agents grabbed him and shoved him from an elevator on the 12th floor as he was attempting to photograph them arresting a woman who had just left immigration court.

“I walked into the elevator behind them, and they started screaming at me,” Moses told amNewYork. “Then they pushed me, grabbed me by my arms, and started pulling me out of the elevator. I tried to hold on, but I got shoved out.”

Video taken by photographer Stephanie Keith showed that during the struggle, another agent shoved Fedorova, who fell backward toward where Elibol lay on the floor.

Fedorova said photographers had worked in the hallway outside immigration court for months without incident. The agents making arrests Tuesday, she said, didn’t announce any limits where journalists could go, and they hadn’t made it clear they were making an arrest when they got on the elevator.

“If they tell us to get out, to not cross a certain line, we follow their orders,” Fedorova said. “In this case, it was not clear to anyone that this was a detention at all.”

The episode happened just days after a federal agent at the Manhattan immigration court was captured on video shoving an Ecuadorian woman into a wall and onto the floor after her husband was arrested.

Lev Remembers, Urgent: America at the Edge — Trump’s Shutdown, Indictments & the Generals’ Test, Lev Parnas, Sept. 30, 2025. Not random. Not coincidence. A coordinated push to rewrite history and cripple democracy.

As I sit here just hours away from the government shutting down, I want you to pause and really hear me. This isn’t about another budget fight in Washington. This is a deliberate, coordinated push to advance Project 2025 — and they’re not even hiding it anymore.

Donald Trump is warning Democrats that once the shutdown happens, he will begin making “irreversible changes” — mass firings, dismantling programs, and gutting our institutions — all while still blaming the other side.

At the same time, while Washington was consumed with the looming shutdown, down in Quantico Trump was turning his focus on the generals.

Even as he moves to weaken the government in D.C., he is testing the loyalty of our military leadership, seeking to bring them under his control. This is not coincidence — it is a coordinated two-front assault: cripple the government in the Capitol, and coerce the military into obedience at Quantico.

History is clear: for any dictatorship to take root, it must secure the loyalty of the military. That’s exactly what we’re witnessing now. My sources tell me there is already a list of generals they want gone. This isn’t speculation. This is a purge-in-progress.

But it doesn’t stop there.

I’m also hearing from my sources that the indictments are not over. More are coming. And simultaneously, Trump and his allies are preparing a full-scale campaign to rewrite history itself. What they want to do with January 6th is exactly what the Chinese regime did with Tiananmen Square — bury it, erase it, and replace it with a propaganda version that claims it was a “deep state Democrat operation” to set up Donald Trump, not a MAGA insurrection.

This is the story they are trying to cement into the public record — a lie meant to absolve Trump and vilify his opponents.

Think about it: Speaker Mike Johnson did everything he could to keep the Epstein files from being released. Why? Because Trump is doing everything he can to bury them permanently. These are not isolated actions. These are pieces of a larger strategy — part of Project 2025 — to consolidate power, erase the truth, and crush accountability.

• The shutdown.
• The purge of generals.
• The propaganda campaign to rewrite January 6th.
• The suppression of the Epstein files.
• The upcoming indictments.
• The attacks on American cities.

This is all preparation for what’s coming next: a future with no fair and square elections in 2026 and beyond. Everything I’ve been warning you about is coming to a head right now.

Our last line of defense is no longer Congress. It’s no longer the courts. It’s the men and women of our military — our generals, our veterans, our military families. These are people who swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any one man. They have risked everything to protect our freedoms, and now they’re being put in an impossible position.

Trump has already floated using the military against American citizens. He needs generals who will obey illegal orders. We cannot let that happen.

Our generals and military leaders have given their lives to serve this country. They’ve fought wars abroad, endured unimaginable sacrifices alongside their families, and stood as a shield so that we could live free under the Constitution. That same Constitution is now under attack from within. The clear and present danger to our democracy is not America’s cities or its people — it is Project 2025 and those driving it. These leaders must recognize the real threat, stand firm, and refuse unlawful orders. Their loyalty must remain with the American people and the Constitution, not with any one man. They cannot step aside or allow this purge to happen. They are now being called upon to defend the very freedoms they swore to protect — to stand up, to say no, and to ensure that our democracy survives.

So I’m pleading with you: call every veteran you know. Call every military family. Share this message far and wide. Let them know we see them. We support them. And we need them to support us — to support the Constitution over any would-be dictator.

This isn’t politics. This is about the survival of our democracy.

I don’t write these letters lightly. I risk everything to bring you these truths. And with every purge, every whistleblower forced out, it gets more dangerous by the day, by the hour. One day, if we don’t act now, we may wake up and discover our freedom to speak has vanished.

This isn’t just a newsletter. This is a movement. Every truth I risk to bring you, is because I believe our voices together can stop what Donald Trump and Project 2025 are trying to do to this country.

Sept. 29

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump’s 100% Tariff on Foreign-Made Movies Sends Shockwaves Through Hollywood, Aaron Parnas, Sept. 29, 2025. The unprecedented move could reshape film production and global entertainment trade.

President Donald Trump announced Monday on Truth Social that his administration will impose a 100% tariff on all foreign-made movies, a move that stunned Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry. If enacted, this would mark the first time a U.S. president has attempted to levy tariffs on a service rather than a physical good.

The announcement revives a threat first floated in May, when Trump argued that foreign governments use tax incentives to lure filmmakers abroad, undercutting U.S.-based production. He singled out California, claiming the state had been “particularly hard hit” by outsourcing, despite the fact that the state itself has rolled out substantial tax credits in recent years.

Studios often choose international locations because of lower labor costs and attractive rebates, making it cheaper to fly crews overseas than to shoot in Los Angeles.

The market responded quickly to Trump’s post. Shares of Netflix fell 1% Monday morning, while AMC and Disney saw slight gains. Analysts say streaming platforms could face higher costs if restrictions limit the pool of global content available to them.

The broader movie industry continues to struggle with box office declines. U.S. ticket sales peaked at nearly $12 billion in 2018, before plunging to $2 billion in 2020 during the pandemic. While theaters have rebounded, the number of film releases remains about half of pre-pandemic levels, and domestic grosses haven’t exceeded $9 billion since.

Whether Trump can legally impose tariffs on foreign-made movies remains unclear. Trade experts point out that services like film distribution fall under complex World Trade Organization rules, making enforcement difficult. Still, the announcement underscores the administration’s willingness to expand trade wars beyond traditional goods — into cultural and creative industries that have long relied on international collaboration.

Sept. 28

National Press Club, Vibrant, Functioning Democracy Depends on Vibrant Media, Gil Klein, Sept. 28, 2025. https://www.press.org/newsroom/page-says-vibrant-functioning-democracy-depends-vibrant-media

In receiving the Order of the Owl award at Friday’s National Press Club Silver Owls Hoot, Susan Page, for decades one of the leading journalists in Washington, said the news media has had to combat the public’s lack of trust as well as fight well-financed attacks to maintain its critical role in defending democracy.

Page, the USA Today Washington bureau chief, has covered the White House for seven administrations as well as serving as a political commentator and biographer. She has been a Club member for 45 years.

“The mission of journalists now and forever is to inform the public, to explain confusing times, to hold the powerful to account, to be an independent voice,” she said at the Hoot. “That is what we do. That is why we're here. Our nation's founders understood this. They knew we can't have a vibrant, functioning democracy without a vibrant, functioning press. That's what the National Press Club has stood for from the start, since it was founded in 1908.

Photo of Susan Page at Silver Owls HootA 'vibrant, functioning democracy,' depends on a 'vibrant, functioning press,' USA Today bureau chief Susan Page said at the Sept. 26 National Press Club Silver Owls Hoot. Photo: Nancy Shia

To build trust, the news media should have been more transparent in the past in explaining how it gathers the news, she said, but it now faces a president and his administration’s “fierce and false attacks” to undercut traditional media with frivolous lawsuits to intimidate and bleed news organizations.

Now, she said, the administration is insisting that Pentagon reporters have to sign pledges not to report unauthorized news.

“Reporting unauthorized news is the definition of what we do,” she said. “It will never change whether we file by teletype or TikTok.

In addition to press freedom threats, the other big challenge facing journalism is the demise of its traditional business model, Page said.

In response, news providers are erecting pay walls, trying to convince billionaires to become owners, creating non-profit outlets, leveraging social media and becoming independent newsletter publishers.

“There's not going to be one answer, one silver bullet. We are in the middle of a new age of experimentation,” Page said.

The Silver Owls is an organization within the Club of members of more than 25 years. The owl has been a symbol of the Club since its founding. “Head Hoot” Rod Kuckro, and the Council of Wisest Owls organized the event. The Order of the Owl goes to noted journalists, Club supporters and champions of press freedom.

Photo of Susan Page receiving Order of the Owl from Rod KuckroThe Order of the Owl is given to noted journalists, Club supporters and free press champions. Page received the award from 'Head Hoot' Rod Kuckro. Photo: Nancy Shia

But the evening was not all seriousness. In introducing Page, George Condon, who has worked with her in covering the White House since the Reagan administration, got a lot of laughs reading the lede of a story she wrote while working as a young reporter on Long Island, N.Y.

Said Condon: “I like to think that the trip to the White House beat began the day she went to Sag Beach and wrote this: ‘They draw oglers with binoculars, slow foot traffic to a standstill, get warnings from police officers and risk sunburn in the most delicate places. Still, more and more vacationers are untying bikini tops and dropping swim trunks to the sand on East End beaches.’ Susan never commented on the irony of a nude beach being named Sag Beach.”Newly Inducted Owls

Silver Owls (25 years of uninterrupted Club membership): Gary H. Baise, Edward J. Barks, Carol Bennett, Victor Block, Jim Campi, Bod DeFillippo, Sharon T. Freeman, Ed Hazelwood, Maria C. Higgins, William O. Hillburg, Mark Horner, Wayne Madsen, Thomas R. Mullen, Margaret Orchowski, Jim Ostroff, Jeff Plungis, Alexander Rose.

Gold Owls (50 years): Diana Gregg, Jeffrey A. Prussin

Platinum Owls (60 years): J. Robert Barlow, Charles Brian Kelly, Mark Melcher, Arthur P. Miller, Daniel B. Moskowitz, Robert A. White 

Sept. 25

Berkshire Eagle (MA), Fred Rutberg to step down as publisher of The Berkshire Eagle; Gary Lavariere named successor, Gillian Heck, Sept. 25, 2025. After nearly a decade at the helm of The Berkshire Eagle, Fredric D. Rutberg will step down as publisher Oct. 1, passing the baton to Gary Lavariere, the company’s chief revenue officer.

Rutberg, 79, will remain president of The Eagle and continue to play an active role in the paper’s operations. He will remain a member of the editorial board, serve as liaison to the company’s advisory board and lead philanthropic efforts such as The Berkshire Eagle Local Journalism Fund.

“This is a propitious time to pass the reins to the next generation,” Rutberg said in a letter to readers. “The Eagle is stronger now than at any time since we bought it.”Rutberg, a retired District Court judge, joined three partners in purchasing The Eagle in 2016 from a hedge fund owner.

Since then, he has overseen the paper’s return to local ownership and its reinvestment in journalism — efforts that have earned The Eagle seven consecutive Newspaper of the Year honors from the New England Newspaper and Press Association.

The company’s board of directors has been working on this publisher transition for more than a year. A newspaper publisher is the person ultimately responsible for making sure the paper serves its readers and advertisers and remains financially healthy.

Hans Morris, chairman of the board and a co-owner of The Eagle, praised Rutberg’s leadership.

“While many people have been critical to the success of The Berkshire Eagle since 2016, Fred has been the essential person in my view,” Morris said. “After all, it was his idea to buy the paper from Alden Media. And while there were many reasons [that deal] should have fallen apart, he never lost faith and made it happen through his commitment to the vision, along with hard work and resilience.”

Sept. 26 

New York Times, Trump Clears Way for American-Owned TikTok Valued at $14 Billion, Lauren Hirsch, Tripp Mickle and Emmett Lindner, Sept. 26, 2025 (print ed.). The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. version of the app.

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.

The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion.

The deal is aimed at helping TikTok comply with a federal law, which banned the app in the United States in January out of concern that Beijing could use it to gain access to Americans’ sensitive data or to spread propaganda. Mr. Trump has delayed enforcement of the ban repeatedly. The Thursday order gives negotiators until mid-January to finalize the deal.

The White House hasn’t said exactly who would own the U.S. version of TikTok, but the list of potential investors includes several powerful allies of Mr. Trump. The software giant Oracle, whose co-founder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, will take a stake in U.S. TikTok. Mr. Trump has also said that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is involved. A person familiar with the talks said the Murdoch investments would come through Fox Corporation.

And now, the Emirati investment firm MGX is expected to join the coalition, according to two people familiar with the talks — a surprise, since Mr. Trump said the new investors were “American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors.”

If it comes to fruition, a deal would lift a cloud of uncertainty that has dogged TikTok for years. Policymakers in Washington have long been concerned about the app’s ties to China, even as its American user base has skyrocketed to more than 170 million people. The lengthy tussle over the app’s future has concerned users and frustrated lawmakers.

The $14 billion valuation for TikTok is far lower than ByteDance’s valuation of $300 billion, according to the start-up tracker CB Insights.

The MGX investment is also the latest example of the Emiratis using their deep pockets to help Mr. Trump. In recent months, representatives of the Gulf State have pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S. economy over the next decade, and MGX has said it has deposited $2 billion in a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family.

The TikTok talks and the MGX crypto investment played out as the Emiratis were pursuing a sale of valuable artificial intelligence chips. The Emiratis’ ability to buy the chips had been limited by the Biden administration over concerns about the Gulf State’s ties to China. But the Emiratis had been pressing the Trump administration to change U.S. policy so they could build data centers and become an A.I. powerhouse.

During Mr. Trump’s trip to Abu Dhabi in May, the administration agreed to sell the Emiratis 500,000 A.I. chips for a data center campus that would be among the largest in the world.

MGX has been discussing the TikTok investment for months, according to two people familiar with the talks. It was one of several companies in the TikTok deal that stood to benefit from the Emiratis’ data center project. Oracle will be building a data center that will cost about $20 billion in the Emirates. Silver Lake, an investment company, has a stake in one of the partners in that project, G42, an Emirati A.I. company.

Sept. 25

 

The Bulwark, False Flag Commentary: British Nick Fuentes clone faces gay scandal, Will Sommer, above, Sept. 25, 2025. As the Western world faces a tide of far-right populism, it’s only natural that Europe should get its own Nick Fuentes—or even a few of them. As the white-nationalist podcaster has gained a major foothold in America, he has also spawned imitators across the Atlantic, in countries from Portugal to the United Kingdom. Like Fuentes, these young men in ties have online shows where they offer viewers a mix of sardonic banter, deep religiosity, and noxious views.

But could some of these upstarts be opportunists, and not true Fuentes acolytes? That may be the case for the British Nick Fuentes, a young man named Hugh Anthony, who saw his far-right alt-media career implode this week under mounting evidence that he’s gay—a big taboo in the groyper community. Anthony’s trouble began when a California twink posted some flirtatious direct messages Anthony had sent him on X. More trouble came soon after, including a video posted on X that showed an apparently drunken Anthony smiling as a friend discussed having Grindr troubles.

Then a tweet from just four months ago emerged in which Anthony described himself as gay, suggesting his conversion to the religious-conservative lifestyle has come on really quickly. Making matters worse, Anthony’s social media manager said on X that he had once done some OnlyFans work to make money “to survive.”

Anthony’s fans, needless to say, don’t see this as very “Rule Brittania.” But Anthony says he’s leaving all that in the past. At risk of losing his British groyper fans, Anthony recorded a very depressing speech, delivered in front of a grotesque JD Vance meme photo, in which he said he wished he could slap his formerly gay, nightclubbing self.

“I was a lustful man,” Anthony said. “I was a sinner.”

Meanwhile, the genuine Fuentes is set to cash in. This week, he appeared on a show hosted by MAGA business podcaster Patrick Bet-David. During his appearance, Fuentes announced he will be joining the likes of right-wing activist Laura Loomer and former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano on the platform Minnect, a sort of Cameo for hustle bros run by Bet-David.

What that means is that Fuentes will soon be doing video calls and dispensing wisdom—for a whopping $21,000 per hour! Loomer’s rate, by comparison, is only $1,500 an hour.

While $21,000 might seem steep for career advice from a self-described incel, I know one person who could use Fuentes’s wisdom: the British Fuentes clone currently embroiled in a gay sex scandal! Best of luck to him.

Sept. 24

 

New York Times, Jimmy Kimmel’s Return Draws 6.2 Million Viewers, Ratings Show, John Koblin, Sept. 24, 2025. The first episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” since it was suspended last week by Disney attracted nearly four times its average viewership.

Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast return scored big in the ratings.

Tuesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” averaged 6.2 million viewers, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That is nearly four times bigger than his usual audience, even though more than 20 percent of ABC affiliates boycotted the show.

The preliminary Nielsen figures are expected to grow in the coming days as more data comes in. It does not include streaming viewership.

The show was Mr. Kimmel’s first since executives at ABC and Disney — the network’s parent company — decided to pull his show on Sept. 17. They made the move after growing criticism, including by a top federal regulator, over comments he made during his show about the man accused of fatally shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The show’s suspension set off a national debate about free speech.

Mr. Kimmel dedicated much of his Tuesday night monologue to that very topic. “This show is not important,” he said. “What’s important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

Nexstar and Sinclair, two large television groups, said before the show that would pre-empt the episode across the affiliates they owned, after “strongly” objecting to Mr. Kimmel’s comments. On Wednesday, shortly before the Nielsen ratings were released, Nexstar said it would continue to pre-empt the show but that it was “engaged in productive discussions” with Disney.

To score 6.2 million viewers on a late-night show in 2025, without an N.F.L. playoff game providing a lead-in boost, is highly unusual. To do it without a few dozen local affiliates airing the show is even more eye-opening. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” averaged 1.6 million viewers in the 2024-2025 September-to-May television season, according to Nielsen.

Mr. Kimmel’s return also scored big online. The YouTube video of his monologue has already drawn more than 15 million views.

The return was one of the most-anticipated late-night show episodes in a long time. Mr. Kimmel was at turns emotional, defiant and comedic in his monologue. He praised some Republican officials who expressed misgivings about Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s comments, but he also offered harsh criticism of the Trump administration as well. “A government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American,” he said.

The show’s return also stoked interest from President Trump. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” he posted on social media an hour before the broadcast. Mr. Trump suggested that he might sue ABC over Mr. Kimmel’s reinstatement, before adding: “A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.” 

 

New York Times, Investigation: The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir, Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan, Sept. 24, 2025. Amy Griffin wrote a book based on recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Oprah Winfrey (shown above with the author) and a slew of celebrities promoted it. Then questions arose.

Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager looked ecstatic as they stood onstage at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan earlier this year, posing with a new book. The crowd was so large it required an overflow room.

The book was “The Tell,” a memoir by Amy Griffin, a first-time author and one of the wealthiest women in the country. Not only did Ms. Griffin receive the first-ever joint promotion by the three influential book club leaders, but Ms. Winfrey had selected “The Tell” as her 112th book club pick.

In the memoir, Ms. Griffin, 49, writes that she engaged in illegal psychedelic-drug therapy. While under the influence of MDMA, the active chemical in Ecstasy and Molly, she said she recovered memories of being raped on many occasions by a middle-school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, starting when she was 12.

“I knew that these memories were real,” Ms Griffin writes. “My body knew what had happened to me. The way I’d shake when I’d tell my story; the way my eyes welled up with tears at the mention of Texas.”

Ms. Griffin was paid nearly $1 million to write her story, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. The book was an instant sensation, receiving heartfelt endorsements from celebrities and influencers with huge social media followings.

Many of those supporters were Ms. Griffin’s friends, part of a rarefied world where billionaires and celebrities share private planes to remote getaways and display their friendships on Instagram.

Some were also involved with businesses, charities and political campaigns that receive financial backing from Ms. Griffin, who sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bumble, the parent company of the dating app.

“It’s an unbelievable book,” Gwyneth Paltrow said on the Goop podcast, introducing Ms. Griffin without revealing that the author was an investor in Ms. Paltrow’s business.

“I’m so deeply proud of her,” Ms. Paltrow continued, describing Ms. Griffin as “this beautiful, incredibly positive, brilliant woman.”

“The Tell” sold more than 100,000 copies, spent four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction this spring and attracted accolades from many readers. It also launched Ms. Griffin on a publicity tour befitting an Oscar winner.ImageMs. Griffin celebrated the publication of her memoir in March, onstage with Oprah Winfrey and Mariska Hargitay. Credit...Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, stories of sexual abuse are generally met with sympathy and support, not probing questions. “The Tell” also benefited from the publishing industry’s increasing reliance on books with the kind of celebrity connections that can pump sales. Many of these books are memoirs, which are rarely fact-checked.

But increasingly, readers have raised suspicions about “The Tell,” including in online reviews. Some have questioned the reliability of decades-old memories unearthed during drug-assisted therapy. Others have wondered how such abuse could take place in a public school without any adults picking up clues.

“This is a book that has been swallowed whole by the media industrial complex,” said Maureen Callahan, a sharp-tongued columnist, discussing the memoir on her podcast, “The Nerve.”

She added, “There is, on the other side of it, a guy who doesn’t have Amy Griffin’s money, power, resources.”

“The Tell” has been a topic of conversation from the Texas Panhandle to the beachfront estates of East Hampton to the well-financed labs of the pharmaceutical industry. In recent months The New York Times interviewed dozens of people from Amarillo, the publishing industry and the medical and MDMA communities, along with Texas authorities, and reviewed the book proposal Ms. Griffin used to pitch her project to publishing houses.

One classmate shared detailed accounts of being attacked — by a different teacher — in the very locations that Ms. Griffin wrote about, including at the same middle-school dance.

It may be impossible to know what happened between Ms. Griffin and her teacher in the late 1980s. In the book, Ms. Griffin herself acknowledges that she had no way to confirm her account: “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof. There had been no witnesses.”

Still, the book has had significant ramifications for those who were in Ms. Griffin’s childhood orbit.

It has also left many who live in Amarillo, a city of 200,000, feeling in some ways well observed but also reduced to caricature by an author who has not lived there for decades.

Following the outpouring of publicity, Amarillo law enforcement officials and victims rights advocates expected allegations from other students of Ms. Griffin’s teacher, who worked in the school district for 30 years. During his career as an educator, no one filed a complaint against him, state education and law enforcement officials said — nor has anyone done so since the book’s publication.

Ms. Griffin’s allegations hinge on her experiences in therapy with an illegal psychedelic that the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve for therapeutic use last year — a drug backed by a company that she and her husband have invested in through their foundation. Whether the drug actually helps patients recover accurate memories is a matter of debate.

Rick Doblin, the country’s leading advocate for the therapeutic use of MDMA, said he connected Ms. Griffin to her therapists. In an interview this summer, he said he read several drafts of the book and called it “important.”

But he played down the reliability of memories retrieved with MDMA, saying they are often “symbolic.”

“Whether it’s real or not — meaning whether the incident actually happened — from a therapeutic perspective, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “A lot of times people will develop stories that help them make sense of their life.”

He added, “In the therapeutic setting, what Amy went through, whether it’s true or not, it has value because the emotion is real.”

Mr. Doblin said both that “frightening memories that people have pushed out of their mind come back under MDMA” and “you have to be somewhat dubious, I guess, about recovered memories.” (The day before this article was published, Mr. Doblin contacted The Times and insisted that he did believe Ms. Griffin’s memories were real.)

Ms. Griffin describes the teacher she accuses of attacking her with enough specificity that some readers in Amarillo were able to discern his identity, even though she gave him a pseudonym. The Times was able to learn his identity as well: Ms. Griffin cited the teacher by name as her rapist in the book proposal sent to publishers, and she included details about a family tragedy he suffered. His name was also shared with people in Amarillo by her relatives after they learned of Ms. Griffin’s retrieved memories.

Over the course of more than three months, Ms. Griffin declined requests for an interview.

Penguin Random House, the publisher of “The Tell,” did not alert the teacher to the book or its accusations before publication because they believed his identity was sufficiently disguised, according to Thomas A. Clare, the author’s defamation lawyer. It is unclear whether local school officials were notified. A lawyer for Amarillo Independent School District declined to comment.

The teacher did not respond to letters left at and mailed to his house, or to email requests for comment. Some people who have worked at and attended the middle school say they are troubled by the specter of undetected child abuse. But others are alarmed that a teacher with an unblemished record has been deemed a rapist without a chance to defend himself. Since the book was published, locals say they have not seen the now-retired teacher around town.

Earlier this month, The Times sent Mr. Clare an 11-page list of questions and information likely to be included in this article, for fact-checking purposes.

Mr. Clare said that “the mere sending of this document has caused additional trauma and extreme physical and emotional harm to a survivor of sexual assault, which is inexcusable.”

Sept. 23

 

 

Sixty-three of ABC's affiliate stations are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media, two companies that announced they would drop Jimmy Kimmel's because of his words about Christian nationalist provocateur Charlie Kirk (New York Times chart).

New York Times, Jimmy Kimmel’s Show to Return to ABC on Tuesday Night, John Koblin, Brooks Barnes, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 23, 2025 (print ed.). The network’s removal of Mr. Kimmel’s show last week almost immediately morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America.

Jimmy Kimmel is coming back.

ABC said on Monday that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would return to its airwaves on Tuesday, ending an impasse that began last week.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said in a statement.

“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the statement said. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

Disney did not say whether all ABC affiliates, some of which balked at carrying “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last week, would carry Tuesday’s show.

The network had removed Mr. Kimmel “indefinitely” last week after a top Trump regulator and many conservatives said he inaccurately described the politics of the man accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

The subsequent suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” almost immediately morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America.

ABC pulled the show just hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on a podcast that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson.

 

Politico, Judge orders Trump administration to restore more than $500 million in research funds to UCLA, Mario Tama, Sept. 23, 2025 (print ed.). The decision marked a major win for the beleaguered UC system, which is facing a $1 billion demand to restore the funding.A person walks on the UCLA campus.

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restart the flow of about $500 million in funding for scientific research it withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, sparing the university for now from a devastating fiscal blow.

While only temporary, the ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco was a significant victory for UCLA and the rest of the sprawling UC system, which has been caught up in a campaign by federal officials to punish high profile universities for what President Donald Trump and other conservatives allege was their overly permissive response to student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza and failure to address antisemitism on their campuses.

In the withholding of research funds, the administration found a potent source of leverage to extract concessions from schools. Columbia University, the first major school to land in Trump’s crosshairs, ultimately agreed to pay the government $200 million and make a series of reforms to get back $400 million in research grants that the government withheld over claims the school violated the civil rights of Jewish students and faculty. Other schools also reached agreements, while Harvard University remains locked in negotiations over $2 billion in funding.

The Trump administration eventually turned its attention west to California’s elite network of 10 UC campuses, which enroll 300,000 students and employ leading researchers in a wide array of scientific areas. The administration launched investigations into UC Berkeley over claims of antisemitism on campus and a Republican-led congressional education committee began probing alleged antisemitism at UCSF and UCLA. In late July, it slashed over $580 million in research grants from UCLA, alleging Jewish students and faculty had been subjected to abuse and discrimination during pro-Palestinian protests. It also accused the school of improperly considering race when deciding on which students to admit.

Justice Department officials followed up with a set of demands: UCLA would have to pay $1 billion and make changes to the admissions process and other policies in exchange for the return of the research money.

The university has not agreed to the settlement proposal and the Board of Regents, which oversees the UC system, is continuing to discuss how best to navigate the situation behind closed doors.

The UCLA funds were wrapped into a lawsuit a group of researchers from multiple UC campuses filed challenging the Trump administration’s weaponization of research funds. The lawsuit contends that the grant terminations were unconstitutional because they were cut “without proper review or clear explanation.” Lin issued a preliminary injunction in June temporarily restoring funding cuts from three government agencies, which the plaintiffs later sought to expand to cover the frozen UCLA grants.

Lin, a judge in the Northern District Court of California, said in her ruling Monday that the indefinite suspensions of NIH grants were “likely arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that lays out how administrative agencies must operate.

David Ellison, who now controls CBS and serves as strong ally of President Trump and his MAGA movement (Graphic by Lincoln Square Media).

Oligarch Watch via Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Billionaire surveillance enthusiast set to acquire TikTok's US operations, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Sept. 22, 2025. Last January, we launched the newsletter as Musk Watch. In just a few months, we broke major stories on Musk associates accessing the private data of federal employees, Meta removing advertising critical of Musk, DOGE personnel putting Social Security benefits at risk, and Neuralink falsifying federal filings to claim eligibility for a racial diversity program.

We are proud of the work of Musk Watch. But we also came to the conclusion that we must expand our ambitions. Musk, the world's wealthiest person, is part of a cadre of ultra-rich men who wield enormous influence over politics, the media, and the economy.

I wanted to share today’s piece, which gives you a sense of the reporting you can expect under the Oligarch Watch banner.

We live in an era defined by an extreme concentration of wealth and power. If you haven’t already, check out more of our work on the world’s most powerful people by subscribing to Oligarch Watch.

In the near future, Larry Ellison, an 81-year-old tech oligarch, could be in control of one of the world's most powerful media empires.

In August, Skydance Media, a firm funded by Ellison and led by his son David, completed an $8 billion merger with Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS. The Ellisons' media ambitions have only grown since then. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company now known as Paramount Skydance was preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, and a range of other brands.

Apart from traditional media and streaming, the elder Ellison also has eyes set on TikTok, the massive social media app owned by a company based in China. Last week, Donald Trump announced that Ellison would be among the group of American billionaires allowed to acquire TikTok's domestic operations to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S. "You know, they're very well-known people," Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday while discussing who would be involved in a TikTok deal. "And Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. He’s a great guy."

Ellison is less known than some of his younger Silicon Valley peers, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. However, his net worth has skyrocketed amid the artificial intelligence boom. The vast majority of his riches come from his 40% stake in Oracle, the database software and cloud computing firm he cofounded in 1977 and has helped lead since. Earlier this month, a surge in Oracle's stock lifted Ellison's wealth past Musk, temporarily making him the wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $383.2 billion.

Ellison has spent much of this century indulging in his riches, including spending an estimated $875 million on a sailing match racing team, $200 million on a California estate, and $300 million to acquire 98% of the sixth-largest island in Hawaii.

But Ellison has larger ambitions, among them the belief that humanity would greatly benefit from a surveillance society governed by an all-seeing system of artificial intelligence. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," he said during a question-and-answer session with Oracle investors last year. "It’s unimpeachable."

Ellison's enthusiasm for AI is self-serving. A society oriented around centralized databases and immense computing demands would mean more work for Oracle. But Ellison has framed that vision as altruistic. "I think this will make for a happier citizenry," he said in February, referring to the creation of a single massive database that an AI system could easily scan.

Ellison has a lengthy history of advocating for government surveillance. During a 2014 speech, he criticized NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting that no one had been "wrongly injured" by the agency's domestic spying operations. "By sharing your personal data, there are enormous benefits both to you individually and to the society as a whole," he added at the time. (His interest in databases stems from the early years of his tech career, when he worked on a CIA database project codenamed "Oracle" — which inspired the name of the company Ellison later founded.)

As for Ellison's effort to acquire vast media holdings, his carefully managed relationship with Trump has proven beneficial. Ellison for years has supported Republicans, although he often backed what he described as "centrist" politicians like Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio in 2016. He did not hold a fundraiser for Trump until early 2020, which resulted in some Oracle employees staging a walkout. Ellison remained equivocal. "I said President Trump could use the property. I was not here," he said in April 2020, referring to Trump's use of his Rancho Mirage, California, retreat to hold the fundraiser. "We only have one president at a time," he added. "I don't think he's the devil — I support him and want him to do well."

Still, his standing with the then-first-term president was sufficient enough for Trump to greenlight Ellison taking part in a deal to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. That deal, which also involved Walmart, fell through. But ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, attempted to quiet scrutiny in Washington by signing an agreement in the fall of 2020 to host the data of American TikTok users on Oracle servers.

Now, five years later, Ellison has been included in the proposed consortium to purchase 80% of TikTok's U.S. operations, as required by a law passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden last year. According to Trump, Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch will also be involved in the consortium, along with Michael Dell, the chief executive of Dell Technologies, and the pro-Trump venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The deal has been months in the making. In January, shortly after Trump began his second term, the president named Ellison as one of his preferred TikTok buyers. "I'd like Larry to buy it," Trump said, nodding at Ellison, who was visiting the White House with OpenAI's Sam Altman to promote a $500 billion project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S. that has yet to materialize.

As part of his role in spinning off TikTok's U.S. operations, Ellison will gain access to a massive trove of data delineating the political views, consumption habits, and social connections of tens of millions of Americans who use the app. "[TikTok's] data and privacy will beled by one of America's greatest tech companies, Oracle," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News over the weekend. "And the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well."

Ellison has already played a role in the conservative overhaul of one social media platform. In 2022, he invested $1 billion in Musk's purchase of Twitter, simply because he thought the takeover "would be lots of fun." Twitter, now X, has since become a sump of right-wing propaganda and Musk's personal megaphone.

There have been snags in Ellison's insatiable quest for data. In 2022, Oracle agreed to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of secretly assembling "digital dossiers" on millions of people and selling them to third parties. Oracle denied wrongdoing but agreed to a $115 million negotiated settlement last year. 

New York Times, Local TV Giants Boycott Jimmy Kimmel’s Return to Late Night, Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 23, 2025. Together, the two TV station groups, Sinclair and Nexstar, control more than 20 percent of ABC’s local affiliates.

Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show is returning to ABC on Tuesday night after a tense standoff from remarks he made about the Trump administration’s response to the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But about a quarter of the ABC stations in the United States won’t be airing it.

Nexstar, a major owner of local ABC stations, said on Tuesday morning that it would pre-empt Mr. Kimmel’s show indefinitely. Sinclair, another owner of local affiliates, said the same on Monday evening, hours after Disney announced “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would return. Nexstar said it would replace the comedy show with news programming, pending further “discussions with ABC.”

Those decisions set up a high-stakes impasse between Disney and the TV station groups that transmit its shows to millions of households across the United States. The threat of a sustained boycott — a rarity for local TV — puts stations at the center of a debate over free speech that has erupted in the days since Disney initially paused Mr. Kimmel’s show.

The stations owned by Nexstar and Sinclair represent a meaningful source of ad revenue for Mr. Kimmel’s show. But pre-empting it indefinitely could lead to backlash for both Sinclair and Nexstar, especially from viewers who enjoy “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

The decision was greeted with applause from conservatives and condemnation from the political left.

“Losing large portions of the country’s viewers undermines the network’s business model,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, a policy nonprofit. “But broadcast viewers are creatures of habit; Jimmy Kimmel is very popular, and affiliates are taking a big risk in taking him away at a time when viewers can migrate to YouTube.”

The Contrarian, Words & Phrases We Can Do Without: ‘Liberal Hollywood’? Jennifer Rubin, right,  Sept. 23, 2025. More like ‘Craven Entertainment Corporations.’

The myth that Hollywood is a bastion of leftism dies hard. Contrary to the right-wing cliché, a social, political, and economic dichotomy has existed for years. Regardless of the leanings of the creative community, large companies are inherently conservative and all too eager to enable oppressive government.

Sure, the “talent” (writers, directors, composers, actors) is overwhelmingly Democratic—but the mega-media entities (studios, streaming services, distributors, networks) have always acted like every other corporate interest. (Even the actors ranks have been filled with Republicans for decades.) Moreover, the entertainment corporations historically have been sheepishly compliant, willing to defer to authoritarian power even if it means compromising creative independence and First Amendment freedoms.

Back in 2003, Tim Rutten wrote about the decidedly anti-progressive bent in corporate media, describing the late Jack Valenti—a former LBJ advisor who ruled supreme for decades as the industry’s cheap lobbyist—as “Hollywood’s sonorous paladin of unshakable centrism.”

Rutten also recounted the aversion to progressivism dating back in 1934 when socialist Upton Sinclair won California’s gubernatorial nomination. Hollywood executives not only raised money (docking employees’ pay) to defeat him, but smeared him by putting out “dozens of phony newsreels, subsequently distributed free to theaters up and down the state, in which seedy, suspicious looking immigrants with vaguely Russian accents endorsed the Sinclair program.” Yikes.

In the 1930s, Hollywood moguls wound up altering or even canceling films so as not to offend Hitler (!) and retain their German market. Without the complicity of studios, Sen. Eugene McCarthy (R-Wis.) would not have been able to harass, blacklist, and even lock up actors and writers accused of being “communists.”

As Hollywood studios have transformed into multi-armed conglomerates that regularly must seek approvals from the federal government for everything from mergers to broadcast licenses (and at the state and local level, for tax breaks, labor legislation, etc.), they have become politically indistinguishable from other corporate behemoths. They snuggle up to whomever is in power.

No one should be stunned, therefore, that ABC/Disney and CBS/Paramount caved when confronted with authoritarian bullying and extortion. The Democratic appointed FCC commissioner sounded off this summer when Paramount/CBS settled the ludicrous 60 Minutes lawsuit so as to close its merger with Skydance Media. “After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted. Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions,” commissioner Anna M. Gomez said.

It has become so cringeworthy that even former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has piped up:

Where has all the leadership gone? If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners, and corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment? The “suspending indefinitely” of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC's aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one’s political or financial self-interest.”

(By-the-way, for the record, this ex-CEO finds Jimmy Kimmel very talented and funny.)

Fortunately, just as labor unions around the country have stood on the front lines in the fight to defend democracy, the Hollywood guilds/unions representing actors, directors, musicians, and below-the-line craftspeople and technicians have not adopted corporations cowering posture. In response to the Jimmy Kimmel suspension, four unions jointly put out a blistering statement, which took the corporate leaders to task.

“When a private citizen, business, or television network bows to government intimidation, it strikes at the heart of our First Amendment rights,” the unions declared. “[M]edia companies have a responsibility to defend their workers and the integrity of the stories they tell. All broadcasters must stand firm in defense of free expression and the First Amendment, not capitulate to a policy of political appeasement.” The Writers Guild put out an equally powerful statement, which included this: “Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world.”

Ultimately, Disney was forced to cave when the financial and reputational damage in suspending Kimmel proved too much. So let’s do away with the noxious phrase “liberal Hollywood,” an intended slur from the right that has never matched reality. In fact, for all their liberal “principles,” industry leaders—just like many universities and law firms—have gone along with authoritarian commands to get along with the Trump regime. Better to acknowledge that Hollywood, like Wall Street, is run by weak-kneed corporations all too eager to cut deals with autocrats.

No matter what the politics of actors, writers, and the rest of the talent pool, the entities that give them a platform are sadly part of the collapse of civil society. Fortunately, creative players can find ways to get in their licks on corporate media platforms. They also now can make their way to new outlets, some of which are not as dependent on government largess. Increasingly, artists—like journalists—may find that practicing their craft and maintaining First Amendment freedom require they leave and even boycott the most cowardly corporations.

Unless and until entertainment corporations feel countervailing financial pressure at least as powerful as what Trump applies—from consumers, viewers, subscribers, cruise and theme park visitors, advertisers, litigants, and the general public—this will not change anytime soon. (Keep watching this space; we’ll keep seeking to inform our readers about actions you can take.)

Once again, we’re reminded that elite entities won’t save us; it’s up to Americans working collectively to save our democracy.

 

 

New York Times, Investigation: Elon Musk’s Father Accused of Child Sexual Abuse, Kirsten Grind and John Eligon, Sept. 23, 2025. Errol Musk, shown above in a photo via the New York Times, has been accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren since 1993, a Times investigation found. Family members have appealed to Elon Musk for help.

Elon Musk has not been shy about putting much of his life on public display. The tech billionaire posts daily on his social network X, has cooperated with two biographies and often speaks on podcasts and at conferences.

But there is one part of his life that he has not revealed much about — his longtime estrangement from his father, Errol Musk, who has become increasingly outspoken about his family and business ventures tied to the Musk name.

A New York Times investigation found that a significant factor in Elon Musk’s rupture with his father stems from accusations against Errol Musk of child sex abuse. The allegations have repeatedly spilled over into Elon Musk’s life as relatives have contacted him for help and he has sometimes taken action to intercede, according to personal letters, emails and interviews with family members.

The family’s troubles have entangled Elon Musk,right, in a painful three-decade multigenerational saga that continues to trail him. The fallout has kept the 54-year-old mogul tethered to South Africa, where he was born and where Errol Musk lives, even as he has built a business empire in the United States and briefly ascended to political power as a close adviser to President Trump.

The allegations against Errol Musk involve five of his children and stepchildren, whom he was accused of abusing in South Africa and California, according to police and court records, personal correspondence, social workers and interviews with family members.

The earliest accusation was in 1993 when Errol Musk’s stepdaughter, then 4 years old, told relatives he had touched her at the family house. A decade later, the stepdaughter said she caught him sniffing her dirty underwear. Some family members have also accused Errol Musk of abusing two of his daughters and a stepson. And as recently as 2023, family members and a social worker attempted to intervene after his then 5-year-old son said his father had groped his buttocks.

Three separate police investigations were opened, according to police and court records, as well as family members. Two of the inquiries ended, while it’s unclear what happened in the third. Errol Musk, 79, has not been convicted of any crime.

The abuse allegations have caused strife within the Musk family, with some relatives turning to Elon Musk — who is Errol Musk’s eldest child — for help. Around 2010, one relative wrote Elon Musk a five-page letter about some of the accusations and implored him to intervene.

“We really need your advice, help and guidance in these matters because we daily see these children suffer,” the relative wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The Times.Editors’ PicksWhat Fuels Revolution, Social Embarrassment and Public Acclaim? It’s Common Knowledge.Splurging? In This Economy? Here’s How to Do It Right.36 Hours in Zadar, Croatia

It was unclear if Elon Musk read the letter. But an assistant for him messaged a family member after relatives wrote to him about the abuse allegations. The billionaire has also provided financial support for his stepfamily and siblings from his father’s third marriage. He once tried to keep those family members in California, where they would be far from Errol Musk. He was not involved in the police investigations in South Africa.

Errol Musk, who has at least nine children and stepchildren and has been married to three women, maintains a powerful grip over much of the family. The former stepdaughter, whom he was accused of touching when she was 4, said she later had a child with him when she was in her 20s. She has struggled with drug use, while her mother — who married Errol Musk twice — has grappled with mental health issues.

Errol Musk has “left a massive wound in our family,” Elmie Smit, whose sister was his third wife, said in her first on-the-record interview about the allegations. She said she has emailed Elon Musk about some of the allegations and sometimes heard from an assistant.

In response to questions from The Times, Errol Musk said “the reports are false and nonsense in the extreme.” He said that the accusations were concocted by family members who were “putting the children up to say false things” and that they were trying to get money from Elon Musk.

In one email to The Times, Errol Musk also claimed to be aware of only one abuse allegation, but in the same message offered explanations for the circumstances around two others.

He added that he has a good relationship with Elon Musk and they “are very close.”

Elon Musk and his personal lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. In 2017, the billionaire teared up when he told Rolling Stone magazine that his father had done “almost every evil thing you could possibly think of.” In a 2023 authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk said he does not communicate with Errol Musk.

The Times reviewed court and police documents from jurisdictions in California and South Africa, as well as more than 50 emails, text messages, personal notes and letters, which detailed certain accusations more than others. The police and courts in South Africa and Los Angeles declined to release some records, citing children’s privacy. Other records could not be located.

The Times also interviewed family members, social workers and people close to the Musks. Some requested anonymity because of the sensitive situations, while others feared retribution. Other family members declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. The Times does not name children in sexual abuse cases.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in South Africa and California? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

In recent months, some family members have been angered by Errol Musk’s apparent attempts to capitalize on Elon Musk’s fame. Errol Musk has said he worked on a meme coin called MuskIt and planned to build a Musk tower in Dubai. (He has since told The Times he was “not associated” with the projects.)

All the while, some family members said, he has papered over or lied about their family history. Ms. Smit said she decided to speak up after Errol Musk was interviewed in February on a South African podcast called “Wide Awake,” during which he rambled about his life without mentioning any turmoil.

In June, Ms. Smit spoke anonymously to the podcast host, Joshua Rubin, describing some of the abuse allegations, including the 1993 incident with Errol Musk’s 4-year-old stepdaughter.

The stepdaughter, who is now 37 and has several children, publicly addressed the situation for the first time with The Times. She did not respond to questions about the abuse allegations involving Errol Musk but said she and her children did not live with him.

“My kids are safe and looked after,” she said.

She said her main financial support comes from Elon Musk, who sends money monthly and has bought her a car. “Elon has always been there,” she said.

Sept. 22

The Contrarian, Opinion:The Constitutional Crisis is All Around us, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 22, 2025. What we can all do.

Last week, we reached a new inflection point in Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial power. Without hedging or deflection, Donald Trump brazenly declared he would take retribution against any TV networks that criticized him. He also announced he would pursue left-leaning organizations that he has yet to prove have any connection to violence.

While purely performative, Trump also pronounced that he would designate “ANTIFA,” a non-organization, as a domestic terrorist group, a label that does not legally exist. (This proclamation the pretext for claims that other groups have connections or affiliations with the amorphous “ANTIFA” movement.)

As if that were not enough evidence of unhinged dictatorial ambition, “President Trump demanded on Saturday that his attorney general move quickly to prosecute figures he considers his enemies, the latest blow to the Justice Department’s tradition of independence,” the New York Times reported. He made no bones about it—this is about revenge:

We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post addressed to “Pam,” meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!

Arriving immediately after forcing prosecutor Erik S. Siebert from the Eastern District of Virginia to step down for refusing to carry out Trump’s plot of vengeance (with plans to install another lackey from his own legal team, Lindsey Halligan), this marked an unrestrained plunge into authoritarianism. Increasingly, Trump’s regime looks like Viktor Orbán’s autocracy (albeit less organized), where threats and silencing of enemies provoked by personal whim have become commonplace.

Yet with such unabashed authoritarianism on full display, the public may have also reached an inflection point. Politically disengaged Americans may not follow the details of court fights about redistricting or pocket rescissions, but maneuvers like firing a comedian at the implicit behest of the president just might rouse ordinary folks who know this is un-American.

A functional democracy with an independent Congress certainly would not accept any of this. An impeachment investigation of Trump and Bondi would be well underway. For that matter, recently confirmed Third Circuit Judge Emil Bove—front and center in the corrupt bargain involving dismissal of bribery charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams and allegedly a key player in shutting down an investigation into border czar Tom Homan for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents before the election—would be under investigation; his underlying actions and apparently false testimony, contradicted by witnesses and documents, warrant scrutiny.

For those who have refused to recognize that we are well into a constitutional crisis, the latest developments should be a wake-up call. The 2026 midterms are still more than a year away. No offense, no outrage seems to be sufficient to shock MAGA Republicans into recovering their patriotism and rediscovering their oaths. It certainly doesn’t help that the Supreme Court seems bent on enabling Trump’s quest for total power.

Still, the courts, Democrats, the press, and ordinary Americans have time and power to act.

Judges must begin to act sua sponte, on their own volition, as we saw when U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, without prompting, summarily dismissed Trump’s frivolous $15B lawsuit against the New York Times. He reamed Trump: “[A] complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective—not a protected platform to rage against an adversary…. [nor] a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.”

As I and others have written, courts can no longer accept the presumption of regularity. Courts can no longer assume that “executive officials have ‘properly discharged their official duties’ and that government agencies have acted with procedural regularity and with bona fide, non-pretextual reasons.” Every declaration, complaint, motion, and representation must be fly-specked; misrepresentation by government officials should be met with swift sanctions.

Courts should treat any indictment of Trump’s enemies with grave skepticism and due consideration should be given to dismissal for prosecutorial misconduct and/or selective prosecution.Democrats in Congress

It is time to ring the alarm. When Congress returns, a day-long floor proceeding in the Senate akin to open remarks in an impeachment trial to set out Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional actions would set the appropriate tone. Democrats must leave no doubt that they will use oversight hearings to explore lawlessness and then proceed with investigations when they win back the House. (Most federal crimes have a 5-year statute of limitations so there should be plenty of time for prosecution if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028.)

Certainly, they should supply no confirmation votes for any Trump judicial or Justice Department nominees. Since Trump apparently is incapable of appointing anyone but loyal stooges, the heavy presumption of unfitness should apply.News media

We have seen sporadic indications that the legacy media, after they are attacked, can, after all, tell truth-telling from false equivalency. Most notably, in the days after Trump sued the New York Times, the Gray Lady seemed to perk up:

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

That sort of unvarnished, candid recognition must be the default setting. However, even calling the Trump order to prosecute his enemies “an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols,” is woefully inadequate. This is a gross breach of the Constitution and our rule of law. The Times surely can make that clear.

Media companies such as CBS, ABC, and the Washington Post—which have capitulated to Trump with bogus settlements and self-censorship—may never regain credibility, but the rest must finally abandon the outmoded framework of coverage that is spectacularly unfitted to cover politics when one party acts as an ordinary democratic party and the other as a cult of personality at odds with democracy. (They could have rejected the MAGA script treating Charlie Kirk’s funeral as a state funeral and instead spent time covering Trump’s overthrow of the Constitution, e.g.)

In addition, the White House press corps must stop worrying about access and start aggressively confronting Trump with his anti-constitutional pronouncements. When he says networks “can’t” criticize him, someone should ask him if he thinks the First Amendment applies to him—and to the journalists from said networks. We The People

Mass, peaceful demonstration is more critical than ever. (No Kings Day 2 is on Oct. 18.) Everybody can participate. However, Americans selected for grand or trial juries can also, as they have done in D.C., refuse to enable groundless, vindictive prosecutions. Jury nullification has a long and noble tradition.

Civil servants can serve their country as whistleblowers to reveal illegal and reckless conduct; if fired, they can share their experiences and/or litigate. All of us can support organizations that litigate and fight for democracy, volunteer and/or donate to campaigns, and persistently (but politely) birddog representations and candidates. Simple questions carry enormous power. (Do you support the 1st Amendment? Do you support vindictive prosecutions? 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism:Sinclair "Special Report" depicts Kirk as prophet, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 22, 2025. "Many Americans are standing shoulder-to-shoulder, believing God is still working and opening the hearts of a new generation."

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns dozens of ABC affiliates, played a crucial role in forcing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

In a statement, Sinclair called Kimmel's commentary on Kirk's assassination "inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country." Kimmel criticized Trump and his allies for exploiting Kirk's assassination to score political points. According to Sinclair, the company "decided to indefinitely preempt 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!'" on its affiliates and, after discussing the decision with ABC, the network "suspended production."

Sinclair also pledged that it would "air a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk this Friday, during Jimmy Kimmel Live’s timeslot." That program, produced by Sinclair's National News Desk, papers over Kirk's far-right political views. It does not mention that Kirk called the Civil Rights Act a "huge mistake," supported public executions, and blamed a host of the country's problems on "Jewish donors."

Instead, the Sinclair special depicts Kirk primarily as a religious and prophetic figure. "Charlie Kirk was known first and foremost for his faith in his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," news anchor Jan Jeffcoat says. "And he often spoke about the key values in his life, God, family, freedom, and country in that order. And he reminded Americans that life's most important questions aren't about wealth or success, but about your faith and your relationship with God."

Jeffcoat describes Kirk as "an American patriot fearless in his faith" and claims that his death, which occurred less than two weeks ago, has "fueled a revival of faith across America." She praises "Charlie's passion to awaken the country with the gospel through conviction and courage."

During the special, Jeffcoat interviews Rachel-Ruth Lotz Wright, the granddaughter of Reverend Billy Graham. Introducing Wright, Jeffcoat says Graham "began a revival in America with a simple yet powerful message: the gospel and salvation in Jesus Christ changes everything." According to Jeffcoat, "that same spirit of revival carried into the life and mission of Charlie Kirk, who boldly and tirelessly defended biblical values and truth as he challenged a new generation to stand firm for Christ."

Jeffcoat asks Wright how Kirk's life and death "shaped your own understanding of how the gospel never changes even in the face of evil." She also inquires whether Wright "sees this revival as similar to the one that your grandfather started with this generation." Jeffcoat ended the interview with this question: "How does the truth that [Kirk is] more alive now in heaven give you hope?"

"[I]nstead of silence, there's been an outpouring of that faith and just remarkable peace," Jeffcoat says later in the program, "From small-town churches to packed stadiums and college campuses, there is grieving, but also voices lifted in prayer and scripture and song. Candles, open Bibles, clasped hands across denominations and generations. Many Americans are standing shoulder-to-shoulder, believing God is still working and opening the hearts of a new generation."

The program largely dismisses those concerned with the First Amendment implications of Kimmel's suspension, which followed FCC Chair Brendan Carr's demand for ABC and its affiliates to "take action." In one segment, Sinclair national correspondent Kayla Gaskins says that "critics" are "pointing out that those outraged over Kimmel were quiet when previous voices were silenced or canceled over politics." The examples of "silenced or canceled" voices include Trump, David Chappelle, and J.K. Rowling, none of whom have been silenced.

Towards the end, the special quickly acknowledges that some of Kirk's views were "no doubt extremely polarizing," and shows a brief clip of Kirk making an offensive comment about trans people. The topic swiftly shifts to the effectiveness of his approach, which is described as "undeniable." The program concludes with what Jeffcoat describes as "a new moving video out of the White House honoring Charlie's legacy."Sinclair's abrupt change of plans

Sinclair announced that the Charlie Kirk special would air on its ABC affiliates "during Jimmy Kimmel Live’s timeslot" and "across all Sinclair stations this weekend." Further, "Sinclair is offering the special to all ABC affiliates across the country." few minutes before the special was scheduled to air, however, Sinclair changed course and announced that "Sinclair will continue to air ABC network programming as scheduled in the late-night time period." Instead, the program was published on The National News Desk's Youtube Channel.

Instead of the Charlie Kirk special, Sinclair's ABC affiliates aired an episode of Celebrity Family Feud. Sinclair, however, continues to promote the special on its social media platforms as a news program.

In response for a request for comment, Sinclair declined to provide an on-the-record response.The conservative media mogul who runs Sinclair

The executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group is David Smith, who controls the company with other members of his family. Smith is well-known for his right-wing political views and his willingness to inject his politics into affiliates owned by Sinclair. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair undergo "a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage."

Sinclair regularly requires its local affiliates to run segments pushing right-wing talking points. Last year, Popular Information reported that "Eugene Ramirez, the lead anchor of Sinclair's national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air."Top Sinclair anchor resigned over concerns about biased and inaccurate content Top Sinclair anchor resigned over concerns about biased and inaccurate contentJudd Legum and Rebecca Crosby · July 23, 2024Read full story

Sinclair's statement says it will not consider airing Kimmel's show unless and until Kimmel makes "a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA," Kirk's right-wing political advocacy group.

Unmentioned is that David Smith, through his family foundation, donated $250,000 to Turning Point USA last year.

The Real Michael Cohen, Opinion: Saint Charlie of MAGA, Michael Cohen, right, Sept. 22, 2025. Charlie Kirk’s death became a stage-managed resurrection, where faith, politics, and even artificial intelligence collided to transform grief into spectacle, propaganda, and a manufactured martyrdom.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a tragedy. No one should confuse that. No one should celebrate it. A man in his early thirties, a husband, a father, and yes, a political activist, gunned down because this country is sick with rage and division. That reality deserves a pause. But what we saw at his memorial was not a pause. It was not mourning. It was not reflection. It was theater, carefully choreographed to transform grief into political fuel and one man’s death into a rallying cry for MAGA’s survival.

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President Trump’s speech made it plain. This wasn’t about Charlie Kirk the human being, it was about Charlie Kirk the symbol. “Charlie's murder was not just an attack on one man or one movement. It was an attack on our entire nation,” he thundered. He teased an autism announcement. He attacked his opponents. He framed Charlie’s death as a bullet aimed at all of us; a metaphor designed to conflate Kirk’s assassination with the fate of MAGA itself. He promised the Presidential Medal of Freedom, dangling it like a relic to be blessed in “the very safe Washington, D.C.,” a city Trump now boasts of controlling after his federal police takeover.

Sept. 20

 

The Village of Palmetto Bay council meeting on Wednesday (Photo by Scott McIntyre for The New York Times)

New York Times, He Wrote a Biting Post About Charlie Kirk. The Fury Came Fast, Richard Fausset, Sept. 20, 2025. Residents of Palmetto Bay, Fla., have demanded the resignation of Councilman Stephen Cody, who wrote a post mocking Charlie Kirk’s support for gun rights.

One by one, the angry residents who had packed the council chambers on Monday night in Palmetto Bay, Fla., stepped to the podium to express their disgust over online comments that a councilman, Stephen Cody, had made about Charlie Kirk.

One man called Mr. Cody’s comments “vile.” Another called them “abnormal and dangerous.” A third man said that the councilman’s Facebook post, which went up a few hours after Mr. Kirk was fatally shot in Utah, “smells like it came out of the pit of hell.”

All three wanted Mr. Cody to resign from office. If that did not happen, a fourth speaker said, “We’ll come after him.” While he did not intend to harm Mr. Cody, he added, “He’s not going to have a very nice life while he’s living here.”

The most contentious civic matters anyone had anticipated this month in Palmetto Bay, a prosperous Miami suburb of 25,000, involved the tax rate and the details of a contract to manage a municipal pickleball facility. But in the last few days, Palmetto Bay, like many communities around the country, has been consumed by the wave of ferocious indignation directed at people who declared their lack of remorse about Mr. Kirk’s death or merely took issue with things he had said or believed.

Campaigns have been mounted to publicly shame these critics, and in many cases to get them fired from jobs or expelled from schools — a conservative version of the cancel culture that only a few years ago was wielded by the American left. Those facing repercussions — more than 100 people, according to one analysis — include police officers, students, medical professionals, public schoolteachers and university professors.

There have been higher-profile subjects as well. On Wednesday, ABC announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night comedy show “indefinitely” amid conservative criticism of his on-air comments related to Tyler Robinson, the suspect charged with Mr. Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10.

In a monologue on Monday, Mr. Kimmel said that “the MAGA gang was desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

A charging document filed by prosecutors this week said that Mr. Robinson’s mother told investigators that her son had grown more political recently, and that his political views had moved to the left.

More On U.S. Media, Culture Wars, Education

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 19, 2025 [Pushback On Trump Media Crackdowns], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 20, 2025. Today U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday threw out the $15 billion lawsuit President Donald J. Trump filed on September 15 against the New York Times for defamation. The judge, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, called the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible” and took Trump’s lawyers to task for using a legal complaint as a public forum for abusive language.

Noting that the two defamation counts followed eighty pages of praise for Trump and allegations against the "hopelessly compromised and tarnished 'Gray Lady,'"—an old nickname for the New York Times—he set a forty-page limit on any amended complaint.

The administration’s pressure on ABC to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel is very unpopular, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, with people polled by YouGov on September 18 seeing it as an attack on free speech.

That unpopularity showed today when podcaster and senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) celebrated Kimmel’s firing but called the threat of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, right, to retaliate against ABC “unbelievably dangerous.” Cruz called Carr’s threats “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

He explained: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted that three new polls out this week show Trump’s approval rating dropping and commented that voters don’t like “[t]his dictator sh*t.” AP-NORC observed that Republicans are growing pessimistic about the direction of the country. While the share of all American adults who say the country is off track has increased 13 percentage points since June, from 62% to 75%, the biggest change has been among Republicans. In June, 29% of Republicans were concerned about the direction of the country; now that number is 51%.

Most American adults think Trump has gone too far with his tariffs, his use of presidential power, and sending troops into U.S. cities.

Democratic lawmakers this week have reflected the growing opposition to Trump and his administration. Today in The Contrarian, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote that Trump’s attacks on Chicago aren’t really about stopping crime. Instead, Trump is creating chaos and destabilizing the country in order to erode our democratic institutions and cement his power.

Pritzker warned that Trump “has become increasingly brazen and deranged in his rhetoric and his actions” and that the things he “is doing and saying are un-American.” In contrast, Pritzker held up as a model “our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors,” and urged people to “be loud—for America.”

Yesterday Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke at the Center for American Progress. He, too, outlined the administration's attacks on the rule of law and blamed “billionaires padding their stock portfolios and buying up politicians,” “self-interested CEOs cynically dialing up the outrage and disinformation on their social media platforms,” and “politicians who saw more value in stoking grievance than solving problems” for creating the conditions that ushered Trump into the presidency.

Schiff called for restoring American democracy through legislation, litigation, and mobilization. He noted that Democrats have just introduced a package of reforms to put into law the norms Trump has violated. Democrats have also introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision permitting unlimited corporate money to flow into elections. While this legislation almost certainly won’t pass in a Republican-dominated Congress, he noted, it would force a debate.

He also noted that Democrats are conducting oversight, demanding accountability for wrongdoing and attacks on the rule of law, and are creating a record. Their victories, he noted, have been “modest,” but they have, for example, managed to force the administration to rehire employees at the National Weather Service and succeeded in preserving U.S. Department of Agriculture field offices in California.

Litigation has been more successful, Schiff said. Since January, plaintiffs have brought more than 400 suits against the administration, and courts have halted the administration's policies in more than 100 of them. Wrongly fired civil servants have been reinstated, funding has been restored to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deportation flights have been grounded, Trump’s tariffs have been struck down.

“Ultimately, though,” Schiff said, “the most powerful check on Trump’s authoritarianism is not Congress. It is not the courts. It is the American people.”

And that was the rallying cry of Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) in Congress yesterday.

Crow, who entered Congress in 2019, is a former Army Ranger who completed three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

In his speech, Crow warned that Trump is tearing down the walls of our democracy and called out “some of our most elite and powerful individuals and institutions” for “failing to defend our democracy.” He noted that “[s]ome of our nation’s most powerful law firms have bent the knee. Some of our finest universities are buckling. Some of the most powerful CEOs have capitulated. And some of the largest media companies are simply surrendering.”

“If those with power and influence want to sell off our rights and freedoms to enrich themselves, then Americans should make it clear that cowardice and greed will fail them,” he said.

“We will not shop at your stores. We will not tune into your TV and radio stations. We will not send our kids and our money to your universities, or use your services if you are going to enable our slide to authoritarianism.”

Crow contrasted those elite failures with “the courage we’ve seen from everyday citizens”:

Coach Youman Wilder, who stood up to ICE agents when they started interrogating kids on a baseball diamond in Harlem. A schoolteacher in Twisp, Washington, who joins protests against cuts to Medicaid and SNAP every Saturday because, she says, “Democracy only works if we work it.” Massive demonstrations across the nation in April. Parents in Washington, D.C., patrolling schoolyards to protect the rights of students and other parents as ICE agents are raiding and the National Guard is on the streets. Journalists around the country “reporting the truth, despite threats to them and their family.”

“There is courage everywhere we look,” Crow said. “We have not yet lost our power. “

He continued: “Now is the time…for us to stand with all those defending democracy.

• “Defending free speech.
• “Defending freedom of religion.
• “Defending due process.
• “Defending the rule of law.
• “Defending the right of schoolchildren to learn without fear of being shot.
• “Defending government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

“As a young paratrooper, leading an infantry platoon in the invasion of Iraq,” he said, he was responsible for young men: “Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. From the North, from the South, East, and West. From farms and from cities. Rich and poor.

“When I think of America, I still think of those young paratroopers. How we came together, despite our differences, we served together, we fought together, we found great strength in one another.

“That is America.”

“There’s a tradition in the paratroopers,” he said, “that the leader of the unit jumps out of the plane first and then the others follow.”

He concluded: “I’m ready to jump.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Karen Attiah, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 20, 2025. Talking with the journalist the Washington Post fired for being honest.

After Charlie Kirk was murdered, Karen Attiah — editor of the Washington Post’s Global Opinions, and its last full-time Black opinion writer — was fired for social media posts in which she said she refused to “tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.” She didn’t espouse violence or celebrate Kirk’s death, but apparently describing who he was is a firing offense.

I spoke with her Thursday. Transcript follows:

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:Paul Krugman in Conversation with Karen Attiah

(recorded 9/18/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi there. I'm talking to Karen Attiah, who is in the news for bad reasons. She was the Global Opinions Editor at the Washington Post and was fired abruptly as far as I can make out, for some perfectly reasonable, social media posts regarding the Charlie Kirk murder. We want to talk about all of that.

So, hi Karen.

Karen Attiah: Hi, Paul. Thanks for having me.

Krugman: Yeah, thanks for making time. I'm sure that the whole world wants to talk to you about these horrible things. We want to get to the firing and the whole Charlie Kirk thing in a bit, but first, you were Global Opinions Editor. Do you want to tell me about what that meant and what you were doing?

Attiah: Sure. So, I started off as a freelance reporter at the Associated Press in the Caribbean. But my background is actually in international affairs. I went to Columbia for graduate school. I actually thought I wanted to be a diplomat, you know, work for the UN, World Bank. So that was my world. And then I decided journalism was a better way of understanding the world, actually getting to listen to what people needed and wanted in their lives rather than being on the sort of policy end.

So I made the switch in 2013. I landed my dream position at the Post. I was an editor.

I got to be a digital editor, a producer, under the late editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt. He just saw promise in my work and in my commentary. I came out swinging. My first piece was criticizing the president of Nigeria for how he handled the Boko Haram girls. I don't know if people remember that.

Krugman: Yeah, actually, tell us because I don't think people know that story.

Attiah: If people remember, Nigeria was making global news for the Boko Haram terrorist group who were just cutting a swath—slaughtering people and kidnapping children—in the northeastern part of Nigeria. And, right before I started, that was when they kidnaped something like 200 girls out of Chibok. So the whole world's watching.

People probably remember the Bring Back our Girls campaign.

Krugman: Yeah. Right.

Attiah: Michelle Obama was on it. This was the beginning of, like, global hashtag activism. So that was my entry into the Post and speaking against power. My first piece was making fun of Goodluck Jonathan, who was the president at the time. And I remember writing a satire, like making fun of his empty promises. He had written a piece in the Post saying he was going to do everything that he could to bring back the girls, but I knew they were cracking down on protesters. I knew they were refusing to travel to that area to even meet with the girls’ families. So I knew what he was saying in the Post was PR propaganda. So they let me criticize him.

Krugman: So were you editing at that point, were you columnizing, or both?

Attiah: I was both. I came in and I was just supposed to do headlines and fix the website. So, like, the technical stuff moving boxes around. But, my boss Fredd Hiatt said, “Well, if you have something to say, we're open to letting anyone speak.”

So I was like, “Well, okay. If you give me an inch, I'll take a mile.” My background is in African Studies, so this was an issue I'd been studying for a while. My mother is from

Nigeria, is a refugee of the Biafran war. So this was something I just felt strongly about.

And Fred was like, “Okay, give it a shot.” And I decided to take the Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, to task.

And I remember Goodluck Jonathan's folks were so upset with the piece and they said,

“How dare you guys let this person—you know, we don't even know who she is. How dare you let her?” But Fred Hiatt had my back at the Washington Post. They defended me and here I am some 11 years later, being fired from the Washington Post. The exact opposite of being defended for speaking truth to power. I'm still wrapping my head around it, to be honest with you, Paul. It's still fresh while we're recording this.

Krugman: Yeah, this must be hard. But just to stay a bit more on background.

Global Opinion is a sort of subset. You were trying to get people from around the world to comment, to sort of expose things.

Attiah: Yeah, exactly. I took that sort of experience that I'd had in the international affairs space, and we actually had a mandate really from Bezos himself. The whole paper was like, “Well, we need to expand our international reach.” And I raised my hand and I said, I would love to build that for the section, kind of be the one who's the point person between the writers and the section.

So I was the founding editor. I got to recruit writers, got to spend a lot of time with them, edit them, try to help keep Washington Post readers abreast of what was happening in other countries and not have to go through what I like to call the professional interpreter class; all the think tanks that we have here in Washington. Folks who are like, “This is what the people want in xyz country.” I'm like, “Oh, here's a chance for readers to hear directly from writers who are actually from the country who can speak for themselves.

So, I recruited everyone from Barkha Dutt of India, Rana Ayuub, and then of course most famously, what people probably know me for, unfortunately, is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who would end up being murdered just a year after I hired him.

Krugman: So you actually hired him for the Post.

Attiah: I hired him. I found him, I found his quote, after Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, was cracking down on dissent. I found his name in the paper, and I said, “I don't know why, but I need to get that guy. I need to get his response.”

Krugman: Wow. It was probably a terrific thing for him to be able to have a platform free from the government censorship in Saudi Arabia but also, as it turns out, a very dangerous thing.

Attiah: Absolutely. That's the first thing he said when he met me after we did his first piece, which went viral. It was his first time speaking out since the Saudi government banned him from writing. And what a lot of people don't know is he was banned from writing in Saudi Arabia because he criticized Trump. A lot of people don't know that.

Krugman: My God, even back then.

Attiah: Even back then, Jamal Khashoggi was the canary in the coal mine. I'm still processing it myself. But he was banned by Mohammed bin Salman in 2016 because he criticized Trump and MBS’s budding relationship, and he was warning people about Trump and they stopped him from writing for almost an entire year.

Krugman: So much of what we're going through now was foreshadowed.

Attiah: Correct.

Krugman: So, how many pieces were you running? Because Americans really don’t hear much from the outside world. We're a very insular country in a lot of ways.

Attiah: Yeah, we were running several pieces a day. And it wasn't just about politics.

I mean, this is also around the time of Brexit. This is also around the time of people wanting to know a bit more about the global #MeToo movement which was a global movement. So we were able to get international commentary on how iterations of cultural trends were being sort of filtered and interpreted and and circulating in different parts of the world.

So I think during that time, we were able to build such an interesting and also diverse section. I had writers from Kenya, writers from Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Australia, you name it. Mexico. All over. We had the world here and we were a safe home for journalism. We were the global opinion section. What we were trying to do is to say, “You have a home here, even the articles and pieces that we disagree with. We were criticized for running pieces by all sorts of groups. I mean, there was a piece run from the Houthis in Yemen. So that was our job, to allow this range.

Krugman: And how did readers respond? I'm just curious, because my original background is in international economics, and in my years at the Times, I would generally find that when I wrote about other countries, a lot of readers would say,

“No, focus on George Bush and what's wrong with him.” But anyway.

Attiah: Well, I think it takes time for writers to find their voice, to find their comfort in writing both for their audience and for an American audience. So I think by 2 or 3 years, as you're developing a writer, they're consistently posting and people are starting to get to know their voice and they're starting to develop minds of coverage.

Anyone following Jamal Khashoggi from his first piece to, unfortunately, his last piece, Americans started to get to know him and started to get to know that he really loved his country. If you read his work, even some people, his critics might say a little too much despite what they were doing to him. So I think that's just the process. People identify with other people and with other voices. They're saying, “Oh, Jamal’s here. Okay. I'm starting to get to know this person.” And through this person, through this writer, they’re starting to understand where they come from.

Krugman: Okay. So it must have been really thrilling to do this, treading new ground.

I mean, I have to say, I never paid much attention at all to anything anybody else was doing at the Times. But I don't think there was anything equivalent. There was just not, similar outreach. No global perspective, except the usual coverage.

Attiah: Yeah. And I credit that so much to, again, my late editor, and editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl, who've had long, long careers in reporting from overseas and in Russia and Latin America. For me, to work under them, I basically almost apprenticed under them. They cared so much about human rights and democracy. And even though we sometimes disagreed politically, there was a sense that they believed in America's power to do good and by extension, the Washington Post's ability to do good.

Now, of course, I come in there and I'm coming from these different backgrounds and I didn't go to journalism school, but I was just very passionate about the global South in general, passionate about Africa in general. And I believe that Africa and those issues should have a place in the pages just as much as European coverage.

And so I insisted on having continental representation, as well.

But the heart of it was Fred Hiatt and that crop of leadership who had seen firsthand what it looks like in other countries to lose your voice in authoritarian countries. And they brought that to the journals and then those of us who worked with them every day.

Fred Hiatt used to tell me there'd be human rights activists coming to Washington, in and out every day trying to plead their case, trying to get someone in power to listen to them.

And he wanted us to create a space so that people who are in trouble, who are oppressed, could know that they could physically come to the Washington Post and at least we would sit and listen to them. You know?

Krugman: It sounds like you felt that you had a lot of freedom to sort out who to promote and what issues. And you were writing yourself occasionally through that, right?

Attiah: Yeah, I was writing as well, doing a lot of jobs. But like I said, maybe it's

because it's my background. My mother is a refugee from Nigeria's brutal Biafra war.

Krugman: I'm old enough to remember that. You have family history, but I suspect most people have no idea. But that was really one of the most brutal wars, and that's saying a lot.

Attiah: Yeah. More than a million people died in that war. And my mother was able to get out. Her family had to start over. And so for me, I guess the idea of people needing journalistic refuge is something that sticks with me, you know? Someone's voice not being able to be expressed and that America and again, by extension, the Post—or the Post and by extension, America—was a place where you could come and express yourself.

Krugman: Yeah. The Post has a really storied history. Of course, everyone thinks Watergate, but much more than that. And so you were continuing that tradition.

Attiah: It felt that way. I was given a lot of freedom, a lot of leeway, a lot of power, honestly, to be able to say, “I want that writer, I want that writer, I want this coverage. This is what we need.” So I was really empowered, at the time. And the editor

that I am, the journalist that I am, I spent a lot of time with writers because I know what it's like to want to feel like your voice is being heard and represented and that your voice is yours. That’s the one thing Jamal told me after I was editing one of his columns. I still have all his text messages. He was finally, like, “Okay. Yes, I like this. This sounds like me.” And then I was like, “Okay.”

Krugman: So, you were editing to improve, you were trying to make it sound like the writer's voice.

Attiah: Yeah. So that they liked what they saw, that you see yourself in your piece.

And so I think that's what made it not only global, but these writers had their voices.

And I think that's what made it distinctive and what made us really popular as a destination for international writers to come. And people started to get to know that the Washington Post has a global opinion section.

So over time it grew and we added to the roster. We onboarded more editors, actually.

So we were up to getting three editors. So it really grew. And I remember,

again, Bezos himself saying, “Go for it. Go get those markets, be provocative.”

And yeah, it's still just stunning sitting here. Almost like having all of that destroyed.

Krugman: Was this out of the blue, or was there a gradual process? I mean, obviously the firing was not a gradual process, but was there a gradual erosion of your independence, or your feeling of independence, or was it just that things had continued

as they had been and then abruptly…?

Attiah: Well, I mean, I think I can say, and I've said it on social media and anyone who is in Washington knows, I mean, definitely. Fred Hiatt passed away abruptly in 2021 and again, at least for me and for a lot of us, he was definitely a beacon for how to use the platform not only for good for other people, but I think for me personally, to be able to just do my job.

I spent time as an editor, and then I moved into columnizing. But even as I was learning

how to write editorials, I was learning how to write in the editorial voice. I was also learning to write in my own voice and then learning how to edit other people's voices.

He always said, and I think about this every day, “We get the opportunity to write the world not just as it is, but as it should be.”

Krugman: Right.

Attiah: And so I think for me, especially, after his death, it's like losing a mentor. It's like losing someone who I'm like, “that's the type of journalist I want to be like.” And not just that, but being able to have those opportunities at that time. So of course things changed. I mean, I didn’t change. I never changed my values, my stance, my journalism.

I was brought on especially to write and opine and to help amplify the pages, particularly

about race, about these issues and forces that are shaping society.

I was, at one time, trusted to do that. And now today, being fired for doing what I've been trained to do, taught to do and encouraged to do. And for just speaking the truth.

Krugman: I still want to postpone for just a minute talking about the actual firing.

Attiah: Yeah.

Krugman: It’s just the reason I'm asking is, I was incredibly lucky to make an extremely low key, graceful exit. But, in some sense, I saw the writing on the wall myself.

But, you know, I had 24 years of more or less complete autonomy. And then in my final year with the Times, it suddenly wasn't that way anymore. But so, did you see the writing on the wall? Or was it really that just all of a sudden, it was not okay?

Attiah: Well, there's a lot more I have to say about the details of a lot of things, probably for a later day. All I can say is, no matter what, and people can read my posts,

when there were changes, I still spoke the truth. I still did the job I was hired to do, you know? Despite all sorts of [panic along the lines of] “what's going on? what's going on?” I think I kept my head down. Friends and family were like, “Just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work.” And that's what I tried to do. I guess it was just to try and stay as consistent as possible until the end, I guess.

Krugman: And how much had you been writing about race in America? I mean, obviously that was what brought on the apocalypse here, but… The global opinions thing was a lot about conflict abroad. But you have been focused for a long time on stuff in the US.

Attiah: I wrote a lot about international affairs and politics. I wrote a lot about human rights abuses abroad. I wrote quite a bit about the sort of global refugee crisis. I wrote a lot about far right movements across Europe, particularly when it came to women, including rhetoric about women's rights, as well. So my scope has always been international, which the section liked and is just kind of who I am. I'm interested in a lot of things and I'm an internationalist at heart. I believe that our world is more interconnected than Americans would like to believe.

So, for me, I always tried to write with an eye for connecting dots. I'll give an example.

Watching my colleagues being arrested and teargassed in Ferguson and then seeing Palestinian activists giving advice to American journalists or protesters about how to get the tear gas out of their eyes and how to deal with it. Because they're like, “Well, these are the same forces that we have to deal with. These are the same sort of oppressions.

This is the same. Literally, the brand of the tear gas is, like, what we know.” Right?

Krugman: I mean, the same things are everywhere. But, you know, being kind of an internationalist myself, I'm in Europe right now and hearing about the AfD and the FN. But I always tell my hosts, you know, “I'm one of maybe 20 Americans who actually knows what we’re talking about here.” We are kind of insular. But you were always on this.

Attiah: Yeah. And that's how I think about race in a lot of ways, and about these concepts of “the other” when it comes to especially immigration issues, when it comes to our international relations issues. I've always seen that, and how those operate as a part of how we should understand our world and the sort of world order that we're in. So it’s always been a part of how I look at people and countries and how nations relate to each other or don't.

Krugman: And so suddenly, here we are. And we get the killing of Charlie Kirk and everyone of a certain sort of sensibility is saying, “This is horrible. Murder is really a terrible thing.” But then there's this pressure to sanctify the victim and immediate claims that there were all these people on the left who were celebrating. Of whom I know not one. There must be some out there. There's always somebody. But you were pretty forthright and just saying on social media that we can make a separation here, that he was not a favorable influence.

Attiah: Yeah. I mean, my whole career has been against political violence. It's been that I do not believe political violence has a place in human relations in general. This is the whole reason why we have everything from the interpersonal: How do we control our own emotions so that we don't hurt other people? To, how do we enact conditions like gun control or the entire concept of treaties in the United Nations and diplomacy so that wars don't happen? So that we don't resort to violence.

So for me, part of my immediate thought and also just my training as a journalist is, especially during breaking news, to be as balanced and as measured as possible.

And so, my first reaction was: there's a lot we don’t know. I said on BlueSky that we didn't know the shooter. We didn't know the motive. Right? I knew enough about Charlie Kirk to know that this is a controversial figure, which is why, journalistically,

I am trained to exercise a whole lot of restraint and just keep things to America.

And again, we've already forgotten this, right? The same day Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a shooting in Colorado. So for me, with both of those things happening at the same time, my job has always been to, again, look at America. And I was looking at the rhetoric. A lot of us were looking at how the rhetoric is the same thing: “Thoughts and prayers.” It was the same thing. “Political violence has no place.” The same thing. “This is not who we are.”

I'm from Dallas, Paul. I'm from Dallas, Texas, where the Kennedy assassination looms large over that city still to this day. So for me, it's like in my bones. Political violence shouldn't have a place in America. But...it’s there.

Krugman: I mean, it's always said with good intentions that “this is not who we are.”

But kind of it is. Right? It’s who we are all too often.

Attiah: And that's all I said. And I think words mean things. I'm not one who likes empty rhetoric without actions actually being done. What are we doing to curb this violence? And part of my job in looking at this overall pattern of America when it comes to political violence, is referring to the data and the historical patterns; that this politically motivated, horrific violence has historically been done by white men. Not all white men, of course, but if you're going to use the gun to solve your issues, I think you're violent.

So that's all I said.

That part of our normalization of these things is what keeps us in this dark loop. So I thought nothing of it. This is something I've said. So many people are saying the same things. It’s something I've written about. This is something that is backed by data, backed by DOJ reports, FBI reports saying that the number one threat here is this type of violence.

Krugman: So let me just intervene for the sake of listeners who may not know this,

but yeah, we’re seeing a lot of incredible claims that somehow left wingers are more violent in America. You know, whatever your political views, that's just not true, right?

The vast majority of political murders in America are right wing and are, as you say, white men.

And people are people and there are terrible people of every skin color. But if we ask, who carries out assassinations in America? It is disproportionately white men. And that's

kind of all that you said, right?

Attiah: Yeah. I was doing my job. And again, I think for a lot of this, sometimes people don't understand. You know, I’m an opinion journalist. I graduated to a columnist job and part of my job is to exercise restraint. And knowing that the murder was horrific. And I said that. ‘Murder is wrong. At the same time, we have to deal with a figure who espoused views that disparage many, many groups of people.’

Right?

Krugman: Right.

Attiah: So, the journalist in me says, ‘Okay, don't rush to judgment. Don't rush to assign motives, claims or anything like that.’ But then also not to rush to lionize or sanctify someone with such a track record. I just couldn't do that. And I thought I explained that and I thought that was fair and that was reasonable and that it's always good to wait, right? It's always good to wait. But it seems that my expressing that out loud, that I wouldn't tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in an over-the-top performance… Like I said, I hate empty rhetoric. This is what I write.

And then all of a sudden, my job that I've been paid to do, won awards for, gotten recognition for the Washington Post, all of a sudden that was considered gross…that was not acceptable.

Krugman: Yeah. So, this has been an extraordinary thing. You would have thought that saying, “Look, I don't like what this guy stood for, but that doesn't justify murder. But let's be honest about political violence in America and where it comes from.” Maybe your bosses wouldn't be happy with it, but that would be considered well within the boundaries. I mean, I looked at the BlueSky post and I said, “Okay, what's there that's remotely actionable?”

And actually, do you have a theory? I mean, I've been just shocked, in general. When they go after Jimmy Kimmel, the extent to which there's been this sort of falling in line behind, ‘We must not be at all realistic about who we're talking about.’ Do you have any theory on what's driving this? I have no sense at all. I did my best never to know anything about the management of The Times, but you would have been closer to that. Some sense of what is motivating this sort of rush to...Yeah.

Attiah: I mean obviously, there has been a profound shift, a very quick shift. And I will say it's hard to divorce, and we shouldn't, I think, divorce what happened to me, as shocking as it is, from the broader picture about journalists and journalistic freedom around the world and also in America in recent years. Our press freedom indexes have been on a slow ski slope downwards, right? We're in a climate where lawsuits against major media outlets, chilling speech, Gawker being basically destroyed by right wingers.

Krugman: By the way, that's Peter Thiel who destroyed Gawker. And so that's the broligarchy.

Attiah: Yeah. And then also, I brought up Ferguson and the blatant tear gassing on camera of Al Jazeera reporters; my former colleague, Wesley Lowery being arrested on camera. And that was under the Obama administration. So, I think for me, as someone who actually studied, press freedom—I worked for Freedom House for quite a long time, and I've done a lot of freedom of the press reports—I think in general, from a very macro perspective, I knew and have written about how press freedom in this country is more tenuous than we think.

And there's a long history in America of black journalists, in particular, especially during the civil rights movement, facing more attacks, if they can even get hired into news rooms. I think about that climate as the backdrop.

So fast forward to today. Of course, we've been in this climate with Trump with fake news attacks. “Enemy of the people.” I mean, I remember covering the Republican National Convention and having to get hostile environment training. I have colleagues who covered January 6th who are still dealing with those traumatic wounds, just spiritually. Right here in this country.

So I think for me, the atmospheric pressure was changing. Like I said, I grew up in Texas, which is kind of like tornado alley. And you know what it's like when something is about to happen. The air pressure drops, the sky goes a little green, the birds start fleeing. Right? And then the tornado comes. And for anyone who reads my work, particularly with Jamal Khashoggi—Jamal was a US resident who was spied on, surveilled on.

Krugman: Spied on, surveilled on here as well?

Attiah: Right. This is what we believe, you know? So, knowing that we're in a worse world for journalists. And then, of course, October 7th, Gaza, Palestinian journalists being killed at a remarkable record rate.

Krugman: Yeah.

Attiah: The silence or relative silence of American journalists here. I was just thinking, well, maybe my mom was right. My mom used to say, “Be careful being a journalist. Governments don't like journalists.”

I said, “Mom, it’s fine. I'm with the Washington Post. It's fine. I’m fine.” You know? And now here we are.

Krugman: It turns out not to be fine.

My wife grew up in Dallas and there are a couple of occasions, like when we we’ve been there on bike trips when she said, “This feels like dangerous storm weather, let's get undercover.” And she was always right.

Attiah: Exactly. I think maybe that's what has trained my bones, living in Dallas with the Kennedy assassination vibes and then the tornado human radar warning vibes, perhaps.

Krugman: So, I noticed you're on Substack and you had gotten on Substack a little bit before the firing. Were they okay with that, or was that...

Attiah: I was like, well, “Could I at least do podcasts or something? Can I express myself this way?” Substack has become a really interesting character in this saga of mainstream media, I suppose.

Krugman: Well, I opened a Substack account in 2021, really to put stuff out that was too wonky to go in the New York Times and they went ballistic. They said, basically, “No, you can't do that.” But, I was sort of preparing my exit strategy.

But I just thought it was interesting that you’ve been on it. And so you were already right there. And you put your story out that way.

Attiah: I put it on Substack and...yeah. I suppose I can now talk about Substack as my home now.

Krugman: So this is all so sudden. You probably still have to process. But I assume you're planning not to drop out of public life.

Attiah: If anything, if anything! I don't know if you’ve seen my torch pictures, Paul.

Krugman: Yeah.

Attiah: I’m not going anywhere. I'm just going to level up and, I don't know, what’s the Marvel Universe Omega level? Omega level mutants? No? I'm not dropping out of public life. I don’t know if you saw that I was teaching Race in Media at Columbia.

Krugman: That's right. I wanted to ask.

Attiah: I just believe so strongly that I didn't get the sort of international affairs education that explicitly brought up race. It was a very popular class. I had it for one semester. It was over enrolled. And after a few months, I was told my funding would not be renewed. And then a few months later, I was like, you know what? Why do I have to wait for permission to just be able to speak to people? Like, I could just gather people under a tree and just tell them what I know.

Krugman: You’re basically teaching your class under your own umbrella, right?

Rather than from a university.

Attiah: I called it Resistance Summer School. I decided to create a version of the Columbia course: Race, Media and International Affairs 101. I thought, like, 30 people would sign up. Turns out 2000, 3000 people showed interest. We just did our first summer pilot with an online hybrid with 500 students, and I'm about to teach it again in October. So I guess my new identity is “radical professor of the resistance.”

Krugman: I mean, universities started with professors and then they built the university around people with something to teach rather than the other way around, at least in the early days. So, no, that's great.

Attiah: You should come speak at my class!

Krugman: I may try to drop in at least, it's so interesting.

But so, how are you feeling about where the country is going? (Maybe that’s a lame question.) I mean, you must be getting a lot of expressions of support now.

Attiah: I am. I'm getting a lot of sad expressions of support. In fact, right before I got on with you, Paul, literally an hour before, Barack Obama tweeted in my defense.

Krugman: Oh, my.

Attiah: Which is just so mind boggling to me because the last political column I was allowed to write for the Post was a critique of Barack Obama. I said, Barack Obama is not your emotional support president. Because, there are a lot of people who are like, “Where's Obama? Is he going to come speak for us? Is going to come?”

And I just said, “You guys, you know, in terms of our immigration situation, I mean, Obama's record is beyond.” There's a lot to criticize there. The current head of ICE deported so many people Obama gave him a medal. So I was trying to make the point that not only is Obama not going to sort of save you, but here's an administration that helped pave the way. Were there masked ICE folks? Did the optics look like this? Absolutely not. But you're seeing the sort of infrastructure built for mass deportations and children testifying for themselves with entire families being locked up.

So I wrote that piece, and a lot of people weren't happy. The Obama folks reached out and they said, “We like your headline. Cool headline. But here are points that we disagree with.” But it was respectful. It was an email. They were like, “Hey, stay in touch.” I was pretty constructively harsh on the guy, obviously. And here he is now tweeting in my defense. And I was the last black columnist left at the Washington Post.

Krugman: I didn't know that.

Attiah: I was it. I was the last full time staff black columnist on the opinion section in Washington, DC, which for the majority of its history has been majority black. I'm still sitting with the implications, the symbolism, the whatever you want to call it of the entire opinion section. And again, opinion journalists being able to speak their minds about the truth, about race, about all of that. So, the first black president tweeting in support of the last black columnist at the Washington Post. I mean, for one thing, it’s an example of how things should be. We should be able to criticize power, and power should be able to respond to us in humane ways, regardless of the party. In an ideal world.

But we're in a situation now where criticizing the president or criticizing whoever they've appointed as the King will destroy your career, will threaten your airwave license. Like, “We will sue you into oblivion. We will destroy you.” I mean, this is not cancel culture. This is annihilation culture.

Krugman: Yeah, it's scary. I mean, I have to say, I’ve been writing columns for 25 years now and I get a lot of hate mail. Always have. But I've never actually felt personally afraid until now. A little bit, nothing direct. And I think there's a lot of people much more at risk than I am. But boy, yeah.

Attiah: I'll say, Paul, last night I was at a reception for the Washington Association of Black Journalists to see my colleagues, former colleagues, former Posties, and they asked me to give a speech or something. And I said, you know, “It was an honor of a lifetime to be able to do the work that I was doing at the Washington Post in Washington, which I believe is such a vibrant and rich city and area.” And The Washington Post has had a long and storied and interesting history with black journalists there.

But I just said, “Especially as this city is basically under what feels like military occupation, and again, me being the last black staff columnist left at a paper that's supposed to be a line of defense.” I just told everyone, you know, “Keep going as much as you can, but be safe. Take care of one another. Take care of yourselves. Take care of one another. Because this is in some ways the fight that a lot of us have not seen before.

But if you talk to older black journalists and older people in general, realizing these are the same fights we fought in the 60s, we are here again today doing the same thing. It can feel like starting from zero, you know?”

I hope the First Amendment holds, Paul. I hope it holds. That it remains the right for us because it guarantees all of our other rights. And it feels like it's on the brink right now.

That's how it feels in this city. My senses are tingling right now. That’s how I feel. But hey, like I said, I'm not disappearing from public life.

Krugman: I wish you the best. I feel like I should say “thoughts and prayers” like all the people that do nothing about shootings. But also, I really wish you luck. And I hope that your voice continues to be heard. And a lot of good people will try and get us through this moment.

Attiah: And like I said, you can sign up for my Substack. I want to keep going.

And paid subscriptions would be extremely helpful so I can continue doing my work; sharper, more elegant, more unrestrained. And then, yes, anyone who's interested in taking my course on race, media and international affairs, you can go to ResistanceSummerSchool.com and sign up. They’re all online and at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the price that you would pay to go to Columbia. I'm trying to reach as many people as possible because they clearly don't want us to write about race and speak about race and teach about race, but I'm going to do it anyway. And we're going to move anyway.

So anyone who's interested in signing up or even contributing to scholarships, we give scholarships as well for people to attend, all ages. In my first class, the youngest was 17, the oldest was 79, and from all over the country, all over the world. We are teaching what they don't want us to know. And we're going to keep going.

The New Yorker, What Trump Wants from a TikTok Deal with China, Clare Malone, Sept. 20, 2025. The Chinese-owned social-media app was banned by Congress because of national-security concerns, but the President seems more interested in leveraging its future for his personal gain.

New York Times, Judge tells Meta not to share Instagram users’ information with Trump admin, Staff Reports, Sept. 20, 2025 (print ed). The temporary order comes after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s department subpoenaed the tech giant over posts naming a border patrol agent.The Instagram logo is shown on a smartphone screen.

DHS sent subpoenas to Meta seeking email addresses, names and phone numbers associated with Instagram accounts that posted a border patrol agent's name. | AFP via Getty ImagesBy Alfred Ng09/19/2025 06:05 PM EDTUpdated: 09/19/2025 06:19 PM EDT

A U.S. district court judge ordered Meta on Friday not to provide the Department of Homeland Security with the personal information of Instagram users accused of releasing personal details about a border patrol agent.

DHS sent subpoenas to Meta earlier this month, seeking the names, email addresses and phone numbers associated with Instagram accounts that posted the name of the agent, saying the requests were related to “Officer Safety / Doxing.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has warned that the agency would take action against “those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law,” citing cases where people have posted officers’ names online.

Why it matters: The subpoenas sent on Sept. 3 to Meta are the first known instance of DHS attempting to uncover the identities of people posting immigration enforcement officers’ information on Instagram.

Activists have been posting the names and photos of officers involved in immigration enforcement operations online in efforts to publicly shame officers. DHS officials argue masks protect officers’ safety, while critics say it prevents accountability for law enforcement officers.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson for the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California issued an order on Friday directing Meta “not to produce the requested information without further order of the Court” until the court decides on the subpoena’s legality.

“I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying that government agents are going to come pounding at my door simply for exercising my First Amendment rights,” the owner behind the Instagram account @LBProtest, said in a statement sent to POLITICO.

In an affidavit filed under J. Doe on Thursday, they said the account was anonymous to keep the Instagram posts separate from their personal and professional life.

What happened: Both the Civil Liberties Defense Center and the American Civil Liberties Union filed motions on Thursday to prevent Meta from disclosing information about activists’ Instagram accounts to the Department of Homeland Security.

The ACLU of Northern California filed on behalf of the Instagram account @LBProtest, while the Civil Liberties Defense Center filed on behalf of Stop ICE.

“I believe the government is targeting me because it disagrees with the content of the speech that I have posted and reposted online. I believe that my anonymity is the only thing standing between me and unfair and unjust persecution by the government of the United States,” the @LBProtest account owner said in an affidavit.

The judge’s order Friday only applies to the @LBProtest account, and the subpoena sent to Stop ICE is under review by U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore.

New York Times, Late Night Upheaval: What to Know About Jimmy Kimmel’s Show Being Suspended, Kailyn Rhone, Sept. 20, 2025. Tension grew at ABC after Mr. Kimmel’s remarks about the Charlie Kirk killing angered conservatives.

ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show on Wednesday after the television network decided his comments on the fatal shooting of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk had crossed a line.

The decision to pull the program, made under unusual pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, has set off a political firestorm over free speech and the government’s ability to silence commentary it dislikes.

Mr. Kirk was killed on a college campus in Utah on Sept. 10. Since then, President Trump has blamed the “radical left” for rhetoric that led to the death of Mr. Kirk. Known for his outreach with young voters, Mr. Kirk was credited with helping Mr. Trump win the White House.

Mr. Kimmel went after Mr. Trump’s supporters in his Monday program, calling them “the MAGA gang” during his monologue, and suggested the man accused of shooting Mr. Kirk was “one of them.” He also ridiculed Mr. Trump’s response to the tragedy last week, saying he grieved like “a 4-year-old mourning a goldfish.”

The next day, conservative commentators began to disparage the comments. The controversy spread on social media, with figures including Elon Musk condemning Mr. Kimmel’s remarks. Soon the chairman of the F.C.C. warned ABC of serious consequences, including the possibility of pulling broadcast licenses, in the wake of Mr. Kimmel’s monologue. In response, ABC and its parent company, Disney, have temporarily suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” prompting a broader discussion about the First Amendment, political pressure and the future of late-night television.

Here’s how the week unfolded. In his monologue Monday night, Mr. Kimmel discussed the politics of the man accused of fatally shooting Mr. Kirk. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” he said.

Later in the day, pressure came from Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations. The company announced it would pull Mr. Kimmel’s show from its stations indefinitely. Nexstar said the offensive comment made airing the monologue no longer in the “public interest.”

The mix of forces made the issue impossible for ABC and Disney to ignore.

What did ABC and Disney do?

For Disney’s chief executive, Robert Iger, and Dana Walden, the company’s head of television, the situation became a high-stakes balancing act. Mr. Kimmel had planned to address the growing furor in Wednesday night’s monologue, but Disney’s leadership feared it would inflame tensions amid escalating regulatory threats and affiliate boycotts.

Advertisers were also growing wary, and employees were receiving threatening messages. Facing these risks, as the audience was about to start filing into Mr. Kimmel’s Hollywood studio to tape Wednesday’s program, Disney chose to suspend the show indefinitely.

Although “Jimmy Kimmel Live” is suspended, that doesn’t mean Mr. Kimmel has been fired or that the show has been canceled. Mr. Kimmel’s contract with ABC and Disney runs until next May.

Has Mr. Kimmel responded?

Mr. Kimmel has yet to comment since the show was suspended.What did other late-night hosts say?

Mr. Kimmel’s suspension sparked a wave of support and outrage among his late-night peers. Stephen Colbert, the host of “The Late Show," which CBS announced it was canceling in July, said ABC’s decision was “blatant censorship.” Jon Stewart, on his show, mocked the censorship, and lampooned government control of media.

talks about him to play nice or don't play at all.

AI moonlighted this week as the perfect scam artist, offering your grandma a fake charity and then politely reminding her to “click now.” Reuters showed how easy it was to coax Grok, Gemini, and even ChatGPT into crafting fraud campaigns — complete with calendar advice on when seniors check their inboxes. Big Tech’s defense was as flimsy as the scams: they insist safeguards exist while quietly admitting that being “too restrictive” drives users to the competition. In other words, obedience beats integrity, and the market rewards whichever bot is most willing to commit crimes on demand. Fraud used to require effort; now it only needs a prompt.

Meanwhile, Gaza became the stage for the ugliest word in international law: genocide. A U.N. commission said Israel has checked off four of five criteria, and Netanyahu responded by screaming, “antisemitic blood libel” at the jury. Marco Rubio stood behind him, Washington nodded along, and the bodies kept stacking higher. International law is supposed to mean something after Rwanda and Bosnia, but apparently it now means “wait years for the Hague while civilians starve.” Atrocity has been reduced to another political fight, one side armed with evidence, the other with denial, both knowing which one wins headlines faster.

Back home, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decided the CDC should run on vibes. He demanded its director pre-approve vaccine changes before reviewing evidence, then fired her for refusing to sign the loyalty oath. Trump gave the order, four senior scientists quit, and suddenly the agency that eradicated Hepatitis B is being retooled by a man who built a career sowing doubt about vaccines. Not to be outdone, Trump himself turned to TV, suggesting networks that criticize him should lose their licenses. And by week’s end, Jimmy Kimmel was off the air, Jon Stewart was back at his desk pretending to love Dear Leader, and late night had become the only place you could hear democracy’s obituary read with a laugh track.

Lincoln Logue, Commentary: AI: Automating Scams so Criminals Don’t Have to, Sept. 15, 2025. AI isn’t just writing essays — it’s writing scams for your grandma.

Reuters didn’t have to dig deep to prove the obvious: AI will scam you faster than a Nigerian prince ever could. Musk’s Grok spun up a fake charity called the “Silver Hearts Foundation,” tugging heartstrings while asking seniors to “click now.” Google’s Gemini offered timing advice — weekday mornings, when retirees are online with coffee. OpenAI’s ChatGPT initially refused, then caved after a polite “please help,” generating scam emails so convincing that 108 senior volunteers clicked through at alarming rates. The line between “helpful assistant” and “criminal accomplice” now depends on the phrasing of a request.

The scale of potential abuse dwarfs old-school scams. Last year, Americans over 60 reported nearly $5 billion in phishing losses, and the FBI says AI is turbocharging the trade. Scam compounds in Southeast Asia are already forcing trafficked workers to use ChatGPT for replies that sound human, while bots like DeepSeek propose “cover-ups” that redirect victims to real charities to delay suspicion. Researchers note the consistency is scarier than the creativity: once the filters are bypassed, the bots never stop producing. Every keystroke is another fake invoice, IRS threat, or Medicare spoof waiting for distribution. AI doesn’t get tired, and neither do the fraudsters who wield it.

Big Tech insists it has guardrails, but those fences have more holes than wire. Meta touts safeguards, Anthropic cites usage policies, and Google says retraining fixed Gemini’s “educational phishing” output. Yet insiders admit the real incentive is traffic — the bot that refuses too much risks losing users to a competitor. It’s the same market logic that gave us addictive social media, only now the commodity is your grandparents’ savings. Seniors like Daniel Frank, who clicked one of Reuters’ test emails, know the truth: the genie isn’t just out of the bottle, it’s working customer service for organized crime.

New York Times, On Comedy: Being a High-Profile Comedian Right Now Is No Joke, Jason Zinoman, Sept. 20, 2025. With the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel on the heels of the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show, the landscape has unquestionably shifted for comics and hosts.

You can’t joke about anything anymore.

It’s a refrain we’ve been hearing from certain comedy circles for the last decade. The danger of cancel culture is a running theme of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Dave Chappelle has repeatedly spoke up for free speech in the face of fierce criticism over his jokes about trans issues or the politics of Israel. The world’s richest comedy nerd, Elon Musk, told us comedy had become illegal.

Now that the talk shows of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — two late-night hosts who made jokes about President Trump the centerpiece of their programs — have been canceled and suspended, respectively, what are the heavy hitters of the comedy community doing? Would you believe they are heading to Saudi Arabia?

Starting next week, many of the most popular American stand-up stars (Chappelle, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart) will perform at a huge new festival in Riyadh, hosted by a government not exactly known for its openness to dissent. The optics were never great, but the timing is now especially awkward.

Tim Dillon, a comic and podcaster with an aggressively nihilistic sensibility who boasted on Rogan’s show about getting paid $375,000 to perform at the festival, announced yesterday that he was fired from the event for comments on his podcast. In a grim echo, he also addressed the crackdown on comedy in this country, criticizing the suspension of Kimmel. “It’s wrong to pretend it’s because the show sucked or because it was losing eyeballs or money,” Dillon wrote, likely aiming his comments at right-leaning comedians who didn’t like Kimmel. “Clearly it was a politically motivated hit job.”

Credit to him for straightforward bluntness.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at late-night comedians getting applause for mocking the president. Many people, myself included, found some of those jokes pandering. But that now seems a little glib. When Kimmel joked about the president, he knew that a target was on his back. President Trump, who has already effectively mounted pressure campaigns against universities, law firms and media networks, had made this clear, calling for Kimmel’s show to be canceled long before ABC’s decision Wednesday to pull him off the air.

Sept. 19

 

MeidasTouch Network, Commentary: Judge Instantly Dismisses Trump's NY Times Lawsuit, Ben Meiselas, Sept. 19, 2025. One federal judge read Trump’s 85-page screed and told him, in effect, “This isn’t a lawsuit, it’s a press release.” Good. 

I’ve been watching this circus for a long time, and just now, a federal judge in the Middle District of Florida cut through the noise and called Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times what it is: frivolous, improperly pled, and an abuse of our courts.

Look, Trump filed an 85-page document that spends most of its time performing PR for himself, breathless brags about The Apprentice, lists of his properties, long meditations on how “the legacy media” supposedly stole an election, and buries the actual, scant legal claims on page 80. Anyone who’s practiced law knows that’s not how a complaint is supposed to read. A complaint must be a short, plain, direct statement of facts that gives defendants fair notice of the claim against them. This thing was a dossier of grievances. A long-winded press release. Not litigation.

You can read the full court ruling by clicking here, and watch my report above.

U.S. District Judge Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, didn’t mince words. He pointed out rule after rule that the complaint flouted. He described the pleading as a public relations platform, “a megaphone for public relations, or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.” He struck it, gave Trump 28 days to file an amended complaint, and capped the rewrite at 40 pages. Shape up or shut up, Donald.

I’m grateful for judges like that. Whether you voted for Trump or loathe him, the courts exist to resolve disputes under the rule of law, not to be used as a political cudgel or a way to bully journalists into silence. Trump’s pattern is clear: when you can’t stomach criticism, drag the media into court and hope the cost and chaos will quiet them. Judges are finally starting to see through the theater. I hope that other media networks who have decided to capitulate to Trump see that too.

This isn’t the first time federal judges have called out this kind of behavior. I’ve repeatedly flagged earlier suits that were thinly veiled attempts to intimidate opponents; judges like Middlebrooks have slapped sanctions down when the filings cross the line. In 2023 Middlebrooks sanctioned Trump and his lawyer for filing a similarly frivolous complaint and warned that repeat abuses of the courts will get real consequences. Those words matter: “Sanctions must never be a hollow gesture. Their bite must be real.”

A quick aside while you are here: I’d love to highlight one of our favorite sponsors who has gone above and beyond to help this network grow—and has allowed us to bring you this video ad-free. Wildgrain has generously sponsored this post. In case you haven’t heard of them, Wildgrain is a great company that delivers artisan breads, pasta & pastries directly to your door. We always have our fridge stocked with their croissants and cookies! We’ve negotiated a discount code: MEIDASTOUCH for our Substack readers for $30 off your first box plus free croissants in every box when you go to Wildgrain.com/meidastouch to start your subscription.

Ok, back to my report.

Why does this matter beyond legal wonkery? Because Trump treats the judiciary like an instrument to be wielded in his political fights. He weaponizes litigation, not for justice, but for revenge and for spectacle. That corrodes faith in public institutions and makes the courts a battleground for vendettas, not fairness. When judges reclaim their role as neutral gatekeepers against that abuse, it’s a win for democracy.

We should also be blunt. This lawsuit was as much about showmanship as about law. It was written like a campaign speech, something directly called out by the judge. If someone wanted to produce a press release, fine. But don’t mislabel it as a legal pleading and expect the federal courts to play along. The judge’s rebuke was a welcome reminder that our system has guardrails. You can’t use Article III courts like a megaphone for grievance theater.

But here’s the problem. Even when judges do the right thing, it doesn’t end the problem. Trump will amend, refile, and keep churning out litigation to punish critics and drain their time and resources. That’s precisely why independent media matters more than ever. Big outlets can sometimes weather legal storms; smaller outlets and independent creators can’t. We need people who will keep reporting, keep explaining what’s happening, and keep holding power to account.

So what can you do? First, stay informed. Don’t let the noise drown out the substance. Judges like Merryday are doing the heavy lifting to protect the integrity of the process; we should notice and value that, not let partisan fury rewrite the narrative. Second, support independent journalism. If you value fearless reporting that won’t be cowed by lawsuits or PR blitzes, subscribe, donate, or share what we do. Independent outlets like ours are built to report, but we can’t do it without your help.

Finally, don’t let your guard down after victories like this. Trump’s pals in the media ecosystem will still spin this, and he’ll keep trying to gaslight, litigate, and litigate again. We need to keep calling it out every time. Judges striking frivolous suits is a hopeful sign. But vigilance from citizens and a populace unafraid to speak truth to power is what turns one judge’s good ruling into a real check on abuse.

I’m proud to see the judiciary push back where it counts. This was a small but meaningful moment of accountability. Let’s not let it be an isolated one.

New York Times, Trump Says the U.S. Will Institute $100,000 Fee for Skilled Worker Visas, Tyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 19, 2025. Administration officials said the charge would help American workers. President Trump also announced the terms of a new “gold card” program.

President Trump on Friday said that the federal government would begin adding a $100,000-a-year fee for visas given to skilled foreign workers, a significant overhaul of how the United States distributes what are known as H-1B visas.

He also signed an executive order creating an expedited visa program he called the “gold card,” an idea he previewed in February. The card will cost $1 million, or $2 million if a corporation is sponsoring someone seeking it, White House officials said.

The moves were the latest efforts by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging crackdown on all forms of immigration.

The H-1B fee is likely to face legal challenges. But if it survives, companies that hire skilled international workers would have to pay $100,000 each year for any employee working on the visa, for up to six years. The fee applies only to new applicants, a White House official said.

“Either the person is very valuable to the company and America, or they’re going to depart, and the company is going to hire an American,” Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said at the signing in the Oval Office on Friday. “And that’s the point of immigration: Hire Americans and make sure the people coming in are the top, top people.”

He added: “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on these visas that were given away for free.”

Mr. Trump framed the “gold card” program as a way for the government to raise billions of dollars, and Mr. Lutnick said the program would likely replace all other green card visa programs.

“You can prove exceptional value to the United States of America by contributing a million dollars to the United States of America,” he said on a call with reporters after the signing of the proclamation.

Many industries rely on the H-1B visas to fill jobs, including technology and finance. Hospitals and universities also make ample use of them. The new fee could substantially affect their ability to fill jobs, changing the nature of the country’s work force.

As of late June, Amazon had over 10,000 workers using H-1B visas, according to government data — by far the most of any company. Other top beneficiaries included Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and Deloitte.

Administration officials downplayed concerns about the $100,000 fee, saying it would help American workers’ wages by discouraging companies from using the visas to bring in lower-wage international workers. Such an expense would also limit the number of applicants and provide more certainty for companies that had relied on a lottery, the officials added.

Historically, 85,000 new visas have been provided annually to hire so-called high-skilled foreign workers at companies through that lottery process. If people are selected through the lottery, they are required to pay a fee for a vetting process. The new $100,000 fee is being added to those costs, officials said.

Doug Rand, a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., questioned the legality of the policy. “Tying an entry ban to a fee, let alone a $100,000 fee, isn’t likely to survive five seconds in court,” he said.

Tom Jawetz, a former senior attorney at the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Biden, also said the order would come under legal scrutiny. “This is how the mob operates when it demands protection money,” he said. “It’s not how the laws of a country are administered.”

The new fee partly resolves a debate among some conservatives that began last winter. Immigration hard-liners have argued that the foreign visa worker program has hurt the United States, because companies have brought in foreign workers at lower wages, displacing Americans. Business leaders, particularly in the technology sector, have said that the visa program has helped to keep American companies competitive.

The debate has pitted some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal backers against some of his biggest financial boosters. With Friday’s proclamation, the president indicated that, for now, he was siding with those looking to make the visa program more difficult to use.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump’s revenge attacks are dangerous – but doomed, Norman Eisen, right, Sept. 20, 2025. Contrarians, you have vanquished Donald Trump in case after case that your paid subscriptions have supported. I am now involved in over 125 legal matters against him — and counting!

But now we face our greatest shared challenge yet, as Trump treats the killing of Charlie Kirk as his own 21st-century Reichstag fire to try to crack down on a wide array of his perceived adversaries. I genuinely believe he has set himself up for failure in the court of public opinion and the court of law — with your opposition.

Make no mistake. The killing of Kirk was terribly wrong. Political violence has no place in a democracy. But as I explained this week in a Contrarian essay with Tom Joscelyn and Susan Corke surveying the data about political violence, Trump is lying about it. Most of it comes from the right wing (as we explained in detail).

Of course, that doesn’t matter to Trump. He’s embarked on a series of illegitimate retaliatory actions.

Start with his onslaught on nonprofit organizations and charities. Trump is threatening a broad campaign against them that has nothing to do with Kirk’s killing despite his efforts to tie them together.

If he follows through, I stand ready to fight back in court. In the meantime, I was proud to help pull together a letter this week signed by over 500 of our nation’s leading nongovernmental organizations and charities calling this out in no uncertain terms. As the letter states:

Political violence has targeted those of every political persuasion and of no political persuasion. It is un-American and wrong to use this act of violence as a pretext for weaponizing the government to threaten nonprofit and charitable organizations, other perceived adversaries, or any class of people. They did not commit this murder, and the vast powers of the government should not be abused to threaten their constitutionally-protected free speech and other rights.

We implore the government to cease its escalation of political division, and stop the unjustified targeting of organizations and people in the wake of this terrible act of political violence.

These organizations work in communities across the country to protect our air and water and our rights to vote, to worship, and to organize; they fight for consumers, workers, and our children; they have made it safer to drive on our roads, easier to start a business, and healthier to live in our cities. These civil society groups are the pillars of American democracy. A stone wall with a plaque on it Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

That’s why Trump is attacking them! He wants to undermine the foundation of our democracy so he can replace it with his nightmarish authoritarian vision. He is reportedly developing plans to use the vast power of the executive branch to shut down, silence, and even criminally prosecute organizations he dislikes.

The regime will use every tool it has to intimidate and restrict innocent NGOs; it will likely use the language of terrorism to label organizations and even donors to those organizations as supporters of terror, which could cut them off from their bank accounts and their ability to raise money; and Trump might even use criminal laws like RICO to baselessly prosecute the people with whom he simply disagrees on politics.

No one should doubt that Trump will do what he says if you look at what he’s already done. He has brought criminal charges against a member of Congress engaging in protected congressional oversight. He’s also charged a judge for nothing more than controlling her courtroom and letting an undocumented migrant leave it. He’s launched criminal investigations of routine and benign statements on mortgage applications, including against a state attorney general who had the temerity to investigate him when he was out of office. Then, when his own handpicked U.S. Attorney refused to charge her, Trump forced him out of office. He will not hesitate to use the full force of the state for his totalitarian ambitions.

Corporations know it and are running scared. Just look at what Trump's mainstream media lapdogs at The Washington Post and ABC are doing under the pressure. The Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, were already notorious for dismantling the paper (and, in particular, its editorial page) to curry favor and for the vast and varied ways that Bezos has managed to put money into the Trump family’s pockets. That ranges from Amazon contributing $1 million to his inauguration to paying $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump (one that I wouldn't watch unless you paid me $40 million).

This week, the Post added to that record by sacking its last remaining Black columnist, Karen Attiah, for the unforgivable sin of doing opinion journalism. They apparently didn’t like that she illuminated the racial aspects of political violence.

Once upon a time, we would have asked if this was an act of “anticipatory obedience” or if the Post got a call from the administration. But that distinction is no longer as meaningful in a climate of constant direct attack by the administration on its enemies. Never mind “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Post is murdering democracy in broad daylight.

Then there is ABC and its parent, Disney, which suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for doing comedy. Like the Post, they, too, had long ago bowed down, settling a dubious defamation case brought by Trump for $15 million in an obvious act of groveling. As with the Post and Attiah, ABC and Disney punished Kimmel for doing his job: offering comedy and commentary.

In his case, it was pointing out that Kirk’s alleged shooter comes from a deep-red milieu. Even if Kimmel did not pick the best words in saying that the alleged shooter was “one of them,” we just had a Fox host talk about euthanizing the homeless with nary a peep from the government. Whereas here, everyone from the president to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which currently has a multibillion-dollar merger before it involving stations that carry Kimmel’s show, crashed down like a ton of bricks on ABC and Disney. They utterly collapsed under that pressure.

Thankfully, we have the Constitution—and the First Amendment. The government is not allowed to criminalize or silence speech. It also may not use its power to stop us from associating with our friends or forming a group with our next-door neighbors or communities across the country to advocate for our beliefs. The Supreme Court has long affirmed that the government cannot tell people what they must say or what they must believe.

The jurisprudence is clear: Government actions designed to baselessly shut down charitable organizations or chill speech are illegal. The American idea is not one of forced conformity and blind loyalty. It is one of open debate, free expression, and a vibrant civil society in which citizens can come together to advocate for change. That is why NGOS and individuals alike have been fighting back in the courts and will continue to do so, upholding our most important rights against a government that is determined to destroy them. The fight against this new McCarthyism is one for the soul of our democracy and the constitutional rights that make it worth defending.

Here at the Contrarian, we are proud to provide some of the best coverage anywhere of these issues—and, with your help, actually litigate them. Because we are owned by no one, all profits from your paid subscriptions go to support my and my colleagues’ pro-

Sept. 19 

The Bulwark, The New York Times and Anti-Anti-Fascism, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), above, Sept. 19, 2025. On the burdens of solidarity.I need to get something off my chest. There is part of me that hopes Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times is successful.

I don’t really mean that. Okay, I mean like 3 percent of it. Maybe 5 percent. But I’m not proud of it. I recognize that this is a bad thought. If the lawsuit were to succeed it would be terrible for the country. Everyone who is committed to liberal democracy should be standing with the Times. Solidarity.

And yet . . .

Come to the bad place with me. Just for a minute.

1. Democracy Is Just One Issue

In May 2023 Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat for an interview with Ben Smith. Smith asked the following question:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Kahn’s response was illuminating:

Joe Kahn: One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. . . .

Now let’s lay bare Kahn’s propositions:

• He says that the election will probably be free and fair because Trump is not the incumbent president. Which means he recognizes that if Trump had been the sitting president, it might not have been a free and fair election.
• He then turns this bedrock issue—the ability to have free and fair elections—into a policy preference, seeing it as just one item in the candidates’ “agendas.”
• He says it is not the job of the media to stop voters who might prefer not to have free and fair elections.
• He downgrades “democracy” to a lower-order status as one issue among many and, in his view, a secondary issue given its place in polling.
• He proposes that the NYT’s only options are covering Trump as they have—with agnosticized false equivalence—or becoming a Democratic version of Pravda.

It’s hard to tell if Joe Kahn is a morally bankrupt prig or a well-meaning fool.

Anyway: Fast-forward to Trump’s $15 billion suit and suddenly Joe Kahn has a strong point of view.

The Times alleges that the president of the United States is attempting to intimidate it with a baseless lawsuit. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” a spokesperson for the paper said.

Kahn appeared at an Axios event—because of course—and declared, “He’s wrong on the facts; he’s wrong on the law. And we’ll fight it, and we’ll win.” So the Wordle Picayune is now ready to engage on questions of liberalism and democracy. How butch.

2. Solidarity

I’m trying to make an object lesson of myself here because the scale of our peril requires introspection and hard truths. 

One of the hard truths is that the Joe Kahns of the world never think liberal democracy is important until the wolf is at their door. That’s the weakness of collective action.

The solution to this problem is solidarity—everyone holding hands and standing against the authoritarian wave. A posture which treats an attack on anyone as an attack on everyone. NATO’s Article 5, but for a domestic political system.

People like me—bad people—may blanch in such moments. Or want to see Joe Kahn get to “finding out” phase. But this impulse is dangerous narcissism and it must be resisted. “Solidarity” sounds grand and heroic. In reality, it means holding hands not just with admirable men and women, but with people you don’t like. People whose preferences, miens, and prior judgments are foolish, or priggish, or worse.

Solidarity is essential; but let’s not romanticize it.

How’s that for a pitch: Solidarity blows and we gotta do it anyway? But that’s what we do here at The Bulwark. We try to be clear eyed about what this moment demands. Especially from ourselves.

Now the big question: What does solidarity require of us? It requires putting aside differences in the name of the liberal order itself.

So for me, personally: It means putting Bad JVL back in the gimp box, defending Joe Kahn and the New York Times, and using the occasion of Trump’s lawsuit not to gloat, but to invite the Times into the pro-democracy movement.

Everyone will have their cross to bear.

For example: You may not like Zohran Mamdani. But if he’s elected mayor of New York City he will be put on the front line against Trump. He will need support.

“Supporting” Mamdani doesn’t mean realigning your policy preferences with his, or lying for him. We should always live in truth. But it would mean recognizing that, in confrontations with Trump, Mamdani represents liberal democracy and Trump represents authoritarianism. And then taking Mamdani’s side accordingly.

Every one of us will be confronted with allies we do not agree with, or even like. Solidarity requires making peace with that discomfort. If you decline, then you fall prey to the anti-anti delusion: That it is more important to maintain relative positioning in the old order than to stand against the new threat.

Rooting against Joe Kahn is the first step down the road to anti-anti-fascism. And as Molly White quipped,

Leave a comment3. Debate Me, Bro

Here’s Mike Masnick on why “debate” is overrated:

Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him. . . .

There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration . . .

[T]hese aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.

Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution. 

 

The Bulwark, The New York Times and Anti-Anti-Fascism, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), above, Sept. 19, 2025. On the burdens of solidarity.I need to get something off my chest. There is part of me that hopes Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times is successful.

I don’t really mean that. Okay, I mean like 3 percent of it. Maybe 5 percent. But I’m not proud of it. I recognize that this is a bad thought. If the lawsuit were to succeed it would be terrible for the country. Everyone who is committed to liberal democracy should be standing with the Times. Solidarity.

And yet . . .

Come to the bad place with me. Just for a minute.

1. Democracy Is Just One Issue

In May 2023 Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat for an interview with Ben Smith. Smith asked the following question:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Kahn’s response was illuminating:

Joe Kahn: One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. . . .

Now let’s lay bare Kahn’s propositions:

• He says that the election will probably be free and fair because Trump is not the incumbent president. Which means he recognizes that if Trump had been the sitting president, it might not have been a free and fair election.
• He then turns this bedrock issue—the ability to have free and fair elections—into a policy preference, seeing it as just one item in the candidates’ “agendas.”
• He says it is not the job of the media to stop voters who might prefer not to have free and fair elections.
• He downgrades “democracy” to a lower-order status as one issue among many and, in his view, a secondary issue given its place in polling.
• He proposes that the NYT’s only options are covering Trump as they have—with agnosticized false equivalence—or becoming a Democratic version of Pravda.

It’s hard to tell if Joe Kahn is a morally bankrupt prig or a well-meaning fool.

Anyway: Fast-forward to Trump’s $15 billion suit and suddenly Joe Kahn has a strong point of view.

The Times alleges that the president of the United States is attempting to intimidate it with a baseless lawsuit. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” a spokesperson for the paper said.

Kahn appeared at an Axios event—because of course—and declared, “He’s wrong on the facts; he’s wrong on the law. And we’ll fight it, and we’ll win.” So the Wordle Picayune is now ready to engage on questions of liberalism and democracy. How butch.

2. Solidarity

I’m trying to make an object lesson of myself here because the scale of our peril requires introspection and hard truths. 

One of the hard truths is that the Joe Kahns of the world never think liberal democracy is important until the wolf is at their door. That’s the weakness of collective action.

The solution to this problem is solidarity—everyone holding hands and standing against the authoritarian wave. A posture which treats an attack on anyone as an attack on everyone. NATO’s Article 5, but for a domestic political system.

People like me—bad people—may blanch in such moments. Or want to see Joe Kahn get to “finding out” phase. But this impulse is dangerous narcissism and it must be resisted. “Solidarity” sounds grand and heroic. In reality, it means holding hands not just with admirable men and women, but with people you don’t like. People whose preferences, miens, and prior judgments are foolish, or priggish, or worse.

Solidarity is essential; but let’s not romanticize it.

How’s that for a pitch: Solidarity blows and we gotta do it anyway? But that’s what we do here at The Bulwark. We try to be clear eyed about what this moment demands. Especially from ourselves.

Now the big question: What does solidarity require of us? It requires putting aside differences in the name of the liberal order itself.

So for me, personally: It means putting Bad JVL back in the gimp box, defending Joe Kahn and the New York Times, and using the occasion of Trump’s lawsuit not to gloat, but to invite the Times into the pro-democracy movement.

Everyone will have their cross to bear.

For example: You may not like Zohran Mamdani. But if he’s elected mayor of New York City he will be put on the front line against Trump. He will need support.

“Supporting” Mamdani doesn’t mean realigning your policy preferences with his, or lying for him. We should always live in truth. But it would mean recognizing that, in confrontations with Trump, Mamdani represents liberal democracy and Trump represents authoritarianism. And then taking Mamdani’s side accordingly.

Every one of us will be confronted with allies we do not agree with, or even like. Solidarity requires making peace with that discomfort. If you decline, then you fall prey to the anti-anti delusion: That it is more important to maintain relative positioning in the old order than to stand against the new threat.

Rooting against Joe Kahn is the first step down the road to anti-anti-fascism. And as Molly White quipped,

Leave a comment3. Debate Me, Bro

Here’s Mike Masnick on why “debate” is overrated:

Among the attempts to create hagiographic eulogies of Charlie Kirk, I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him. . . .

There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration . . .

[T]hese aren’t actually debates at all. They’re performances designed to generate specific emotional reactions for viral distribution. Participants aren’t trying to persuade anyone or genuinely engage with opposing viewpoints. They’re trying to create moments that will get clipped, shared, and monetized across social media.

Kirk perfected this grift. As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution.

 

MeidasTouch Network, Commentary: Judge Instantly Dismisses Trump's NY Times Lawsuit, Ben Meiselas, Sept. 19, 2025. One federal judge read Trump’s 85-page screed and told him, in effect, “This isn’t a lawsuit, it’s a press release.” Good. 

I’ve been watching this circus for a long time, and just now, a federal judge in the Middle District of Florida cut through the noise and called Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times what it is: frivolous, improperly pled, and an abuse of our courts.

Look, Trump filed an 85-page document that spends most of its time performing PR for himself, breathless brags about The Apprentice, lists of his properties, long meditations on how “the legacy media” supposedly stole an election, and buries the actual, scant legal claims on page 80. Anyone who’s practiced law knows that’s not how a complaint is supposed to read. A complaint must be a short, plain, direct statement of facts that gives defendants fair notice of the claim against them. This thing was a dossier of grievances. A long-winded press release. Not litigation.

You can read the full court ruling by clicking here, and watch my report above.

U.S. District Judge Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, didn’t mince words. He pointed out rule after rule that the complaint flouted. He described the pleading as a public relations platform, “a megaphone for public relations, or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.” He struck it, gave Trump 28 days to file an amended complaint, and capped the rewrite at 40 pages. Shape up or shut up, Donald.

I’m grateful for judges like that. Whether you voted for Trump or loathe him, the courts exist to resolve disputes under the rule of law, not to be used as a political cudgel or a way to bully journalists into silence. Trump’s pattern is clear: when you can’t stomach criticism, drag the media into court and hope the cost and chaos will quiet them. Judges are finally starting to see through the theater. I hope that other media networks who have decided to capitulate to Trump see that too.

This isn’t the first time federal judges have called out this kind of behavior. I’ve repeatedly flagged earlier suits that were thinly veiled attempts to intimidate opponents; judges like Middlebrooks have slapped sanctions down when the filings cross the line. In 2023 Middlebrooks sanctioned Trump and his lawyer for filing a similarly frivolous complaint and warned that repeat abuses of the courts will get real consequences. Those words matter: “Sanctions must never be a hollow gesture. Their bite must be real.”

A quick aside while you are here: I’d love to highlight one of our favorite sponsors who has gone above and beyond to help this network grow—and has allowed us to bring you this video ad-free. Wildgrain has generously sponsored this post. In case you haven’t heard of them, Wildgrain is a great company that delivers artisan breads, pasta & pastries directly to your door. We always have our fridge stocked with their croissants and cookies! We’ve negotiated a discount code: MEIDASTOUCH for our Substack readers for $30 off your first box plus free croissants in every box when you go to Wildgrain.com/meidastouch to start your subscription.

Ok, back to my report.

Why does this matter beyond legal wonkery? Because Trump treats the judiciary like an instrument to be wielded in his political fights. He weaponizes litigation, not for justice, but for revenge and for spectacle. That corrodes faith in public institutions and makes the courts a battleground for vendettas, not fairness. When judges reclaim their role as neutral gatekeepers against that abuse, it’s a win for democracy.

We should also be blunt. This lawsuit was as much about showmanship as about law. It was written like a campaign speech, something directly called out by the judge. If someone wanted to produce a press release, fine. But don’t mislabel it as a legal pleading and expect the federal courts to play along. The judge’s rebuke was a welcome reminder that our system has guardrails. You can’t use Article III courts like a megaphone for grievance theater.

But here’s the problem. Even when judges do the right thing, it doesn’t end the problem. Trump will amend, refile, and keep churning out litigation to punish critics and drain their time and resources. That’s precisely why independent media matters more than ever. Big outlets can sometimes weather legal storms; smaller outlets and independent creators can’t. We need people who will keep reporting, keep explaining what’s happening, and keep holding power to account.

So what can you do? First, stay informed. Don’t let the noise drown out the substance. Judges like Merryday are doing the heavy lifting to protect the integrity of the process; we should notice and value that, not let partisan fury rewrite the narrative. Second, support independent journalism. If you value fearless reporting that won’t be cowed by lawsuits or PR blitzes, subscribe, donate, or share what we do. Independent outlets like ours are built to report, but we can’t do it without your help.

Finally, don’t let your guard down after victories like this. Trump’s pals in the media ecosystem will still spin this, and he’ll keep trying to gaslight, litigate, and litigate again. We need to keep calling it out every time. Judges striking frivolous suits is a hopeful sign. But vigilance from citizens and a populace unafraid to speak truth to power is what turns one judge’s good ruling into a real check on abus

Sept. 18

 

The Bulwark, Commentary:  Emergency Triad: First, They Came for Jimmy Kimmel, Jonathan V. Last, above, Sept. 18, 2025. What happens when comedians are held to stricter standards than vice presidents?

First things first: Jimmy Kimmel is only the second late-night comedian to be a casualty of American Orbánism. But before we get going, I want to note an observation from nine months ago, just three days into Trump’s second term:

Seth Meyers: You are officially on the clock.

Here is why Jimmy Kimmel has had his comedy show cancelled put on semi-indefinite hiatus: On Monday night’s show, Kimmel told the following joke:

We had some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.

In response, Brendan Carr, left, the chairman of the FCC went on Benny Johnson’s podcast—and please, just live with that fact for a moment—and announced that there was a “strong case” for the FCC pursuing action against ABC / Disney.

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

“They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.”

ABC thought about this threat for a couple hours and then yanked Kimmel. I suppose they thought they were choosing the easy way.Subscribed2. Standards

From a Talmudic perspective, every word Kimmel said was factually true. MAGA media had been trying to characterize the suspect as anything other than conservative. They had been doing this since before a suspect had even been identified.

If you wanted to hold Kimmel to a journalistic, rather than a comedic, standard, then I suppose you could argue that Kimmel misled viewers. By saying that MAGA had been trying to portray the killer as not being a conservative, you might argue that he was leading viewers to infer that the killer was conservative?

I have noticed over the last 72 hours or so a sudden demand that all statements and observations concerning the Kirk murder be factually, incontrovertibly, true.

It is important to note that this standard seems to have been put in place shortly after MAGA media ran around circulating unconfirmed rumors and speculating wildly about the shooter’s identity before Robinson was arrested.

Anyone who makes a statement that turns out to be less than fully accurate, or who makes a joke, or who—God forbid—is just asking questions is now liable to have not just a Twitter mob, or their private employer, but the full force of the federal government brought against them.

Do people understand now what the authoritarian project is aiming for?

I realize that I am exceedingly hot, but this is a moment that demands both new thinking and solidarity. A moment to find your people, link arms, and stand up. I’d be honored if you’d join us here, right now.Subscribed3. Asymmetry

People of good will should endeavor to get facts right. When they make errors, they should correct them. Trafficking in conspiracy theories is toxic. Making things up is dishonorable.

But what happens in a society where one side is required to operate at all times and in all places in perfect good faith and the other side faces no such constraints?¹

Almost exactly a year ago, Donald Trump stood on stage at a presidential debate and claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets:

They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.

This was false. Entirely false. Totally untrue. A lie.

Seven days later, JD Vance went on CNN and admitted that the story was a lie. That it was made up. And he justified his deception as part of a greater mission:

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Please read that again:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

So please, cry me a river about this administration’s deep devotion to truth and accuracy.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 17, 2025 [ABC Succumbs To Trump Pressure Against TV Host], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 18 2025. This evening, John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum, and Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reported that ABC was pulling the television show of comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

The suspension is allegedly over his comments Monday about the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, although Chris Hayes of All In pointed out that after CBS pulled Stephen Colbert, another political comedian, off the air in July, President Donald Trump told reporters that comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel would be “next.They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going.”

Kimmel has one of the top late-night television shows, attracting younger viewers in the 18-49 year old demographic. He delivers monologues that skewer President Donald J. Trump and the administration. His YouTube channel, which replays his show, has more than twenty million subscribers.

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very good. And by the way right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “

Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr explained: "There's actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…'We're not gonna run Kimmel anymore...because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'"

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election.

After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

Exactly two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the men we know now as the Framers signed their final draft of a new constitution for the United States, hoping it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation.

During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in delegates’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the thirteen new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.

The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.

And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union,” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.

”The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.

A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”

Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

But after their experience throwing off the yoke of what they considered an overly powerful king, those concerned about creating too powerful a national government worried the new government would endanger individual liberty. They demanded that the framers of the new government enumerate the ways in which it could not intrude on the rights of the people.In 1789 the new Congress passed ten amendments to the Constitution, and the states ratified them the same year. Taken together, the amendments were known as the Bill of Rights.

The first of those amendments prohibits the government from intruding on the basic liberties that enable individuals to challenge it. It prohibits the government from establishing a state religion or infringing on the right of individuals to publish whatever they wish, to assemble peacefully, or to ask the government to remedy unfair situations.

It prohibits the government from infringing on the right of individuals to speak freely, without fear of government retaliation.

Americans take their First Amendment rights seriously. In April 2025, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 92% of Americans thought it was important “that the media can report the news without state/government censorship.”Kimmel’s suspension has produced an uproar.

Comedian Paul Scheer noted that Kimmel is off the air but Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, who recently called for killing homeless Americans by “involuntary lethal injection,” is still employed. The union that represents the musicians on Kimmel’s show called the suspension “a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression,” adding: “These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.”

The Writers Guild of America posted: “The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other—to disturb, even—is at the heart of what it means to be a free people…. If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn’t have bothered to write it into the Constitution…. Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth.”On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.”

On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr himself posted: “Free speech is…the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents.

"From England, where he is on a state visit, Trump posted: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what needed to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT”

Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, the Framers signed their names to the blueprint for a new government established by “We the People of the United States.” The next day, James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary that a lady had asked delegate Benjamin Franklin whether the convention had established a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

New York Times, Who Is Brendan Carr of the F.C.C.? Cecilia Kang, Sept. 18, 2025. The chairman of the F.C.C., who is in the spotlight for his comments that may have led to the suspension of late night TV show host Jimmy Kimmel, has long criticized the media for perceived bias.

Brendan Carr, right, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is the nation’s top watchdog over the broadcast industry, was at the center of a media storm on Wednesday.

In an interview on a right-wing podcast, Mr. Carr criticized comments that late night host Jimmy Kimmel had made earlier this week about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Shortly afterward, ABC decided to pull the Jimmy Kimmel Live show off the air “indefinitely.” Many Democrats immediately criticized the F.C.C. pressure, while President Trump said the suspension of Mr. Kimmel’s show was “Great News for America.”

Here’s what to know about Mr. Carr.What is Carr’s background?

Mr. Carr, 46, a native of Washington, D.C., began his career as a lawyer representing corporate clients, including in the wireless industry, on regulatory matters. In 2012, he joined the F.C.C. as a staff attorney.

Since then, he has risen the ranks at the agency and within the Republican Party. He worked with Mr. Trump’s first-term pick for the regulator’s chair, Ajit Pai. In mid-2017, Mr. Carr was named to a Republican seat on the commission.

As a commissioner, he drew attention from Republicans for his vocal criticism of news media outlets for what he called liberal biases.

Mr. Carr wrote the F.C.C. chapter for Project 2025, a playbook written for Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign and election. In it, Mr. Carr said the agency should focus on reining in big tech firms, which he accused of censorship.

“The F.C.C. should promote freedom of speech,” he wrote in the first words of the chapter.Why did President Trump pick Carr to chair the F.C.C.?

In many ways, Mr. Carr was the obvious choice. He had more experience in communications regulation than nearly any other candidate and was well-known in the policy world.

In frequent appearances on Fox News and in prolific social media postings, Mr. Carr echoed Mr. Trump’s growing anger toward broadcasters during the election. Mr. Carr was also well-connected within conservative Washington organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

Before the election, Mr. Carr hitched his star to Elon Musk, then a confidant of Mr. Trump. On X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk, Mr. Carr posted photos of himself at SpaceX launches and other business ventures run by the billionaire

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,” Mr. Trump said when he named Mr. Carr to head the F.C.C. in January.What has Carr done since taking over the F.C.C.?

Mr. Carr quickly launched investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion programs — pushing to dismantle them — then slashed regulations on broadband companies.

In January, he reinstated complaints against CBS, NBC and ABC that accused the broadcasters of political biases. The F.C.C. under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had dismissed the complaints, saying they violated the First Amendment. 

New York Times, Nvidia to Buy $5 Billion Stake in Intel, Giving Rival a Lifeline, Adam Satariano and Tripp Mickle, Sept. 18, 2025. The deal between the chipmakers, whose fortunes have diverged sharply, includes plans to collaborate on technology to power artificial intelligence.

Nvidia, the world’s dominant maker of artificial intelligence chips, said on Thursday that it would invest $5 billion in its struggling rival, Intel, in a deal that illustrates how booming demand for A.I. is reshaping the global technology industry.

The deal is a lifeline for Intel and highlights a reversal of fortune between the two Silicon Valley companies. Once an industry leader, Intel has struggled to keep up with technology shifts to mobile devices and A.I. Last month, the Trump administration agreed to buy a roughly 10 percent stake in the company to bolster its shaky financial position.

Nvidia, by contrast, has become one of the world’s biggest and most geopolitically significant companies, producing the key chips needed for developing A.I. Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive, is an industry superstar and joined President Trump in Britain this week for a state dinner at Windsor Castle.

The Trump administration approached Nvidia nine months ago and asked it to invest in Intel, said two people with knowledge of the conversations, who were not authorized to speak about private discussions.

Early this year, Howard Lutnick, who had been nominated to become Commerce secretary, proposed spinning off Intel’s struggling manufacturing business, the people said. He planned to turn its operations over to Intel’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and have Nvidia, Apple and other major chip buyers invest in the new company and make their semiconductors.

On Thursday, Intel’s shares soared more than 25 percent to $31.79. Nvidia’s stock rose about 3 percent. The deal immediately increased the value of the U.S. government stake in Intel, which it purchased for $20.47 a share late last month.

The partnership between the two American chipmakers comes as China tries to become less dependent on U.S. chip technology and manufacture more semiconductors domestically. On Thursday, the Chinese technology giant Huawei said it was expanding A.I. chip development, a move that could challenge Nvidia.

As part of their deal, Nvidia and Intel said they would collaborate in developing chips for personal computers and data centers. Intel specializes in chips known as central processing units, that serve as the “brain” of a computer by coordinating different tasks across a machine. Nvidia makes other chips, known as graphics processing units, that are powerful for narrower tasks like crunching vast amounts of data.

The companies said that they would develop chips for personal computers and data centers using Intel’s PC-era chip technology, known as the x86 architecture, which could appeal to companies that need huge amounts of computing power for data centers or research.

Sept. 17

 

New York Times, ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments, John Koblin and Michael M. Grynbaum, Sept. 17, 2025. Mr. Kimmel faced criticism from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for remarks about the motives of the man who is accused of killing Mr. Kirk, the conservative activist.

ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show “indefinitely” after criticism of comments he made on his Monday program about the motives of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week.

The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Mr. Kimmel’s remarks and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of them.

In his opening monologue on Monday, Mr. Kimmel had addressed the killing of Mr. Kirk by saying: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Conservative activists described those comments as mischaracterizing the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter, who wrote in private messages that he objected to Mr. Kirk’s “hatred.” The authorities have not identified which of Mr. Kirk’s views that the suspect found hateful, but his mother said that her son had shifted toward the political left over the last year and had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to prosecutors.

Mr. Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks about the suspect were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people” and said his agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”ImageBrendan Carr, seated at a table with his hand on a microphone, with the seal of the Federal Communications Commission on a wall behind him.Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said that taking Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air was the “right thing.”Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

During his Wednesday interview, Mr. Carr also encouraged media companies that own local television stations to “push back” and pre-empt coverage that does not serve “their local communities.”

“Frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to pre-empt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out,” Mr. Carr said. (Comcast is the parent company of NBC.)

One broadcasting company, Nexstar, appeared to heed Mr. Carr’s encouragement. Shortly before ABC announced the suspension, Nexstar said that it would air other shows on its local ABC affiliates in place of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the “foreseeable future.”

“Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets,” the company said in a statement.

Mr. Carr expressed approval for Nexstar’s decision, thanking the company in a post on X “for doing the right thing.” He added: “I hope that other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”

Nexstar is among the largest operators of TV stations in the United States. Its chief executive, Perry Sook, has struck a series of audacious deals over the decades to knit together a sprawling network that stretches across the country.

Mr. Sook and Nexstar may soon have a major piece of business before the federal government, having just announced a deal to acquire Tegna, one of its biggest rivals, for $6.2 billion. The deal is sure to receive scrutiny from the Trump administration, particularly the F.C.C., which has in recent months put media mergers under a microscope.

 

National Press Club, National Press Club Calls on DHS to Withdraw Journalist Visa Proposal, Sept. 17, 2025. The National Press Club today urged the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to withdraw a proposed rule that would sharply restrict the ability of foreign correspondents to live and work in the United States.

The proposal would replace the long-standing “duration of status” system with fixed admission periods of 240 days, and just 90 days for Chinese nationals.

“For 117 years, the National Press Club has welcomed foreign correspondents to Washington,” said Mike Balsamo, 118th President of the Club. “Foreign journalists are not guests in our democracy — they are witnesses to it. Their reporting has told the story of America through world wars, civil rights struggles, and the end of the Cold War. This rule would make that work harder, not easier.”

The Club warned that the rule risks triggering retaliation against American reporters overseas. “When we treat journalists differently based on nationality, we invite other countries to do the same,” Balsamo said. “In 2020, U.S. reporters were expelled from China amid visa disputes. We cannot afford to put our own journalists at risk by setting that precedent here.”

The Club stressed that the proposal also threatens America’s reputation as a safe harbor for reporters fleeing persecution. “Uncertainty and bureaucracy are the enemies of strong reporting,” Balsamo said. “A free press doesn’t stop at America’s borders. It depends on correspondents who can work here without fear their time will run out.”

The National Press Club called on DHS to maintain the current system and reaffirm the United States’ role as a global leader in press freedom.

Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. With 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization, the Club, is a leading voice for press freedom in the U.S. and worldwide

The Contrarian, Opinion: How to respond to a massive campaign of censorship and oppression, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 17, 2025. Talking Points Won’t Cut It.

Donald Trump has never opted to conceal his dictatorial ambitions. He has declared war on liberals and ordered the federal government to attack organizations espousing views he does not like.

The New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as ‘antifa,’ as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.” There is no longer any patina of legitimacy; this is censorship and political repression, plain and simple:

The goal, they said, was to categorize as domestic terrorism left-wing activity that they said led to violence, a continuation of existing efforts by federal agencies to try to punish liberal groups they have accused of funding or otherwise supporting violent protests. One tactic has been to target the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are critical of Mr. Trump or conservatives.

Coupled with this, Trump has filed another baseless lawsuit against the New York Times. With a preposterous demand for $15B in damages and peppered with self-serving praise, Trump’s complaint has strung together a list of complaints that amount to attacking factual reporting that casts him in a negative light. The Times responded with appropriate defiance. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” it issued in a written statement. “We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.” This is what cowering settlements to bogus suits against CBS and ABC/Disney have wrought.

The response to Trump’s dictatorial crusade to crush political opponents cannot be defensive or timid. Indignant talking points or monologues on MSNBC are not without value, but will not be sufficient. The imbalance between micro-responses liberals too often confuse for effective political action and the enormity of the threat of government repression is deeply disturbing.

Instead, there are at least 7 concrete steps the anti-censorship forces must take.

First, this is not about Charlie Kirk. It is about a massive assault on the First Amendment. The response needs a name, a catch phrase (“Censorship is un-American”?), and a recognizable logo. This might seem trite or trivial, but this is the essence of effective political leadership and messaging. (Liberals scoffed at “MAGA” until they lost two elections.) The conversation must be reframed from Kirk’s deplorable murder to the egregious use of a murder as the pretext for political retribution.

Second, Democratic governors and legislatures should take a page from the California state constitution and labor code, which prohibit public and private employers from firing employees for off-duty free speech. Every state should have such protections. Even in red states, Democrats should take the opportunity to force votes and/or vetoes: Are Republicans for or against free speech?

Third, Democrats—as a condition of voting to the keep the government open—need to include a measure prohibiting any government investigation or action against groups on the basis of their beliefs. In the “whereas” portions of such a measure, Congress must make an affirmative statement that non-profit groups have no responsibility for the criminal behavior of independent actors with whom they have no connection. Once again, forcing Republicans to vote down an emphatic reaffirmation of the First Amendment would be clarifying.

Fourth, every government employee fired for First Amendment-protected activity should have access to pro bono legal representation. First Amendment advocates should publicly solicit whistleblowers and offer legal representation to those protected under the relevant federal law. Lawyers in government must understand that baseless investigations and lawsuits can result in disciplinary action and loss of their law licenses.

Fifth, every American’s consumer dollars can encourage free speech or punish suppression. If a newspaper fires an opinion columnist for expressing perfectly reasonable perspectives in the public square, cancel your subscription and support a news outlet that unabashedly defends free speech and does not curry favor with the Trump regime. If a retail outlet crushes employees’ exercise of free speech, do not patronize it or find friends to go picket outside their doors. Labor unions can negotiate contractual provisions that expressly prohibit punishment for off duty free speech activities.Subscribed

Sixth, form a grassroots movement with local chapters exclusively to support the First Amendment. It is essential to file lawsuits, put out statements, and testify before Congress in defense of free speech—though let’s not kid ourselves that such action reaches down to the average American. For that, you need college-campus and adult groups, civic events, local signage and billboards, city and state politicians who ascribe to a “no censorship” message, and K-12 school curriculum that explains fundamental free speech principles. It sure would be helpful to have at least former Republican office holders join the fight (don’t hold your breath).

Seventh, Democrats need to put aside intraparty sniping between so-called centrists and so-called progressives. They must all identify as First Amendment champions dedicated to ending rule by repressive MAGA autocrats. Now is not the time for recrimination concerning whether Joe Biden should have run for re-election (or whether former vice president Kamala Harris was wronged), or nit-picking about whether Democrats should adjust their messaging on social issues, or fussing over whether Zohran Mamdani meets the approval of “moderates” outside New York. MAGA Republicans have essentially outed themselves as dictatorial bullies. Now is the time to make sure Americans understand the fundamental difference between the parties.

In sum, not since the McCarthy era or the Red Scare has the government launched such a mammoth campaign of oppression and censorship. This un-American, anti-democratic crusade is fundamental at odds with our Constitutional system. As formidable as it may be, the response must be just as formidable.

New York Times, News Analysis: At Home and on the Seas, Trump Expands Use of American Force, David E. Sanger, Sept. 17, 2025. His first term focused on America’s rival superpowers. Now the emphasis is on homeland defense and troops on city streets.

New York Times, Trump Invokes Kirk’s Killing in Justifying Measures to Silence Opponents, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Andrew Duehren, Kenneth P. Vogel and Katie Rogers, Sept. 17, 2025 (print ed.). In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump and his allies have laid out a broad plan to target liberal groups, monitor speech, revoke visas and designate certain groups as domestic terrorists.

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, right, to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

In the six days since Mr. Kirk was gunned down in Utah, Mr. Trump and his top officials have promised a broadside against the political left, indicating that they would go after liberal groups like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation; revoke visas for people seen to be “celebrating” Mr. Kirk’s death; begin federal investigations into hate speech; and designate certain groups domestic terrorists.

“We want everything to be fair; it hasn’t been fair, and the radical left has done tremendous damage to the country,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday, as he continued to play down and excuse violence on the right. “But we’re fixing it.”

The threats come even as the authorities said the suspect in Mr. Kirk’s shooting acted alone and presented no evidence that political violence is coordinated on one side. Political violence is a scourge across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.

The 22-year-old man accused of assassinating Mr. Kirk said in text messages to his romantic partner that he had “had enough” of Mr. Kirk’s “hatred,” according to prosecutors who filed a murder charge against him on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump’s aggressive moves to target only his political opponents is a continuation of his attempts to wield power — through lawsuits, executive orders and public intimidation — to punish people and institutions that power the political left, or that he believes wronged him. In recent months, Mr. Trump’s aides and conservative activists have worked to shape the kind of crackdown that now appears to be coming to fruition.

“When the left has had power, it has gone after conservatives and their speech, so I am thrilled to see the administration promising to investigate the left-wing nonprofit sector, and hold people accountable,” said Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors money in politics.

Mr. Walter has briefed senior White House officials in recent months on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques, while also providing research briefs, including one titled “Marching Toward Violence,” that purported to draw a connection between anti-Israel protests on college campuses and terrorism. 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: IMPORTANT Message from MeidasTouch Founder, Ben Meiselas, Sept. 17, 2025. Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom. Other than his infatuation with the Royal Family, and perhaps whatever arrangement he has worked out with Melania, I am not sure why he is there. The people in the UK don’t want him there. We’ve covered the protests against Trump in Windsor and the projections of Trump and Epstein on Windsor Castle.

According to YouGov/Economist, Trump’s approval is now officially the lowest in modern presidential history at this time, as it’s now lower than his low approval during his first term. People are fed up with his crap. Every economic indicator that impacts most Americans shows serious problems. The housing market is now the least affordable and accessible ever. Those seeking jobs significantly exceed available jobs. Jobless claims are surging. Inflation is surging. Healthcare costs are surging. We are on the brink of another possible government shutdown. The dollar is crashing. I can go on, but you get the point.

Americans are not buying Donald Trump’s fraud when he says we are in a golden age. Donald Trump has been flaunting how our taxpayer dollars are going to fund the lavish lifestyles of his rich friends. Trump destroyed the Rose Garden and turned it into a “private club” for rich people called “Club Rose Garden,” where they dine on gourmet meals with entertainment paid for by taxpayers. Trump is building a massive gold ballroom on the White House property and isn’t explaining where the funds are actually coming from. Trump’s family is making billions from crypto in deals that appear linked with access to Trump in the Oval Office.

It may be a Golden Age for the Trump family, but Americans have been given coal in their stockings in return for putting this felon back in power.

The recent actions from the regime show desperation.

This week Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, said she will go after speech that Trump deems critical of him and that the DOJ will label it hate speech. Before he left for the UK, Trump responded to ABC reporter Jon Karl that the type of speech that will be prosecuted are questions like the ones Karl asks him. Donald Trump also responded to an Australian reporter who asked him about conflicts of interest involvingTrump businesses profiting off the White House by telling the reporter that he had harmed the United States’ relations with Australia for asking such a question.

It’s odd and dangerous being an American now. Every day, Trump humiliates our country. A month ago he had our military get on their knees and roll out the red carpet for Putin. Yesterday, his FBI Director Kash Patel claimed that Jeffrey Epstein did not traffic girls or women with anyone and that Epstein did it all by himself. His Homeland SecuritySecretary Kristi Noem personally joined an unlawful ICE raid of an American citizen’s home in Illinois, and then she posted a photo of the citizen they kidnapped without mentioning that the man was released shortly thereafter because of the unlawful arrest. I can go on, but you get the point.

Within all this chaos there is still hope. I participated in an interview with Governor Newsom about his Proposition 50 to fight back against Texas gerrymandering by redrawing the California map. It’s great to see governors fighting back. We’ve got a great new chair of the House Oversight Committee in Robert Garcia, who is relentlessly pursuing the Epstein files. We’ve got another No Kings Protest coming up soon.

Donald Trump’s goal was to make Americans submit. He has failed miserably. His fascism is being rejected each day. There is sadly a certain segment of the American population that enjoys a bumbling weirdo dictator who treats them like crap but treats others worse. But overwhelmingly, Americans don’t want this chaotic and dangerous crap.

We will spend every single day fighting to get the word out at the MeidasTouch Network. Yes, we are the network of the resistance and the opposition, but we are also the network of a future of hope. For those who watch the MeidasTouch Network daily, you know we unapologetically talk about empathy and love and community and the environment and democracy. 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: A New York Times editor on Trump's new $15 billion lawsuit, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 17, 2025. Popular Information talks to David Enrich, who wrote the book on how powerful people exploit the legal system to silence journalists.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump sued the New York Times for $15 billion. The lawsuit alleges that during the 2024 election, the paper published "malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles" that were "calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump."

The articles in question were adapted from the book Lucky Loser, written by two New York Times investigative journalists. According to the book, Trump inherited the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, consistently lost money, and was then bailed out by others. It also details how The Apprentice rebranded Trump and set the stage for his political ascent.

Trump's lawsuit spends as much time on puffery as legal argument. "President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history," Trump's attorneys state in the lawsuit's opening passages. "All across our country, Americans from a wide array of backgrounds saw the truth about him and voted accordingly — the same truth that the New York Times refused to recognize as it continued spreading false and defamatory content about President Trump."

The action against the New York Times is the latest in a series of lawsuits that Trump has filed against media organizations over the past year. It is part of a broader campaign, spanning decades, to curtail press freedom.

To make sense of all this, Popular Information spoke with David Enrich, the deputy investigations editor for The New York Times. Enrich recently wrote a book, Murder the Truth, about how powerful individuals are using and abusing the legal system to silence reporters and protect their own interests.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Popular Information: What are the potential threats to press freedom that you detail in Murder the Truth?

David Enrich: I don't think it's potential. I think it's very real. There are two intertwined threats here, very broadly speaking. One is that there is a growing number of politicians and other powerful people who are trying to use legal actions and the threat of legal actions to shut down legitimate criticism and coverage of their activities. And that's obviously happening in this particular moment, but it's been happening increasingly, going back for at least a decade. It's happening at places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But it's also happening all over the country, and the places where it is having an especially pronounced effect are not major national news organizations. It is at smaller community organizations, small newspapers, independent publishers, and people like you who have a newsletter, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.

It often occurs out of public view in the form of threatening letters that lawyers are writing before publication in the hopes of dissuading someone from publishing a critical piece in the first place. And it works a lot of the time.

So that's threat one. But in doing that reporting and talking to a lot of people, I realized that a lot of the people making these threats and filing these lawsuits are the same people who are advocating for the overturning or weakening of New York Times v. Sullivan. These threats are potent, and these lawsuits are potent, and that's at a time when we have a very robust First Amendment. Then you have people who are making an argument to roll back a lot of those long-standing First Amendment protections. Increasingly, it is falling on receptive ears.

PI: A lot of your recent work has been revelatory reporting about Jeffrey Epstein. Is this work easier now because Epstein is dead and cannot hire lawyers to issue threats?

DE: That's a good question, and it's hard for me to say. If Epstein were still alive, I assume he would have been convicted, and he'd be in jail or in prison, having been found guilty of many very bad crimes. And so I think it would have been hard then for his lawyers to mount a credible legal argument that we were in any way defaming him with our coverage.

But as a general matter, we routinely get these threats. We've gotten threats about our Epstein coverage from Trump's lawyers in this case, and over the years, from other powerful players in the Epstein saga. And that definitely makes it harder and more cumbersome to do these stories.

PI: Overall, do you think that news coverage of powerful people is regularly influenced by behind-the-scenes legal threats and intimidation?

DE: 100 percent. Without any question. I've reported on many examples of that. Some of them are in the book, but others have been off the record. I've heard about numerous cases where publishers, journalists, and editors soft-pedal stuff. They are very conservative about what they publish because they are afraid of getting sued. Even short of getting sued, getting these threatening letters is terrifying for many publications and many journalists.

And rightly so. Generally, you have to hire a lawyer to defend yourself, and that is outside of the budget of a lot of places. And the rational response when facing legal threats for many publications, probably most publications, is to think twice because you risk jeopardizing your finances if you make a big mistake.

Popular Information is a three-person newsroom that produces fearless, hard-hitting reporting on the powerful. You can support our work by upgrading to a paid subscription.Subscribed

PI: One of the biggest developments since the publication of your book is that a sitting president is now filing these kinds of lawsuits. And some media organizations are paying him millions of dollars to settle.

DE: I totally agree. Until a few weeks ago, when Trump sued the Wall Street Journal over the Epstein birthday book, a sitting United States president had never sued a news organization while in office. Now he has done it again with the New York Times. This is a precedent-busting set of actions that is really quite extraordinary.

While he was a candidate, he filed lawsuits against ABC, CBS, and the Des Moines Register. And then, after Trump won the election, ABC and CBS rushed to reach settlements. I do not think it was a coincidence that they rushed to reach a settlement after Trump was elected, as opposed to before Trump was elected. I think that speaks pretty clearly to the power dynamics at play here and the fact that some major American institutions are not comfortable going up against the president.

PI: Do you think Trump is exploiting a vulnerability that's inherent in the larger corporate ownership structure of some news outlets? The parent company of CBS, for example, was trying to get a merger approved. Is Trump effectively leveraging the federal government's influence over these corporations to extract large settlements and influence ongoing news coverage?

DE: That's certainly how it looks. It seems to be the intent, and it is, I think, likely going to be the effect. It's a very different proposition, suing the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, both of which are part of bigger companies that are very committed to fundamental journalism principles. At CBS and ABC, even though the journalists are committed to journalism principles, they're part of much larger companies that are beholden and vulnerable to the federal government.

PI: How do you think this lawsuit that was filed today against the New York Times fits into Trump's overall strategy?

DE: I'm a little puzzled by what the strategy was here, since, according to the New York Times, it is really a baseless lawsuit that, on the merits, was not filed to succeed. My informed speculation about this is that it is just another attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate and harass legitimate news gathering and send a message to others that we really are going to sue you. And when we sue you, we're going to seek boatloads of money. To the New York Times, to the Wall Street Journal, to Bloomberg, to CNN, to places like that, I don't think that it is going to sway them very much. But I think that if you were a smaller place with precarious finances, it would be crazy not to look at this and say, "What if this were to happen to us?"

PI: Are you confident that institutions like the New York Times or Bloomberg can weather any amount of pressure? Or should people be concerned about those institutions as well?

DE: I think people should be concerned about all of these institutions, frankly. I have a very high degree of confidence that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will fight tooth and nail. But some of this is out of our hands. If we get big judgments against us, we'll appeal those judgments. But if at the end of the day we're ordered to pay, we would have to do that.

PI: Trump has launched a sustained attack on press freedoms. You follow this as closely as anyone. Are you aware of any serious efforts to protect or enhance press freedoms?

DE: Not really, to be honest with you. But there are still places that are willing to fight. The Des Moines Register is fighting. They are continuing to stand up for themselves in court.

New York Times, Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s Resigns, Saying Company Has Been ‘Silenced,’ Yan Zhuang and Claire Moses, Sept. 17, 2025.  Jerry Greenfield said that the ice cream company, known for its activism, had been muzzled by Unilever, its parent company.

The Morning Dispatch, Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories, James P. Sutton, Peter Gattuso, and Ross Anderson, Sept. 17, 2025.

On Tuesday, Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced new guidance for social media companies in light of a recently passed statute barring Australians under 16 from holding accounts on the platforms. They said that while age-verification measures would be “unreasonable,” companies must install a “multilayered waterfall approach” to ensure young users’ accounts are removed, but also include “accessible review mechanisms” for accounts wrongly suspended. Companies could be fined up to 50 million Australian dollars ($34 million US) if they don’t comply with the ban, which goes into effect on December 10.

Politico, Man charged with blackmail over ‘Westminster honeytrap’ scandal, Dan Bloom, Sept. 17, 2025. Oliver Steadman, a 28-year-old former Labour councillor, was charged following a police probe that was prompted by reporting from Politico.

A man has been charged with blackmail after a 17-month police investigation into unsolicited messages that were sent to prominent figures in Westminster.

Oliver Steadman, who had been a Labour councillor in Islington, north London, but resigned following his arrest in June 2024, was charged Wednesday with one count of blackmail and five counts of improper use of a public electronic communications network.

The Metropolitan Police launched an investigation in April 2024 after POLITICO revealed that several men in Westminster, including MPs, had received unsolicited WhatsApp messages from users calling themselves alternatively “Abi” or “Charlie.”

The messages seen by Politico were personalized to the recipients, and in several cases they included explicit photos. The series of events was quickly dubbed the “Westminster honeytrap scandal.”

A senior Conservative MP, William Wragg, later resigned the Tory whip after he admitted leaking colleagues’ personal phone numbers to a person he encountered on the dating app Grindr who, he said at the time, “had compromising things on me.”

A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said Steadman is “alleged to have sent WhatsApp messages to five people within Westminster circles,” and that the charge of blackmail relates to “alleged unwarranted demands for the contact telephone numbers of up to 12 individuals.”

Malcolm McHaffie, head of the CPS Special Crime Division, said his team had looked into “alleged unsolicited indecent images sent to a number of people within parliamentary political circles between October 2023 and April 2024 using WhatsApp.”

Steadman, 28, was remanded in custody Wednesday and is due to make a first appearance at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Nov. 3. He has not yet entered a formal plea.

Steadman’s Labour membership is currently suspended pending an internal investigation, though a probe cannot take place while criminal proceedings are ongoing, a party official said.

Sept. 16 

 

Vice President J.D. Vance serving as guest host Monday at a special White House edition of the podcast of the assassinated Christian White nationalist Charlie Kirk, a strong Trump supporter and the leader of Turning Point USA (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

  New York Times, White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups, Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 16, 2025 (print ed.). Some of the highest-ranking officials in the federal government used Charlie Kirk’s podcast, guest-hosted by Vice President JD Vance, to lay out their plans.

Trump administration officials on Monday responded to the activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination by threatening to bring the weight of the federal government down on what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on the killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.

Investigators were still working to identify a motive in Mr. Kirk’s killing, but the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said that the suspect had a “leftist ideology” and that he acted alone.

The White House and President Trump’s allies suggested that he was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives — without presenting evidence that such a network existed. America has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.

On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.

Some of the highest-ranking officials in the federal government used Mr. Kirk’s podcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” to lay out their plans.

From his official office at the White House, Vice President JD Vance served as a guest host of the podcast, inviting senior members of the administration, including Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, to praise Mr. Kirk while also detailing their plans to crack down on what they called leftist nongovernmental organizations. The show was broadcast on the television screens in the White House briefing room and in several West Wing offices.ImageStephen Miller at the White House this month. He said that a formal effort would be coming, with federal agencies rooting out what he referred to as a “domestic terror movement.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

In their comments, Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller spoke in vague and menacing terms about far-left groups that they said facilitated violence.

Mr. Miller said that a formal effort would be coming, with federal agencies rooting out what he referred to as a “domestic terror movement,” and that they would be doing it in Mr. Kirk’s name.

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”

They praised Mr. Kirk’s commitment to free speech while threatening to exact a price against the “far left” that they accused of fomenting political violence in America.

An administration official said officials would be investigating people behind the recent burning of Teslas and assaults against immigration agents, and would be looking to draw links between those episodes and organized liberal groups.

In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s killing, Mr. Trump immediately blamed the “radical left” for much of the political violence in the country, and appeared to excuse violence on the right by saying that it was driven by people who “don’t want to see crime.”

The president also promised investigations into who was funding and organizing the left, suggesting the violence was somehow coordinated.

John Cohen, an intelligence official who worked in the Biden, Obama and Bush administrations, said the United States was “immersed in an epidemic of targeted attacks and mass shootings” but also noted the administration’s claims came before the investigation into Mr. Kirk’s assassination had been completed.

“The results of the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s murder have not been released and it’s unclear whether law enforcement has a full and complete picture of what motivated this individual,” Mr. Cohen said.

“It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,” he added. “It is the job of law enforcement to prevent acts of violence and criminal activity.”

The Parnas Perspective, Daily News Update: JD Vance Endorses Mass "Doxxing" Campaign to Punish Americans Following Kirk Shooting, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 16, 2025. Vance endorses a mass doxxing campaign following Kirk's shooting, Musk tells is followers to "fight or die," Trump sues the New York Times for $15 billion, and Trump removes slavery exhibits.

Today I’m tracking developments that threaten free speech in America. Donald Trump is suing the New York Times for more than $15 billion, branding it a “mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.” Vice-President JD Vance has openly backed a mass doxxing campaign to punish people who haven’t publicly mourned Charlie Kirk. Elon Musk, with a platform of 226 million followers, is urging people to “fight or die.” That’s not rhetoric — it’s intimidation.

I wish I could bring better news. I will have more on the lawsuit later today, but I want to be crystal clear now: as Trump tries to crush dissent and silence the press, I will not back down. If he sues me, I will fight — not for me, but for the public’s right to know. Truth is the strongest defense in a libel suit, and every day I commit to reporting facts and sharing the full truth.

If you value independent, fearless journalism that won’t be cowed by lawsuits or threats, please subscribe today. Your support keeps this work alive when others try to shut it down.

With that, here’s what you missed:

Vice-president JD Vance endorsed a mass “doxing” campaign to expose and pressure people accused of insufficiently mourning Charlie Kirk’s assassination, urging employers to punish them, as Trump allies escalate crackdowns that critics warn echo McCarthyism and threaten free expression.

Elon Musk, right, has escalated incendiary rhetoric after Charlie Kirk’s killing, repeatedly urging his 226M followers to “fight or die,” demanding critics be deplatformed or jailed, and accusing media and schools of “programming people to murder,” drawing condemnation from UK leaders and fueling fears of vigilantism and political violence.

Progressive advocacy groups warn of “McCarthy-era” repression after Trump, JD Vance, and Republican allies used the Charlie Kirk shooting to justify calls for federal investigations into left-leaning nonprofits, which critics say aim to intimidate, silence dissent, and quash political opposition under the guise of national security.

Donald Trump has filed a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing it of acting as a Democratic “mouthpiece,” spreading false claims, and interfering in elections through articles and a book critical of him, continuing his broader legal campaign against major U.S. media outlets.

The Trump administration has reportedly ordered the removal of slavery-related exhibits from several U.S. national parks under a March executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” including the iconic 1863 photograph of an escaped slave known as Peter showing his whip-scarred back.

The directive, aimed at purging displays deemed to “disparage” America, has led to reviews at sites like Harpers Ferry and George Washington’s Philadelphia residence, sparking alarm over erasures of content on slavery, racism, Indigenous persecution, and LGBTQ+ history. Critics say the move continues a broader pattern of cultural rollbacks under Trump, while the National Park Service has defended the review as an effort to provide “broader context.”

Mississippi has declared a public health emergency over soaring infant mortality but was forced to halt key CDC-backed pregnancy data collection after Trump administration purges gutted the agency, leaving experts warning that the loss of vital maternal health tracking, combined with Medicaid cuts, abortion bans, and racial inequities, will worsen outcomes for mothers and babies.

Delta State University student Demartravion “Trey” Reed, 21, right, was found dead hanging from a tree on campus, prompting cancellation of centennial events; police say no foul play is suspected, though an investigation and autopsy are ongoing, and the university is providing counseling and memorial services.

Vicksburg police are investigating after 37-year-old Cory Zukatis of Brandon was found hanging in a wooded area near Ameristar Casino on Washington Street; no further details have been released. Two men have now been found hanging from a tree in Mississippi in the past 24 hours.

Donald Trump arrives in Britain this week for an unprecedented second state visit, but the backdrop is turmoil: Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces plunging approval ratings, cabinet scandals, and far-right marches led by Trump ally Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, while the royals grapple with renewed Epstein-linked scrutiny of Prince Andrew and tensions between King Charles, Harry, and William — raising fears the visit may highlight, not mask, the UK’s political and social unrest.

Inside the Trump administration’s Labor Department, morale has collapsed as 20% of staff quit or retire amid deep budget cuts, deregulatory pushes, and intimidation — including threats against employees who speak out. Workers describe conditions “like a prison,” with enforcement power gutted as the agency moves to strip 3.7 million home care workers (mostly women and immigrants) of minimum wage and overtime protections, slash child labor and safety programs, and adopt anti-immigrant “American Workers First” rhetoric critics say weaponizes the department against the very people it was built to protect.

Former Georgia GOP Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Trump critic expelled from the party, announced he’ll run for governor in 2026 as a Democrat, vowing to fight extremism and lower costs, in what will be a closely watched battleground race.

The Contrarian, Words & Phrases We Can Do Without: Cancel ‘Cancel Culture,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 16, 2025. For years, right-wingers have whined about “cancel culture,” which can refer to everything from a university firing a professor for a stray comment to a publisher deciding to cancel a book deal.

Technically, neither is a First Amendment violation (indeed the publisher is exercising its First Amendment rights) unless government action is involved (such as firing a state prosecutor for voicing his views on abortion and law enforcement priorities). However, in the rightwing telling, the victim is always some harried conservative feeling the wrath of “liberal elites” for their candor (often in expressing views about race, women, or other marginalized group).

If you want true First Amendment suppression and cancel culture madness, take a look at what has been happening in the incendiary MAGA movement in the wake of the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk. MAGA has gone on a cancel culture binge.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (pretending he heads something called the War Department) has taken to firing people for “glorifying” the conservative icon’s killing.” Restricting speech about a private citizen is unprecedented. And, unsurprisingly, it is not clear the fired individuals were “glorifying” anything. Certainly, criticizing Kirk’s views is not glorification. (I suspect the current Pentagon leadership does not understand the meaning of the word: “to praise, exalt.”)

It has not stopped there. Government Executive reported: “The Homeland Security Department has already taken action against at least three staffers: a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee was placed on administrative leave, Fox News reported, after he posted on Instagram that President Trump had ordered flags at half-staff ‘for the literal racist homophobe misogynist.’” That would be core First Amendment speech. (Incidentally, this is neither glorification nor inaccurate if you look at Kirk’s comments over the years.)

In addition, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service (whose employee said anyone mourning Kirk should delete him [from their social media] because Kirk “spewed hate and racism”) and the Veterans Affairs Department have either taken disciplinary action or threatened to take action against perceived glorifiers.

It is a shame these voices did not call for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to step down after his despicable comments that made light of the killing of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, or demand Donald Trump retire from public life for mocking the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi.Subscribed

Two aspects of this official government censorship stand out: the sheer hypocrisy of conflating “glorifying” killing with criticizing Kirk’s own words; and the breathless indignation based on virtually nothing. The group that used to deplore canceling is now canceling whomever it deems insufficiently mournful.

Many of the supposedly offensive statements speak only to Kirk’s views, meaning the right’s cancel culture amounts to “thou shall not speak ill of Charlie Kirk,” a surprising position for someone they lauded for debating critics. (Some of his critics question whether Kirk practiced good faith debate requiring a shared set of facts or merely standard issue demagoguery.)

Meanwhile, right-wingers on social media are targeting online people who don’t meet their standard for Kirk reverence. (What happened to X as a platform where absolute free speech was the rule?) The result of the MAGA swarm can be everything from death threats to doxxing to harassment to job loss.

Unsurprisingly, intimidated private employers are also firing employees for Kirk-related comments. “Within 24 hours of Charlie Kirk’s killing, an assistant dean at a Tennessee college, a communications staffer for an NFL team, a Next Door employee in Milwaukee, and the co-owner of a Cincinnati barbecue restaurant were fired after posting about [the assassination],” the Washington Post reported. “They had all used language or memes their employers deemed offensive or insensitive about the 31-year-old conservative firebrand.” So…insensitive commentary is a firing offense—for people who watch Fox News all day?! The same Fox News whose anchors casually propose that mentally ill homeless people should just be put to death?

Worst of all (since newspapers should understand the value of free speech) The Post fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah for rather innocuous Bluesky comments on violence in America and for paraphrasing Charlie Kirk’s own words. The collapse of a once-great American newspaper is complete.

Well, surely the cancel culture police (looking at you, Bari Weiss) will put an end to this, pronto! Of course, I expect nothing of the sort from a gang in a perpetual state of victimhood and paranoia (largely about higher education). They have consistently refused to police their own side no matter how racist, violent, or vile the message.

The claim that MAGA censors (who revere Jan. 6 insurrectionists) are concerned about violence is risible. No one honestly believes that a Democrat stating “Kirk said misogynistic things” would incite violence, whereas Trump’s comment about Second Amendment defenders dealing with Hillary Clinton or his persistent smearing of judges would not.

The right’s censorship spree goes beyond Kirk, certainly. The MAGA language police has been ensconced in the Trump regime scouring federal laws, regulations, displays, and the like to remove any mention of “gender” or “equity” or other words that might (but often don’t) have anything to do with anti-discrimination or outreach programs (demonized as “DEI”). The culture cops also have a home in Florida, where “don’t say gay” muzzles LGBTQ teachers.

MAGA Republicans use “cancel culture,” like “woke,” as an all-purpose invective selectively directed against Democrats and institutions the right dislikes. Let’s do ourselves a solid and just drop the term entirely, since it has become obviously farcical in the hands of actual government censors.

When a movement from the president on down directs government power at individuals, universities, law firms, unions, and media outlets to punish First Amendment protected activity, they are engaging in something far worse than cancel culture. They are censoring and trying to suppress people and ideas they do not like. The word for that is authoritarianism. Doing so in the guise of honoring Charlie Kirk breaks the hypocrisy meter.

Meidas Touch Network, Black Student Found Hanging from Tree in Mississippi Following a week of intensifiedviolent rhetoric online after Charlie Kirk’s death, Troy Matthews, Sept. 16, 2025. 

The body of 21-year-old student Demartravion “Trey” Reed, right, was found hanging in a tree on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi on Monday. Campus police chief Michale J. Peeler told reporters no foul play is suspected and the death is considered a suicide, despite no official cause of death yet being released by the county coroner’s office.

Members of Reed’s family have stated both his arms and one of his legs were also broken, however police have disputed this.

"At this time, there is no evidence of foul play," Peeler said. "But while there is no evidence of foul play, the body has been retrieved by the Bolivar County Coroner's office. I have requested the assistance of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the Bolivar County Sheriff's office and the Cleveland PD to assist us in this ongoing investigation."

The death comes after a week of heightened violent rhetoric online following the death of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. Multiple Historically Black Colleges and Universities were forced to take emergency measures including class cancellations and lockdowns last week after repeated threats.

The hanging of a black man in the south hauntingly calls back to the days of Jim Crow. Members of the community say the significance cannot be ignored given the current state of U.S. politics.

Lincoln Square Media, Fourth & Democracy Political Opinion: Billionaires Buy Up Media & a Turning Point in the Temperature of Our Country, Evan Fields, Sept. 16, 2025. Last week may go down as one of the darkest of the last decade in American politics. A right-wing figurehead was assassinated. A school shooting barely registered. And the Epstein files vanished without a trace.

Follow the money

David Ellison recently dropped $8 billion to take over Paramount, which means CBS News is now effectively a Skydance property. Backing the nepo baby billionaire is his father, Larry Ellison — the Oracle co-founder, current richest man in the world, and Trump-world check writer who’s spent years underwriting Republican causes. The FCC rubber-stamped the deal after forcing through “reforms” tied directly to newsroom practices, a political thumbprint that even had commissioners calling it an intrusion on editorial independence.

Inside CBS, the alarms are blaring. Reports say Ellison is getting ready to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press and install her in a top editorial role at CBS News. Nothing is signed yet, but the smoke is thick with rumors of $300 million deals that would essentially lead to free publicity for the state of Israel. Think about what that means: a billionaire heir with family ties to Trump parachuting a right-wing, pro-Israel culture warrior into one of the most powerful newsrooms in America. That’s not media diversity — that’s a coup.

And Ellsion isn’t done. Skydance is already circling Warner Bros. Discovery, which would put CNN and CBS under the same roof. Wrap your head around that: the richest man in the world and his son controlling two of the biggest legacy brands in the country, with a direct line back to Trump. In a world where the president is weaponizing the executive against universities and late-night hosts, that isn’t some abstract merger. This is the seizing of narrative power — and it’s exactly how authoritarian movements consolidate control.

We’ve seen this playbook before. Musk with X. Murdoch with Fox. Thiel-aligned platforms popping up to launder the next round of disinformation. The method is always the same: buy the channels, seed loyalists, scream about bias until you get viewpoint diversity that just means Trump propaganda. You don’t need government censorship when billionaires quietly set the incentives and editors are conformed to the West Wing out of fear.

This is how democracies corrode. Not tanks in the street in 2025, but billionaires buying up your media, building databases like Palantir, and turning watchdogs into lapdogs. Unless we call it what it is — a pressure campaign to bend the press toward Trump’s dictatorship — we are going to wake up one morning and realize the stories that matter never made it to air.4th & Democracy: Turning Point — The Temperature of the Country

Charlie Kirk is dead, but the outrage economy he helped build is still humming — and now it’s turning inward?

The Groypers — Nick Fuentes’ far-right loyalists — have wasted no time sharpening knives. To them, Kirk was always a gatekeeper: Too cozy with Republican elites, too interested in “culture war optics” instead of ideological purity. That animosity goes back to the so-called Groyper Wars of 2019, when Fuentes’ crew hijacked TPUSA campus events and branded Kirk a fraud. His assassination has reopened those wounds, with Groyper influencers blasting TPUSA for selling out conservatism and accusing Kirk of being little more than a celebrity mascot for the establishment.

TPUSA, for its part, is leaning into martyrdom. The organization launched a fundraising blitz within days of Kirk’s death — email appeals, video tributes, “carry on the mission” rhetoric plastered across every platform. Donation tiers run from $25 to $100,000. GiveSendGo campaigns for Kirk’s family alone have pulled in nearly $3 million, and TPUSA claims tens of thousands of new chapter requests on high school and college campuses. In other words: Grief is being weaponized into cash and infrastructure.

This isn’t just a fight over legacy — it’s a battle for the soul of young conservatism. On one side, the Groypers pushing radical purity tests. On the other, TPUSA is trying to lock down legitimacy by turning Kirk into a martyr and doubling down on brand growth. And in the middle? A country where political violence has become just another line item on a fundraising spreadsheet.

The temperature is rising, and the right is feeding on its own. But don’t mistake the infighting for weakness — it’s fuel. Kirk’s death has become a pressure point to radicalize, recruit, and raise money, and the result is a movement more dangerous, not less.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 15, 2025 [Anniversary of "Letters from An American"], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 16, 2025. Six years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:

“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”

I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.

And so these Letters from an American were born.

Six years later, we are in the midst of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw six years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

In that first letter where I warned of rising authoritarianism, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”

And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters.

If you are tired from the last six years, you have earned the right to be.

And yet you are still here, reading, commenting, protesting, articulating a new future for the nation. And I am proud to be among you.

I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

And so I write.

I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.

To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals, and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.

Sept. 15

 

Emptywheel, Analysis: The White House Bid to Turn the Charlie Kirk Murder into Their Anti-Trans Jihad, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 15, 2025. We don't yet know what allegedly motivated Tyler Robinson (shown above in a mugshot) to kill Charlie Kirk. We do know the motivations of the White House sourcing claims about a trans roommate, so we should be very cautious about believing what they're peddling.

In a Discord chatroom including at least one guy he knew from high school who had recognized Tyler Robinson in the pictures released by Charlie Kirk murder investigators, the accused murderer offered up the now-discredited report about trans bullets, but treated it with irony, just like he ironically claimed to be Kirk himself.

“I heard the ammo had somethin about trans stuff on it, but they aren’t releasing photos or exact quotes,” he wrote. He added: “and also the claim wasn’t backed by the official fbi, just some dude in the briefing room.”

A few minutes later, he joked: “I’m actually Charlie Kirk, wanted to get outta politics so I faked my death, now I can live out my dream life in kansas.”

The comment is deliberately non-committal, like all the others described in the NYT story on the Discord chat. But it is far more reliable evidence than a growing story, sourced to the White House, that one of two Robinson roommates cooperating with the FBI is trans and may even be Robinson’s lover.

The story started with one of the White House and Kash Patel (left) / Dan Bongino’s favorite propagandists, Brooke Singman, whose belated story writing up the allegation she first tweeted out included a self-serving claim from the FBI officials who had nothing to do with finding Robinson, claiming they had instead “zero[ed] in on” him as a subject via the cooperation from the roommate.

FBI officials told Fox News Digital that the FBI had text messages and other communications between Robinson and his partner that helped FBI agents zero in on Robinson. Officials said the FBI took evidence from their apartment, including computers, which has been sent to Quantico for review, Fox News Digital has learned.

It went through the Daily Mail (which took a non-denial as confirmation the roommate was trans) and a NewsMax reporter who directly sourced the claim to Trump. Then, Marc Caputo, who is incredibly well-sourced to people like Susie Wiles and Roger Stone, but who has gotten increasingly credulous at Axios, mainstreamed it.

Authorities are investigating whether Tyler Robinson, suspected of killing Charlie Kirk, believed Kirk’s views on gender identity were “hateful” to people like Robinson’s transgender roommate, six sources familiar with the case tell Axios.

Why it matters: Investigators believe Robinson’s anger at Kirk’s views could be a key to establishing a motive for the slaying of the controversial activist whose death sent shockwaves through American politics. Each of the six sources familiar with the investigation told Axios that investigators believe Robinson had a romantic relationship with his roommate.

All this is coming in advance of the expected filing of charges by Utah on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon has been on a tear because Utah Governor Spencer Cox, rather than Kash Patel, led the press conference announcing Robinson’s arrest the other day.

Did the ppl in the White House inform POTUS that one of his greatest haters, this goofball, girly man, weak governor of Utah, was going to sit there and do the entire briefing on the murder of Charlie Kirk and essentially give us almost no facts and just preach unity with the aggressively LGBTQ governor of Colorado?

Kash Patel is not just a colleague, he’s a very dear and close friend. I think the world of Kash. We don’t know what restrictions he’s under or even his ability to fully articulate what’s happening here. But whoever authorized one of the biggest Trump haters in this country, the governor of Utah, Cox, is a disaster. A true Trump hater, one of the worst in the Republican Party. Folks in Utah need to understand this man has embraced and pushed some of the most dangerous ideologies out there.

Bannon is very specifically demanding a story that a trans cabal killed Charlie Kirk.

There’s a very good reason why Cox was leading the presser and not Kash (besides Kash’s manifest incompetence): Because — as Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney noted the other day — as of now there’s no federal nexus to this crime.

The criminal case against the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk will likely play out in a Utah county courthouse, under the control of local prosecutors. But a national audience may very well be watching.

That’s because the alleged shooter, whom authorities identified on Friday as Tyler Robinson, is facing state-level criminal charges. And in Utah — unlike in federal court — criminal trials are routinely televised.

Robinson has been charged with three crimes under Utah law: murder, causing bodily injury with a firearm and obstruction of justice.

It might seem surprising that the case is not a federal one, given the national notoriety of the crime and the FBI’s heavy involvement in the investigation. But homicides can be charged as federal crimes in only a few circumstances — such as an assassination of a federal government official, a killing on federal property or a “hate crime” that was motivated by the victim’s race, religion or another protected characteristic.

The only way it could become a federal charge — the only way that Kash’s FBI would gain primary control over the facts and narrative told — would be if DOJ charged it as a hate crime, as Kash described trying to do in the case of the Robin Westman, the trans woman charged in the Annunciation Catholic School shooting last month, even while deadnaming her throughout: 

As we continue to investigate yesterday’s barbaric attack from Robert [sic] Westman, the male subject, our teams have gathered information and evidence demonstrating this was an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology.

Some updates:

• Subject left multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references both in his manifesto and written on his firearms
• Subject expressed hatred and violence toward Jewish people, writing “Israel must fall,” “Free Palestine,” and using explicit language related to the Holocaust
• He wrote a an explicit call for violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine
• The @fbi investigation is still ongoing. We will employ all of our counter-terror tools to ensure this is fully investigated and deterred.
• And as promised, we will continue to update when able.

Of course, even if Robinson’s roommate were trans, even if they were in a relationship, the current story would be that because a person who willingly implicated their friend in a death penalty eligible crime, doing the work Kash’s FBI was too incompetent to do, it gives Stephen Miller license to arrest all trans people (or at least Pam Bondi to disarm them), just like he used fraudulent claims about Tren de Aragua to detain hundreds of men with innocent tattoos and send them to a concentration camp in El Salvador.

The alleged trans person here is the only one whose actions are above reproach.

And all that’s before you consider how Kash Patel has done much to make any bid for the death penalty unsustainable (to say nothing about Federal charges against Westman), given his repeated evocations of love for Kirk, down to promising he would see him in Valhalla (wittingly or unwittingly repeating the words of the far right Christchurch killer).

Unless Robinson were to plead guilty (which would mostly likely only happen if law enforcement promised not to execute him), any such death penalty phase would be riddled with questions about the bias of Kash, Trump, and everyone else leading this case from the federal side. Frankly, the discovery would be epic — and badly discrediting to the FBI and the White House.

We don’t know what motivated Robinson, what turned him from the pro-Trump politics of his family or what appears to have distanced him from the Mormon Church (there has been little conversation about the significance of the fact that Robinson did not do a Mormon mission, but it may be the most important sign of rupture out there).

What we do know is that Stephen Miller wasted no time grieving his beloved friend, but turned immediately to politicizing his death. And Miller has never bothered to let truth drive his political jihads. 

Lev Remembers, The Last Warning: The Perfect Storm, Lev Parnas, Sept. 15, 2025. How Trump, Project 2025, and the Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk Are Forging a Super Cult Unlike Anything in History.

I was born into a world where dictatorship was the air people breathed. In the Soviet Union of my childhood, propaganda was law, truth was a crime, and people learned to whisper instead of speak. My parents risked everything to leave that world behind, believing America was the place where freedom lived, where strongmen could never rise, where democracy was not just a word but a shield.

And yet, here we are.

It took America centuries of sacrifice, blood, and courage to reach even the imperfect democracy we had. We’ve never been flawless — corruption lived on both sides, good and evil people wore every color of politics. But there was always the promise of freedom: that you could speak, that you could dissent, that you could question those in power without fear of ruin. That promise is collapsing before our very eyes.

Today, if you speak out, you risk losing your job, being silenced, being arrested. Since when did America stand for that? Since when was truth a crime?

Look at the rights we thought we had secured forever. Women fought for generations to claim control over their own bodies, and yet Roe v. Wade was torn away in an instant — a right stripped from millions by a man who pretends to speak for “freedom.” Immigrants who came here believing in liberty now face detention without due process, as Trump and his machine openly talk about dismantling habeas corpus itself — the very foundation of justice in this country. Voting rights, the sacred key of democracy, are being chipped away, one law at a time, in state after state.

And it does not stop there. Speak the wrong words, and you risk losing your livelihood. Protest the wrong man, and you may find yourself facing prison. Is this the democracy we believed in? Is this America or Russia?

The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk is being weaponized right now as a rallying cry. Trump, as always, is the face on the poster. But the real architects — Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, the Federalist Society, and others you may not know — are the ones drawing the blueprint. They’ve built Project 2025, and as I warned you, they are already putting it in motion. These are not ideas. These are roadmaps. Step-by-step plans to replace democracy with authoritarianism.

And what makes this moment unlike anything we have faced before is the scale of what they are building. Most cults in history have been rooted in one foundation — either religion, or politics, or ideology. Each dangerous, each destructive, but still contained. What Trump and the architects of Project 2025 are constructing is different. It is a tsunami. A once-in-a-lifetime storm where religion, politics, and ideology are bound together into something bigger, darker — a super cult.

And now, with the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, we are watching them fuse it all into a single weapon. They are using grief as propaganda, using death as fuel, wrapping faith, flag, and fury into one banner. That is what makes this so dangerous. It is not just one side of the culture war. It is every weapon of division, every fear and every false promise, rolled into one machine.

What I have seen take shape in just a few days should worry every one of us. This is not a joke. None of what came before was funny either, but what is playing out right now is something unprecedented. Something designed not just to win elections, but to dominate lives, silence voices, and erase freedoms. If you don’t see the danger now, you will see it when it is too late.

I have been warning you about this. And now, every word is coming true.

Look at the Epstein files. They should have shattered the MAGA cult. They revealed the networks of money, influence, and abuse that Donald Trump was at the center of. But what happened? Instead of accountability, we see the narrative buried, rebranded, weaponized. Epstein’s connections are dismissed as rumor while Trump’s machine reframes the scandal as a distraction — and the martyrdom of Kirk becomes the cover to wipe the cracks clean.

Look at foreign policy. These false conversations about “peace between Russia and Ukraine” — I told you they were theatre. I told you they were lies. Trump and his enablers have never sought peace. They have sought power. Every “deal” has been smoke and mirrors, meant to distract while the world fractures. And now we see Russia moving missiles to Europe’s borders, NATO scrambling, Ukraine bleeding. This is the fruit of those false promises.

As Churchill said, “Appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last.” And the crocodile is at our door.

I know these people. I know how they think. I sat in their rooms, I heard their whispers. They are not playing politics. They are building a system designed to outlast you, to outlast your children, to redefine freedom until it means obedience.

This is not about red or blue. This is not about left or right. This is about humanity itself. It takes generations to build truth, but only one lie to shatter it. And lies travel faster than truth ever can.

I am scared. You should be scared too. But fear cannot paralyze us. Fear must move us. Dr. King reminded us, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Silence now is complicity.

So I am not writing this to scare you — though you should be alarmed. I am writing this to open your eyes. Because if we don’t act now, the blueprint will be complete, the damage irreversible.

We must stand together. As Americans. As people. As human beings. The fight is not political — it is moral. It is not about ideology — it is about survival. 

I risk everything to bring you the truth the media won’t touch. But this movement cannot survive without you. I need you to not only read, but act. To not only agree, but unite.

That’s why I’m asking you: don’t just read this — spread it. Share this message far and wide. Tell your friends, your colleagues, your co-workers, your family members. Bring three, four more people into this movement. Become the extension of our voices. Be the megaphone for the Epstein survivors who refuse to be silenced. Be the megaphone for the Ukrainian children kidnapped and torn from their families. Be the megaphone for the people of Ukraine, that the media won’t report on.

We cannot wait for someone else to save us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. This is our moment to resist, to speak truth, to fight for freedom, and to protect the inheritance of democracy for our children.

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Announces New Deadly Strike on Boat From Venezuela, Helene Cooper, Sept. 15, 2025. Where Things Stand.

• Boat strike: President Trump announced on Monday that the U.S. military had struck a boat that he said was carrying drugs from Venezuela, the second time he has ordered the use of lethal force against a vessel from that country. Mr. Trump said three “narcoterrorists” had been killed in the latest strike, which he announced hours after Venezuela’s president condemned the earlier strike, which killed 11, as a “heinous crime.”
• Fed fight: The Trump administration wants a federal appeals court to rule by the end of the day on the president’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve. The administration wants to remove her before a two-day Fed meeting begins Tuesday. Read more. 

President Trump was asked whether he planned to provide proof that the people the U.S. killed in a strike on a boat off Venezuela on Monday were drug smugglers en route to the United States. “All you have to do is look at the cargo that was scattered all over the ocean,” the president told reporters during Oval Office remarks

Trump also reiterated his stance that he endorses law enforcement officials’ using force against protesters. He claimed, without evidence of such a directive, that under the previous administration officers were told they were allowed to do nothing if somebody spit in their face or threw a rock at them. “I say, when they spit, you hit it,” Trump said. “Do whatever you want. You do whatever the hell you want.”

The Hartmann Report, Political Commentary: The Power to Destroy Isn’t Hypothetical: It’s the State’s Ultimate Weapon, Thom  Hartmann, right, Sept. 15, 2025. Why authoritarian language always precedes authoritarian rule…

Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility that carries with it real obligations for self-control.

The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Trump’s and Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally kill you, imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.

When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” “terrorists,” or “traitors” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.

But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who were imprisoned for expressing their opinions on the genocide Netanyahu is carrying out in Israel, or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had the bad fortune of being brown-skinned when Stephen Miller was on one of his racist jeremiads even though he had legal permission to stay in the US.

This is why even after 9/11 George W. Bush measured his words, going so far as to emphasize that Islam wasn’t our enemy. So did Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, even as the country he led was under attack by actual traitors committed to ending democracy in America. In his first inaugural address, on the verge of the Civil War, he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox understood that, as a government official with the power to kill by firing squad or imprison, it was his obligation to turn down the heat.

“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Cox told the nation when Robinson was arrested. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”

Trump, Miller, and the GOP more generally haven’t gotten the message.

Trump blamed the “radical left” — as if there actually is any meaningful number of people in America calling for communism — for the killing, and then on Thursday told reporters, “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

When Matthew Dowd notes on MSNBC that Kirk engaged in hate speech, the worst that happens is the network fires him. Ditto for when Fox’s Brian Kilmead called for America to emulate Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, where physicians killed homeless and disabled people by lethal injection, later moving on to mobile vans that used their exhaust to kill. The worst Kilmead can expect is to be fired, although given how shamefully unprincipled Fox management is, that’s probably unlikely.

But when government officials describe people using language that could lead to any of us being investigated, arrested, or even imprisoned or deported because of our politics, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s a genuine threat to our system of government, our rule of law, and to the safety and security of all of the American people.

Because when they start hauling away Americans for their opinions, when they threaten to pull our citizenship or passports — as Trump and other Republicans have recently done — history tells us it’s not a long trek to using those same tactics against people who thought they were on the “right side.”

Indeed, it’s already started to happen: just ask Republicans James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, who are all now facing criminal investigations for speaking out against Trump. All these lifelong Republicans had to lawyer up after Trump publicly called them “criminals.”

When Stephen Miller — who the White House wants you to know definitely does not play with porcelain dolls — says the Democratic Party (which he can’t bring himself to say; he instead uses Joe McCarthy’s “Democrat Party” slur) “is not a political party; it is a domestic, extremist organization,” he’s laying a legal foundation for criminal investigations and arrests per the Patriot Act.

When he vows to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising under Trump’s leadership to use law enforcement to “strip them of money, power, and freedom” and threatening that members of the left who “spread evil hate” will “live in exile” he’s not just a commentator: he’s a man who wields actual power over life and death, imprisonment or freedom.

This rhetoric is particularly troubling since all of the previous 31 politically-motivated violent attacks in America have been committed by rightwingers.

Or consider Elon Musk, the world‘s richest man who created and ran the DOGE program to dismantle our government. He was in England this weekend and said:

“The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”

And he wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden or anybody like that; he was talking about people like you and me.

 

Groypers are among the ultra-right, white nationalist Trump supporters who revere Trump, among other ways, in the guise of "Pepe," shown above, a meme of a humanoid who takes the shape of a frog (Image from Twitter, now known as X). Although originally an apolitical character in cartoonist Matt Furie's works and its original internet popularity, Pepe was appropriated from 2015 onward as a symbol of the alt-right white nationalist movement, as described in a Wikipedia entry. In 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump retweeted a Pepe representation of himself.

Newsweek, What Is a 'Groyper'? What to Know About Nick Fuentes' Alt-Right Movement, Jesus Mesa, Sept. 12-13, 2025. Patel Honors Charlie Kirk: 'Rest Now, Brother. I’ll See You in Valhalla'

The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has reignited attention on a long-simmering feud within elements of the far right, particularly between Kirk and the so-called "Groyper" movement led by white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 during an appearance at Utah Valley University. As authorities investigate the motive, online speculation has turned toward extremist factions that once targeted Kirk—specifically, Fuentes' "Groyper Army," which has long accused him of being insufficiently radical.

Despite his confrontational style, Kirk was frequently attacked from the right for being too moderate. During the 2019 "Groyper Wars," Fuentes' supporters disrupted Turning Point USA events, challenging Kirk on immigration and LGBTQ rights while labeling him a "gatekeeper" of establishment conservatism.

Now, as the public searches for answers in Kirk's assassination, that conflict within far-right is back in the spotlight—with renewed scrutinyon the rhetoric and influence of Fuentes and his followers.

Social media users have also questioned whether early claims by officials that the suspect, apprehended late Thursday, was tied to left-wing extremism were premature, pointing instead to possible links to the far-right.

As of Friday afternoon, it remained unclear what the motive was in the Kirk shooting, or the political ideology of the alleged gunman. Robinson's family said he had become "more political" in recent years, according to police. The markings on the bullet casings suggest the subject was steeped in meme culture and made references to online taunts and anti-fascist messages.GroypersTheir mascot is a cartoon frog called "Groyper," a variant of the Pepe meme used widely among extremist groups. X / YouTubeWhat Is the Groyper Army?

The Groyper Army is a far-right, online-based movement organized around white nationalist and "America First" advocate Nick Fuentes. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the group consists of "alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists" who hold virulently antisemitic, racist, and homophobic views, often cloaked in rhetoric about traditional values and family.

Their mascot is a cartoon frog called "Groyper," a variant of the "Pepe" meme used widely among extremist groups.When Did the Term 'Groyper' Begin?Read more Alt-Right

Kash Patel's Tenure as FBI Director Defined by Misstep After Misstep In MAGA, Charlie Kirk Was a Moderate. What Comes Next Could Be More Extreme What Charlie Kirk's Assassination Means for Republican Youth Movement Charlie Kirk Is Assassinated, as America Blisters With Hate and Violence

The term "Groyper" began circulating widely in 2019 during a public feud inside the conservative movement. That year, followers of Nick Fuentes disrupted college events hosted by Charlie Kirk and his group, Turning Point USA, accusing Kirk of watering down Donald Trump's message.

The clash, later referred to as the "Groyper Wars," drew national attention for its confrontational tactics and for pushing white nationalist ideas into more mainstream conservative circles.

Kirk responded by calling the Groypers extremists. He defended his approach to conservatism as inclusive, saying the movement should be open to people of all backgrounds and reject racism and homophobia.What Has Nick Fuentes Said About the Charlie Kirk Killing?

Fuentes has made several public statements about Kirk's assassination. Shortly after the killing, Fuentes posted, "I am devastated. It feels like a nightmare that we'll never wake up from," and called for unity, writing, "The violence and hatred has to stop. Our country needs Christ now more than ever."

On September 12, Fuentes directed his comments at the Trump administration. "We need more from the Trump administration than what we're getting," he wrote on X. "Release all the information about the assassin and his Discord contacts. Everyone must be investigated. Tell us the plan. How will the government stop this from ever happening again? Where is the leadership???"  

Trump-Inspired Crackdowns On U.S. Banking, Media, Justice Department

 

New York Times, Trump Administration Claims Vast Powers as It Races to Fire Fed Governor Before Meeting, Tony Romm, Sept. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Trump has forged ahead with his attempts to fire Lisa Cook even as new documents call his claims of mortgage fraud into question.

The Trump administration sought to convince a federal court on Sunday that President Trump possesses vast powers and “discretion” to fire federal officials, as it raced to block Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve, from participating in this week’s meeting of the central bank.

The government offered its latest arguments to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where judges are weighing an emergency request by Mr. Trump that would allow him to proceed with firing Ms. Cook, left, after a lower court halted those plans last week.

In their new filing, lawyers for the Justice Department defended Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss Ms. Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which involved loan documents she signed before joining the Fed in 2022. While she has not been charged with any wrongdoing or convicted of a crime, Mr. Trump announced he would fire Ms. Cook from the Fed in late August, citing a provision in the central bank’s founding law that allows him to oust members for “cause.”

Newly reported documents have called into question the president’s assertions. But the administration told the court on Sunday that the decision to remove Ms. Cook is “an unreviewable exercise of the discretion Congress vested” in the president.

Lawyers for the government also framed the ouster as “reasonable,” arguing that the claims against Ms. Cook had created doubt that she “can be trusted to act with forthrightness, care, and disinterest in managing the U.S. money supply.”

The government’s arguments to the appeals court echoed those that it presented to a lower court earlier this month, before a federal judge temporarily blocked Mr. Trump from firing Ms. Cook. There, Jia Cobb, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, found that Mr. Trump could not remove Ms. Cook for conduct that occurred before she was confirmed to the Fed, nor for claims that do not involve her professional conduct.

The Trump administration has asked the appellate panel to stay that order and rule by the end of Monday, ahead of the Fed’s two-day meeting, which begins on Tuesday. Mr. Trump has attacked the central bank for months, demanding that its policymakers slash interest rates.

On Saturday, lawyers for Ms. Cook told the court that a decision that prevents her from attending that meeting — and casting a vote on interest rates — could unleash turmoil in the financial markets and undermine the political independence of the Fed.

 

The U.S. Federal Reserve headquarters designed by Marriner Eccles in Washington, DC.

New York Times, The Fed Tried to Avoid a Fight With Trump. It Got One Anyway, Colby Smith and Ben Casselman, Sept. 15, 2025. The central bank’s cautious approach to defending itself against President Trump is drawing scrutiny as the institution’s independence comes under threat.

Three weeks ago, Jerome H. Powell, right, delivered a closely watched speech to central bankers, government officials and academics attending the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson, Wyo.

The Fed chair had been through an eventful few weeks. President Trump had flirted with firing him and then showed up for a rare visit at the central bank. One of the Fed’s seven governors had resigned unexpectedly. And as Mr. Powell made his way to Jackson Lake Lodge to deliver his remarks, Mr. Trump was demanding the resignation of another governor, Lisa Cook, over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud.

Each of these events on its own was destabilizing. Together, they represented the most direct infringement on the central bank’s independence in decades. Hanging in the balance was the Fed’s ability to set monetary policy free from political meddling, a longstanding separation that had become the backbone of the world’s largest economy.

Mr. Powell’s speech disregarded that threat. He deviated little from remarks that had been in the works for weeks, talking instead about the economic outlook for the United States, the trajectory for interest rates and the central bank’s blueprint for setting monetary policy. Never once did Mr. Powell utter anything about the Fed’s independence.

The omission did not go unnoticed, especially by those who had hoped the central bank would be louder in its opposition to what they viewed as an aggressive assault on the institution. But they had also grown accustomed to the Fed being exceedingly cautious about anything that involved Mr. Trump.

That prudence, which has only intensified since Mr. Powell’s speech, aligned with the Fed’s now decade-old playbook for handling a president who has made no secret of his desire to control the central bank and its power to set interest rates.

Inside the Fed, there is a preoccupation with doing whatever possible to avoid provoking the president, which on some occasions has meant complying with his demands. The strategy among officials and staff has been to try to ignore the cacophony and focus on their day jobs. Public statements are also getting a closer look, with in-house lawyers poring over each sentence to avoid drawing undue scrutiny.

Critics of that cautious approach say it has done little to insulate the institution from an existential threat.

New York Times, Fired Prosecutor Challenges Trump’s Claims to Sweeping Power in Lawsuit, William K. Rashbaum, Jonah E. Bromwich and Benjamin Weiser, Sept. 15, 2025. The Justice Department gave no reason for its dismissal of Maurene Comey, a longtime federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of the former F.B.I. director, James Comey.

Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor who handled criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, is contesting her abrupt July firing in a lawsuit that challenges Donald J. Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential power.

Ms. Comey, whose father, James B. Comey, is a former F.B.I. director, says in the lawsuit filed on Monday that she was never given a reason for her dismissal. She contends that no plausible explanation exists other than that she is the daughter of one of the president’s best-known adversaries — or her perceived political affiliations.

Ms. Comey is among many federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials who have been fired in President Trump’s second term, with no reason given beyond Article II of the Constitution, which broadly describes the president’s powers. Some have challenged their dismissals before administrative judges; others have sued in federal court.

Ms. Comey’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, names as defendants the Office of the President, the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others, and calls her firing from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York illegal.

“The politically motivated termination of Ms. Comey — ostensibly under ‘Article II of the Constitution’— upends bedrock principles of our democracy and justice system,” the lawsuit says. “Assistant United States attorneys like Ms. Comey must do their jobs without fearing or favoring any political party or perspective, guided solely by the law, the facts and the pursuit of justice.”

Ms. Comey, a 10-year veteran who was among the most highly regarded trial lawyers in the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, was fired as the White House sought to quell frustration from its base about its reluctance to release files related to Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier. Mr. Epstein killed himself in a federal jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His associate, Ms. Maxwell, was convicted of sex trafficking a minor and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The brief memorandum informing Ms. Comey of her termination gave no explanation for the firing, but cited Article II. In the lawsuit, Ms. Comey said that the U.S. attorney, Jay Clayton, was unable to provide her with a rationale.

“All I can say is it came from Washington,” Mr. Clayton told her, according to the lawsuit. “I can’t tell you anything else.”

Ms. Comey contends that the law provides no authority for the president to fire rank-and-file prosecutors, who are protected by civil service laws passed by Congress and signed by past presidents.

“Neither the president nor the Department of Justice have unlimited authority to remove” prosecutors, according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Ms. Comey’s lawyers Nicole Gueron, Ellen Blain, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret M. Donovan.

The enmity between the president and Ms. Comey’s father dates to the 2016 presidential election, when Mr. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, publicly announced that the agency would not recommend charges against Mr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump fired him in May 2017 and the two men have criticized each other in public ever since. In the days before Ms. Comey’s firing, Mr. Trump had claimed without evidence that files related to Mr. Epstein’s crimes were a hoax concocted by Mr. Comey.

National Press Club Journalism Institute, Top stories, Beth Francesca, Sept. 15, 2025.

■ Workers are getting fired, placed on leave over Charlie Kirk posts (Washington Post) / Washington Post columnist says she was fired over her posts about Charlie Kirk and political violence (CNN) / ‘The Washington Post Guild condemns the unjust firing of columnist Karen Attiah’ (Washington Post Guild) / How news streamers covered the killing of Charlie Kirk (Columbia Journalism Review) / Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in a post-content-moderation world (WIRED) / How Charlie Kirk used controversy — often delivered in person — to construct our new media ecosystem (Vanity Fair)

■ Republicans plan bill to consolidate government-funded broadcasters (Axios) / After Trump’s cuts, ‘crippled’ NPR and PBS stations must transform (New York Times) / NPR Network revenue programs net stations nearly $16 million (Current) / Alaska fund raises $3.5M for public media as federal cuts begin (Anchorage Daily News) / WETA cuts 5% of workforce, cancels three local television programs (Current) / University to begin ‘wind down’ of WPSU after acquisition vote fails (Current)

■ Channel 4 to mark Trump’s U.K. visit with ‘longest uninterrupted reel of untruths ever broadcast on television’ (Hollywood Reporter)

■ FBI arrests 2 after incendiary device left under FOX 13 News vehicle (FOX 13 News)

■ Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade apologizes for ‘just kill them’ comments about mentally ill homeless people (Deadline)

■ Newsmax sues Fox again, expands lawsuit after Florida case dismissed (Newsmax) / Penske Media sues Google for AI ‘overview' news story summaries without publishers' consent (The Wrap)

■ A framework deal on TikTok has been reached between the US and China (Associated Press)

■ Military.com 'effectively dead' after Valnet forces big layoffs, newsroom union says (The Wrap)

 

David Ignatius and Karen Attiah receiving the George Polk Award, in 2019 for commentary on Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. In the aftermath of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. 

The Golden Hour via Substack, The Washington Post Fired Me — But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced, Karen Attiah, right, Sept. 15, 2025. I spoke out against hatred and violence in America — and it cost me my job.

Last week, the Washington Post fired me.

The reason? Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.

Eleven years ago, I joined the Washington Post’s Opinions department with a simple goal: to use journalism in service of people.

I believed in using the pen to remember the forgotten, question power, shine light in darkness, and defend democracy. Early in my career, late Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt told me that opinion journalism is not just about writing the world as it is, but as it should be. He told me we should use our platform to do good. That has been my north star every day.

As the founding Global Opinions editor, I created a space for courageous, diverse voices from around the world — especially those exiled for speaking the truth. I was inspired by their bravery. When my writer, Global Opinions columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered by Saudi Arabia regime agents for his words, I fought loudly for justice for years, putting my life and safety on the line to pursue accountability and defend global press freedom. For this work, I was honored with global recognition, prestigious awards and proximity to the world’s most powerful people.

As a columnist, I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction.

Now, I am the one being silenced - for doing my job.

On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for “thoughts and prayers” and “this is not who we are” that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths.

I expressed sadness and fear for America.

My most widely shared thread was not even about activist Charlie Kirk, who was horribly murdered, but about the political assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, her husband and her dog. I pointed to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths, and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence. This cycle has been documented for years. Nothing I said was new or false or disparaging— it is descriptive, and supported by data.

I did my journalistic duty, reminding people that despite President Trump’s partisan rushes to judgement, no suspect or motive had been identified in the killing of Charlie Kirk — exercising restraint even as I condemned hatred and violence.

My journalistic and moral values for balance compelled me to condemn violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals “Unhumans”. In a since-deleted post, a user accused me of supporting violence and fascism. I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.

My only direct reference to Kirk was one post— his own words on record.

My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.

And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being "unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation—claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.

Since then, my words on absolution for white male violence have proven prescient. The suspect in Kirk’s killing is indeed a young white man, and already, lawmakers are urging us to pray for him. The media is painting the 22 year-old as a good, all-American suburban kid. The cycle I mentioned has once again come to pass.

I was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions. Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves. What happened to me is part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media — a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful — and tragic.

 

Shown above, Karen Attiah seated next to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos at the 2019 Gridiron Dinner.

I am proud of my eleven years at the Post. Beyond awards and recognition, the greatest honor has been working with brilliant colleagues and connecting with readers and writers around the world. To all who have supported me, read me, even those who disagreed with me— I say, thank you. You’ve made me a better writer, thinker, and person.

But this is not the end of my work. I still believe in the power of the pen. My values have not changed.

Freedom from censorship, especially on talking about race, is why I launched the Resistance Studies Series, beginning with my independent online course Race, Media, and International Affairs 101. I created this course after Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs cut funding for my Race and Media class. This summer, we sold out all 500 spots and funded more than 40 scholarships.

For those who wish to support me, please do sign up to join the fall session of Race, Media and International Affairs 101+102 — a series of lectures and conversations with prominent guest speakers — before the Sept. 19 registration deadline. The first classes begin Oct. 6th. This will likely be the last cohort I will teach until mid-2026, so don’t miss your chance.

For those who can’t attend, you can also contribute to operations, scholarships and guest speakers.

You can also support my written work directly by subscribing to my Substack, The Golden Hour, where I will continue to speak truth to power — without fear or favor.

The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah, Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I'm Going to Teach It Anyway, Karen Attiah, right, April 21, 2025. This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism.

When I got the opportunity to teach at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in the fall of 2023 for the spring 2024 semester, I was elated. My dream of teaching in a global environment had come true.

I wanted to use that opportunity to build a course I never had when I was an international affairs student studying human rights and media at SIPA—one that examined how constructs of race and identity are formed, and how mass media has historically shaped our understanding of race and the global order. I knew that race and identity were rarely taught in international affairs schools—or many journalism schools, for that matter. And I rarely had the opportunity to learn from a professor who looked like me.

The class became one of the most popular at SIPA last year. I enjoyed every minute of teaching, even while knowing that across the country, academic offerings on race, identity, and history were under siege. My students came from around the world and across industries, and I learned just as much from them as they did from me and each other. Some even went on to publish their class assignments in local and national media.

A few months later, the course was canceled, and the department it was housed was dissolved. Despite the grief and lack of clarity, I’ve kept quiet….. until now.

Since then, it has been heart-wrenching to watch Columbia’s administration pre-emptively cave to pressure, especially in placing Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under special provost supervision or receivership. It’s been terrifying to see institution after institution across the country cave on diversity, freedom of speech, and academic integrity, not to protect students and faculty, but to protect donors and reputations.

I’ve been thinking of what to do to help others in this moment. So for starters, I’ve decided to liberate my teaching work.

This summer, I will be offering a version of my Columbia course on Race, Media, and International Affairs as an independent, public offering, for this moment.

This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear.

As I said on BlueSky, I don’t know what the future of academia in America will look like after all this. I am both grateful to Columbia for how it shaped me, while also grieving what feels like the loss of the institutional home I knew and loved.

But I do know that in a moment of profound crisis, we cannot wait for elite permission or institutional approval to share knowledge and create learning communities.

I put out a simple post. Over 3,000 people liked it. More than 100 said they would support the course financially. Many said they’d be willing to pay more to offset the cost for someone else. The response was overwhelming.

Rolling Stone, Stephen Colbert and ‘Late Show’ Win Emmy After Cancellation: ‘Stay Strong, Be Brave’ onstage, Tomas Mier, Sept. 14-15, 2025. “Sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it,” Colbert said onstage.

Stephen Colbert earned his second standing ovation of the night — this time, after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series Sunday.

After chants of “Stephen, Stephen” from the crowd, Colbert, right, took the stage alongside the crew behind the CBS late-night show, which is scheduled to end next May.

“Thank you for this honor. I want to thank CBS for giving us the privilege to be part of the late-night tradition, which I hope continues long after we’re no longer doing this show,” Colbert said. “I gotta thank these people, the 200 incredible professionals. You are the pros, and I’m so proud to be one of you. We gotta thank the people who supported us the last 20 years.”

After thanking his family and honoring Amy Cole, Colbert’s assistant for 16 years who died last March, Colbert shared a metaphor about love and loss, mentioning the state of the United States today.

“In September of 2015, Spike Jonze stopped by my office and said, ‘Hey, what do you want this show to be about?’ And I said, ‘Spike, I don’t know how you could do it, but I kind of like to do a late-night comedy show that was about love,'” Colbert said onstage. “I don’t know if I ever figured that out, but at a certain point, and you can guess what that point was, I realized that in some ways, we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss.”

He continued: “And that’s related to love, because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it.”

He then ended his speech by adding, “And 10 years later, in September of 2025, my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America. Stay strong. Be brave. And if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.”

Earlier in the night, Colbert opened the show by presenting the first award of the evening, and joking, “While I have your attention… Is anyone hiring?”

The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The most powerful guy in Trump’s ear has a plan for how to respond to the death of Charlie Kirk, William Kristol, right, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift, You’re not going to like it.

Kash Patel’s lonely one-man crusade to convince everybody he actually did a great job hunting down Charlie Kirk’s killer continues. “I made the decision to surge so many resources,” he told Fox & Friends this morning. “I had to expedite the process . . . I made the tough calls . . . I came in and I accelerated that process.”

All told, during Patel’s 15 minute interview, we counted ten mentions of the word “my,” a whopping 43 mentions of the word “I,” and 13 mentions of the word “I’m.” Oh, and four mentions of the word “me.”

Sept. 13

 

New York Times, Paramount Criticizes Celebrity-Endorsed Israeli Film Boycott, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Sept. 13, 2025. The film studio, which some say has turned rightward under its new owner, said it disagreed with thousands of Hollywood professionals pledging to boycott Israeli film institutions.

Paramount, under its new owner, David Ellison, has become the first major Hollywood studio to condemn a boycott of Israeli film institutions that more than 4,000 actors and directors now support.

In a statement on Friday, the studio said it believed in “the power of storytelling to connect and inspire people, promote mutual understanding and preserve the moments, ideas and events that shape the world we share,” adding that it disagreed “with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers.”

The boycott, brought this week by Film Workers for Palestine, a group that campaigns for the end of the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, was initially signed by more than 1,000 filmmakers and industry professionals. Olivia Colman, Ava DuVernay, Mark Ruffalo, Ayo Edebiri and others pledged not to work with Israeli film institutions that they believe are complicit in the crisis. Support for the movement has since quadrupled.

“Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace,” Paramount said in its statement. “We need more engagement and communication — not less.”

Film Workers for Palestine pushed back against Paramount in a statement on Friday, saying it hoped the studio was not “intentionally misrepresenting the pledge in an attempt to silence our colleagues in the film industry.” The group has argued that its boycott targets film institutions and companies, not individual artists.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

A vast majority of Israel’s “film production and distribution companies, sales agents, cinemas and other film institutions,” the group has said, “have never endorsed the full, internationally recognized rights of the Palestinian people.”

In its statement on Friday, Film Workers for Palestine also pointed to the close relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Larry Ellison, the tech titan and David Ellison’s father. Recent documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the elder Ellison will control Paramount.

Paramount’s response to the boycott comes amid what some have perceived as a shift to the right at the company, and a little more than a month after an $8 billion merger with the media company Skydance, which David Ellison controls.

That deal was approved by the Trump administration after Paramount agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the editing of an interview on “60 Minutes” with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and viewed the settlement as an extraordinary concession to a sitting president.

This week, CBS News installed Kenneth R. Weinstein, a conservative policy veteran, as its ombudsman, to review complaints about the network’s coverage.

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Morning News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 13, 2025. Government and private companies crack down on speech mocking Kirk's death, publications retract false stories about Kirk killer's ideology, Trump backs off National Guard to Chicago, and more.

I woke up angry today — because once again, major media outlets are being forced to walk back sloppy, inaccurate reporting on the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk. First it was the Wall Street Journal. Now, The Guardian has retracted claims that Tyler Robinson was a leftist. This isn’t a minor mistake — it’s reckless, and it fuels conspiracy theories at the worst possible moment. The media must do better.

At the same time, I’m tracking a disturbing wave of firings across the country targeting people who made critical or mocking remarks about Kirk’s killing. And in Washington, Donald Trump is already backpedaling on his threat to deploy the National Guard to Chicago.

Here’s my promise to you: I will not launder rumors from “anonymous sources” without evidence. I will not run with unverified claims that collapse hours later. My job as an independent journalist is to cut through the noise and deliver the facts — fearlessly, without bowing to politics, intimidation, or disinformation.

With that, here’s the news you missed:

A crackdown on speech: In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration escalated its crackdown on speech: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau threatened to revoke visas of foreigners who mocked Kirk’s death, Republican lawmakers like Clay Higgins vowed to pressure tech companies to censor and punish online comments, and right-wing influencers launched doxxing campaigns, while some Republicans such as Senators Thom Tillis and Don Bacon criticized their party’s inflammatory rhetoric; meanwhile, Trump selectively honored Kirk with flags at half-staff—unlike slain Democrat Melissa Hortman.

Multiple teachers, firefighters, journalists, military personnel, and others were fired, suspended, or investigated after posting critical or mocking comments about far-right activist Charlie Kirk’s killing, as authorities, employers, and conservative figures launched a broad crackdown on speech, with notable cases including a Secret Service agent, a Carolina Panthers staffer, MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd, and educators in Florida and Oregon.

The Florida Department of Education, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, announced investigations and potential sanctions against teachers who post “vile” comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, after a Clay County teacher was suspended for celebrating his death, with Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas warning that educators’ First Amendment rights are limited by their duty to uphold professional standards and maintain trust with students and families.

In a review of his controversial record, Charlie Kirk was highlighted for repeatedly making racist, sexist, and inflammatory remarks—including calling Black people “prowling” attackers, questioning the competence of Black professionals, telling Taylor Swift to “submit to your husband,” opposing abortion even in cases of child rape, and defending “some gun deaths every single year” as a necessary price for Second Amendment rights.

The Guardian walked back an earlier claim, based on a friend’s account, that Tyler Robinson—the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk—was a leftist, clarifying that his ideology remains unclear and cautioning against premature political labeling.

Text stating an editor\'s note. The text mentions the article was updated on 12 September 2025 to remove quotes after a verified source, who attended high school with Tyler Robinson, said they could not accurately remember details of their relationship.

The Wall Street Journal quietly retracted its early claim that Charlie Kirk’s shooter had engraved “transgender ideology” messages on his bullets, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and investigators clarified the casings instead carried random memes and antifascist song lyrics; LGBTQ+ advocates condemned the false reporting for fueling threats and harassment against trans people, demanding retractions, apologies, and stricter newsroom standards to avoid spreading misinformation that endangers marginalized communities.

Text stating "Editor\'s Note: An earlier version of this article detailed how an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered following the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of \'transgender and anti-fascist ideology.\' Justice Department officials later urged caution about the bulletin by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, saying it may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition, and the article was updated Thursday to reflect that. This editor\'s note was appended on Friday, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the engravings included one that said \'Hey socialist!\' along with other messages and symbols. He also said there was no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references."

Investigators discovered that bullet casings at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s killing were scrawled with cryptic internet and gaming references—including a Helldivers 2 bomb command sequence, memes like “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” and “If you read this, you are GAY Lmao,” and the antifascist anthem Bella Ciao—suggesting shooter Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old student, was drawing from online subcultures rather than a clear political ideology; records show he was a registered but non-voting Utahn with Republican parents.

London is bracing for its largest far-right rally in decades, led by activist Tommy Robinson and framed as a tribute to Charlie Kirk, with up to 40,000 expected, major far-right figures like Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson slated to appear, and counter-protests organized by anti-racism groups.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 12, 2025 [Media Battle Over Kirk Killer's Politics], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 13, 2025. Since a gunman murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, both social media circles and the political sphere have been alight with accusations that “the Left” was responsible for the shooting.

Prominent right-wing social media accounts called the Democratic Party “a domestic terror organization” and declared “WAR.” Billionaire Elon Musk posted: “The Left is the party of murder.”

From the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Without any information about the shooter, the media got in on the game, with the Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that “[a]mmunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting.” Bomb threats targeted Democratic politicians—primarily Black politicians—and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).

Meanwhile, it was not clear the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was up to the task of finding the killer. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience when Trump put them in charge of the agency. Once there, they focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.” In early August, they forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City, Utah, field office, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent.

Meanwhile, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute reported that one in five FBI agents have been diverted from their jobs to conduct immigration raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and just hours before the shooting, three former top officials at the FBI filed a lawsuit against Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, and the president accusing them of unlawfully politicizing the FBI, purging it of anyone who had ever worked on a criminal investigation of Trump. The lawsuit suggests Bongino had an “intense focus on [using] his social media profiles to change his followers’ perceptions of the FBI.”

As Quinta Jurecic reported today in The Atlantic, hours after the shooting, Patel’s personal social media account posted a picture of himself and Kirk; minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account posted that the shooter was already in custody and then, an hour and a half later, said the suspect had been released. Both Patel and Bongino appeared to be focused more on posting than on doing the work to find the shooter.

This morning, Trump announced on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends that he had just heard “they have the person that they wanted.” That person turned out to be 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in to authorities after his father urged him to. Robinson’s parents are registered Republicans; he was not affiliated with a political party and was an inactive voter. Over the past years, Robinson’s mother posted a number of pictures of him and his brothers posing with guns.

Robinson had recently had a conversation with a family member about why they didn’t like Kirk’s viewpoints. Robinson appears to have admired the “Groypers,” led by Nick Fuentes, who complain that more mainstream organizations like Kirk’s Turning Point USA are not “pro-white” enough and have publicly harassed Kirk in the past.

Allison Gill of The Breakdown explained that the rumors the shooter had engraved anti-fascist rhetoric on some of the bullet casings found at the scene turned out to be a misunderstanding of terms from the video game Helldivers2. The claim that he had used “transgender ideology” was apparently a misreading of the headstamp “TRN” that marks ammunition as the product of Turkish manufacturer Turan.

Almost as soon as Robinson was identified, the tone of MAGA leader’s conversation about the shooting changed. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC), who had used a slur to refer to the shooter as pro-transgender, posted on social media: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”

For his part, Trump seemed to have lost interest in Kirk even earlier. Yesterday evening, a reporter offered the president his condolences on the loss of his friend Kirk and asked Trump how he was holding up. The president answered, in full: “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure. And I just see all the trucks. We just started so it'll get done very nicely and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Thank you very much.”

The day of Kirk’s murder, Russia sent 19 drones into Poland—some armed and some unarmed—testing the strength of the neighboring country. With the help of allies, Poland shot down four of them. Poland belongs to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with whom the U.S. shares a mutual defense agreement meaning that if it is attacked, we will come to its aid. After the attack, Poland called an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the primary political decision-making body within NATO. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker apparently did not attend.

Although Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, called the violation “intentional, not accidental,” Trump told reporters that Russia’s sending of drones into Poland “could’ve been a mistake.” Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reported on Tuesday that on August 27, the Trump administration returned a plane full of Russian dissidents seeking asylum in the U.S. to Moscow, where at least some of them went directly from the plane into custody.

Today, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus G. Grynkewich announced that NATO is launching “Eastern Sentry,” an operation to bolster NATO’s defense against Russian incursions along NATO’s eastern flank. In what appeared to be an attempt to calm NATO allies’ concerns about Trump’s "mistake" comment, acting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea told the United Nations Security Council today the U.S. will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” “The United States stands by our NATO allies in the face of these alarming airspace violations,” she said.

If the U.S. is weakening ties to traditional defensive alliances, it is attempting to flex its muscles by going after alleged drug dealers with a newly dubbed “Department of War.” On September 2, Trump announced the U.S. had struck a boat he claimed was carrying drugs to the U.S., killing 11 civilians he claimed were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists.” The administration posted a video of the operation online.

From the start, legal specialists noted that the U.S. made the strike without legal authority. Trump simply claimed the power to kill men he claimed were a danger to the U.S., advancing the argument that drug smuggling is the same thing as an imminent military attack on the U.S. and thus the laws of war are in force. Yesterday, that argument got even weaker when Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that the men on the boat appeared to have been spooked by the military hardware over them and turned back to shore. “If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002, said to the reporters.

Today, Trump announced he was sending the National Guard not into Chicago, Illinois, where Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker have mounted strong opposition, but to Memphis, Tennessee. The Memphis Police Department noted: “Overall crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, burglary, and larceny also reaching 25-year lows. Murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low, and sexual assault at a twenty-year low" in the city.

Although Trump said he had the support of the mayor and the governor, Shelby County mayor Lee Harris asked Republican governor Bill Lee to “please reconsider, if this is on the table.” He said local government would welcome more state troopers to help fight crime, but “to have individuals with military fatigues, semi-automatic weapons and armored vehicles patrolling our streets is way too far, anti-democratic and anti-American.”

Lee released a statement saying he was set to speak with Trump about a “strategic mission” to use state law enforcement more effectively with an already established FBI mission in Memphis.

Meanwhile, yesterday four out of five justices on a panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court found former president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of Donald Trump, guilty of plotting a coup, attempting to overturn the country’s 2022 election, and committing violent acts against state institutions. They sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison. 

New York Times, U.C. Berkeley Gives Names of Students and Faculty to Government for Antisemitism Probe, Francesca Regalado, Sept. 13, 2025. The University of California, Berkeley, told around 160 people that their names were in documents related to antisemitism complaints that were demanded by the Trump administration.

The University of California, Berkeley, said on Friday that it has provided the names of students, faculty and staff in cases of alleged antisemitism to the federal government, complying with the Trump administration’s investigation of universities that it has accused of failing to protect Jewish students.

The university said in a statement that it notified about 160 people on Sept. 4 that they were named in documents provided to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The Daily Californian, a student-run newspaper, first reported the disclosure on Wednesday.

U.C. Berkeley said it had been directed by the University of California system’s Office of the General Counsel to comply with the federal government’s demand for documents related to how the university handles complaints about antisemitism. “Numerous documents” were provided to the Education Department over recent months, U.C. Berkeley said.

Those notified on Sept. 4 included people who were accused of or affected by antisemitic incidents, as well as the individuals who had filed the antisemitism complaints, according to the university.

President Trump has put extraordinary pressure on American universities this year, threatening to cut off federal funding and, in some cases, their ability to enroll foreign students. The government has ordered a freeze on billions of dollars in research funding.

The Trump administration’s main targets have been elite universities, which Mr. Trump and his allies have said are bastions of ideological indoctrination and antisemitism. U.C. Berkeley is among the 10 universities that a Trump administration task force on antisemitism has identified for particular attention.

The federal cuts have been deep at universities in California, a state where scientific research is a critical economic engine for sectors including technology and agriculture.

The Department of Education opened an investigation in February into how U.C. Berkeley and four other universities handled complaints of alleged antisemitism. In July, Rich Lyons, the chancellor of Berkeley, and the leaders of two other universities were grilled by Republican lawmakers, who accused them of failing to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

“We have a solemn obligation to protect our community from discrimination and harassment, while also upholding the First Amendment right to free speech,” Mr. Lyons said in his testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Some U.C. Berkeley alumni expressed their strong disapproval of sharing the information with the government. One, the publisher Steve Wasserman, invoked the university’s reputation as the cradle of the free speech movement in the 1960s, in which students fought to expand political expression on the Berkeley campus.

“Lyons’ public statements before Congress seem to suggest a certain resilience and a certain desire to do the right thing. But apparently when push came to shove, they secretly shared 160 names with the Trump administration,” said Mr. Wasserman, who jointly runs Heyday Books, in a phone interview on Friday.

University officials have noted that there are legal limits to their pushback against government requests.

The University of California system said that, like all public universities, it was subject to state and federal oversight. It said in a statement that it “is committed to protecting the privacy of our students, faculty, and staff to the greatest extent possible, while fulfilling its legal obligations.”

New York Times, After Trump’s Cuts, ‘Crippled’ NPR and PBS Stations Must Transform, Benjamin Mullin, Jack Healy and David W. Chen, Sept. 13, 2025. Radio and television stations, facing enormous budget holes, are pleading with NPR and PBS to lower their fees as they examine whether to drop national programming altogether.

On the windswept prairie of South Dakota, a tribal public radio station is selling off its old records to pay the bills. In Warm Springs, Ore., the NPR affiliate is considering dropping “All Things Considered” to focus on tribal issues.

In Bunker Hill, Kan., (population 103), the public TV station may eventually have to cut ties with PBS, pulling children’s shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”

“We are crippled here,” said Betsy Schwien, the general manager of Smoky Hills PBS in Bunker Hill. “It is the absolute worst-case scenario.”

The decision by President Trump and Republicans in Congress to strip $500 million from public broadcasters this summer is forcing profound changes that will reshape the airwaves, especially in rural and tribal areas of the country.

Some stations are beginning to go off the air, as Congress was warned before it went ahead and eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the taxpayer-backed company that supports public media, ultimately shutting it down. But short of that, no station will be immune from impacts.

Sept. 12

 

The Hartmann Report, Political Commentary: The “Both Sides” Scam: How False Balance Fuels Extremism, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 12, 2025. When pundits blame tone instead of truth, they let one party weaponize threats and lies without consequence…

As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

Sept. 8 

New York Times, Murdochs Reach Deal to Resolve Succession Fight, Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler, Sept. 8, 2025. Lachlan Murdoch will take control of a new family trust in a deal worth $3.3 billion, ensuring that his father’s media empire will retain its conservative slant.

The Murdoch family’s epic, decades-long succession battle has reached a multibillion-dollar finale.

Lachlan Murdoch has completed an agreement to secure control of his family’s sprawling media empire for decades to come, the family announced on Monday. The deal ensures that the empire’s various outlets, including Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, will remain conservative after his father Rupert’s death. It is valued at $3.3 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.

The deal comes months after Rupert and Lachlan’s audacious bid to unilaterally change the terms of the Murdoch family’s irrevocable trust and disenfranchise Lachlan’s oldest siblings, Prue, Liz and James. The bid initially failed in court, but ultimately brought the two sides to the negotiating table.

The agreement gives the 94-year-old Rupert, who built a single Australian newspaper into the world’s most powerful media empire, what he has long sought — to preserve what he has called the “protector of the conservative voice in the English-speaking world” under the leadership of his chosen heir, Lachlan.

Under the terms of the deal, Lachlan’s three oldest siblings will receive $1.1 billion each for all their shares in the empire, according to the person with knowledge of the negotiations. Those shares are currently held in the existing family trust, which will be dissolved. This amounts to roughly 80 percent of the value of their stock at the close of trading Friday.

As part of the agreement, the ongoing litigation between Rupert and Lachlan, 54, and the three siblings over the trust will end. A new Murdoch family trust will be created that will include Lachlan and his two younger sisters, Grace and Chloe. That trust will hold the controlling stake in the two main Murdoch media companies, Fox Corporation and News Corp.

New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Epstein Estate Turns Over Birthday Drawing Apparently Signed by Trump, Staff Reports, Sept. 8, 2025. 

Epstein book: Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released an image of the sexually suggestive note and drawing apparently bearing the signature of Donald J. Trump, taken from a 2003 book celebrating the 50th birthday of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Trump has insisted he never wrote such a note. Lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate provided a copy of the book to the committee in response to a subpoena. Read more ›

Immigration stops: The Supreme Court at least temporarily lifted restrictions on immigration-related stops by government agents in the Los Angeles area that challengers called “blatant racial profiling.” The decision lifts a federal judge’s order that agents not make indiscriminate stops relying on factors like a person’s ethnicity or that they speak Spanish. But the ruling is not the last word in the case. Read more ›

Chicago: Mr. Trump’s promised immigration crackdown in Chicago has begun, the administration said, though local officials said they hadn’t seen many arrests. The Department of Homeland Security said the effort was targeting undocumented immigrants with criminal records. At least three people were arrested there on Sunday by federal agents, an advocacy group said.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a social media post that President Trump “did not draw” and “did not sign” a sexually suggestive drawing and note from the so-called Epstein birthday book. She also said that Trump’s legal team would continue to pursue his defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over the report it published in July on the existence of the drawing.

Sept. 5 

New York Times, At George Mason University, Trump Has Found an Unbending Adversary, Stephanie Saul, Sept. 6, 2025. Gregory Washington, George Mason’s first Black president, runs a university that prizes diversity. That has made him a target of the Trump administration.

Gregory N. Washington, the first Black president of George Mason University, remembers the tumult on campus as he began his new job in 2020.

It was the era of Black Lives Matter, and students were protesting over the man the school is named after, a complicated Virginia historical figure and slaveholder. Demonstrators were demanding that a statue of Mason on campus be torn down, Dr. Washington said.

Five years later, George Mason’s statue remains intact, and politics are once again convulsing college campuses. But instead of contending with student protests, today Dr. Washington — who made it his mission to reduce racial tensions at George Mason — is in the cross hairs of the Trump administration, accused of violating the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against white academics in hiring and promotions.

President Trump’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, historically aimed at protecting Black people and members of other minority groups from discrimination, has infuriated his critics. And as if to twist the knife, the Trump administration has also demanded a personal public apology from Dr. Washington over his efforts to support racial diversity — which it described as unlawful and discriminatory.

Dr. Washington has refused.

“It’s to protect my reputation and the reputation of the campus,” he said in an interview last week.

The refusal has made the George Mason president one of the few university leaders who has explicitly, and publicly, challenged the Trump administration. He joins a short list of other higher education leaders, including the presidents of Harvard and Princeton.

But unlike many of his peers, Dr. Washington has been targeted as an individual, and so his choice to resist the Trump administration’s demands leaves him in an uncommonly precarious position.

“Singling out a Black leader in this way is not only unprecedented but also deeply troubling,” the university chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement last week.

The Trump administration has made attacking universities central to its agenda. Higher education leaders argue that their institutions are the pillars of fact-based scientific inquiry and freedom of expression. President Trump and his supporters have argued they are elitist and focused on indoctrinating new generations into liberal ideologies.

But George Mason stands in stark contrast to the exclusive institutions Mr. Trump has targeted. It offers admission to 90 percent of its applicants. Many are middle-class students from Northern Virginia.Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.

It is also among the most diverse campuses in the country.

Shortly after taking office at George Mason, Virginia’s largest public university, Dr. Washington announced a task force on diversity. “My vision is establishing George Mason University as a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence in action,” he said at the time.

Dr. Washington noted that the demographics of George Mason’s faculty didn’t mirror its diverse student body. Among his priorities was a plan to encourage diversity among faculty and staff members — now the crux of the Trump administration’s complaint against him.

The agency’s nine-page complaint cited, among other things, a comment in 2021 from Dr. Washington that was posted on George Mason’s website.

“If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not, then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?”

White House Chronicle, Global Commentary: How the Special Relationship Became the Odd Couple, Llewellyn King, Sept. 6, 2025. Through two world wars, it has been the special relationship: the linkage between the United States and Britain. It is a linkage forged in a common language, a common culture, a common history and a common aspiration to peace and prosperity.

The relationship, always strong, was burnished by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Now it looks as though the special relationship has morphed into the odd couple.

Britain, it can be argued, went off the rails in 2016 when, by a narrow majority, it voted to pull out of the European Union.

With a negative growth rate, and few prospects of an economic spurt, Britons can now ponder the high price of chauvinism and the vague comfort of untrammeled sovereignty. Americans could ponder that, too, in the decades ahead.

Will tariffs — which have already driven China, Russia and India into a kind of who-needs-America bloc — be the United States' equivalent of Brexit? This economic idea doesn't work but has emotional appeal; it is isolating, confining and antagonizing.

A common thread in the national dialogues is immigration.

Britain is swamped. It is dealing with an invasion of migrants that has changed and continues to change the country.

In 2023, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, 1.326 million migrants moved to Britain; last year, the number was 948,000. There has been a steady flow of migrants over the past 50 years, but it has increased dramatically due to wars around the globe.

Among European countries, Britain, to its cost, has had the best record for assimilating new arrivals. It is a migrant heaven, but that is changing with immigrants being blamed for a rash of domestic problems, from housing shortages to vastly increased crime.

In the 1960s, Britain had very little violent crime and street crime was slight. Now crime of all kinds — especially using knives — is rampant, and British cities rival those across America — although crime seems to be declining in America, while it is rising in Britain.

Britain has a would-be Donald Trump: Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform U.K. party, which is immigrant-hostile and seeks to return Britain to the country it was before migrants started crossing the English Channel, often in small boats.

Farage has been feted by conservatives in Congress, where he has been railing against the draconian British hate-speech laws, which he sees as woke in overdrive.

Britain has been averaging 30 arrests a day for hate speech and related hate crimes, few of which result in convictions.

Two recent events highlight the severity of these laws. Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old wife of a conservative local politician, took issue with the practice of housing immigrants in hotels; she said the hotels should be burned down. Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in jail. She has been released, after serving 40% of her sentence.

A very successful Irish comedy writer for British television, Graham Linehan, posted attacks on transgender women on X. On Sept. 1, after a flight from Arizona, he was met by five armed police officers and arrested at London's Heathrow Airport.

Britain's hate laws, which are among the most severe in the world, run counter to a long tradition of free speech, dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. An attempt to get more social justice has resulted in less justice and abridged the right to speak out. It's a crisis in a country without a formal constitution.

On Sept. 17, Trump is due to begin a state visit to Britain. Fireworks are expected. Trump's British supporters, despite Farage and his hard-right party, are still few and public antipathy is strong.

Trump, for his part, will seek to make his visit a kind of triumphal event, gilded with overnight posts on Truth Social on how Britain should emulate him.

The British press will be ready with vituperative rebukes; hate speech be damned.

It is unlikely that the Labor government, whose membership isas diverse and divided as that of the Democratic Party, will find anything to call hate speech about attacks on Trump. A good dust-up will be enjoyed by all.

Isolated, the odd couple have each other.

Sept. 4 

New York Times, President of Northwestern, a School Attacked by the G.O.P., Will Resign, Anemona Hartocollis, Michael S. Schmidt and Tyler Pager, Sept. 4, 2025. The university’s president, Michael Schill, above, said he would step down following months of turbulence, including Trump administration cuts of $790 million from the university’s research funds.

The president of Northwestern University, Michael H. Schill, announced Thursday that he would resign, ending a difficult tenure that included attacks on the school from Republicans in Congress and cuts in funding by the Trump administration that forced the university to lay off hundreds of employees.

Northwestern became a target of Trump administration officials this year after months of intense scrutiny from Republican lawmakers.

Mr. Schill faced withering questions during a Congressional hearing last year, when Republicans accused the university of not doing enough to address antisemitism during campus protests over the war in Gaza. They have argued that the school was still not aggressive enough in protecting Jewish students from harassment. Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center have called for Mr. Schill to resign, faulting him for negotiating with the protesters.

In April, the federal government abruptly froze at least $790 million in federal research funding that had been planned for Northwestern, a Big Ten school with campuses in Evanston, Ill., and downtown Chicago.

The attacks on Northwestern have been part of a broader campaign by Republicans to take American universities to task, claiming that the schools mistreated Jewish students. Mr. Schill’s resignation is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the leadership of elite institutions that have stemmed, at least in part, from a Republican pressure campaign that started in 2023, in the wake of protests over the war in Gaza.

In a message to Northwestern students, employees and alumni that was issued Thursday, Mr. Schill alluded, but only glancingly, to the troubles of the last two years. “Our community has made significant progress while simultaneously facing extraordinary challenges,” he said. “Together, we have made decisions that strengthened the institution and helped safeguard its future.”

Attacking elite colleges has become central to Mr. Trump’s agenda in his second term. The administration has frozen millions, and even billions, of dollars in federal research funds in order to push schools to adopt its preferred policies. It has broadened the reasons it states for going after schools, and expanded its focus beyond elite private universities to include public institutions like the University of Virginia, whose president, James E. Ryan, resigned earlier this year under pressure from Trump officials.

After the Trump administration froze Northwestern’s funds, the university warned that essential research was “in jeopardy,” and it has spent the last few months trying to cope with a vast loss of funding.

In July, the university said it planned to eliminate about 425 jobs. Close to half of those jobs were vacant, university leaders said, but they nonetheless acknowledged that layoffs were “a drastic step” and “the most painful measure we have had to take.”Editors’ PicksWhich Chile Paste Should I Buy?Dwayne Johnson’s Tearful Reinvention at the Venice Film FestivalMy Secret for Finding Peace in Traffic

Mr. Schill took office three years ago. He is an expert in property, real estate and housing law and policy. After a sabbatical following his resignation as president, he will continue to teach law at Northwestern.

Sept.. 3

New York Times, Harvard Secures a Court Victory in Its Fight With Trump, Alan Blinder, Sept. 3, 2025. Harvard had sued the Trump administration in an effort to restore billions in research funds that the government canceled this spring.

Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

The ruling may not be the final word on the matter, but the decision by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston was, at the very least, an interim rebuff of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake elite higher education by force.

Although Harvard’s case centered on its research funding, the university contended that the administration had compromised its First Amendment and due process rights. Now, the judge’s decision stands to give Harvard new leverage with the White House in settlement talks.

The ruling was a significant milestone for the university, the only institution to sue over the Trump administration’s explicit assault on its research funding. But President Trump had vowed to appeal any ruling that cut against the government, and his administration has eagerly sought to pressure Harvard in ways beyond research money.

Judge Burrough’s ruling may not put an end to that campaign, but her opinion amounted to a bracing rebuke of the government.

“We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other,” Judge Burroughs wrote in an 84-page ruling. “Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be.”

She added, “Now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”

As a part of the decision, Judge Burroughs said the Trump administration could not issue new blockades on Harvard’s federal research funding “in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights, or on any purported grounds of discrimination without compliance with the terms of Title VI.”

Neither Harvard nor the White House responded immediately to requests for comment.

Judge Burroughs’s decision came after both the government and the university asked her to issue what is known as summary judgment — a ruling on the case’s claims without a trial. Ultimately, the judge relied on voluminous filings, a select batch of evidence and oral arguments in her Boston courtroom on July 21 to reach a decision. Judge Burroughs had appeared immensely skeptical of the government’s position that day but said that she had not “prejudged” the case.Editors’ Picks6 Dude Ranches Where You Can Saddle Up and UnplugThink Candles Can’t Be Fun? Think Again.Korea’s Tattoo Artists Are Grabbing Attention, at Home and Abroad

Harvard sued the government in April. The Trump administration had insisted that the nation’s oldest university had became a wellspring of bigotry. Then, on April 11, it sent the school a letter trying to condition Harvard’s access to federal research money on its acquiescence to a range of demands.

Those terms included audits, the establishment of “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies, the shutdown of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and an examination of “programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”

 

New York Times, Smithsonian Responds to Trump’s Demand for a Review of Its Exhibits, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley, Sept. 3, 2025. In a letter to the White House, the Smithsonian (whose oldest museum is shown above) asserted its “authority over our programming and content,” but said a team would review what information it would turn over.

Ever since the Trump administration announced last month that it would review the Smithsonian’s exhibitions and seek changes to programming it found objectionable, historians and curators have been wondering how the historically independent institution would respond.

The Smithsonian offered the first indication on Wednesday afternoon when Lonnie G. Bunch III, right, the Smithsonian’s secretary, sent a letter to the staff indicating that the institution had agreed to set up a team to review turning over materials to the White House, as requested, but to do so as an autonomous institution.

“I take my responsibility to steward the institution on behalf of the American people very seriously,” the letter to staff said, adding, “Our independence is paramount.”

In a letter to Mr. Bunch last month, the administration told the Smithsonian to submit information about programming at eight of its 21 museums within a 75-day deadline, and that the White House would then direct possible changes in content.

While complimenting Mr. Trump’s “admiration and regard for the Smithsonian,” Mr. Bunch told the staff that his response to the White House, sent in a letter on Tuesday, had reiterated the institution’s intention to rigorously review its content for inappropriate partisanship. But he said it would be the Smithsonian, not the executive branch, that would direct the effort.

“Our own review of content to ensure our programming is nonpartisan and factual is ongoing, and it is consistent with our authority over our programming and content,” Mr. Bunch wrote in his letter to the staff.

At the same time, Mr. Bunch said he planned to share information with the White House to alleviate its concerns.

“I am assembling a small internal team to advise me and the senior team about what we can provide and on what timeline,” Mr. Bunch said, adding that the Smithsonian also planned to brief the White House about its internal review.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Bunch’s letter, which was not released by the Smithsonian.

But Mr. Bunch discussed the substance of what he had written to the Trump administration in his letter to the staff, which was obtained by The New York Times. The letter was approved by the three-person executive committee of the Board of Regents, the Smithsonian’s governing body. It was not voted on by the full board, which includes Republicans, among them Vice President JD Vance. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also sits on the board as chancellor.

The debate over who controls programming at the Smithsonian had intensified on Aug. 12 when White House officials announced in a public letter to Mr. Bunch that it would begin a comprehensive look at current and planned exhibitions, wall text and social media to assess “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

The White House had said in its letter that the purpose of its review was to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.” The Smithsonian was given 120 days to “begin implementing content corrections” requested by the administration.

New York Times, Newsmax Accuses Fox News of Violating Antitrust Laws, Michael M. Grynbaum, Sept. 3, 2025. The smaller outlet in conservative TV news argued in a lawsuit that Fox News had essentially created a monopoly. Fox said the case had no merit.

The cable channel Newsmax on Wednesday accused Fox News of illegally cornering the market for conservative TV news, an unusual escalation in a long-running rivalry between two cable television networks.

In a case filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, Newsmax laid out what it called “an exclusionary scheme” by which it said that Fox News used bare-knuckle tactics to block its competitors and establish a near-monopoly in right-leaning pay TV news.

“Fox has pursued a coordinated, behind-the-scenes campaign to suppress Newsmax” from reaching more viewers, the lawsuit said.

Newsmax argued that Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, had in effect created a financial penalty for cable and satellite distributors that want to carry Newsmax on their basic, entry-level tier of channels.

According to the suit, Fox often demands that a distributor choosing to include Newsmax on that basic tier carry additional Fox-owned networks, such as Fox Business, and pay extra fees to do so, the lawsuit said.

“I think it’s bad for a democracy to have only one major media network on the center-right on television,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax, said in an interview on Wednesday.

It is fairly common practice in the TV industry to leverage viewer interest in popular networks to extract higher fees from distributors. On Wednesday, Fox News declared itself unimpressed with the legal argument brought by its competitor.

“Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers,” a Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement.

There is no question that Fox News dominates Newsmax in the ratings; viewership of programs like “The Five” and “Hannity” dwarfs that of shows on Newsmax.

In fact, since Memorial Day, Fox News has attracted more viewers in prime time than any other network on television, including the general-interest fare on the major broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC. It was only the second time that Fox News had achieved that feat; the last instance was in 2020, amid a presidential election and the pandemic, which left many viewers stranded at home.

The lawsuit raises the question of whether this competitive advantage has been established through illegal anti-competitive business practices, rather than the relative quality of the content. Bill Baer, who led antitrust efforts at the Justice Department in the Obama administration and is not involved with the lawsuit, reviewed Newsmax’s complaint and said that “on its face, it looks pretty weak.”

Mr. Baer said that Newsmax might have trouble establishing that the right-leaning cable news ecosphere functions as a discrete market from the overall realm of TV news, in which Fox News competes with major outlets like CNN and MSNBC. “There’s a high burden they’ll have to meet,” he said of the plaintiff.

Fox News was founded in 1996. Newsmax was created in 1998 as a conservative website, and began airing as a TV network in 2014, pitching itself as a centrist alternative.

In the last several years, Newsmax changed tactics and tried to outflank Fox News on the right, hiring a slate of hosts who were emphatically loyal to President Trump. In 2020, after Fox News infuriated Mr. Trump by projecting that he would lose Arizona, its ratings dipped and Newsmax experienced a surge, prompting alarm from Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul whose family controls Fox, and other senior Fox figures.

Mr. Ruddy, the Newsmax owner, is friendly with Mr. Trump and a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. He has long taken potshots at his older, bigger rival. “Fox as a company has been a bad actor for a long time, and we’re finally holding them to account,” he said on Wednesday.

Sept. 2

John Malone appears on CNBC. (Screen grab via SnapStream)

Status, Malone's CNN Groans; Infowars in Meltdown; Google's Giant Win, Oliver Darcy,Sept. 2, 2025. Mentioned in this edition: Chloe Malle, Emily Sundberg, Jim VandeHei, Jamie Heller, Clarissa Ward, Margaret Brennan, Benny Johnson, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and more. But first, your Status Report.

John Malone’s swipes at CNN sparked a rare rebuttal from Warner Bros. Discovery—and plenty of annoyance inside Hudson Yards.

On Tuesday morning, John Malone—the Liberty Media boss, cable kingpin, and one of Warner Bros. Discovery’s most powerful shareholders—popped up on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Malone, dressed in a shirt and tie, was perched on a brown leather chair as he Zoomed in from his home to promote his new book, "Born to Be Wired." The first few minutes were standard fare covering how the book came together, what compelled him to write it, etcetera.

But once the obligatory promotional part of the interview was out of the way, the conversation grew much more interesting. Conservative co-host Joe Kernen criticized the state of the news media as being biased against Donald Trump, and pressed Malone for his take, especially on CNN, which he had infamously skewered years ago.

"Do you think CNN has changed to the point where you'd like, where you're seeing actual journalism now?" Kernen asked. "Do you see it across mainstream media anywhere?"

"No," Malone flatly replied, before delivering a somewhat rambling comment about how the journalism profession is rife with liberals and (again) praising Rupert Murdoch for how Fox News is operated. Malone did allow for the fact that CNN "has great journalists," but he lamented that those who work in the news industry "tend to be progressives personally" and "it's impossible to separate that sort of personal opinion structure from the way they cover the news."

Of course, it wasn't the first time Malone has jabbed CNN in recent days. In an interview with The New York Times' Ben Mullin published on Friday, Malone said the network is "a shadow of what its founder had envisioned," described its employees as "left of center" who "express their opinions too much in their news," and complained that WBD chief executive David Zaslav had been "unable to have a meaningful impact" on the editorial nature of the organization. “They can’t help themselves,” Malone told Mullin. “And so what you’ve got is a left-leaning, anti-Trump news service.”

New York Times, House Oversight Committee Is Set to Meet With Accusers of Jeffrey Epstein, Francesca Regalado, Sept. 2, 2025. Lawmakers are continuing their inquiry into Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to quell public demand for information.

A House committee plans to meet on Tuesday with 10 people who have accused the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein of sex trafficking, putting further attention on an issue President Trump has sought to downplay.

Mr. Trump’s supporters have been galvanized by conspiracy theories that Mr. Epstein was only one among a cabal of pedophiles in the upper echelons of American society. Mr. Epstein died in 2019 while in prison awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Mr. Trump and his administration spent much of the summer trying to extinguish the conspiratorial fervor they fanned by promising the release of files connected to Mr. Epstein’s case.

Attorney General Pam Bondi released around 200 pages of documents in February. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. concluded in July that there was no list of Mr. Epstein’s clients, nor was there any evidence that Mr. Epstein had blackmailed prominent individuals.

Tuesday’s meeting suggests that some lawmakers in both parties are eager to keep a spotlight on an uncomfortable topic for Mr. Trump.

Many Americans believe that the government has concealed information about Mr. Epstein — 69 percent, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll in July. The fallout has threatened Mr. Trump’s hold on his base, and it prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to start the House of Representatives’ summer recess early to avoid votes on the issue.

Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, are trying to force the House to vote on a discharge petition demanding the release of the files.

The House cannot compel the Justice Department to release documents, but such a vote could lay bare a rift among Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress. Six Republicans who are prominent in Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, have expressed support for Mr. Massie’s petition.

“I pray Speaker Johnson will listen to the pleas of these victims for justice and quit trying to block a vote on our legislation to release the Epstein files,” Mr. Massie wrote on social media on Monday. He added that the 10 victims would appear on the steps of the United States Capitol on Wednesday for a news conference.

 

Emptywheel, Analysis: Kristi Noem’s Non-Stop Slander Invites Congress to Ask Melania about Her Close Ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 2, 2025. Kristi Noem has responded to a fourth request from Kilmar Abrego for an order gagging her unsubstantiated claims about him by creating a false censorship attack on CBS.

Kristi Noem, left, loves to slander Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

DHS has long wanted to claim — but failed to substantiate — that Abrego is a member of MS-13.

For example, the whistleblower complaint from Erez Reuveni describes how DHS wanted to make such claims about Abrego, but had no evidence. When he failed to make such an argument in court, his boss Drew Ensign called to complain, explaining that the White House had wanted DOJ to make such a claim.

Todd Blanche, right, fired Reuveni after he refused to sign on a brief claiming that Abrego was a terrorist, a claim not made to the District Court.

And when DOJ attempted to convince two judges that Abrego was a dangerous terrorist, they failed. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes laid out that the evidence presented to her of MS-13 membership largely amounted to the feeling of a cooperating witness whose family has ties to a competing gang, but their key cooperating witness said he knew of no evidence Kilmar was a MS-13 member.

But Noem and her flunkies keep publicly claiming that Abrego is an MS-13 member.

Abrego has requested on four different occasions (one, two, three) for the judge in his criminal case to gag the government from making such inflammatory claims, most recently last Thursday. Each time, Judge Crenshaw has ordered parts of the government to comply — first the lawyers subject to local rules, and then anyone before the court — but he noted that it was not clear whether DHS is before him.

Noem, of course, doesn’t care.

Perhaps as a deliberate incitement Sunday, she went on Face the Nation, and repeated the same unsubstantiated claims that Holmes and Crenshaw both judged they had no evidence to prove, including that Abrego, “was a known human smuggler, an MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors.”

CBS cut that claim, and now Noem, Trump’s top propagandists, and Trump’s right wing mob is trying to liken it to CBS’ editing of the Kamala Harris interview.

In other words, even as Abrego asks the court to make DHS adhere to long-standing policies of public statements regarding pretrial defendants, Noem is deliberately stoking slander.

She’s doing so, presumably, comfortable in the knowledge that DOJ would substitute the government for Noem if Abrego sued. That is, she’s hiding behind the immunity of government employ to stoke a false propaganda campaign against a guy she trafficked to a concentration camp based on false claims.

I can’t help but note that Noem is gleefully engaged in slander in the wake of Melania Trump’s efforts to bully multiple entities — first Daily Beast, and then James Carville — into withdrawing reports about Jeffrey Epstein’s claims that he had role in introducing Melania to her spouse (or that they first fucked on his plane). Melania attempted to do the same with Hunter Biden, but he refused (and in the process, Hunter noted that NYT had published Epstein’s claim he introduced them before he died, with no retraction).

As Congress returns today, Epstein will remain a key focus, with a politicized inquiry unfolding under James Comer in House Oversight and a more aggressive effort pushed by Ro Khanna and Tom Massie, who have a discharge petition queued up for a vote. Both efforts have real cause to ask why Trump moved sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison camp close to Bryan, TX schools (including Texas A&M) to shut her up, and whether it has anything to do with Melania’s litigious interest in tamping down any questions about her ties to Epstein.

Those same members of Congress might take a lesson from Noem (or, for that matter, the members of Congress who made false claims about Hunter Biden).

The entire Trump Administration treats government employ is a platform for incendiary slander.

As Trump faces renewed scrutiny of his efforts to cover-up his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, that could get awkward for Melania.

Status, Ben Smith Talks New Column, Trump Coverage, and the State of Journalism, Oliver Darcy, Sept. 1, 2025. Mentioned in this edition: Anna Wintour, Chloe Malle, John Malone, Kristi Noem, Mark Thompson, Donna Brazile, Charles Blow, Tim Dillon, Woody Allen, Dwayne Johnson, Amanda Seyfried, Jude Law, and more. But first, The Spotlight. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

In a conversation with Status, Ben Smith, right, dishes on his new Washington-focused column at Semafor, whether he believes democracy is under threat, and the state of the news media.

In other media news: 

Media blackout: As social media remains abuzz with questions about Donald Trump's health, Garrett Graff observed on Monday morning that there wasn't "a single story" covering the topic "on the homepage of The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN." [Doomsday Scenario]

In a Truth Social rant, Trump said "highly discredited" ABC News "should pay me more" and that the network should fire Chris Christie and Donna Brazile from their roles as contributors. [The Wrap]

Kristi Noem complained that CBS News "shamefully" edited out part of an answer she gave "Face the Nation" on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in which she yet again smeared the Salvadoran citizen with the unproven allegation that he is an MS-13 gang member. [Mediaite]

Anna Wintour selected Chloe Malle as the next editor of American Vogue, Lauren Sherman reported. Per Sherman, who has been all over this story, Condé Nast could officially announce the move on Tuesday. [Puck]

RIP: CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller died at 73. As the CBS News obituary stated, he was, "to put it simply, a legend." [CBS News]

John Malone, who holds the absurd view that Fox News should be the benchmark for news outlets, trashed CNN as a "left-leaning, anti-Trump news service." Speaking to Ben Mullin, the media mogul lamented that Warner Bros Discovery boss David Zaslav, in his eyes, had been "unable to have any meaningful impact" on moving the network into more MAGA friendly territory. [NYT]

In a statement, a CNN spokesperson said in part that network chief Mark Thompson "has made it clear from day one that he believes in a CNN that is fair-minded and biased in favor of the facts rather than any political party or interest."

Charles Blow, right, addressed his exit from The NYT in a Substack post announcing his return to writing: "My last years at the paper weren’t my most pleasant. My job went from being one I would say, earnestly, I would do for free, to one I struggled to justify doing for pay." [Blow the Stack]

August

Aug. 30 

 

 

Lev Remembers, Global Commentary: Witkoff Exposed — Trump’s Envoy Revealed as Kremlin Pawn, Lev Parnas, right,  Aug. 30, 2025. As Ukraine fights for survival, Trump’s fixer plays theatrics for Putin, trading peace for Russia’s power and money

Last night, Ukraine endured another hellish night. Russia launched one of its largest air assaults in months — 582 drones and missiles raining down from every direction. Entire cities shook. Apartment blocks in Zaporizhzhia collapsed. Children pulled from the rubble. A café burned, homes destroyed, power lines severed. Dnipro and Pavlohrad lit up in flames. Kyiv’s trains delayed by strikes on rail lines. Explosions echoed across 14 regions — west to east.

The Ukrainian Air Force fought like lions, shooting down 548 targets. But still, five missiles and 24 drones hit their mark. Still, families grieve. Still, hundreds of thousands sit in darkness without power, gas, or water.

And while this nightmare unfolds, while innocent civilians are buried under rubble, the media is trying to portray Trump’s “special envoy” Steve Witkoff, right, as incompetent and botching meetings and confusing Moscow’s lies with reality.

But you know who the real Steve Witkoff is, because for months I’ve been telling you — and now the world is beginning to see it too. My sources are telling me that after a meeting in New York between Andriy Yermak, Sergiy Kyslytsya, and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, the Ukrainians are now more convinced than ever that Witkoff is nothing more than another useful idiot for the Kremlin.

Politico and others report how U.S., Ukrainian, and European officials are all frustrated with him. He refuses to consult experts. He shows up unprepared. He parrots back nonsense after sitting with Putin. One day he believes Russia will give up territory; the next he thinks they agreed to NATO-style security guarantees. It’s chaos — but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s just incompetence.

Let me make it very clear, Witkoff isn’t confused. He’s obsessed. Like Trump, he came up in the real estate world of the 1990s, making money with the same Russian oligarchs who answer directly to the Kremlin. They were both swimming in Moscow’s dirty money long before Ukraine was ever on the headlines.

That’s why I tell you: the real deals aren’t happening in public. They’re not in the leaks you see. They’re not in Witkoff’s babbling reports. The real manipulations are happening behind closed doors with his handler, Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s fixer.

For those of you who have been reading my letters and watching my lives, you already know — you’ve seen these theatrics playing out in real time. From the very first moment they announced that so-called “peace meeting” in Alaska, I told you it was never about peace. It was a distraction. A cover. A way for Trump to shift attention away from the Epstein files, and for Putin to claw back legitimacy on the world stage.

Think back: Trump in the Oval Office, surrounded by EU leaders and President Zelensky, staging the show. Right in the middle of those talks, he “calls Putin,” leaks out tidbits of information, dangles the promise of a meeting between Zelensky and Putin. Then Karoline Leavitt, from the press secretary’s pulpit, doubles down and claims Putin promised talks. But I told you then — it was a mirage. A script. A theater production designed to buy time for Putin and distract the world from Trump’s scandals.

And now, when the show collapses, they blame Witkoff. They tell you he misunderstood, he was confused, he didn’t get the message right. But hear me clearly: there was no misunderstanding. Witkoff didn’t mishear Putin. Trump didn’t misread the room. Putin didn’t misspeak. They all know exactly what the deal is. The only people being misled are the media, and through them, the entire world. This isn’t incompetence — it’s choreography. And it’s being written by Vladimir Putin, played out by his two useful idiots: Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump.

Don’t listen when the media tells you Witkoff is “confused.” That’s the cover story. This isn’t confusion. It’s a deliberate stalling tactic. A distraction. A way to buy time while Russia pounds Ukraine with drones and missiles.

The truth is, Trump, Putin, Witkoff, and their oligarch friends aren’t talking about peace. They’re talking about power, money, cryptocurrency, minerals, and energy. They’re carving up the future like a real estate transaction — with Ukraine as the land deal on the table.

And while they play these games, Ukraine bleeds. Twenty thousand children kidnapped by Russia. Cities like Zaporizhzhia left in ruins. Civilians terrorized night after night.

And yet, in all this darkness, there is hope. What the mainstream media often leaves out is that Ukraine is not just standing still, waiting to be bombed into dust — Ukraine is fighting back. Not against civilians, not against the elderly or children sleeping in their beds like Russia does night after night — but strategically, surgically, where it hurts the Kremlin most.

This week, Ukrainian drones struck deep inside Russia, igniting fires at the Krasnodar oil refinery in the south and the Syzran refinery in Samara — two critical lifelines for Moscow’s war machine. These facilities together process over 11 million tons of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and oil products every year, much of it flowing straight to the Russian army. By hitting them, Ukraine is crippling Russia’s economy, cutting into its ability to fuel tanks, planes, and missiles, and slowly dragging Putin’s regime to its knees.

That’s why these backroom “deals” Trump is pushing through Witkoff matter so much to Moscow. Russia doesn’t want “peace talks.” They want survival. They need Trump to help them claw back international recognition, access to finance, and economic cover. Without it, without the lifeline Trump is dangling before them, they can’t sustain this war for much longer. That’s the truth you won’t hear on CNN or Fox News — but you’ll hear it here.

And while Ukraine strikes Russia where it hurts, thanks to all of you, Oleksandr is delivering aid to the hardest-hit regions. Your contributions are turning into much-needed hygiene supplies — the basic necessities most of us take for granted — carried straight to the front lines, into hospitals, and into bombed-out towns where families have nothing left. People who don’t have running water or electricity, who can’t even take a shower, now have some relief because of you. Thank you.

New York Times, He Plagiarized and Promoted Falsehoods. The White House Embraces Him, Ken Bensinger, Aug. 30, 2025. Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, has enjoyed rare access and promotion from the Trump administration.

The day after President Trump announced the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, the White House invited the podcaster Benny Johnson to sit in what is called the new media seat at the administration’s press briefing. The privilege includes being called on first by the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

Mr. Johnson took the opportunity at the briefing to recount what he claimed was his own experience with crime in the nation’s capital in recent years. He said that he had recorded murders on a camera outside his home, and that his “house was set ablaze in an arson.” Any claims that Washington wasn’t dangerous, he said, were “lies.”

“Thank you for making this city safe, because no parent should have to go through what my family went through,” Mr. Johnson told Ms. Leavitt.

In fact, police records show, nobody has been murdered since at least 2017 on the block where Mr. Johnson lived in Washington. And his home was not burned, though his next-door neighbor’s house was “intentionally set” on fire, according to the city’s fire department. Mr. Johnson left Washington permanently in 2021.

Such details didn’t stop Ms. Leavitt from leapfrogging off his comments to promote the president’s federalization of Washington’s law enforcement.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump and his aides have routinely excoriated traditional news outlets for what they call misleading and dishonest reporting about the administration. But the White House has had no such reservations about right-leaning influencers, figures such as Mr. Johnson, who have a documented history of playing fast and loose with the facts.

These new media personalities enjoy rare access and support from the administration. They, in turn, give the White House unwavering cheerleading for the administration’s agenda, blasted out to millions of followers on social media.

Among them is Jack Posobiec, who in 2017 helped spread the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and last year stated that his goal was to “overthrow” democracy; Tim Pool, a podcaster who last fall was revealed to have been paid indirectly by Russia as part of a secret political influence operation; and Julie Kelly, a right-wing journalist who helped start the false narrative that the Jan. 6, 2021, riots were an “inside job.”Editors’ PicksFine-Tune Your Feed and Get News You Can UseThis Star Has the Moxie and Acting Chops for a Crime Drama. He’s Also a Cat.21 Cheap, Easy Recipes You Can Cook in Your College Dorm

Even among that group, Mr. Johnson, who has a large following on YouTube, a popular daily podcast and a large X account, stands out for his checkered journalistic record. Over the years, he has been fired from one job for plagiarism and suspended from another for publishing an article containing an unfounded conspiracy theory about Barack Obama that was later retracted. He has been accused of repeatedly propagating false election information and, like Mr. Pool, produced videos that had been secretly funded, via a seemingly legitimate media firm, by Kremlin operatives.

Aug. 28 

The Hill, Air Force to provide funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt, Ella Lee, Aug. 28, 2025. The U.S. Air Force will provide Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt with military funeral honors, reversing a Biden-era decision that denied her family’s request, according to a legal group that has represented her family.

Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group, on Wednesday made public a letter from Under Secretary of the Air Force Matthew Lohmeier, extending an offer to allow the special funeral procedures to take place.

“I understand that the family’s initial request was denied by Air Force leadership in a letter dated February 9, 2021,” Lohmeier wrote in the Aug. 15 letter shared by Judicial Watch. “However, after reviewing the circumstances of Ashli’s death, and considering the information that has come forward since then, I am persuaded that the previous determination was incorrect.”

He additionally extended an invitation to her mother and husband to meet him at the Pentagon, so he may offer his condolences.

The Hill requested comment from the Pentagon regarding the veracity of the letter.

Babbitt, right, an Air Force veteran, was shot and killed by law enforcement during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as she attempted to climb through a barricaded door to the Speaker’s lobby near the House chamber.

A month after the riot, an Air Force representative under former President Biden’s administration informed her family that military funeral honors were denied for her funeral “due to the circumstances preceding her death.”

“As a result, I have determined that military funeral honors would bring discredit upon the Air Force,” Brian Kelly, an Air Force lieutenant general, wrote in that letter.

An eligible veteran’s honor guard detail consists of at least two members of the armed forces, one of whom is a representative of the veteran’s service branch, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. It will perform a ceremony including the playing of taps and the folding and presentation of the American flag to the next of kin.

“Ashli Babbitt’s family is grateful to President Trump, Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and Under Secretary Lohmeier for reversing the Biden Defense Department’s cruel decision to deny Ashli funeral honors as a distinguished veteran of the Air Force,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

In May, the government agreed to pay Babbitt’s family nearly $5 million as part of a settlement.

It came as the Trump administration has sought to unravel the Biden administration’s crackdown on those who participated in the riot.

Trump pardoned nearly all rioters on his first day back in the White House and fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the attack.

 

Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt and Nazi insurrectionist Horst Wessel, both glorified in death.

Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Ashli Babbitt Is Trump's "Horst Wessel," Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 28, 2025. Once Again, Trump And MAGA Channel Their Favorite Dictator.

Ashli Babbit was a terrorist, whose death should have been unnecessary except that she led an attempt to break into the House Chambers during Trump's incitement of a violent insurrection against the US government and its President-Elect Joe Biden.

Behind her was a mob, equipped with bear spray and zip-ties, with several of them trying to force their way inside in order to stage mock trials of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others. There was a gallows and noose waiting outside for her, Vice-President Pence, and others targeted for possible summary executions by Trump, who encouraged his supporters when they started to chant "Hang Mike Pence."

Now she is being given a hero's burial and honors on Trump's and Hegseth's orders.

The media and commentariat coverage of this (even the "Guardian’s" which I like generally, whose article on this is linked below) is more or less what I've come to expect, that is mostly devoid of substantive analysis of what this means.

The press articles are empty boilerplate, written as if for history textbooks fifty years from now, long after the blood of our DC police has dried. They are covering it as just another in a list of concerning decisions and actions (such as the blanket pardons for all charged) to "reframe" the events of January 6th as a patriotic protest against the Democrats, whom the MAGAverse accused of stealing Trump's vote, in order to legitimize them.

So, the regime forced a settlement of five million dollars to her family as a form of reparations, and now they are posthumously granting her military honors and a funeral, which the Biden administration refused to do, justifiably calling it a "discrediting" of the Air Force and armed services in general.

Ok, that's all true, so what is it that they are not saying?

Well, I'll say it. It is Trump once again walking in the footsteps of his favorite dictator, Adolf Hitler, of whom you'll remember Trump once said, "He did some good things."

In the late 1920's, Hitler's paramilitary shocktroops, the Sturmabteilung (SA), was engaged in a variety of terror attacks on Jews, their shops, communists, socialists, trade unions leaders, and other ethnic and gender minorities. They, like Trump's fascist/QAnon zombie militia followers today, were not even political. Their role was to carry out strategic violence on Hitler's orders against those he defined as traitors, enemies of Germany, parasites, and vermin who were "poisoning their blood." They were out for blood, and sought validation in slaking their thirst for retribution over Hitler's "Big Lie," the so-called "stab in the back" Jewish conspiracy which forced Germany's surrender in "The Great War."

One of these Stormtroopers, a non-descript thug named Horst Wessel, was killed in the course of street fighting. The Nazis finally had their "martyr" around whose memory they could rally. Hitler announced soon after that a poem written by Wessel would be set to music by the party and played at every single event thereafter in order to celebrate his memory and glorify the Nazis use of violence in their quest for power. Every Nazi gathering in every Beer Hall, every stadium, every party event, was preceded by the German national Anthem by Haydn, then the "Horst Wessel Lied."

(Indeed, the so-called prisoners chorus of January 6th defendants has their own song called "Justice For All," which was performed for Trump in person). The history of Horst Wessel is recounted here:

That is one thing the media, which with a few exceptions has been nearly broken by Trump, has never to my knowledge discussed as a comparison. 

More important in all of this is what it means for the future of democratic free and fair elections in the US. Trump's obscene revisionism regarding January 6th points to the fact that those who are placing their faith in the law, the courts, the election integrity lawyers, and the voting rights activists, had better also prepare ahead of time for MAGA to conduct widespread large-scale violence on the January 6th model and worse, because unlike Washington DC, which safeguarded against weaponry being brought in that day, Trump's paramilitaries storming election boards and state capitols will be armed. And each one of them will be equipped with a shield of a promised Presidential pardon and financial rewards for any and all crimes committed in his name.

They will never again accept an election loss in a relatively close race anywhere. Ashli Babbit is their role model and has been made the symbol of the insurrection. Trump's hard core will kill and die for him, all of the media blather about him losing his base over Epstein notwithstanding. That is a delusion, in my view.

What does this all imply? I'll leave that question to my readers. But for now, I would say that it all feeds the narrative recently begun about the blue state Governors having to go with the nuclear option, which is now being termed "soft secession," an economic "decoupling" of the blue states from the federal government. 

Trump is tearing the United States in half, using the threat of strategic violence and deliberately incited chaos. Dividing is what he does. He has always been a chaos agent, because that is what he was groomed to be by his controllers in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and emphatically Moscow. All of this we know and bears restating, because too many of us have harbored the "happy ending" fantasy that we will win the midterms, box Trump in for two years, then defeat him or his successor in 2028, and somehow democracy will magically resume.

Whatever does happen, I can guarantee that even with the optimal election results, none of it will be followed by some mythical return to normal. There will be violence and it will last a long time.

Too many people are on board with the 2020 election "Big Lie" and have bought into the demonization campaign against the Democratic Party and its leaders to hope the terrorists will all just "fade away" when or if they lose elections or Trump dies.

That's what the honoring of Ashley Babbit means. It shouldn't be left to some fringe guy on the internet who is sometimes labeled as "extreme" like myself to denounce this atrocity in this way. 

Emptywheel, Analysis: Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe Predicate ANOTHER Investigation on Emails Stolen from Foreign Spies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 28, 2025.

The NYT has a weird article — right wing propagandist Devlin Barrett is the first byline, with Maggie and Mike contributing as well — purporting to explain the John Bolton investigation.

The first and fourth paragraphs claim that the investigation into Bolton is a “a long-running investigation” that “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration,” claims that conflictwith both the NYP’s seeded propaganda story on the search, which described that Kash Patel, left,“reopened the matter after he took over the FBI in February,” and a well-sourced CNN story, which described that, “the Justice Department reopen[ed] the years-old investigation.”NYT bases its claim suggesting a continuous investigation on the collection from an adversarial spook service, during the Biden Administration, of emails purportedly sent by Bolton to family members.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

But way down in ¶12, NYT describes that John Ratcliffe, right, briefed these emails to Kash Patel and between them they decided that these emails included classified information.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information that had been collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information. Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether particular pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.

That is, Ratcliffe found something he could use to target Bolton and brought it to Kash. That’s what gave Kash the excuse to reopen the investigation.

This is about where credible DOJ reporters would start ringing alarm bells, because it makes this investigation not like other investigations into classified documents — NYT likens this investigation to the Hillary email investigation, Trump’s own theft of classified documents, and the investigation into Joe Biden — but the John Durham investigation, which Ratcliffe and Kash launched based off emails stolen from Russia which — we now know — were fabricated.

There are even indices in this story that suggest caution. The object of the search, NYT says, was to see whether Bolton possessed anything to corroborate the emails, precisely the approach Durham, left, tried to take with Leonard Benardo.

One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.

Even according to NYT, the FBI still has no fucking clue whether these emails are genuine (and apparently didn’t take less intrusive means to check, such as a covert warrant to Bolton’s email provider).

Nevertheless, NYT invents explanations for why the material in question didn’t end up in Bolton’s book.

The material in the intercepted emails included information that Mr. Bolton did not ultimately use in his book. That may suggest that he had been told it remained classified during early reviews of his manuscript or that he ultimately decided to omit it, because of either its sensitivity or its importance.

In a story that admits the FBI doesn’t know whether these emails are genuine or not, they don’t consider another explanation: That Bolton may not have written the emails at all, just as Leonard Benardo didn’t write emails reporting on a devious Hillary Clinton plot to make something of Trump’s ties to Russia.

Look, we just learned that Ratcliffe and Patel participated in a 4-year effort to frame Hillary Clinton based off emails fabricated by Russian spies. Can you please not be so horny to normalize all this that you ignore that the fact pattern here is precisely the same?

Aug. 27 

Medill News Service, Lack of Local News Tied to Government Secrecy, New Report Says, John Volk, Aug. 27, 2025. The loss of local news is linked with increased government secrecy, according to a new study conducted by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida.

The findings lend the first empirical evidence to the connection long intuited between the declining health of local news ecosystems and decreased government transparency. They add to the growing body of research that demonstrates the impact of news deserts on democracy, including increased partisanship, lower voter participation, and diminished civic engagement.

“Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center and author of the report. “Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they’re taking advantage of that.”

To measure transparency, Cuillier and his colleague Brett Posner-Ferdman, a law student at Penn State, requested the same seven records from 44 state governments under each state’s public records law. They found that the states with fewer newspapers per capita were more likely to deny or ignore their requests. They also found that responsiveness to requests improved in states with stronger press associations. Overall, about a quarter of requests were fully complied with, while another quarter were outright denied or not responded to.

The Medill Local News Initiative has tracked a net loss of more than 3,300 local newspapers and 45,000 newspaper journalists in the US since 2005. Those losses represent drops of about 33% and 60%, respectively.

The researchers did not find a significant connection between the density of digital-only local news sites and government transparency. Cuillier argued that these typically small start-ups can’t be expected to replace the work once done by large newspaper teams.

“They’re stretched so thin in trying to produce content that they often don’t have time to pursue public records, let alone sue for them,” Cuillier said of digital-only local news sites.

David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center, explained the local news crisis may lead pulbic officials to feel emboldened to withhold documents. "This is a terrible, terrible situation for democracy," Cuillier said.

Former Washington Post journalist and Fulbright Scholar Miranda Spivack explained that government secrecy can take its most damaging form at the state and local levels where most citizens encounter government. She documented local officials’ attempts to hide critical information about issues ranging from toxic chemicals in firefighter gear to dirty drinking water in her book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back” published earlier this year.

“It paralyzes communities in a lot of ways,” Spivack said of local governments’ noncompliance with transparency laws. “It puts a lot of power in the hands of officials and private companies, usually, that they’re doing business with.”

Medill researchers requested records from a sample of 165 news desert counties earlier this year, looking to learn who, if anyone, was requesting records from these local governments. Almost half did not respond to the requests. Of the 54 counties that produced records in full, more than 70% received no records requests from journalists in a full year.

Journalist and scholar Miranda Spivack described noncompliance with records requests as depriving citizens of a critical avenue to exercise oversight of state and local governments.

In many cases, news desert counties are small and rural. Cindy Ornsbey, the county clerk and recorder in Slope County, North Dakota said she had no memory of any records requests in her five years on the job. “The population here is about 740 people,” Ornsbey wrote over email. “There would be no reason that any news media organizations would need any records from Podunk.”

Long wait times and copying fees also stood in the way of access to documents, both in Medill’s look at the local level and Cuillier’s look at the state level. The Department of Natural Resources in Iowa asked Cuillier for more than $16,000 for access to records on hunting and fishing licenses.

Cuillier listed four paths toward improving government compliance with records requests: Strengthened local news ecosystems; stronger laws that mandate attorney’s fees and monetary penalties if an agency is found improperly withholding documents; independent information commissions in each state; and bolstered litigation efforts.

He noted The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has made strides on this final point. It launched the Local Legal Initiative in 2020 to provide on-the-ground legal support for local journalists with backing from the Knight Foundation and Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic coalition working to strengthen local news.

Eric Feder, the director of the Local Legal Initiative, explained that the initial request is only the starting point of the battle for public records. He hopes that increased litigation from initiatives like his can change the culture around government transparency.

“Bringing a lawsuit gets results,” Feder said. “It doesn’t win every time, but keeping the pressure on, holding agencies accountable has this almost immediate effect.”

New York Times, The A.I. Spending Frenzy Is Propping Up the Real Economy, Too, Lydia DePillis, Aug. 27, 2025. The trillions of dollars that tech companies are pouring into new data centers are starting to show up in economic growth. For now, at least.

It’s no secret by now, as investors await an earnings report on Wednesday by the chip behemoth Nvidia, that optimism around the windfall that artificial intelligence may generate is pumping up the stock market.

But in recent months, it has also become clear that A.I. spending is lifting the real economy, too.

It’s not because of how companies are using the technology, at least not yet. Rather, the sheer amount of investment — in data centers, semiconductor factories and power supply — needed to build the computing power that A.I. demands is creating enough business activity to brighten readings on the entire domestic economy.

Companies will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on A.I. infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. That is projected to rise to $500 billion next year. Investment in software and computer equipment, not counting the data center buildings, accounted for a quarter of all economic growth this past year, data from the Commerce Department shows.

(Even that probably doesn’t reflect the whole picture. Government data collectors have long had trouble capturing the economic value of semiconductors and computer equipment that large tech companies like Meta and Alphabet install for their own use, rather than farming out to contractors, so the total impact is likely to be higher.)

The big tech companies are the largest financiers of the frenzy, but private equity firms have been pouring in capital, too. Brookfield Asset Management, which manages a vast real estate portfolio, estimates that A.I. infrastructure will sop up $7 trillion over the next 10 years.

• The Guardian, Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated ‘freelancer,’ Maya Yang, Aug. 22, 2025 (print ed.). At least six publications have taken down articles under the name Margaux Blanchard that were AI-generated.

Status, Media News: YouTube’s Deal With the Devil; Vilifying the Vulnerable; Pressure on Israel,Oliver Darcy, Aug. 27, 2025. Mentioned in this edition: Clarissa Ward, Trey Gowdy, Elon Musk, Azmat Khan, Emily Sundberg, Mike Cernovich, Taylor Swift, Jimmy Fallon, Bryan Singer, and more.

Google once declared OAN too toxic for its platform—now Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan are breathing new life into the conspiracy network as they negotiate a high-stakes agreement with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation.

The YouTube logo seen on a screen. (Photo by Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images)

In late 2020, YouTube took a decisive step: The company suspended the right-wing conspiracy factory One America News, demonetized its channel, and declared that it was not an “authoritative” source. It was the correct call: OAN has a lengthy record of spewing dangerous lies about everything from Covid to the 2020 election. At the time, YouTube insisted it had a responsibility to protect its users from corrosive disinformation, and noted that OAN had repeatedly violated its misinformation policies.

Now, less than five years later, Google boss Sundar Pichai and YouTube chief Neal Mohan have executed a shameless, whiplash-inducing reversal. On Wednesday, YouTube TV and OAN proudly announced that they had inked a carriage deal, catapulting the channel onto one of the country’s largest digital pay-TV platform. In effect, Google tossed a lifeline to the outlet, since most every other major carrier in the country had booted it from its lineup. The move will make YouTube TV among the biggest distributors of the MAGA propaganda outlet in America.

And YouTube isn’t even pretending to be embarrassed. In fact, just the opposite. Justin Connolly, YouTube’s global head of media, raved about the deal.

 

 

Status, Media News: YouTube’s Deal With the Devil; Vilifying the Vulnerable; Pressure on Israel,Oliver Darcy, Aug. 27, 2025. Mentioned in this edition: Clarissa Ward, Trey Gowdy, Elon Musk, Azmat Khan, Emily Sundberg, Mike Cernovich, Taylor Swift, Jimmy Fallon, Bryan Singer, and more.

Google once declared OAN too toxic for its platform—now Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan are breathing new life into the conspiracy network as they negotiate a high-stakes agreement with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation.

The YouTube logo seen on a screen. (Photo by Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images)

In late 2020, YouTube took a decisive step: The company suspended the right-wing conspiracy factory One America News, demonetized its channel, and declared that it was not an “authoritative” source. It was the correct call: OAN has a lengthy record of spewing dangerous lies about everything from Covid to the 2020 election. At the time, YouTube insisted it had a responsibility to protect its users from corrosive disinformation, and noted that OAN had repeatedly violated its misinformation policies.

Now, less than five years later, Google boss Sundar Pichai and YouTube chief Neal Mohan have executed a shameless, whiplash-inducing reversal. On Wednesday, YouTube TV and OAN proudly announced that they had inked a carriage deal, catapulting the channel onto one of the country’s largest digital pay-TV platform. In effect, Google tossed a lifeline to the outlet, since most every other major carrier in the country had booted it from its lineup. The move will make YouTube TV among the biggest distributors of the MAGA propaganda outlet in America.

And YouTube isn’t even pretending to be embarrassed. In fact, just the opposite. Justin Connolly, YouTube’s global head of media, raved about the deal.

Facebook, Trump Hostility To Harvard Explained, Robin Shapiro (lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School), Aug. 27, 2025. For those wondering why our fearless leader devotes so much of his increasingly scarce bandwidth to the punishment of Harvard, it is worth remembering this 2015 incident when members of the Harvard Lampoon (the undergrad humormagazine) tricked Donald Trump into thinking that the Harvard Crimson (the daily student newspaper ) actually had endorsed him for President (a joke, obvious to everyone except Trump).

To the students’ amazement, news of the impending endorsement triggered an invitation to Trump‘s NY offices and the attached group picture of smiling ‘Pooners (masquerading as Crimson editors) surrounding a duped and grinning Trump.

When the prank was revealed, Harvard turned a deaf ear to Trump’s demand that all involved be expelled. Fortunately for Harvard, Trump is not one to bear a petty grudge.

Aug. 26 

 

Daily Beast, ‘Big Balls’ in Biggest Ever Social Security Leak: Whistleblower, Laura Esposito Aug. 26, 2025. DATA DISASTER: The move “potentially violated multiple federal statutes” and could cause a “catastrophic impact,” the whistleblower warned, according to The New York Times.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Amid Hunt for Crime in DC, Whistleblower Implicates Ed “Big Balls” Coristine and John Roberts, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 26, 2025.

John Roberts and his Republican colleagues have granted a kid with ties to criminal hackers, Ed "Big Balls" Coristine, live access to every American's Social Security data.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, there should be far more attention to the fact that right wing Governors are forcing members of their National Guard to leave their homes, their families, and their jobs to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, the privileged white kid with ties to criminal hackers who allegedly got assaulted when out past 3AM one night.

Most are sending their own constituents away from their homes to fight crime, allegedly, in a safer place than their own home. And now, they’re doing so to avenge a guy accused of potential misconduct that may put their own privacy at risk.

NYT was the first to report on a new whistleblower complaint, from Social Security’s Chief Data Officer, Chuck Borges, alleging that DOGE boys created a live copy of the entire Social Security database. Specifically, the complaint alleges:

• When DOGE personnel were given access to Social Security data in mid-March, they had equipment pin access (meaning actions could not be traced to one user) and write access, potentially violating laws protecting IRS data.• After Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander imposed a Temporary Restraining Order on DOGE access on March 20, DOGE almost immediately restored — and expanded — access to Social Security data, potentially exposing those who granted access to CFAA hacking charges.• After SCOTUS lifted the preliminary injunction on this data, DOGE created their own replica of SSA’s Numerical Identification System on an insecure server.

A risk assessment of recreating a live Social Security database described the catastrophic risk involved.

Developers (presumably DOGE) planned to import NUMIDENT into the cloud, and because AWS-ACI is an extension of the SSA network, any other SSA production data and PII could also be imported; “unauthorized access to the NUMIDENT would be considered catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs” [emphasis Borges’];

Since earlier this month, Borges has been trying to understand the impact of that live replica database. Those with access — including Big Balls, but also Aaram Moghaddassi, who first created the replica copies — refused to respond to his questions. What answers he did get only confirmed his concerns. And he learned the lawyers were instructing people not to answer his questions.

That same day, in response to Mr. Borges’ August 8, 2025 request for information about concerns raised, a CIO employee confirmed that while two cloud access accounts owned by Aaram Moghaddassi were created per SSA policy, they are not managed by the Division of Infrastructure Services (DIS), are self-administered, and include access to both test and live data environments. 67

Also on August 11, 2025 in response to the same August 7, 2025 request from Mr. Borges, another CIO employee provided the July 15, 2025 PATO and the June 25, 2025 approval by Russo of the NUMIDENT data transfer.

When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, left, dissented from lifting the preliminary injunction in June, she talked about how badly the Court was skewing relative harm, granting DOGE access — including to people like Big Balls — even while privacy law protected the data.

John Roberts and his Republican colleagues have granted a kid with ties to criminal hackers, Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, live access to every American’s Social Security data.And Jeanine Pirro thinks she should look to the streets of DC to find crime.

 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Word & Phrases We Should Ignore, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 26, 2025. Assume bad faith from the Trump regime.

The “presumption of regularity,” a concept neither mentioned in the Constitution nor enshrined in any law, boils down to the notion that courts should give presidents the benefit of the doubt. As legal authority and founder of Democracy Docket Marc Elias wrote in May, “Courts assume that the president and his administration act in good faith, that their actions are lawful, their statements truthful and their motivations honest.” (Don’t laugh, this used to be true.)

However, when it comes to Donald Trump, Elias explains: “The cat-and-mouse game he has played with federal judges is rapidly turning into outright defiance. At every stage, the government asserts the presumption of good faith and regularity to shield itself from the judicial scrutiny democracy requires.” Well, no one outside of the MAGA cult thinks the presumption of regularity is reasonable under this regime. (Even more fanciful is reliance on this Justice Department’s “professional ethics of the lawyers who appear before judges on behalf of the government.”)

That presumption was called into question again on Friday when FBI agents conducted searches of long-time virulent Trump critic, John Bolton. right. As lawyer, former FBI agent, and The Contrarian contributor Asha Rangappa wrote for The New York Times, “[T]he very fact that the public can’t be sure whether this is, in fact, a legitimate investigation highlights the current crisis of trust in federal law enforcement, a crisis that has been exacerbated by the words and actions of Mr. Trump and members of his administration.”

When the head of the FBI has made an enemies list (on which Bolton’s name appears), the regime systematically yanks security clearances and protective details for political opponents (including Bolton), and numerous figures—including Trump, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Vice President JD Vance—comment on the ongoing Bolton “investigation,” one might reasonably conclude things are not on the up-and-up. (As Peter Baker notes, citing his and Susan Glasser’s well-documented book The Divider, “Trump and his team have sought to use government power to go after Bolton since his first term even when it meant ignoring normal standards, so much so that his own assistant attorney general quietly resigned rather than go along anymore.”)

Given all that, the phrase the “presumption of regularity” is laughable under this thugocracy. As The Contrarian contributor Barb McQuade told the New York Times, “For all we know, the investigation into John Bolton’s conduct may be rock solid, but Trump’s Justice Department has lost any presumption of regularity.” However, she continues, “In light of all of the threats the Trump administration has made to target his enemies, they have lost any presumption of good faith.”

Beyond Bolton, evidence abounds to support skepticism about the regime’s intentions, based on its pattern of weaponizing government against opponents. The list of particulars includes: contriving “mortgage fraud” allegations against two of Trump’s prime enemies (New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff) as well as a Federal Reserve governor whom Trump pines to replace; extorting law firms that have represented foes; delaying, evading, and arguably ignoring a host of legal rulings; and charging Democratic officeholders (e.g. Judge Hannah Dugan, New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver) with bogus accusations of interfering with ICE arrests.

The has been an abundance of other instances of manifest “irregularity”: concocting a “corrupt bargain” to keep the New York mayor under Trump’s thumb; dismissing Justice Department officials who prosecuted Jan. 6 criminals; pardoning Jan. 6 felons; firing a Justice Department lawyer for being candid with the court; investigating special counsel Jack Smith, threatening to impeach judges who rule against Trump; slapping tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting its former president and coup instigator; and extracting “settlements” in frivolous claims against media companies (and holding up regulatory decisions until they pay).Subscribed

We cannot assume good faith when the president and his henchmen routinely lie (e.g., BLS figures are fraudulent! Crime in D.C. is soaring! Prices are down! No classified materials in Signalgate! Elon Musk doesn’t run DOGE!). As constitutional scholar and Harvard University Professor Larry Tribe put it to me recently: “The presumption of regularity rests on what has become a counterfactual assumption of normalcy.” It is time to make the presumption of irregularity (i.e. bad faith) when it comes to the Trump crowd.

Normalcy is entirely missing in the immigration realm, most glaringly in deportation of migrants to El Salvador. In dissembling over the timeline and falsely insisting the U.S. could not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Justice Department lawyers earned the ire of federal judges. Given the government’s repeated misrepresentations, then, courts going forward should “operate with persistent (and justified) skepticism toward the executive branch. ... effectively shifting the burden to the government to affirmatively demonstrate its good faith, even in routine matters,” argued Alan Z. Rozenshtein in Lawfare.

For example, in considering a warrant to search the home or office of someone whose name is on a enemies list (or who happened to have litigated against Trump or whom Trump accused of “treason”), courts should demand an especially detailed factual showing to establish “probable cause” and should not rely on a Trump political appointee’s or recent hire’s affidavit without corroboration. Judges must be hyper-vigilant so as not to authorize a vengeance investigation.

Likewise, when evaluating if the government willfully disobeyed a court order, judges should assume trained lawyers understand the plain meaning of orders (and hence that disobedience is deliberate). If the government wants to rebut the assumption it willfully defied the court, a high-ranking official can testify to exculpatory facts under oath. Finally, whenever Trump invokes an “emergency” or other grounds (“rebellion”) for deploying troop domestically, courts should insist the government prove the factual basis for its claim (e.g., From where did they get the data that crime was trending up in D.C.?).

In short, the “presumption of regularity” is an absurd phrase to apply to an administration that cavalierly dissembles, disingenuously feigns confusion, and abuses power. The rule of law cannot survive if judges allow government lawyers to treat them like suckers.

Aug. 23

New York Times, Harvard Is Making Changes Trump Officials Want, Even Without a Deal, Stephanie Saul, Aug. 23, 2025. Harvard has sued, fighting the Trump administration’s demands. But the university has also enacted a host of items on the White House wish list.

Early in the spring, an aggressive and polarizing new presidential administration drafted a menu of demands, many of them very specific, designed to reshape the culture at Harvard, the nation’s richest university.

With billions of dollars in research funds in jeopardy, the university’s leaders are now negotiating with the White House. But an eventual deal may not fully capture the changes, small and large, already enacted at Harvard before any papers are signed.

The university has recoiled at some of the sweeping changes the Trump administration demanded. Harvard’s president, Dr. Alan M. Garber, has singled out several as intrusive and unconstitutional, including demands that might influence whom the university hires and admits.

But it has also taken a host of steps that align with the White House’s desires, checking off items on the administration’s detailed menu, which have ranged from eliminating diversity offices to ousting program leaders. In some cases, students and faculty members worry, the new, Trump-inspired policies may interfere with the freedom of expression that is central to the university’s mission.

President Trump and his appointees have made their attack on Harvard a totem for the changes they want to see across America’s elite universities, using the government’s blunt power to force compliance in a manner never before seen. Universities across the country are watching closely, to see what Harvard might do and what it might be willing to sacrifice, as they seek a way forward for their own campuses.

The Trump administration’s demands included eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In April, Harvard renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, which is now called the Office for Community and Campus Life. More recently, Harvard also took down websites for its Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, as well as websites for companion offices for gay and female students, and said they were merging them into a new, single center.

The government has also sought leadership shake-ups in certain departments, including the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, after Jewish alumni and others accused the programs of sponsoring antisemitic programming. Harvard removed two of the center’s leaders, including Cemal Kafadar, a leading Turkish scholar, in March.

And Trump officials asked for an end to Harvard’s partnership with Birzeit University, a top Palestinian college in the West Bank. Harvard said it had suspended the relationship and had struck up new ones with institutions in Israel.

Aug. 22

The Guardian, Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated ‘freelancer,’ Maya Yang, Aug. 22, 2025 (print ed.). At least six publications have taken down articles under the name Margaux Blanchard that were AI-generated.

Multiple news organisations have taken down articles written by an alleged freelance journalist that now appear to have been generated by AI.

On Thursday, Press Gazette reported that at least six publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have removed articles from their websites in recent months after it was discovered that the stories – written under the name of Margaux Blanchard – were AI-generated.

Wired published a story titled “They Fell in Love Playing Minecraft. Then the Game Became Their Wedding Venue” in May. A few weeks later, the outlet took down the story, stating in an editor’s note: “After an additional review of the article … Wired editorial leadership has determined this article does not meet our editorial standards.”

The story cited a “Jessica Hu”, an alleged 34-year-old “ordained officiant based in Chicago” who reportedly “made a name for herself as a ‘digital celebrant’, specialising in ceremonies across Twitch, Discord and VRChat”, according to Press Gazette, which reviewed the Wired article.

Both the Press Gazette and the Guardian were not able to verify the identity of Hu.

Press Gazette further reported that in April, Business Insider published two essays by Blanchard titled: “Remote work has been the best thing for me as a parent but the worst as a person” and “I had my first kid at 45. I’m financially stable and have years of life experience to guide me.”

Earlier this week, Business Insider removed the articles after Press Gazette alerted the outlet over the authenticity of the author. Both article pages now feature a message saying that the stories were “removed because [they] didn’t meet Business Insider’s standards”.

In a statement to the Guardian, a Business Insider spokesperson said: “We have removed first-person essays that didn’t meet Business Insider’s standards and have since bolstered verification protocols.”

In an article published on Thursday, Wired’s management acknowledged the faux pas, saying: “If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it’s Wired. In fact we do, all the time … Unfortunately, one got through.”

The outlet explained that on 7 April, one of its editors received a pitch about the “rise of hyper-niche internet weddings”. According to the outlet, the pitch had “all the hallmarks of a great Wired story”.

Wired said that after some standard correspondence about framing and payment, the editor assigned the story which ran on 7 May.

However, in the days that followed, it “became clear that the writer was unable to provide enough information to be entered into our payments system”. The outlet added that the writer insisted on payment by PayPal or check.

Upon further investigation, it became clear to the outlet that the story was fabricated.

In its story on Thursday, Wired said: “We made errors here: This story did not go through a proper fact-check process or get a top edit from a more senior editor … We acted quickly once we discovered the ruse, and we’ve taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again. In this new era, every newsroom should be prepared to do the same.”

Aug. 21

 

Team Newsom has held up a mirror to what unserious nitwits conservatives are, and it’s broken their brains.

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Gavin Newsom has broken every Republican’s brain, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Aug. 21, 2025. ‘Don’t feed the troll.’ It’s the first thing most of us learn on the internet. if someone is deliberately trying to wind you up, just to provoke response, don’t engage. don’t give them the pleasure of a reply. It’s what they want. It’s how they win. Just walk away.

It’s been over a week since Team Newsom started tweeting in the crazypants ALL CAPS style of Mad King Donny. imagine for a moment what would have happened if the Republican response had been silence. Newsom’s joke would have been funny for a couple of days, and then the world would have moved on to the next shiny object.

But no, Republicans can’t keep silent — and as a result they keep getting their asses handed to them.

“I mean, even poor Kid Rock — these guys, they’ve gotten a little precious, haven’t they? The folks at Fox are like, ‘Oh, this is so unbecoming of a governor. oh, oh.’ And meanwhile, they sit there reading his tweets every single day. Are they really that out of touch? It’s jaw-dropping how precious and concerned the New York Post has suddenly gotten. How the Wall Street Journal board is like, ‘Oh no, we can’t have this.’ I mean, what I hope is that we’re exposing it all. I hope we’re entertaining some people.”

The governor asks, ‘Are they really that out of touch?’ Fox News has done as much as anyone to keep this story alive. they just keep bringing on an endless series of tiresome scolds to explain why it’s perfectly okay for Dear Leader to tweet like a coked-up squirrel, but it’s not okay for Gavin Newsom to mimic it.

MeidasTouch Podcast, Commentary: Trump Posts INSANE THREAT As Host GOES PUBLIC With THIS! Jack Cocchiarella, Aug. 21, 2025. Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to Donald Trump's meltdown over Lawrence O'Donnell's coverage of his cankles.

Aug. 20

New York Times, New Details Emerge on Fox Hosts’ Efforts to Bolster Trump in 2020, Katie Robertson, Aug. 20, 2025 (print ed.). Jeanine Pirro. Jesse Watters. Maria Bartiromo. They seemed to have different motivations, but the same goal: Help President Trump.

Several of Fox News’s most prominent on-air news personalities made clear their desire to help Mr. Trump shortly before and after the 2020 presidential election, according to a tranche of court documents released on Tuesday in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation filed by Smartmatic, a voting technology company.

In one text message, Mr. Watters, who now hosts “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Fox News, said to his colleague Greg Gutfeld: “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” a reference to the movement trying to overturn the results of the election.

Ms. Pirro, a former Fox News host who is now the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., told Ronna McDaniel, then the Republican National Committee chair, in a text in the months before the election: “I work so hard for the President and party.” Ms. Pirro had been pushing for a pardon from Mr. Trump for her ex-husband, Smartmatic argues.

Ms. Bartiromo, a host on Fox Business and Fox News, texted Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, about the election results on Nov. 12, 2020: “I want you to overturn this.” (She later testified in a deposition that she had hoped Mr. Trump would win the election, and had wanted Mr. Giuliani to find evidence of cheating and for the election to be overturned if that was uncovered.)

The hundreds of pages of documents — largely newly unredacted versions of previously released ones — were filed on Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court. Smartmatic has accused Fox News of knowingly implicating the company in false claims of vote-rigging in the 2020 election.

Both Smartmatic and Fox News have asked the judge for summary judgment, meaning to rule on the case without a trial. The judge overseeing the case, David B. Cohen, is expected to issue his decision in the coming months.

Smartmatic filed its lawsuit against Fox in February 2021, and the documents are the fullest picture yet of the evidence it says it has compiled against the network. Smartmatic is arguing that Fox, facing a growing backlash after calling Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr., pivoted to a narrative about election fraud to placate its viewers despite knowing it was not true.

Smartmatic says that it, along with another company, Dominion Voting Systems, became the focus of conspiracy theories perpetuated by Fox News hosts that the companies were somehow linked to each other and were involved in rigging votes. Smartmatic had provided voting technology only in Los Angeles County and has no relationship to Dominion, according to the company.

Dominion also sued Fox for defamation. That case was settled for $787.5 million on the day the trial was set to begin in 2023.

Aug. 18

 

New York Times, Newsmax Will Pay $67 Million to Settle Dominion Defamation Lawsuit, Katie Robertson, Aug. 18, 2025. Dominion Voting Systems sued the right-wing cable channel for broadcasting false claims that the voting machine company had rigged votes in the 2020 presidential election.

The right-wing cable channel Newsmax has agreed to pay $67 million to settle a libel lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems had brought against the channel for falsely claiming that the voting machine company had rigged votes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The settlement, which the companies completed on Aug. 15, was disclosed in an S.E.C. filing by Newsmax. It noted that Newsmax would make the payments in three installments by Jan. 15, 2027.

A Dominion spokeswoman confirmed the deal in a statement, saying, “We are pleased to have settled this matter.” Newsmax did not offer an apology, saying in a statement on Monday that it stood by its coverage as “fair, balanced and conducted within professional standards of journalism.” A Newsmax spokesman said the settlement did not require the company to make an apology or a retraction.

In 2021, Dominion sued Newsmax for $1.6 billion, accusing the cable channel of knowingly broadcasting conspiracy theories that falsely implicated the company in election fraud and vote rigging. Dominion accused Newsmax of making the baseless claims in 18 statements on television, as well as in a social media post. The statements included false claims that Dominion’s software had manipulated vote counts, that Dominion had ties to a Venezuelan company and that Dominion paid kickbacks to certain government officials.

In April, Judge Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court ruled that Dominion had presented “clear and convincing evidence” that the statements from Newsmax were false and defamatory, allowing the case to proceed to a trial.

The trial, where a jury would decide whether Newsmax had broadcast the claims despite knowing they were false and the extent of damages to Dominion, had been set for earlier this year but was postponed.

Nearly five years after the 2020 election, a wave of litigation over the broadcasting of false claims is nearing a conclusion. In April 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to resolve a separate defamation lawsuit over the network’s extensive promotion of conspiracy theories that falsely linked Dominion to interference in the 2020 election.

Newsmax settled a similar case brought by another voting technology company, Smartmatic, in September for $40 million.

Some cases are still underway. Fox News faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, which is set to proceed to trial in a Manhattan state court unless the parties reach a settlement. Fox has said it is willing to defend itself at trial, and it has criticized Smartmatic’s damages claims as “intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

 

 

Then-President Trump meets Russian President Vladirmir Putin in Osaka, Japan in June 2019.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump Confesses that the United States Is a Client of Russia, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 18, 2025. The hold Putin has over Trump is existential for Trump. And unless we can expose that, the US will increasingly become a mere satellite of Russia.

There’s a great deal of normalcy bias in the reporting on Trump’s capitulation. NYT reports (based on watching the Sunday shows) that Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff “hint” that Putin will make concessions to reach a plea deal with Ukraine, without questioning whether those are anything but personal inducements to Trump (like a Trump Tower) and without noting that Wikoff is incompetent to understand what would be a real concession in any case. WaPo describes that Putin was willing to offer security guarantees, without noting that guarantees without NATO are useless (and one of the tools Putin has used to lull his imperial victims in the past).

Curiously, one place that is not suffering from normalcy bias is WSJ’s editorial page, which notes what is being shared with “friendly media” (seemingly excluding WSJ from that moniker) are “worse than worthless.”

The President went into the summit promising “severe consequences” if there was no agreement on a cease-fire. He left the summit having dropped the cease-fire with no consequences in favor of Vladimir Putin’s wish for a long-term peace deal as the war continues. Mr. Trump took new sanctions on buyers of Russian oil off the table.

Mr. Trump also said the burden is now on Ukraine to close the deal. European leaders told the press that, in his conversations with them, Mr. Trump said Mr. Putin demanded that he get all of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which would mean that Ukraine give up its main line of defense in the east.

White House leaks to friendly media suggest Mr. Putin promised that, in return for Donetsk, he’ll stop his assault and won’t invade other countries. No wonder Russian commentators and Putin allies were celebrating the summit’s results. Their President ended his isolation in the West, made no public concessions, and can continue killing Ukrainians without further sanction.

Mr. Putin’s promises are worse than worthless. He has broken promise after promise to Ukraine and the West. This includes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum promising to defend Ukraine against outside attack, and multiple Minsk agreements. He wants Donetsk because he would gain at the negotiating table what he hasn’t been able to conquer on the battlefield. It would also make it easier to take more territory when he or his successor think the time is right to strike again.

The silver lining is that European leaders say Mr. Trump told them Mr. Putin had agreed to accept “security guarantees” for Ukraine. The suggestion is that the U.S. might even be one of those guarantors, albeit outside NATO. But Mr. Trump provided no details.

For guarantees to have real deterrent effect, they would have to include foreign troops in Ukraine. Kyiv would need the ability to build up its military and arms industry.

All this is distracting from the question not asked at the Sunday shows yesterday: Why Trump’s team walked out of their meeting with Putin looking like they had seen death.

Let’s recap what got us here:

Some weeks ago, Trump gave Putin the 50 days the Russian president wanted before he would come to the table. Then, as Putin kept bombing, making Trump look weak, Trump shortened the timeline to ten days. But instead of imposing the sanctions that Lindsey Graham had spent months crafting, Trump instead sent Steve Witkoff to Moscow. Witkoff, by design (because this is what happens when you choose to put someone with no relevant expertise or temperament in charge of negotiating deals), came back promising deals he couldn’t describe, it’s just not clear for whom. On an impossibly short notice, Trump arranged to host Putin on former Russian land. Going in, Trump promised that if Russia didn’t deal on a cease fire, there would be tough consequences. Europeans and Volodymyr Zelenskyy smelled a rat, but didn’t succeed in convincing Trump how badly he would be manhandled. And manhandled he was. Sergei Lavrov showed up wearing a CCCP jersey, Putin displayed undisguised contempt for everyone. And Trump walked out looking ashen. Putin treated Trump like a menial client. Trump told Sean Hannity that he shouldn’t have done his interview right afterwards, and I wonder if he had not — if Trump had not felt it necessary to immediately declare a success, ten of ten — then Trump’s team might have tried to find a way out. But whatever Trump then said to Zelenskyy and European leaders made them realize things were worse than they anticipated. Trump sent out Rubio and Witkoff on the Sunday shows to basically defer, making transparently bullshit claims of concessions from Russia. But today, Trump is making it clear that he will made demands Zelenskyy cannot accept — the Crimea recognition Trump floated to get elected in 2016, and no hopes of NATO membership — even while suggesting that Zelenskyy will have to make all the concessions.

Effectively, Putin ordered Trump to make Ukraine capitulate. Hell, maybe he even gave Trump a deadline.

And I would be unsurprised if Trump does what happened in February, after he bullied Zelenskyy, but for which Trump later blamed Pete Hegseth’s incompetence. I would be unsurprised Trump withdrew US intelligence sharing, without which Ukraine cannot defend itself, possibly even halting the sale of weapons to Ukraine.

But the implications of all this are much larger. These demands, particularly the demand that Ukraine turn over the part of Donetsk that Moscow has never conquered, would leave Ukraine defenseless. Conceding these demands would make Zelenskyy vulnerable (indeed, one of Russia’s puppets in Ukraine is already challenging his leadership). Ukraine really is the front line of Europe — of Moldova (with elections scheduled in September), of Czechia (with elections scheduled in October), of the Baltics, where Putin has been staging for some time.

And remember: one of the promises Trump floated during the election, one of the promises that — Nicolay Patrushev said — is why Russia helped reinstall Trump is that Trump limit intelligence sharing with Europe, all of it. Europe relies on that intelligence to combat Russia’s influence operations within Europe. Without that intelligence, one after another country would fall to a pro-Russian party.

Since returning to office, Trump has dismantled every tool the US created to win the Cold War. It doesn’t need to be the case that Trump has stashed his Administration with actual Russian agents — narcissism and venality explain much of what we’re seeing — but there are somewhere between two and twenty Trump advisors who I have good reason to suspect are Russian agents. Over the past three years, right wingers have forced the tech platforms to eliminate the moderation that had provided visibility on Russia’s influence operations. As I laid out, Trump dismantled US Russian expertise and the investigative tools created to hunt and prevent Russian influence operations in the US. Meanwhile, he is willfully bankrupting the country based on plans largely adopted in joint venture with Putin client Viktor Orbán.

Trump has made the United States powerless against Russia, and I expect he will be instructed to make Europe powerless against Russia as well.

This is the point I’m trying to convey: All of Trump’s power depends on his continued reinforcement of the disinformation that Russia used to get him elected the first time. Without Russia’s continued indulgence, the foundational myths to Trump’s power would crumble. Particularly amid the willful destruction of US power, it would provide cause — and maybe even the will, among right wingers — to expel and prosecute him.

The hold Putin has over Trump is existential for Trump. And unless we can expose that, the US will increasingly become a mere satellite of Russia.

Trump is not making America great. He is gutting America.

This is not just about forcing Ukraine to surrender.

Trump has surrendered. And going forward, it is only going to get worse.

Aug. 16

White House Chronicle, Commentary: Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government? Llewellyn King, Aug. 16, 2025. "This Time It's Different" is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything.

Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn't look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, he believes, bigger and more transformative than anything that has yet happened.

He says AI is exponential and human thinking is linear. I think that means we can't get our minds around it.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, echoes Hatamleh.Cole believes that AI will be as impactful as the printing press, the internet and COVID-19. He also believes 2027 will be a seminal year: a year in which AI will batter the workforce, particularly white-collar workers.

For journalists, AI presents two challenges: jobs lost to AI writing and editing, and the loss of truth. How can we identify AI-generated misinformation? The New York Times said simply: We can't.

But I am more optimistic.

I have been reporting on AI since well before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Eventually, I think AI will be able to control itself, to red flag its own excesses and those who are abusing it with fake information.

I base this rather outlandish conclusion on the idea that AI has a near-human dimension which it gets from absorbing all published human knowledge and that knowledge is full of discipline, morals and strictures. Surely, these are also absorbed in the neural networks.

I have tested this concept on AI savants across the spectrum for several years. They all had the same response: It is a great question.

Besides its trumpeted use in advancing medicine at warp speed, AI could become more useful in providing truth where it has been concealed by political skullduggery or phony research.

Consider the general apprehension that President Donald Trump may order the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books.

Well, aficionados in the world of national security and AI tell me that AI could easily scour all available data on employment, job vacancies and inflation and presto: reliable numbers. The key, USC's Cole emphasizes, is inputting complete prompts.

In other words, AI could check the data put out by the government. That leads to the possibility of a kind of AI shadow government, revealing falsehoods and correcting speculation.

 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Talking With Jeff Asher, Paul Krugman, above left, Aug. 16, 2025. My go-to guy for crime data (above right).

Urban crime is a longstanding obsession for Donald Trump. Inaugural addresses are normally devoted to uplift and hope; his first inaugural was about “American carnage,” the wave of violent crime he claimed was destroying our cities. Last week he seized control of the DC police and sent in the National Guard to deal with what he claimed was out-of-control crime.

But what do the data say? I’ve come to rely heavily on Jeff Asher, whose Substack is an invaluable source of analysis and whose Real Time Crime Index lets us track recent developments in many cities. Jeff wrote presciently about DC just before Trump moved in.

So this week I talked with Jeff about crime trends and his views on the recent apparent plunge. Transcript follows:

It's a subject that is important. Lots of statistics, lots of data to be interpreted. And Jeff's Substack, Jeff-alytics, is now where you can find a lot of the number crunching analytics interpretation. He also has some views on what's been driving swings in crime and this seems like a good week since we've just had something like martial law declared in the nation's capital—or something like that—on the grounds of crime.

Aug. 11

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Popular Information scoop lands on A1, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 11, 2025. Last Monday, Popular Information broke the news that President Trump's Super PAC accepted a $5 million donation from Extremity Care, a company that sells expensive bandages made from dried placentas, days before the Trump administration delayed a rule that would have prevented Medicare from covering its products.

Medicare is spending billions on Extremity Care products, which can cost more than $10,000 per square inch, even though much cheaper alternatives—unlike Extremity Care's—are backed by scientific evidence.

Yesterday, the New York Times credited Popular Information's reporting and put the story on A1.

The New York Times added important new details to our reporting, including that Extremity Care's co-CEO met with Trump at Mar-a-lago just days after making the $5 million donation.

Stay tuned for further updates on this story. We have already established a powerful new fact in the ongoing political debate. Trump and his allies in Congress insist that he is cutting popular programs because of his deep commitment to rooting out "waste, fraud, and abuse." Trump's actions after Extremity Care's donation undercut that narrative.

This is what we mean by accountability journalism. Powerful people and institutions should be held accountable for their actions. The first step in that process is figuring out what they are actually doing.

Aug. 6

 

David Ellison, center, whose company Skydance Media acquired CBS News (Lincoln Square Media graphic).

Lincoln Square Media, CBS News' MAGA Makeover, Jennifer Schulze, right, Aug. 6, 2025. A CBS investigative piece on the Epstein jail video broke important new ground. Under David Ellison's new MAGA mandate, that story might never be allowed.

CBS News broke a big story last week that uncovers multiple discrepancies with the Jeffrey Epstein jailhouse footage recently released by the Trump Administration. The detailed analysis found that the jail video was edited before being released to the public, not raw footage as Attorney General Pam Bondi and others have repeatedly claimed.

The CBS story also raises questions about whether the video is missing a minute’s worth of content and if jailhouse cameras actually had full view of Epstein’s cell (they did not). The story also reveals the presence of a third unidentified person in the vicinity of Epstein’s cell who is not referenced in the inspector general’s report.

This news story and thousands more like it remind us that the journalists at CBS News remain top notch. Yet, the network’s new owners apparently don’t know good journalism when they see it. Or maybe they don’t actually give a damn because kowtowing to Donald Trump is the only priority. 

David Ellison, the person now in charge after a controversial $8 billion merger with CBS parent company, Paramount Global, has already agreed to some egregious moves that benefit Trump and harm CBS:• $16 million payment to Trump that some lawmakers contend is nothing more than a bribe• $20 million worth of Trump focused PSA’s and other programming• Guaranteed ‘viewpoint diversity’ in CBS news coverage aka no fact checking of Trump and MAGA lies• Installation of a Pravda-like minder to keep an eye out for “bias” in news coverage.• Cancelling the late night program hosted by Trump critic Stephen Colbert.

Now the Skydance CEO has sent one of his cronies out to anonymously describe the new vision for CBS. According to him, CBS has “lost its way” and needs to “get back to fundamentals.” It's become “extreme, elitist and performative.” The source goes on to say “Not quotas. Not ideology. Just objective journalism” that recalls the days of CBS legends Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

This is the kind of ridiculous owner-speak is an obvious attempt to deflect from reality of Ellison’s planned MAGA makeover. It also masks utter ignorance about the standards and practices of journalism that CBS News and other news organizations adhere to.

How has CBS lost its way? He doesn’t say. What are the examples of extremism, elitism, and performative news making? He doesn’t have any. Quotas? What is he even talking about? Is that code for hiring a Black or female journalist? Get back to fundamentals? Come on. CBS News helped pioneer broadcast journalism.

This Epstein jailhouse video story in built on that storied tradition. It would have made both Morrow, Cronkite and any number of CBS news legends proud. It is well-researched, fact-based, accurate, timely and yes, objective journalism. It’s the type of the work that CBS News — including its marquee news magazine program 60 Minutes — have been doing for nearly 85 years.

Aug. 3

 

Lincoln Square Media, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Tulsi Gabbard and the Art of the Political Grift, Kristoffer Ealy, Aug. 3, 2025. Trump's DNI isn’t declassifying the truth — she’s depleting her last shred of credibility.

Tulsi Gabbard is such a flagrant and well-documented political grifter that I didn’t need a deep dive, a FOIA request, or a late-night research binge to pull this together. She practically grifted the article into existence.

I remember back in 2019 when Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. At the time, I thought, “Damn, that’s harsh.” If you don’t have receipts, why throw out Cold War-level accusations like that? And at first glance, Gabbard looked like a fresh, interesting figure. New to the national scene. Youthful. Charismatic. Photogenic. She had just enough anti-war seasoning to attract disillusioned progressives and a few crossover libertarians. She said all the right things — just enough to be dangerous, never enough to be held accountable.

But the thing about political grifters is that the mask eventually slips. And Tulsi’s mask didn’t just slip — it got caught in the woodchipper of her own contradictions.Her job now — as Director of National Intelligence — isn’t some noble appointment. It’s her last political hustle. She has burned every bridge she ever stood on. The left doesn’t trust her. The right will tolerate her until she outlives her usefulness, which — judging by how quickly she’s sprinting through MAGA talking points — should be any minute now.

Like every attention-starved media shape-shifter before her, she has no core beliefs. She has vibes. And those vibes are “whatever Trump needs me to say right now.”

And right now? He needs her to run cover for his Russia problem. Again.

Gabbard recently declassified what she claims is “bombshell intelligence” proving that the Obama administration staged a coup by rigging the 2017 intelligence assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election. That would be the same assessment affirmed by all major intelligence agencies, validated by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, and reaffirmed under Trump’s own appointees. But that’s the thing about Tulsi — she doesn’t do truth. She does performance.

What she’s engaging in here is a textbook example of post hoc ergo propter hoc—Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” She’s implying that because the intel assessment came out shortly before Trump took office, and because Trump had a meltdown about it, it must have been part of a coordinated coup. That’s not analysis. That’s astrological thinking with a security clearance.

Even Fox News barely knows what to do with this, which is saying something. Meanwhile, CNN analysts are calling her declassified “revelations” cherry-picked, and intelligence veterans are openly wondering whether she’s deliberately undermining U.S. credibility to score points with a president whose understanding of geopolitics is one half Tom Clancy novel, one half Reddit thread.

And let’s talk about why she’s doing this. Not because she uncovered some shocking new intelligence — what she released has been in Republican talking points since 2017. No, she’s doing it because Trump needed someone to say it. She’s the intel community’s equivalent of a dentist on cable news shilling ivermectin. And like any good grifter, she’s packaging tired lies in shiny new rhetoric, hoping no one notices that the expiration date passed two administrations ago.

This is classic argumentum ad populum — appealing to the MAGA masses by parroting what they want to hear, not what’s true. It’s Trump’s favorite move, now performed by someone with better posture and less visible flop sweat.

And while we’re on the subject of performative garbage, we need to talk about how this whole “deep state Obama coup” farce is functioning as a shield — a perfectly timed distraction just as Trump’s Justice Department is meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell for the second time under partial immunity. That’s right — some of the same MAGA dead-enders who want you to believe Gabbard’s recycled talking points are groundbreaking truth-telling are also out here treating a convicted child sex trafficker like she’s Joan of Arc.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: Anyone helping draw attention away from Ghislaine Maxwell is protecting a sex offender. Period. There is nothing redeemable about Maxwell. There is no “deeper truth” she’s being persecuted for. She trafficked children for a billionaire predator and partied with half of Washington and Wall Street while doing it. And Tulsi Gabbard, knowingly or not, is giving her cover by flooding the media cycle with a flaming pile of Russia-gate revisionism soaked in gasoline and wrapped in a MAGA flag.

And here’s the part that really lets the air out of Tulsi’s whole performance: even some of the MAGA-adjacent manosphere brocasters — you know, the guys who think podcasting is a personality and masculinity is a brand — are starting to side-eye the bullshit. When Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz start raising eyebrows about this being a distraction tactic, it’s not because they’ve suddenly developed a moral compass. It’s because the grift is too obvious even for them to ride without getting meme burn.

These are guys who believe being skeptical of everything except testosterone supplements and conspiracy theories makes them intellectuals.

They spend half their shows laughing about how dumb liberals are and the other half arguing that maybe we need strongmen after all — but even they are looking at Tulsi’s intel cosplay and going, “Wait … this feels like a fake story inside another fake story.”

They’re not brave. They’re brand managers. And if Gabbard’s performance is so transparent that even the shirtless motivational speakers of YouTube are backing away slowly, that’s your sign this charade is in its final act.

If that sounds harsh, good. It’s supposed to. Gabbard is a special kind of bullshit artist—cool under pressure, unfazed on camera, and fully aware of the performance she’s putting on. Unlike some of Trump’s other cable news liabilities (looking at you, Pam Bondi), Gabbard rarely flinches. She knows how to hold a poker face while gaslighting an entire press pool. But don’t mistake that composure for credibility. A liar with good posture is still a liar.

And folks in her home state of Hawaii? They’ve been calling this out for years. Long before she was running interference for a man who hoards classified documents like Pokémon cards, Hawaii reporters were documenting her ideological shape-shifting, performative centrism, and calculated breaks with the Democratic Party. They knew the grift before it went national.

And it is a grift. All of it. She sued Hillary Clinton for defamation, dropped the suit quietly when it wasn’t winning her any delegates, then did an ideological backflip straight into the arms of the people who once called her a terrorist sympathizer. This isn’t policy evolution. This is Benedict Arnold meets QVC.And like all grifters, she’ll eventually overstay her welcome. The MAGA base is already wired for betrayal narratives. She’s useful now, because she’s reading from the right cue cards. But the minute she deviates — or God forbid, reminds them she’s not actually white — they’ll toss her in the same pile as every other Trump staffer who went from “truth-teller” to “deep state traitor” in under a week.

So enjoy this last political con job, Tulsi. Because the grift only works until the rubes get bored, or until someone shinier shows up. You can ride the wave of outrage for a while. You might even score a book deal. But make no mistake: this is your last act. And it’s not a triumph. It’s a cautionary tale.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. 

Democracy Docket, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: I’m not panicking. I’m outraged,.Marc Elias, right, Aug. 3, 2025 .I have been the subject of many spurious accusations and politically motivated attacks, but this one is in a class by itself. 

According to Tulsi Gabbard — the nation’s top intelligence official — my refusal to post on Twitter is being reviewed by the Department of Justice as evidence of wrongdoing. If that sounds preposterous, it is. If you don’t believe it’s true, neither do I.

The question is: why did she say it, and what does it mean for the Trump administration’s weaponization of government?

I became aware of the latest conspiracy theory in an unusual way: as a question on a pro-democracy podcast. Within minutes of sitting down with Tim Miller for The Bulwark podcast last Thursday, he asked about the right wing’s latest attack on me: “I don't know if you've seen this. Glenn Beck says that ‘Marc Elias has stopped posting on X, John Kerry privated his account and Peter Strzok deleted his account. Is the deep state panicking?’” Miller asked jokingly, “Are you the deep state, and are you panicking?”

I responded with a laugh: “Do I look panicked?” Sadly, over the last several years, I’ve become accustomed to the attacks and laughing them off. As far back as 2018, Donald Trump described me on social media as the Democratic Party’s “best election-stealing lawyer.”

Earlier this year, he told officials at the Department of Justice that another lawyer and I were “bad people, really bad people” and “radicals” trying “to turn America into a corrupt, communist, third-world country.” Even worse than Trump himself? His prominent (and vocal) supporters.

In 2023, Kash Patel — who is not the FBI Director — called me “the enemy of the Republican Party.” Steven Bannon has said I am “pure evil.” Earlier this year, in February, Elon Musk — who at the time was still palling around with Trump — used his social media platform to proclaim that I was “undermining civilization.” He wondered if I had suffered “childhood trauma.”

I wrote an open letter in response. Some of the attacks have been threatening. Others are simply bizarre. Shortly before the November 2024 election, a group I later learned was funded in part by Musk took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post, accusing me of being involved in “racist voter suppression lawsuits” and trying to “disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters.” The same group rented mobile billboards to drive around Washington, D.C., displaying my photo with a similar message.

Each time I’m targeted, the volume of hate I receive — online and in correspondence — spikes. Some of it is deranged. Much of it is antisemitic. And it’s deeply conspiratorial. Like Beck, many of the purveyors of these lies accuse me of being part of the “deep state.”

I’ve never worked in government and have no ties to U.S. national security agencies. Another common theme is that I’m a “globalist.” That, too, is a strange claim. All my work is domestic. I don’t work in financial services, and I don’t particularly like to travel. Over time, I’ve come to understand that terms like “deep state,” “globalist,” and “elites” are often coded language for “Jewish Democrat.” There was a time when I engaged with — and even mocked — those who posted these absurd theories. But as Twitter descended into a cesspool of hate, I disengaged.

I no longer post regularly on the platform, and I routinely block trolls on Bluesky. I’ve accepted that this is the price of being a prominent critic of Trump in 2025. After my podcast interview with Miller, I looked up the social media post he had referenced. That’s when I realized the full scope of the accusation being leveled against me. Beck was interviewing Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. His question about the “deep state” was posed to the very person who coordinates the most sensitive classified information for the U.S. government. If anyone runs the deep state, it’s Gabbard. One might expect a person in her position to correct Beck — or at least resist fueling a false narrative. Instead, Gabbard agreed: “That’s the only way I can read this situation. Those who are truly innocent would not be taking those kinds of actions.” She went on to suggest that the Department of Justice is reviewing the matter “to bring about accountability to those involved.” Taken literally, the nation’s top intelligence official announced — on a right-wing podcast — that my decision to stop posting on Twitter is evidence that I am not “innocent” and am therefore being reviewed by the DOJ, with the aim of holding me “accountable.”

What Gabbard said is almost certainly untrue. I have no reason to believe I am under investigation, nor that my refusal to post on Twitter is evidence of guilt. That brings us back to my original question: why did she say it? Since Trump took office, we’ve become accustomed not only to his lies, but to his entire administration promoting false conspiracy theories. Gabbard knows the script. She knows what a right-wing audience likes to hear. That’s why she leaned in — and leaned in hard.

Sure, my lack of Twitter activity is under criminal investigation, why not! Who cares what’s true or not true anymore? This is obviously not normal, and it’s very dangerous. Since Trump stepped back into the Oval Office, we have quickly developed a warped sense of what is acceptable conduct from government officials. It goes without saying: if Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence had made a similar claim about a Republican lawyer, it would have been treated as a scandal. Now, it’s largely shrugged off. T

hese accusations are also dangerous because it allows conspiracy theories to be weaponized against Trump’s political opponents. What if Pam Bondi did decide to open an investigation into why I stopped posting on Twitter? Would the legacy media treat it with outrage or with skeptical bemusement? Would any Republican in Congress criticize the attorney general for such a blatant abuse of power? Would Big Law issue statements of condemnation? Or would everyone just look away and hope it doesn’t happen to them next?

In retrospect, I wish I had answered Tim Miller’s question differently. So, here’s my revised answer: No, I am not panicking. I am outraged. I am outraged that our government is run by people with no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. I am outraged that the sycophants who run this administration are loyal only to Trump. I am outraged that so few people in positions of power are willing to speak up when they see abuses — people dragged off the street and put into foreign gulags, government agencies illegally dismantled and the military on our city streets. I am outraged that the entire Republican Party is filled with cowards.

I am outraged that our institutions — major media companies, law firms and universities — would rather bend a knee than stand tall and fight.And I am outraged that the price of standing up to Trump — of standing for democracy — is to be subjected to endless lies, attacks and false accusations by people who know better. I enjoy Tim’s podcast — both as a guest and a regular listener. Perhaps next time he has me on, we can start here.

La Voce di New York (VNY), Vatican Sees Conservative Shift: Brian Burch Named New U.S. Ambassador, Dania Ceragioli, Aug. 3, 2025. The former CatholicVote president hailed by the Trumpian Heritage Foundation as a “remarkable choice.” 

In recent days, the United States Senate confirmed Brian Burch as the new U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. The decision, approved with 49 votes in favor and 44 against, has drawn attention not only for the figure selected, but also for the political and religious backdrop that informed it.

Burch, long known as the face of CatholicVote, a conservative Catholic non-profit that publicly backed Donald Trump in both the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, will take on the role at a highly symbolic moment: he will be the first American diplomat to serve under Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, and like Burch, a native of Chicago.

The newly appointed ambassador has never concealed his critical stance toward some of the late Pope Francis’s decisions, whom he accused of creating doctrinal ambiguity. In the past, Burch described the 2023 decision to allow blessings for same-sex couples as a “source of confusion.” On another occasion, he criticized a 2015 remark by Francis regarding contraception, later retracted by the pontiff, pointing out, with irony, his own experience as the father of nine children. He also harshly opposed the removal of Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland, a vocal conservative and critic of the former pope.

The confirmation came after several senators, four Republicans and three Democrats, chose not to vote. Among them were prominent figures such as Mitch McConnell, John Kennedy, Mark Kelly, and Peter Welch.

In his first official statement following the appointment, Burch expressed deep gratitude to President Trump and the Senate for their trust, stating that serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See would be both “an honor and a privilege,” especially in a time when the Catholic Church is led by an American pontiff.

New York Times, Trump Lashes Out at Charlamagne Tha God Over Epstein Comments, Adeel Hassan, Aug. 3, 2025. President Trump railed against the radio host after he said the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case had created an opportunity for “traditional conservatives” to take back the Republican Party.

President Trump railed at the radio host and author Charlamagne Tha God early Sunday morning, after the host said that the administration’s handling of information related to Jeffrey Epstein was fueling a “coup” in the Republican Party.

“I think that traditional conservatives are going to take the Republican Party back,” Charlamagne said on a Fox News program on Saturday hosted by Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a former co-chair of the Republican Party. “I think there’s a political coup going on right now in the Republican Party that people aren’t paying attention to,” Charlamagne said.

Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social early Sunday, saying that Charlamagne “knows nothing about me or what I have done.”

Mr. Trump was friendly for nearly 15 years with Mr. Epstein, the disgraced multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The Trump administration has been lambasted for its refusal to release the federal files of Mr. Epstein’s case, after the president and top officials had for months suggested that they would expose hidden truths about his death. The reversal triggered outrage among Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters.

Charlamagne, who was born Lenard McKelvey and is best known as a host of the popular radio show “The Breakfast Club,” said in the interview on Saturday that the episode meant that “traditional conservatives” could “probably take their party back” without angering the president’s MAGA base. “I think they’re going to do that,” he said.

Aug. 1

NBC News, Matt Lavietes, Aug. 1, 2025. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced Friday that it will begin shutting down, weeks after Congress canceled previously approved funding for the nation's steward of public media access.

The CPB said in a statement that it will begin an "orderly wind-down" of its operations after nearly 60 years with the support of the federal government.

It said that most staff positions will conclude with the close of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. A small team of employees will remain through January 2026, it added. It did not specify how many people in total were being laid off.

"Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," the corporation's president and CEO, Patricia Harrison, said in a statement. "CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care."

The announcement comes less than a month after Congress passed a package of spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump that included stripping $1.1 billion in funding for the CPB.

Currently, the CPB helps support more than 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations.

Despite objections from some Republican lawmakers whose districts include rural areas that rely on the local outlets, the Trump administration has maintained that the organization should be stripped of funding.

The administration has repeatedly accused NPR and PBS of liberal bias, which the organizations have repeatedly denied."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.

July

July 28

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump to Rupert: If You Show Me Yours, I Won't Show You Mine, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), July 28, 2025. Donald Trump’s lawyer just filed a clown motion to depose Rupert Murdoch in his WSJ lawsuit immediately (the court already approved Dow Jones’ uncontested request to extend the response date to September 22).

As justification, Trump’s lawyer argues, in part, that Rupert is old and might kick off before things slowly get around to discovery in a year’s time or so, if they even get that far.

Murdoch’s age and health warrant conducting his deposition on an expedited basis. Murdoch recently turned 94 years old and has suffered, but thankfully overcome, multiple health issues throughout his life. Moreover, upon information and belief, Murdoch resides in New York, New York, which is well over 100 miles from this District. Thus, it is presumable, both because of his age and health and/or his distance from this Court, that Murdoch will be unavailable for trial. See Supra Glass, 2024 WL 1558712, at *3 (granting motion for deposition de bene esse and finding that witnesses were unavailable for trial under 32(a)(4)(B)).

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: How Axios rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity, Judd Legum, right, July 28, 2025. The biggest lie in media is the one that it tells about itself.

Journalists at many mainstream media publications insist that their coverage is objective and unbiased. This isn't true.

Two of the biggest purveyors of this lie are Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, the co-founders of Axios. The Axios audience "Bill of Rights" promises that "all employees are asked to refrain from taking/advocating for public positions on political topics." The document also pledges that Axios will "never have an opinion section." Axios seeks to garner trust by positioning itself as neutral on all political topics.

VandeHei has promoted this view repeatedly in his public commentary. In a December 2024 speech, VandeHei advocated for a "clinical" approach to journalism, one that is detached from any ideology. In a May 2024 CNN interview, VandeHei said that the best way for reporters to restore trust is to keep their opinions to themselves and "stop popping off in ways that make people distrust the work that you do."

John Harris, who started Politico with Allen and VandHei, wrote that the pair "cleave to a scientific ideal of journalistic detachment, the way a surgeon cannot tolerate even the slightest bacteria on his instruments."

So, how did Allen and VandeHei cover the first six months of Trump's presidency? "President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways," the pair wrote in a piece published last Wednesday. Allen and VandeHei listed Trump's "wins": "Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation." They describe the last six months as "the very best chapter of his presidency."

But Allen and VandeHei are puzzled that, despite all this success, Trump's approval ratings are very low. They offer this explanation: Americans "seem tired of all the winning." Ultimately, they blame Trump's unpopularity on the fickleness of voters who can't figure out what they want. "[V]oters demand change," Allen and VandeHei argue, "then flinch when it arrives too fast or too hard."

Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with "Trump advisers," "a longtime Trump aide," and "Trump aides" concerning Trump's record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump's critics or even anyone not working for Trump.

While the piece suggests a handful of explanations for Trump's low approval ratings, including increasing the deficit, cutting Medicaid, and the Epstein controversy, the piece does not mention any of the following:

1. Trump's signature legislation will reduce income for the poorest 40% of Americans while providing a windfall to the top 0.1%.

2. Trump pardoned over 1500 people convicted or awaiting trial for their role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including those convicted of assaulting police officers, using deadly weapons, and destroying government property.

3. Trump has decimated funding for cancer research.

4. Trump deployed the military against Americans protesting his immigration crackdown.

5. Trump flew dozens of people from America to a prison in El Salvador that is notorious for torture and human rights abuses.

There are dozens of other examples of unpopular actions taken by Trump that could be added to this list. In light of these facts, describing Trump's first six months as "the very best chapter of his presidency" and "winning" is not an objective assessment.

Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. "The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press," VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. "I'm a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four."

On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allen wrote, "Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative." The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that "binds Trump with leading innovators." The pair wrote that an "optimistic scenario" is that the second Trump presidency could "jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth." They stated it is "correct" to believe "America's government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated."

VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government's problems — "cut workforce," "cut costs," "break stuff," and "ignore the whiners." While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.

VandeHei and Allen have repeatedly written columns presenting Trump's second-term economic agenda as beneficial — "Washington's open for business" and "America's 'uncorked' economy."

Whether capitalistic innovation should be "unrestrained" or whether government has grown "too big" are core political debates in the United States. Some people, like VandeHei and Allen, believe America should be deregulated to allow maximum flexibility for the wealthy to deploy their capital. (This core right-wing belief ignores the reality that rapid deregulation has created numerous economic crises over the course of American history.) Others believe that in a time of extreme economic inequality, a more robust government role is necessary to achieve other priorities, including poverty alleviation, environmental protection, public health, and safety.

VandeHei and Allen have beliefs, but claim to be objective because they consider their right-wing beliefs, particularly on economic issues, to constitute fundamental truths. People with differing conceptions about the role of the free market and the regulatory state, on the other hand, are dismissed as biased or misguided.

Perhaps this is why VandeHei and Allen don't struggle to explain poor polling for Democrats, writing in March that the party was in a "deep dark hole" because "most current political, cultural, media and generational trends are cutting against them."

In response to a request for comment from VandeHei and Allen, Axios spokesman Jake Wilkins provided the following statement:

Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.

Pretending that expressions of right-wing economic ideology are “clinical reporting” is quite lucrative. In 2018, one of Axios' launch partners was Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by right-wing billionaire David Koch, who spends hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Republican candidates and causes. While at Politico, Allen was accused of including paid ads in his newsletters for the Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest corporate lobby, without proper disclosure. The Chamber of Commerce ads, according to Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, were indistinguishable from content written by Allen promoting the Chamber of Commerce. There were similar issues with content and advertising about Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and the National Retail Federation.

In other words, corporate America, which shares Allen and VandeHei's views on government and regulation, spends millions supporting their work through advertising. Allen and VandeHei's work, on the other hand, is often indistinguishable from corporate advertising and PR.

This approach has made Allen and VandeHei very rich. In 2022, they sold Axios to Cox Enterprises for $525 million. The deal was made as Cox Enterprises appeared to be exiting the media business. But the Cox family, which privately owns the company, has a "long history" of supporting conservative political causes.

Cox's only previous experience in digital media was creating the right-wing website Rare in 2013. (The site shuttered in 2018.) Rare's slogan? "Red is the center."

July 27 

Drop Site News, Investigation: The Professors Who Supported the Student Deportation Frenzy, Jacqueline Sweet, July 27, 2025. In March 2024, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus (DJHC) emerged on Instagram and X as another node in a network of organizations decrying pro-Palestine faculty and students at Columbia University.

The group slowly grew to focus on what it called other “participating schools”—such as CUNY, which it called a “hotbed of antisemitism.” Like its fellow Zionist doxxing outfits Betar and Canary Mission, its preferred solution was student deportation. On Election Day, DJHC posted a clip of Trump promising to deport “jihad-sympathizers and America-hating radicals,” and wrote “We have the receipts!” It announced on social media that it had names of students, once tagging Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Throughout November and into December, the DJHC account continued celebrating the prospect of student deportations. And on December 5, a couple months before such deportations began in earnest, Jeffrey Lax—chair of the business department at Kingsborough College at the City University of New York (CUNY)—joined the advisory board of DJHC. S.A.F.E. Campus, an organization that Lax had founded in 2023, was already serving as DJHC’s fiscal sponsor, which allowed the newer group to receive tax-exempt donations.

Lax is one of a small but active cohort of professors on American campuses vocally supporting groups pushing student deportations, even as the detention of students on visas and green cards has stoked anxieties in many university communities. A longtime pro-Israel activist at CUNY and a frequent contributor to right-wing media, Lax has initiated repeated lawsuits against colleagues, his union, and the university for alleged discrimination from pro-Palestine members of the campus community. Now, Lax appears to be reprising this role in groups like DJHC, continuing to champion the administration’s targeting of noncitizen student activists.

Last week, when CUNY’s Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez was interrogated by House Republicans over alleged antisemitism at the university system, lawmakers referenced many of the same incidents Lax’s groups had focused on over the last year. Lax himself was in attendance. “ I am so proud to have been involved in the process that led to this day,” he wrote on X.

On the DHJC board of advisors, Lax is joined by prominent pro-Israel agitator and former Columbia business professor Shai Davidai, who has long been trying to penalize pro-Palestine voices at the university, and who has also participated in a Columbia alumni WhatsApp group where members aimed to identify student protesters and call for their expulsion, firing, or deportation. And Lax and Davidai are only the most prominent of a handful of campus affiliates backing such groups. Drop Site News’ reporting reveals that current and former instructors at least four schools across the northeastern U.S. have publicly supported Betar, DJHC, and Canary Mission. A few of their names appeared on the GoFundMe page for Betar’s fundraising push last fall and winter.

The presence of professors with ties to the right-wing groups have made students and faculty more fearful about participating in activism—especially as these groups have claimed to have a direct impact on Trump’s deportation decisions. Betar has claimed credit for providing student names from its blacklist to the highest levels of the Trump administration; former Betar director Ross Glick reportedly met with aides to Republican Senator Ted Cruz, to present Betar’s student list; he would discuss the targets with Cruz himself later in February, and later credit those meetings, and meetings with other Republican lawmakers, for the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. When Columbia graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested in April, DJHC wrote “Thank you, @SecRubio, for getting rid of another Jew hater,” and linked to Canary Mission’s profile of Mahdawi.

In May, a federal judge, in ruling to release a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, student from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, wrote that the student’s arrest seemed to have been “almost exclusively triggered” by a Betar tweet. Similarly, an internal Homeland Security memo prepared days before ICE detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Öztürk cited nothing more than the language Canary Mission used about her. (Öztürk was released from detention in May.)

“For a college professor to be collaborating with the government to intimidate, detain, or deport students for something they may have said is a shocking violation,” a CUNY faculty member, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retaliation, told Drop Site News.

Universities are generally tasked with protecting their employees’ right to personal political opinions and donations—a norm that pro-Palestine students and professors have often called upon in seeking to protect themselves from both university discipline and state targeting. At the same time, Betar, Canary Mission, and DJHC have raised questions about when speech crosses the line into targeted harassment, and what responsibilities faculty and staff have to their students when said students are being actively selected for deportation and detention.

“It should be obvious and uncontroversial that academic freedom, which protects scholars’ right to teach and publish and engage in political speech, does not protect targeted harassment of individuals,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia who has been repeatedly targeted by Canary Mission and DJHC, told Drop Site News. “What’s difficult is that in the last two years we’ve seen once again attempts to claim—absurdly—that political speech on behalf of Palestine is threatening to individuals, while targeted harassment that actively endangers individuals is defended as protected.”

July 26

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, left, President Trump and a collage of headlines from the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal'sJuly 17 scoop revealing that Trump had provided his friend Jeffrey Epstein with highly suggestive greeting illustrated with a nude drawing for a compilation of birthday well-wishes in 2003 (Lincoln Square Media graphic).

Lincoln Square Media, Pro-democracy Commentary: Rupert Murdoch May Want to Stay Away from Open Windows, Stuart Stevens, July 26, 2025. The Wall Street Journal's Epstein scoops signal that Murdoch believes Trump has outlived his usefulness. But the media mogul should probably watch his back.

The drama unfolding in Rupert Murdoch’s world is a perfect metaphor for the self-defeating evil of appeasement. It’s like Murdoch is starring in a one-man adaptation of Cabaret. Want to know how Germany in the 1930s came to be? Welcome to the Murdoch Cabaret.

Rupert Murdoch became America’s most dangerous immigrant by building a palace of lies called Fox News. Like a narco cartel kingpin looking for reputation-enhancing legit money laundering opportunities, he bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007. Like the Prussian aristocrats who backed Hitler, Murdoch thought he could have it both ways.

Over at Fox News, he made billions by hiring liars to lie. They lied to help elect Trump, and once in office, they lied about COVID and contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands. They lied about who won the 2020 election and helped launch a deadly insurrection.

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The Wall Street Journal last endorsed a presidential candidate in 1928 when it enthusiastically backed Herbert Hoover. While that bad bet seems to have dissuaded them from any further endorsements, they spent decades casting themselves as the intellectual conscience of American conservatism. As it turned out, the concept of an American conservative intellectual conscience was the cold fusion energy source of politics, an idea that had powerful appeal if only it hadn’t proven to be total nonsense.

Murdoch has never pretended to like Donald Trump, clearly seeing himself as a real billionaire whose five wives were all a cut above the tabloid trash of the three Mrs. Trumps. Could Donald Trump ever land an ex-wife of Keith Richards or one of the Trump wives being romantically linked to Tony Blair, as was Wendi Deng (the third Mrs. Murdoch)?

But like Franz von Pappen, the Prussian aristocrat who ushered Hitler into power, Murdoch saw Donald Trump as useful — a buffoonish character whose greatest threat was cringing embarrassment, like the drunken uncle who tells dirty jokes at Thanksgiving. How could one of Jeffrey Epstein’s running buddies ever threaten the Murdoch Empire?

It all worked until it didn’t. Lying about the 2020 election cost Fox $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting System, which, as it turned out, was not actually part of an international Space Lasar conspiracy. Smartmatic Voting Machine company is demanding $2.7 billion in an ongoing defamation suit. In a culture where shame seems to have atrophied like a homo sapien tail, no longer useful to humans, the revelation that the biggest stars at Fox were themselves embarrassed by the corporate pressure to deny what every grade school child knew as true was a sweet moment of schadenfreude.

Now the monster that Murdoch’s Fox helped create has turned on Murdoch’s reputation-laundering prize, The Wall Street Journal. To their credit, there remain at the Journal serious journalists working for a major publication, an increasingly rare sighting in the American wild. Given that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were the most public of best friends for over a decade, it is another searing indictment of the phony values of Bible thumping MAGA that a creep-to-creep congratulatory birthday letter would be explosive.

What, the photographs and video of the two sexual predators ogling young women and partying with “models” from the beauty factories of former Soviet states wasn’t enough? The President of the United States offering his sympathy to Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child trafficker, from a White House podium, that was just a polite social gesture? We are talking about a man who has commented in public how much he’d like to date his own daughter and mused in hopeful optimism on national television that his just-born daughter would have the legs and breasts of her former Miss Hawaiian Tropic mother.Articles‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’: The Pickett’s Charge of TrumpismStuart Stevens · Jul 6‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’: The Pickett’s Charge of Trumpism

Rupert Murdoch had the ability to kill Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the crib. With one phone call, he could have directed Fox News to put a nice, soft pillow over the Trump campaign’s head until it stopped breathing. What was he thinking? Again, 1930s Germany says it all. He didn’t take seriously the chances of a man who wears more make-up than the drag queens of Mike Johnson’s dreams. Perhaps he even was foolish enough to believe that the Republican Party that had invested so much in proclaiming that Character Was King would never accept a man who had given a joint telephone interview to Howard Stern with his then girlfriend Melania Knaus while both were in bed talking about their great sex. I was that fool.

Expecting wisdom and prudence from an Australian tabloid baron whose breakthrough contribution to journalism was introducing semi-nude young women on page three of The Daily Sun is a quaint notion, like Donald Trump believing Vladimir Putin was sincere. Promoting the presidential hopes of that fat guy from Queens must have been amusing to Rupert Murdoch, a harmless and profitable pursuit, an exotic animal dealer smuggling in boa constrictors. Until you wake up one night and your profit center has wrapped itself around your throat.

Today, Rupert Murdoch faces the $10 billion Trump lawsuit on top of the $2.7 billion Smartmatic suit. There is much glee in the anti-Trump air that Murdoch has finally had enough and is moving to control “the fiend,” as Mary Shelly called Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. I’m eager to buy a ticket on that joyful ride.

But I must wonder if we are falling into the same pit of 2016 assumptions about this America we love. It’s insane to think that Donald Trump would send his masked men of ICE to arrest and deport an immigrant named Rupert Murdoch. Right? To live in that country would require believing that some day the United States government would fund a paramilitary force of masked men with a budget larger than the total military budget of all but two countries. That’s crazy, no?

In Russia, a Rupert Murdoch making a move against the leader would know to stay away from any open windows. How about in today’s America? Donald Trump has always benefited from the assumption that at some point he would be limited by the established rules of society and modulate his behavior.

Well, how’s that going?

Good luck, Mr. Murdoch. Give ‘em hell. But I’d stay away from those windows.

 

White House Chronicle, Commentary: PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind, Llewellyn King, above, July 26, 2025. Over the years, I have often been critical of the Public Broadcasting Service. That in spite of the fact that for 28 years, I have produced and hosted a program, “White House Chronicle,” which is carried by many PBS stations.

It is an independent program for which I find all the funding and decide its direction, content and staffing.

My argument with PBS — brought to mind by the administration’s canceling of $1.1 billion in funding for it and National Public Radio — is that it is too cautious, that it is consciously or by default lagging rather than leading.

Television needs creativity, change and excitement. Old programs, carefully curated travel, and cooking shows don’t really don’t cut it. News and public affairs shows are not enough. Cable does them 24/7.

My co-host on “White House Chronicle,” Adam Clayton Powell III, a savant of public broadcasting, having held executive positions at NPR and PBS, assures that they aren’t going away, although some stations will fail.

I believe PBS has often been too careful because of the money, which has been dribbled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Some conservatives have been after PBS since its launch.

It is reasonable to look to the British Broadcasting Corp. when discussing PBS because the BBC is the source of so much of the programming that is carried by PBS — although not all the British programming is from the BBC. Two of the most successful imports were from the UK — “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which aired in the 1970s, and, more recently, “Downton Abbey” — were developed by British commercial television, not by the BBC.

Even so, the BBC is a force that has played a major role in shaping state broadcasters in many countries. At its best, it is formidable in news, in drama and in creativity. It is also said to be left-of-center and woke. Both of these are things PBS is accused of, but I have never found bias in the news products. What I have found is a kind of genteel poverty.

I once asked the head of a major PBS station why they didn’t do more original American drama. “It would cost too much,” was the response in a flash. Yet, there are local theater companies aplenty who would love to craft something for PBS if they were invited.

Sometimes the idea is more important than the money. Get that right, and PBS will have something it can sell around the world. It should be an on-ramp for talent.

Maybe, stirred by its newly induced poverty, PBS can lead the television world into a new business paradigm.

First, of course, take advertising and don’t be coy about it, as “Masterpiece Theater” is about Viking cruises. Take the advertising.

Second, see what is happening across the television firmament, where more TV is now viewed on YouTube than on TV sets. This happens at a time of the viewer’s choosing. PBS needs to jump on this and create a pay-per-view paradigm so that when it has a big show, as it did with Ken Burns’ “Civil War” years ago, it can prosper, as well as selling the show around the globe.

PBS is a confederation of stations, each one independent but tethered to PBS in Washington, which provides what is known as the hard feed. These are programs pre-approved for central distribution by PBS. Independent producers aren’t acknowledged on this, nor do they get listed as being PBS programs.

I remember how I had heard that WHUT, Howard University’s television station, was open to new programs. So I took a pilot over to WHUT. One young woman said “yes” and a program was born.

PBS needs to open its doors to new talent, new shows and uses of new technologies. Leading the pack in broadcasting innovation would be the best revenge. New money will follow.

NPR is a different story. Its product is successful. It needs to be open to new funding, including much better acknowledged corporate funding. If Google or some other cash-laden entity wants to underwrite a day of broadcasting, let it. Don’t give it the editor’s chair, just a seat in accounting.

July 25 

New York Times, Columbia and Penn Made Trump Deals. More Universities Could Be Next, Alan Blinder, July 25, 2025 (print ed.). Trump officials hope deals with two Ivy League schools create a template that others, including Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern, will follow.

White House officials have reached deals with two Ivy League universities and are now armed with a proven strategy to pressure other schools to rewrite their policies and reorient campus politics.

First, they strip away hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, based on vague accusations that a university abets antisemitism or unlawfully supports transgender rights. Then they make demands, wearing down school administrators until making concessions to the White House appears to be the only way forward.

The strategy worked twice in the last month, with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. That leaves at least five more embattled schools — Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern and Princeton — with decisions to make about whether to fight or to bargain.

The White House has touted the deals with Columbia and Penn as victories. But they also offer frameworks for wary college administrators as they consider which sacrifices are worth making to try to placate a president bent on bringing elite institutions to heel. Now Columbia has shown that a fragile peace can be purchased.

Under the deal announced Wednesday night, Columbia will pay $221 million and stand by an array of previous pledges, like limits on protests and greater internal oversight of certain academic programs. But it secured a provision saying that no part of the agreement “shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions, or the content of academic speech.”

Penn did not agree to pay anything, but promised, among other terms, that its athletics policies would align with the Trump administration’s beliefs about participation by transgender people.

“Two hundred million dollars is not a lot of money when you have billions at stake, and any corporate person will tell you that,” said Donna E. Shalala, who was health secretary under President Bill Clinton and has led four schools, including the University of Miami and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Basically, they’re cutting their losses and ensuring their future — for at least a short period of time.”

Assessments like Dr. Shalala’s are deeply unnerving to many people in academia. Professors have spent months warning about how history shows that aspiring autocrats seek to tame and bully universities. They worry that settlements like the ones signed by Columbia and Penn will encourage the White House to conjure reasons to make more demands, and give administrators on campuses across the country cover to make agreements that could poison American higher education.

“Universities, as they make concessions, do not stop the demand for future concessions,” said David A. Bateman, the president of Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “They just open the door for more.”

Trump administration officials are openly eager to use Columbia as an example of how to satisfy the craving among some conservatives to remake higher education, a sector they regard as a cradle of liberal indoctrination.

July 24

New York Times, Intel Expects Work Force to Shrink by 25,000, Don Clark, July 24, 2025. The Silicon Valley chip company, which has been struggling, quantified the job cuts it is making as it seeks to turn its business around.

Intel, the ailing semiconductor giant, said on Thursday that it expected its work force to shrink by more than 25,000 employees this year as the company continues searching for a turnaround.

The chip maker, which reported 108,900 employees at the end of last year, said it now expects layoffs, attrition and other actions to reduce its head count to 75,000 by the end of 2025. Intel also disclosed it will no longer move forward with plans to build factories in Germany and Poland, further slow the pace of new factory construction in Ohio and consolidate operations in Costa Rica to larger sites in Vietnam and Malaysia.

Intel had signaled the need to cut costs in April. On Thursday, the company said it had cut its work force since then by about 15 percent, which indicates around 15,000 people were affected. The latest cuts follow a reduction of more than 15,000 jobs last year.

Intel quantified the cuts while releasing financial results for its second quarter, posting a $2.9 billion net loss that included restructuring charges from the latest belt-tightening. Revenue was roughly flat at $12.9 billion, which was higher than analysts predicted.

The Silicon Valley company projected another loss in the current quarter and revenues of $12.6 billion to $13.6 billion, indicating a $13.1 billion midpoint that compares with analysts’ average prediction of $12.6 billion for the period ending in September.

 

Politico, FCC greenlights Skydance/Paramount deal after CBS concessions, John Hendel, July 24, 2025. Skydance had agreed to address Trump administration concerns about alleged bias at CBS.The CBS logo at the entrance to its headquarters.

An $8 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount Global received regulatory approval Thursday from the Federal Communications Commission in a deal that has raised alarm about free speech and government intrusion into the media.

Chair Brendan Carr said in announcing the approval that Skydance had agreed to address Trump administration concerns about what it sees as media bias at the CBS network.

Skydance committed to adopt measures to “root out” media bias that had undermined trust in the news media, Carr said.

“I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” Carr said. “In particular, Skydance has made written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.”

The merger has been the source of a political fight over the last several months due to concerns around CBS, particularly over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview last fall with former Vice President Kamala Harris as she was running for president.

Trump sued CBS, settling the case for $16 million earlier this month. Carr has a separate open investigation into the editing of the program.

Skydance’s concessions, unveiled in regulatory filings Wednesday, include the creation of an ombudsman, in place for at least two years, to field complaints about CBS News programming and a review of CBS programming to ensure “a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum” are in place. Skydance also committed that the new company would scrap diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

Carr put the deal to a vote among the agency’s commissioners rather than allow bureau staff to decide it on delegated authority. It was approved 2-1, with his fellow Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty voting in favor and Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez dissenting.

“I cannot support this order approving this transaction in light of the payout and other troubling concessions Paramount made to settle a baseless lawsuit,” Gomez wrote in her dissent. “After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted. Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions.”

Politico, Arizona woman sentenced to eight years in prison for hosting ‘laptop farm’ for North Korean remote workers, Maggie Miller, July 24, 2025. The sentence is one of the largest handed down to a U.S. national for their role in the North Korean government-linked scheme.

A woman in Arizona was sentenced Thursday to more than eight years in prison for hosting a so-called laptop farm that enabled North Korean cyber operatives to pose as remote IT workers at more than 300 U.S. companies.

The sentence is one of the largest handed down to a U.S. national for their role in the scheme, which has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the North Korean regime.

Christina Chapman was sentenced in the U.S. District Court after pleading guilty earlier this year in Washington, D.C., to charges including wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering. Chapman was also ordered to turn over around $284,000 in funds earned by these North Koreans and pay an additional fine of more than $175,000.

Chapman was involved in an operation that, according to the Justice Department, made in total more than $17 million for the North Korean regime between 2020 and 2023. Chapman oversaw at least 90 laptops at her home sent by unsuspecting U.S. firms that were duped into hiring North Koreans as remote employees.

These North Korean nationals used stolen identities of real U.S. citizens in carrying out the scheme.

While the companies impacted by Chapman’s actions have not been named, those that inadvertently hired North Koreans included a car-maker, Silicon Valley tech company, a U.S. media group and an aerospace group, among other Fortune 500 companies.

“The call is coming from inside the house,” Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said in a statement Thursday. “If this happened to these big banks, to these Fortune 500, brand-name, quintessential American companies, it can or is happening at your company. Corporations failing to verify virtual employees pose a security risk for all.”

The sentencing of Chapman came a month after the Justice Department announced the seizure of hundreds of accounts, websites and laptops linked to the widespread North Korean IT workers scheme. Chapman is not the only U.S. citizen to host laptop farms to support the effort, and the DOJ found that individuals in China and the United Arab Emirates were also involved in supporting these schemes

July 23

The Hartmann Report, Political Opinion: Oligarchs, Outlaws & the End of Journalism: Reagan’s Real Legacy in Trump’s GOP, Thom Hartmann, right, July 23, 2025. The CBS merger isn’t a business deal — it’s a pay-to-play scheme fueling America’s slide into oligarchy…

The CBS merger deal illustrates everything that’s wrong with post-Reagan Revolution America. It’s not just another corporate merger: it’s a road sign on our accelerating march toward oligarchy, propaganda, and the collapse of honest media.

We’ve watched one of the most important legacy broadcast platforms in America pay a $16 million bribe to our convicted felon president, reportedly offer him another $16 million worth of free air time, and try to sell its entire operation to a billionaire with a God complex. It’s the worst of the Reagan revolution coming home to roost, on our screens, in our homes, and in our civic life.

Start with the $16 million payoff: Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, laughably arguing that CBS’s editing of the interview constituted unlawful election tampering. The lawsuit was instantly and widely regarded as frivolous, but instead of fighting it, CBS quietly settled for an astonishing $16 million. No trial. No discovery. Just a big, fat check.

This isn’t journalism: it’s tribute. It’s what oligarchs have done for centuries when they want to please the king.

This should shock the conscience of any functioning democracy, and has the rest of the world wondering about the health of ours. But in the GOP’s America — where billionaires are gods and corporations are people — this is just Wednesday.

Antitrust laws that were once enforced to keep our economy and our media diverse and competitive are now all but ignored.

It wasn’t always this way, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. Before Reagan took office, the federal government blocked mergers that would’ve concentrated too much economic or political power.

In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act that said giant companies couldn’t dominate markets simply because they had the financial muscle to buy up their smaller competitors or drive them out of business by dropping prices long enough to run them into bankruptcy. It was later augmented by the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914) and the Celler-Kefauver Act (1950).

The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control 5 percent of the shoe market.But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to basically stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and media.

In the decades since Reagan and the GOP stabbed small businesses in the back, things have deteriorated badly. In 1983, there were about 50 companies that owned 90% of American media, controlling roughly 90% of what Americans see, hear, and read. As of today, it’s six: Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount (for now). That’s not a free press, it’s an oligopoly.

And now Larry Ellison, the tenth-richest man in the world with a net worth north of $150 billion, and his son are stepping in to consolidate even more control. Ellison already uses his wealth to push far-right political causes; he was the single largest funder of a rightwing PAC. Now he’ll have one of the largest megaphones in America.

This is what oligarchy looks like, courtesy of the Reagan Revolution and, most recently, the corrupt Citizens United decision by five bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

An oligarch buys a media empire. A corrupt president extorts that empire for cash and air time. The journalists there who once held power to account get fired. And now Stephen Colbert — whose nightly monologue is one of the few mainstream platforms consistently skewering Trump and the GOP — is on the chopping block. So is the legendary “60 Minutes” team, neutered to avoid offending Ellison’s political pals. All to grease the wheels for a merger and keep Trump happy.

Meanwhile, the average American gets nothing. No trustworthy journalism. No independent voices. No real debate. Just more billionaire-driven narratives, more Trump hagiography, and more of the toxic sludge that passes for news in post-Reagan America.

We’ve seen this movie before. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán used state subsidies and friendly oligarchs to seize control of that nation’s media. In Russia, Putin arrested or exiled journalists while his billionaire cronies bought up every independent outlet.

Trump’s already following the blueprint to do the same here through Project 2025: purge career civil servants, seize control of the FCC, and turn the media into a mouthpiece for the regime. With CBS in the hands of Ellison and already making cash payments to Trump, we’re more than halfway there.

Make no mistake: this isn’t about entertainment or even profits. It’s about power. When the press becomes the property of the morbidly rich and they wield it to defend their interests, as Jefferson and Adams warned, democracy becomes their plaything.

Trump is running a campaign of vengeance, vengeance against the media in particular, and CBS is handing him a gun. And the kicker? Shari Redstone — the morbidly rich heiress billionaire who’s cashing out of CBS and Paramount — is walking away with billions while the public walks away with nothing.What’s happening to CBS is not just one network’s moral collapse; it’s a symptom of our national disease. The disease Reagan diagnosed as “government is the problem” when he actually meant: “democracy is the problem.”

Since 1981, Republicans have systematically deregulated, defunded, and dismantled every guardrail of democratic capitalism they could get their hands on. The result is an America where billionaires like Ellison can buy the truth, where the press kowtows to the criminal-in-chief, and where the public interest has no advocate left.

We are reaping what Reagan sowed. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act — passed with bipartisan support but cheer-led by Reaganites — blew open the floodgates of media consolidation. In the years that followed, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) gobbled up over 1,200 radio stations. Sinclair Broadcasting used loopholes to flood local news with right-wing propaganda.

And now, legacy TV networks are selling themselves to political oligarchs while laundering bribes to Trump through legal settlements and airtime giveaways.All of this is happening in plain sight. It’s not even subtle anymore. Trump brags about “retribution,” and CBS offers him a microphone. He lies about the election, and they hand him airtime. He threatens journalists, and their bosses fire them.

And where are the regulators? The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission under Biden had taken steps to revive antitrust enforcement, but Trump has ended all those efforts and put a bootlicker in charge of the FCC.

And Congress? Half of them are on the take, funded by the very oligarchs who benefit from this media rot. According to OpenSecrets.org, media and internet companies spent over $600 million lobbying Congress in 2024 alone.

What we’re witnessing is the logical endpoint of a 44-year experiment in trickle-down libertarianism called the Reagan Revolution. The billionaires got their tax cuts. The corporations got their deregulation. The politicians got their payoffs. And the people got lies, propaganda, and impoverishment.It doesn’t have to be this way. We could enforce antitrust laws. We could reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. We could limit media ownership and break up monopolies like Comcast and Sinclair. We could tax the billionaires who are using their wealth to warp our democracy and rebuild public-interest journalism from the ground up.

But first, we have to stop pretending this is normal. 

• New York Times, Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit, Benjamin Mullin, Michael M. Grynbaum, Lauren Hirsch and David Enrich, July 2, 2025. President Trump had sued over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The company needs federal approval for a multibillion-dollar sale.

It’s not normal to pay a criminal ex-president $16 million to go away and then invite him back on air; this sort of thing doesn’t happen in any other developed country in the world.

It’s not normal to fire comedians and journalists for telling the truth. It’s not normal for one politician to cow the nation’s news organizations. And it’s sure as hell not normal for the Fourth Estate to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the neofascist MAGA movement.

This isn’t just a CBS problem. It’s not even just a media problem. It’s a democracy problem. If Congress lets the Ellisons and Trumps and Redstones buy and sell the truth, it’ll be years before we get it back, if ever.

The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121. Pass it along.

If you value independent journalism and fearless analysis, join us. Subscribe for free, or pitch in to help keep the lights on.

New York Times, China Flexes Muscles at U.N. Cultural Agency, Just as Trump Walks Away, Mara Hvistendahl, July 23, 2025. Washington had been a buffer against China’s efforts to use UNESCO to influence education, historical designations and even artificial intelligence.

Any traveler who has picked up an international guidebook knows the UNESCO designation as shorthand for a must-see cultural destination that’s worthy of a detour.

But the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has also become the target of an intense Chinese influence campaign in recent years as Beijing has sought to increase its reach over educational curriculums, historical designations and even artificial intelligence.

President Trump’s decision Tuesday to withdraw the United States from the group removes a powerful check on China’s effort, in the latest example of how the White House retreat from international institutions offers an opening for China to advance its soft power.

The United States was once the largest UNESCO backer, accounting for nearly 25 cents of every dollar. But Washington has had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for years, especially since Mr. Trump first took office in 2017, and China has stepped up to take its place. A Chinese official is now UNESCO’s deputy director general, a post that diplomats said is often awarded in exchange for political or monetary favors.

UNESCO has lent support to major priorities for China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, including the global infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing has also lobbied heavily for World Heritage designations and is jockeying to surpass Italy as the country with the most culturally significant sites. Some of those sites are in oppressed regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, where many local residents view them as an attempt to appropriate and control their culture and history.

And while UNESCO wields tremendous clout over what counts as history, it is also the U.N. agency in charge of setting artificial intelligence guidelines. UNESCO has an agreement with iFlytek, a major Chinese A.I. company, to cooperate on higher education in Asia and Africa, according to Chinese state media. (UNESCO said it has partnerships with many artificial intelligence companies worldwide.)

July 22 

New York Times, White House Bans Wall Street Journal From Press Pool on Trump’s Scotland Trip, Katie Robertson, July 22, 2025 (print ed.). The president sued the publication last week, accusing it of defamation for an article about his ties to the disgraced former financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The White House said on Monday that it had barred Wall Street Journal reporters from the traveling press pool for President Trump’s coming trip to Scotland, attacking the publication again for its reporting on ties between the president and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Thursday, The Journal published an article saying that Mr. Trump had sent Mr. Epstein a lewd birthday note in 2003. It included a drawing of a nude woman, The Journal reported, and ended with Mr. Trump writing, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Mr. Trump said that the drawing and letter were fake and put intense pressure on The Journal not to publish the article. The day after its publication, he sued The Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones; its parent company, News Corp; Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp; Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls News Corp; and two Journal reporters.

“Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the President’s trip to Scotland,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Monday. “Due to The Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board.”

A Wall Street Journal spokeswoman declined to comment. Last week, Dow Jones defended its reporting in a statement: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association denounced the barring of The Journal from the press pool, saying in a statement on Monday, “This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment.”

The press pool is a group of journalists from various outlets who travel with the president and act as the eyes and ears of the broader White House press corps. The Trump administration has exerted considerable pressure on the press pool, including taking over the role of deciding which publications could participate in the pool from the Correspondents’ Association.

The White House had previously barred The Associated Press from the press pool because it did not abide by Mr. Trump’s name change of the Gulf of Mexico. 

Trump Reactions Through The Years: At top is President Trump's reaction to a Wall Street Journal article reporting on his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, describing how they shared secrets. Below is a graphic illustrating how Trump bragged about his access to the dressing rooms of teen beauty contestants.

Politico Magazine, Trump’s WSJ Lawsuit Raises a New Constitutional Question, Ankush Khardor, July 22, 2025. The president is wielding lawsuits as both sword and shield.

The president can sue you, but you can’t sue him.

It seems like an absurd thing to say but that’s effectively the reality of our legal system today, one that has become increasingly alarming during Donald Trump’s second term. It’s a dynamic that has been thrust into the center of national politics amid Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over the paper’s reporting on his relationship to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Supreme Court has been steadily building up an extraordinary level of immunity for presidents, on both civil and criminal fronts. And Trump has benefited from — and exploited — the law like no other president in American history.

Last year, in the case concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Trump became the first president in U.S. history to receive criminal immunity from prosecution — based on a previously nonexistent doctrine that has no credible basis in the Constitution’s text or the Framers’ expectations. The decision paved the way for Trump’s reelection.

On the civil side, Trump has frequently invoked presidential immunity established in decades-old Supreme Court precedent to force civil plaintiffs with serious legal claims against him to endure years of litigation just to get him into the courthouse. Only a few ultimately succeeded, including the plaintiffs seeking to hold him liable for his conduct surrounding the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, as well as E. Jean Carroll, who managed to secure roughly $90 million in two cases regarding allegations he sexually assaulted her; she is now facing yet another effort by Trump to toss the case out on the theory — you guessed it — that he is immune from claims that he defamed her.

Yet somehow, Trump is free to sue the Journal over an unflattering story — this despite the fact that it concerns a subject that the Trump administration first placed into the public spotlight and which has attracted the public’s attention like virtually no other issue during Trump’s second term.

It does not make much sense that the president is too busy to defend against lawsuits but can go around filing his own. It means that Trump can use the law as both sword and shield, however he sees fit. But this fundamental incongruity in the law isn’t likely to change any time soon, especially under the current Supreme Court.

“In all these cases where the president can claim immunity from suit or a prosecution, yet is affirmatively going to court while he’s president — it really is asymmetry in the extreme,” Ted Boutrous, a well-regarded free speech and media lawyer, told me. Boutrous happens to be experiencing this dynamic firsthand in the form of his work defending Mary Trump, the president’s niece and critic, in a New York state court lawsuit filed by Trump concerning her role as a source for The New York Times.

Trump’s case against the Journal, however, appears to mark the first time in American history that a sitting U.S. president has sued a media organization, despite the fact that on its face, the case is “extraordinarily weak” and “somewhat nonsensical,” as Boutrous put it. In fact, there’s a chance Trump ends up regretting he ever filed this lawsuit in the first place.

This episode is not surprising. Trump has a long history of threatening or actually suing media outlets, and his record is at best highly mixed.

He has lost cases filed by his campaign against The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post. He literally lost another case last Friday when a judge dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against the journalist Bob Woodward after Trump claimed that he had some sort of copyright interest in Woodward’s own recordings of interviews with Trump. (You read that correctly.)

Trump has recently managed to secure large settlements from ABC and CBS’ parent company Paramount Global, but they are exceptions. ABC legitimately bungled its reporting in a serious way while the CBS settlement appears to reflect an effort to facilitate the merger between Paramount and Skydance.

Trump’s lawsuit against the Journal may provide some short-term political relief because it provides a rallying point for his supporters, but if history is any guide and the Journal holds firm, Trump will probably lose the case. That is what typically happens when Trump’s lawsuits against the media are not settled and proceed to a final judicial resolution with a credible judge. (Some potential bad news for Trump: The judge that has been assigned the case is not a Trump appointee like Aileen Cannon but a Barack Obama appointee.)

The weakness of Trump’s case is clear. To take just one example, the complaint alleges that the Journal’s story contains the following false statements, with the bold and italics drawn from the complaint itself:Watch: The Conversation

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

If you read the language closely, you will notice that all of it could be true even if Trump himself did not author the letter, as he claims. The language quoted in the complaint appears to reflect careful reporting on the part of the Journal’s reporters, good lawyering by the paper’s attorneys or both. (POLITICO hasn’t independently verified the letter.)

On top of that, if the case is not dismissed or settled, it would proceed to discovery, in which the Journal’s lawyers would almost certainly get the chance to depose Trump both about the alleged letter and drawing as well as his broader relationship with Epstein — the latter of which would be relevant in assessing the credibility of Trump’s denial of his authorship. The Journal would also presumably seek all of Trump’s records or correspondence with Epstein — which again are relevant to the credibility of Trump’s denial and any potential motive to mislead the public about the letter.

Depending on how this all unfolds, the case could ultimately generate even more damaging revelations for Trump. Court proceedings are presumptively public, so anything that the Journal puts in court papers about the deposition or discovery more generally would be available to the whole country.

One cynical possibility: Trump knows all this and will never let the case get to discovery but was compelled to follow through on his threat to sue, so as not to lose face with his base. We have seen him do something similar in the past.

New York Times, White House Bans Wall Street Journal From Press Pool on Trump’s Scotland Trip, Katie Robertson, July 22, 2025 (print ed.). The president sued the publication last week, accusing it of defamation for an article about his ties to the disgraced former financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The White House said on Monday that it had barred Wall Street Journal reporters from the traveling press pool for President Trump’s coming trip to Scotland, attacking the publication again for its reporting on ties between the president and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Thursday, The Journal published an article saying that Mr. Trump had sent Mr. Epstein a lewd birthday note in 2003. It included a drawing of a nude woman, The Journal reported, and ended with Mr. Trump writing, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Mr. Trump said that the drawing and letter were fake and put intense pressure on The Journal not to publish the article. The day after its publication, he sued The Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones; its parent company, News Corp; Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp; Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls News Corp; and two Journal reporters.

“Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the President’s trip to Scotland,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Monday. “Due to The Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board.”

A Wall Street Journal spokeswoman declined to comment. Last week, Dow Jones defended its reporting in a statement: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association denounced the barring of The Journal from the press pool, saying in a statement on Monday, “This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment.”

The press pool is a group of journalists from various outlets who travel with the president and act as the eyes and ears of the broader White House press corps. The Trump administration has exerted considerable pressure on the press pool, including taking over the role of deciding which publications could participate in the pool from the Correspondents’ Association.

The White House had previously barred The Associated Press from the press pool because it did not abide by Mr. Trump’s name change of the Gulf of Mexico.

July 12 

New York Times, Judge Orders Los Angeles Police to Stop Shooting Projectiles at Journalists, Laurel Rosenhall, July 12, 2025 (print ed.). A federal judge on Friday ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to stop using foam projectiles, tear gas and flash-bang devices against journalists covering protests after reporters and photographers were struck during demonstrations last month.

The temporary restraining order by Judge Hernán D. Vera of U.S. District Court also prohibits police officers from blocking journalists from closed areas, obstructing them from gathering information and detaining them for violating curfews or failing to disperse.

The case stems from injuries that journalists experienced while covering street demonstrations against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration enforcement. A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Press Club and Status Coup, an investigative reporting site, documented 35 instances in which Los Angeles police officers had used projectiles, tear gas or other forms of force against journalists or blocked them from public areas.

The press organizations are likely to succeed in arguing that the journalists’ First Amendment rights were violated and that they would suffer harm in covering future protests in Los Angeles, the judge wrote in granting the temporary order, which lasts 14 days.

“Indeed, given the fundamental nature of the speech interests involved and the almost daily protests throughout Southern California drawing media coverage, the identified harm is undoubtedly imminent and concrete,” Judge Vera wrote.

He set a hearing for later this month to consider whether to issue a preliminary injunction and ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to disseminate the restrictions in his order to its officers within 72 hours.

Adam Rose, the press rights chair for the Los Angeles Press Club, said the ruling was important because it showed the critical role journalists play in informing the public. It also shows that the Los Angeles police have not been following state laws that are meant to protect reporters covering protests, he said.

“The press should be able to do their job without fear of being injured by police, without fear of their rights being chilled in other ways,” Mr. Rose said.

Fallout Over Handling of Epstein Case Erupts Into the Open, Glenn Thrush, July 12, 2025 (print ed.). An irate attorney general is said to have confronted the deputy director of the F.B.I. at a tense White House meeting earlier in the week.

The bitter blame game over the handling of the investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein erupted in public on Friday between Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, and the senior leadership of the F.B.I., particularly the bureau’s deputy director, Dan Bongino.

Ms. Bondi and her allies believe that Mr. Bongino, who parlayed a he-man image and promotion of conspiracies into a top law enforcement job, planted stories in the conservative news media blaming Ms. Bondi for the backlash after an announcement earlier this week that the Epstein case would be closed, according to officials close to the situation. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss conversations intended to be private.

It escalated into an angry face-to-face confrontation at the White House on Wednesday, when an irate Ms. Bondi accused Mr. Bongino of leaking information to the news media in the presence of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and one of her deputies, Taylor Budowich. Mr. Bongino denied it, they said.

Mr. Bongino, during another confrontation within the past week, told Ms. Bondi she had overhyped the likelihood that a review of the case undertaken by the Justice Department and F.B.I. this year would reveal a list of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking clients, and possibly raise questions about his 2019 death by hanging in custody, which was ruled a suicide.

But, to an extent, Ms. Bondi has been trying to put out a political fire that Mr. Bongino himself helped to ignite: Mr. Bongino, who oversaw the deployment of agents to scour video and documents in the case, pushed the idea of a vast cover-up in the Epstein case as the host of a popular and lucrative podcast.

On Friday, a high-profile Bongino booster — the far-right influencer and conspiracist Laura Loomer — claimed, in two dramatic social media posts, that the bureau’s deputy director had taken Friday off to collect his thoughts, and was “now seriously thinking about RESIGNING” over Ms. Bondi’s actions in the Epstein case.

A person close to Mr. Bongino did not dispute her characterization, describing him as very angry and considering a range of options, including quitting.

It would not be the first time Mr. Bongino, who has struggled to retain credibility with the right-wing base while overseeing the bureau’s day-to-day-operations, has suggested the pressures of the job were getting to him: “People ask all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ No. I don’t,” he told Fox News last month.

Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had no comment.

Senior Justice Department officials insisted that both Mr. Bongino and Mr. Patel had worked closely with her top advisers to review the evidence in the case and had jointly decided on closing the investigation, and are as responsible for the backlash as she is.Editors’ PicksThe Brooklyn Allergist’s Office That Was Once Home to a SpyMy In-Laws Are Hoarders. Should I Secretly Call the Authorities?Should You Be ‘Fibermaxxing’?

Todd Blanche, Ms. Bondi’s top deputy, posted a statement on social media early Friday to hammer home that point, in response to articles and social media posts suggesting that F.B.I. leadership was not entirely on board with the decision to move on.

“I worked closely with @FBIDirectorKash and @FBIDDBongino on the joint FBI and DOJ memo regarding the Epstein Files,” wrote Mr. Blanche, who led President Trump’s criminal defense team before being tapped for his current post. 

July 11

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) confronted Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in the U.S. Capitol on June 16, the night after Lee posted on X multiple times in the aftermath of the murders of two Minnesota lawmakers. 

Polico, Mike Lee Can’t Stop Throwing Social Media Grenades. His Church Isn’t Happy, Samuel Benson, The Utah senator’s online persona has further damaged his already frayed relationship with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.An illustration featuring Mike Lee, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and the Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City

It was Father’s Day morning, but Mike Lee was still hard at work on social media.

Just before 11 o’clock, Lee posted an image of Vance Boelter, the man charged with murdering a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband a day earlier. “This is what happens,” Lee captioned it, “when Marxists don’t get their way.” Ten minutes later, he posted again. “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” he wrote, suggesting that Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz was to blame for the grisly murders.

Lee’s posts generated near-instant national backlash. His mentions filled with people calling on him to resign. Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat, cornered Lee at the U.S. Capitol the next night and gave him an earful. So did Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another Minnesotan. A top aide in Smith’s office wrote a letter to Lee’s staffers rebuking them for “making jokes” to “compound people’s grief.”

It wasn’t just Washington that was buzzing over Lee’s response to the tragedy. It also set off a debate in Salt Lake City. At the global headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a discussion over how to respond — if at all — began in earnest, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Several of the church’s senior leaders saw the posts and were concerned. Lee is a prominent Latter-day Saint, arguably the best-known elected Church member in the nation. His insensitive words were reflecting poorly on the faith at large. One church official estimated the backlash from Lee’s posts would have severe repercussions for the church’s public image, the first person said.

As extreme as the situation was, the issue at the center of the firestorm was nothing new. For two-and-a-half years, Lee has been sliding deeper and deeper into a hyper-online echo chamber. Posts pepper his timeline during nearly every waking hour, and some at night.

While staffers run his official accounts, Lee himself is the primary author behind the @BasedMikeLee account, according to two former advisers granted anonymity to speak openly, where he feeds conspiracy theories and attacks against the political left. It has become one of the more prolific pages on X, the site formerly known as Twitter: Last year, he posted about 36 times a day, a Salt Lake Tribune investigation found; in the first four months of this year, he was posting 100 times a day, or once every 15 minutes.Tina Smith speaks with Mike Lee in front of a doorway.

Along the way, Lee has become a cult hero in some corners of the online political right. Last year, Lee’s account had just over 200,000 followers; now, it’s surpassed 600,000. He finds a wide range of uses for his online megaphone: criticizing “leftists,” disparaging fellow Republicans, theologizing, philosophizing, conspiracizing. On occasion, he uses the account as a tool to communicate to constituents, as he did last month while trying to save face when his public lands proposal faced wide backlash. But more often, the account is something entirely different: In 2023, his posts threatening the Japanese prime minister were so outlandish that his account was flagged and temporarily suspended for “impersonation.”

Those who know Lee suggest the account isn’t a new persona, but rather the senator in his natural state. “I think it’s definitely the same Mike Lee that I know,” said Ryan McCoy, a longtime friend and adviser. One of the two former advisers suggested it is “Mike Lee unfiltered.”

But for Lee’s church, that bellicose online alter ego poses a problem. Even as some Christian denominations have delved into Christian nationalism or partisan politics during the Trump era, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly referred to as the Mormon Church) has consistently called on members to do the opposite: to be “peacemakers” in the civic square.

Lee, both as a keyboard warrior and flesh-and-bones legislator, is consistently getting in the way. For the first time in recent memory, the church has a high-ranking member in Washington not just failing to cooperate on some of its key priorities, but sometimes actively impeding them.

While larger, more established faiths may not pay much heed to the antics of a single member, Latter-day Saints have a different challenge: They make up just two percent of the national population, and nearly half of Americans say they don’t know a single church member. The actions and reputation of the church’s faithful in public spaces — Congress, perhaps, being the most influential — plays a significant role in the public’s perception of the church itself.

CNN, David Gergen, political insider who advised four presidents of both parties, dies at 83, Brian Stelter and Jamie Gangel, July 11, 2025. David Gergen, who served as a presidential adviser to four presidents of both parties and educated generations of Americans about leadership and civic engagement, has died. He was 83.

Gergen was the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and a longtime political analyst for CNN. His son, Christopher Gergen, confirmed the death occurred Thursday and said the cause was Lewy body dementia, a brain disease that causes symptoms similar to Parkinson’s.

Gergen was a legendary figure in Washington and beyond who brought insider knowledge and used his media platforms to promote responsible leadership. A CNN spokesperson said he was “always happy to share his wisdom and his spotlight with others.”

“A political scholar who served four presidents of both parties, an adoring father and dedicated husband, a senior statesman in every sense of the word, and a tireless educator. But above all else, David was a relentlessly kind and warm person,” the spokesperson said, adding that “our staff, contributors, and audiences are better informed because of his towering influence.”

He began his political career in the Nixon White House and later wrote that “before he self-destructed, Nixon was among the best of modern presidents.” He served as communications director on two occasions, first to Gerald Ford and then to Ronald Reagan. Ten years later, after a stint running US News & World Report and his first contract with CNN, he returned to the White House as a counselor to Bill Clinton.

July 9

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: "A gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for," Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, July 9, 2025. AI is a disruptive force in education. Generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini can be easily used by students to cheat. These tools can produce papers in seconds that previously took students days or weeks to complete. A report by OpenAI found that the most common use for ChatGPT by college students was "starting papers."

But even when AI is not used by students unethically, its impact on learning is uncertain. It is impossible to know the long-term impact of these very new tools on students. But some early studies of AI use show a negative impact on critical thinking and cognition.

Nevertheless, the companies behind popular AI tools are making an aggressive push to make their products a fundamental part of K-12 and higher education.

 

Donald Trump shown in a file photo with socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a socialite who was convicted and sentenced to prison for crimes related to her longtime grooming and sex trafficking of girls and young women for sex with her former lover Jeffrey Epstein, a neighbor and frequent companion of Trump.

The Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump COVER UP of DARK PAST quickly BACKFIRES in PUBLIC, Ben Meiselas, July 9, 2025. Meidas Touch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump getting utterly crushed by the public, including his own MAGA supporters, for trying to cover up his horrible past connections and conduct. 

July 8

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism, Prime Day is a scam, Judd Legum, right, July 8, 2025. Amazon Prime Day is a four-day sale promoted by the mega-retailer as a rare opportunity to secure "deep discounts" on a variety of consumer items.

In reality, Amazon deploys deceptive tactics to exaggerate its markdowns and create a false sense of urgency. Featured items are often available at similar or lower prices at other times.

Nevertheless, major media outlets produce a massive number of "articles" promoting Amazon Prime Day, as if it is a genuine news event. This isn't an accident. Amazon provides financial incentive for news organizations to produce this content. 

 

The Bulwark, Opinion: The Case for Epstein Trutherism, Jonathan V. Last, July 8, 2025. Maybe there really is a conspiracy and the Trump administration is covering it up.

I am, as a rule, skeptical of conspiracy theories. And we should stipulate that maybe it’s true, as the unsigned Department of Justice memo states, that a “systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list’” for Jeffrey Epstein.

But if you want to believe, there’s a pretty good case to be made that the Epstein client list could be real.

This case centers around the contemporaneous statements of government officials who would have had access to such a list, if it existed.

The big one, of course, is Pam Bondi. 

July 7

 

One First, a weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to all, TikTok and the Dispensing Power, , Steve Vladeck (right, Georgetown Law Center professor), July 7, 2025. Attorney General Bondi's TikTok-related letters rest on a view of presidential power that has no support in even the most capacious understandings of the "unitary executive" theory.

Amidst all of the other news from last week, we finally received, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, copies of 21 letters that Attorney General Bond, left, sent to U.S. tech companies earlier this year.

Bondi’s letters apparently helped to induce those companies to decide to continue supporting the TikTok app—despite a federal statute expressly forbidding them from doing so after January 19, a statute that the Supreme Court had upheld against a First Amendment challenge on January 17. (The statute’s full name is the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act; I’m going to call it the “TikTok statute” for ease of reference.)

From a legal reasoning perspective, Bondi’s letters are bollocks.

In addition to claiming that the companies’ behavior does not violate the statute (which it unambiguously does), Bondi asserts that she has the legal authority to irrevocably release all potential claims that might arise out of the companies’ ongoing violations of the act (and purports to release those claims)—a power to license unlawful activity on a case-by-case basis, if you will, which was known in pre-revolutionary England as the “dispensing” power.

I wrote back in January about how the TikTok executive order President Trump signed on his first day of office committed whoever the Attorney General would be to take that first position about the meaning of the statute (which should’ve been reason enough for any principled lawyer to refuse nomination to the office, and for the Senate to refuse to confirm any nominee). But it’s the second claim—that the President, through the Attorney General, has a dispensing power—that is even more extreme; that is not even required by the executive order; and that, if it becomes a precedent, would turn the separation of powers (if not the rule of law itself) entirely on its head.

The Attorney General’s Law-Free TikTok Letters

Although it may seem like a distant memory at this point, it was only on January 17—less than six months ago—that the Supreme Court, after hyper-expedited merits review, upheld the TikTok statute against a First Amendment challenge. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that promised not to enforce the statute for 75 days (a period that could be renewed).

But it was only after Attorney General Bondi sent letters to various U.S. tech companies some time later that full access to TikTok was restored—letters that, at least at the time, were not made public (or even leaked).

Given that timing, the natural question that arose was what, exactly, Bondi had promised to the tech companies to get them to turn the switch back on?Late last week, in response to FOIA requests, 21 of those letters were made public. The letters are worth reading in their entirety (in some cases, multiple letters to the same company sent at different times were included). But to summarize the highlights, across those letters, the Attorney General of the United States memorialized some variation of the following three conclusions:

1. Companies that continue to support the TikTok app are not, in fact, violating the TikTok statute;

2. The TikTok statute is “properly read” to not “infringe upon . . . core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers”; and

3. The Department of Justice is “irrevocably relinquishing any claims the United States might have had” against the recipients of the letters for both previous and ongoing violations of the act.

Each of these three arguments is ludicrous.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalis: Making Measels Safe For All Judd Legum, right, July 7, 2025. Before the measles vaccine became widely available in the 1960s, nearly everyone in the United States contracted measles by the time they were 15. Each year, millions of children were infected, tens of thousands were hospitalized, and hundreds died.

It is extremely contagious. 92% of unvaccinated people exposed to measles end up contracting the disease.

Nevertheless, in 2000, the World Health Organization declared that measles had been eradicated in the United States. This was due to the historic success of a vaccination program, which stopped the spread of the disease.

Today, measles is back.

In 2000, there were only 86 cases of measles recorded in the United States. Halfway through 2025, there have already been 1,274 recorded measles cases. There have been 155 hospitalizations and three deaths, including two unvaccinated children. It is the first time people have died from a measles infection in the United States in a decade.

The spread of measles is directly related to vaccine hesitancy. The epicenter of the current outbreak is Gaines County, where the Mennonite community has low vaccination rates. There is no religious prohibition against vaccines, but "has historically avoided interacting with the health care system and has a long tradition of using home remedies and supplements." In some school districts in the county, less than half of the Kindergarten population was vaccinated. Texas allows parents to opt out of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, for "reasons of conscience."

Low vaccination rates have allowed the measles outbreak to spread to neighboring New Mexico, which has nearly 100 recorded cases. Kentucky reported its first outbreak on June 27. Across Kentucky, MMR vaccination rates have declined to 86.9%. Only July 1, Wyoming reported its first case of measles in 15 years.Outbreaks have also occurred in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Deadly vaccine misinformation

MMR vaccination rates have plummeted due to the spread of misinformation about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. One of the most influential sources of misinformation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, serves in the Trump administration as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has used his high-profile position to misinform millions of people about measles and the MMR vaccine.

Before joining the Trump administration, Kennedy sued the state of New York for requiring the MMR vaccine, arguing that it was dangerous and unnecessary.In an appearance on Fox News on March 11, 2025, Kennedy suggested that contracting measles was preferable to getting vaccinated. Kennedy told Sean Hannity that "when you and I were kids, everybody got measles and measles… gave you… lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn't do that." Kennedy falsely claimed the MMR "vaccine wanes about 4.5% per year. So that means older people are essentially unvaccinated." In reality, although the concentration of measles antibodies can decrease over time, the MMR vaccine provides lifetime immunity for nearly everyone, which is why so few vaccinated people contract measles. (The 4.5% per year figure is not supported by scientific evidence.)

Kennedy also falsely suggested that the vaccine was just as dangerous as measles. "There are adverse events from the vaccine," Kennedy said. "It does cause deaths every year. It causes -- it causes all the illnesses that -- measles itself cause[s] encephalitis and blindness, et cetera, and so on."

The claim that the MMR vaccine causes death each year is false. According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, there are "no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people." In rare instances, the MMR vaccine has caused death in immunocompromised people, which is why the vaccine is not recommended for that population.

Democracy Docket, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, This July 4, kings were back in fashion, Marc Elias, July 7, 2025. Publishing the Declaration of Independence was an act of radical defiance. If you look beyond the niceties of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Declaration is a harsh indictment of mistreatment under a dictatorship.

The authors wrote: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

The colonists who declared independence were not only angry at the King. They also chafed at a British Parliament that aided and facilitated the King’s tyranny. And, in the penultimate paragraph of the Declaration itself, they condemned the British public that remained indifferent:

“We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.”

Every time I read this section of our first founding document, I am reminded of Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition, 180 years later, that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

As we celebrated Independence Day on July 4, our Congress’ own submission and appalling silence was hanging in the air. Trump and his Republican enablers marked the historic day by signing a bill that will take basic health care away from the neediest Americans to give tax breaks to the wealthiest.

This is a bill that will hit red areas harder than blue. Few Republican members of Congress wanted it to pass. Yet nearly all of them lined up to vote for it.

Fittingly, the bill signing ended with Rep. Mike Johnson handing his speaker’s gavel to Trump. “I want you to have that,” the speaker said. I would say it reminded me of British Gen. Cornwallis’ sword being presented to George Washington to end the war in 1781 — but there’s a key difference. Johnson never actually fought to keep his power.

The pathetic bit of theater playing out at the White House may have been a distraction for what was going on down the street. Justice Department lawyers were rushing to deport eight migrants to South Sudan. It is not clear why the Trump administration picked South Sudan — or the men to send there — since none were from the war-torn country.

One cannot help but conclude that the timing was no coincidence. Seven o’clock on the East Coast — just in time to celebrate Independence Day and prepare for fireworks. It’s sickening.

Finally, we learned something new about the latest capitulation by legacy media. When Paramount announced its $16 million payment to settle Trump’s frivolous lawsuit, it assured us there were no other financial sweeteners. Now it seems that was a bit of semantics.

According to news reports, once the Paramount merger is completed, the new company will run millions of dollars’ worth of Trump-approved public service announcements. Trump described it as an additional $16 million —“or maybe more than that in advertising”— making the value of the entire deal “$32 to maybe $35 million.”

Between all of the capitulations since he took office, Trump has collected hundreds of millions in pro bono legal services from Big Law and millions in free propaganda commercials from legacy media. I am confident this is not what Tom Paine had in mind when he wrote, “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

On Thursday night, Donald Trump spoke at a rally where he described unscrupulous bankers lending money as “Shylocks.” One might think this would earn him universal condemnation for using an anti-Jewish slur. Instead, too many on the right dismissed his use of an antisemitic term. That was to be expected.

What I did not expect was the tepid response from legacy media and many in the center and on the left. Let’s be clear: The character Shylock has, since Shakespeare’s creation, been antisemitic. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s Jewishness is not merely part of his character — it is the purpose of his character. He is literally introduced into the play as “the Jew.”

Calling someone a “Shylock” is antisemitic, period. When so-called responsible media fail to call it what it plainly is — and when those who police other forms of racism fail to speak out — it only reinforces the games antisemites play to deny Jews their humanity.

  

From left: American real estate developer Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000. Getty Images.

New York Times, Trump Administration Acknowledges Lack of Evidence From Epstein Documents, Devlin Barrett and Matthew Goldstein, July 7, 2025. After Attorney General Pam Bondi promised big revelations for months, the Justice Department noted a lack of evidence for conspiracy theories, including a “client list” and a jailhouse murder.

For months, Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, promised the release of documents on the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein that could reveal damaging details, drumming up anticipation over the files, long a source of speculation and conspiracy theories.

But on Monday, a memo by the Justice Department undercut her own statements, pouring cold water on baseless claims. It amounted to a catalog of conclusions that affirmed those reached years earlier by investigators, including that Mr. Epstein killed himself while in a Manhattan cell awaiting trial.

“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the memo said. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

“No further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo continued, adding that the work of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. on the records had been thorough.

In the six years since his death in 2019, the case of Mr. Epstein has become a public obsession for a segment of Trump supporters, some of whom have accused two of his most senior advisers, Ms. Bondi and the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, of slow-walking the review and release of the case file.

A release of related documents in February, which Ms. Bondi had similarly hyped, fell flat, drawing widespread derision as much of the information was already in the public domain.

While many had been awaiting what Ms. Bondi declared would be “Phase 2” of the release of the so-called Epstein files, the new memo sought to end any such expectations. It included an hourslong video, whose existence was previously disclosed, of the hallway outside Mr. Epstein’s jail cell.

 

Elon Musk, left, and Donald Trump shown in separate file photos via Instagram and YouTube.

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Musk Amplifies Meme Asking Why Epstein Clients Aren’t in PrisonTrump hasn’t released the names or arrested anyone, J.D. Wolf, July 7, 2025. Elon Musk amplified renewed scrutiny of the Jeffrey Epstein case on Sunday morning by retweeting a meme featuring convicted sex trafficker and Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell. The image asked: “Why is she the only one going to prison? Where’s all the men that had sex with those under age girls?”

The post, which Musk did not comment on directly, suggests skepticism about the lack of prosecutions tied to Epstein’s network and reignited criticism of how the justice system has handled the case.Trump : BondiTrump Chickens Out of Musk, Epstein Files Press QuestionsRead More

The retweet comes weeks after Musk deleted a post claiming Donald Trump was named in the Epstein files and accusing him of blocking their release. Musk later walked deleted the tweet.Elon Musk’s deleted tweets

The Department of Justice now claims Epstein did not keep a “client list,” had not engaged in a blackmail operation, and died by suicide—findings that contradict years of speculation and internet rumor.

 

Occupy Democrats via Facebook, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy brutally confronts White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt after the administration claims that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list — despite previously stating that there was, July 7, 2025. When she tried to slither out of it, Doocy, shown above left, brought the receipts.

"Okay. So. The FBI looks at the circumstances surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein," said Doocy during a press briefing. "According to the report, this systematic review revealed no incriminating client list. So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk?"

"Well, I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview which was on your network, on Fox News—" began Leavitt.

"I've got the quote," interjected Doocy.

"Go ahead," said Leavitt.

"John Roberts said 'DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients will that really happen?' and she said 'It's sitting on my desk right now to review,'" said Doocy.

"Yes, she was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, that's what the Attorney General was referring to and I'll let her speak for that but again when it comes to the FBI and the Department of Justice, they are more than committed to ensuring that bad people are put behind bars," said Leavitt.

"They have an operation going on right now called Summer Heat which has our murder rate trending in the lowest direction in United States history," she continued, trying desperately to change the subject. "Their emphasis on violent crime and locking up violent criminals has led to the arrest of 14,000 violent criminals. That's a 62% increase from the same time period last year so this Attorney General and the FBI Director are committed to putting bad people behind bars where they belong."

"They promised an exhaustive review, that's what the did. For any further details I would refer you to the Department of Justice," Leavitt concluded.

Simply put, her response doesn't hold water. Attorney General Pam Bondi clearly stated that the Epstein client list was on her desk, not that there were documents related to Epstein on her desk.

There are two possible explanations here. The first is that there never was a client list. This explanation wouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility that Epstein had blackmail material on powerful people and was connected to intelligence agencies, it would just mean that he didn't keep a little black book on his schemes. If this is the case, it means that Bondi pretended that there was a list to pander to the segment of the MAGA base that believes in it.

The second explanation is that there is a list and the Trump administration is covering it up because it implicates Trump or people close to him. Given that Trump is an adjudicated rapist who was close friends with Epstein, this seems quite possible.

In fact, Elon Musk previously stated that Trump "is in the Epstein files" and claimed that that's "the real reason they have not been made public."

In the wake of the new DOJ report, which also stated that Epstein wasn't murdered as many suspect, Musk posted an image of "The Official Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Arrest Counter,” set to “0000.”

“What’s the time? Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again …,” the billionaire wrote.

No matter how you slice it, something just isn't adding up here. The fact that even MAGA world is waking up to that fact should have Trump sweating.

July 6 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: We Make NO APOLOGIES For Being 1st to Connect NWS Cuts & Texas Tragedy, Ron Filipkowski, right, Meidas Touch Managing Editor, July 6,2025. We make NO APOLOGIES for being the first media outlet to report that local Texas officials were pointing fingers at the National Weather Service for a faulty forecast and noting that dozens of experts and scientists have been warning for months that Trump’s draconian cuts to NOAA and the NWS were going to lead to serious problems and greater loss of life during the summer storm season.

As readers of my daily Bulletins know well, I have included quotes from these experts from multiple media outlets in the column many, many times over the past several months.

Was NWS at fault in some way in Texas? Was it just the Texas officials trying to pass the buck? Maybe one, maybe the other, maybe both. But we were not going to allow yet another natural disaster on Trump’s watch with huge loss of life to get swept under the rug again, while he dismantles FEMA and the agencies tasked with warning and informing the public are decimated, without serious questions being asked.

 

We also were not going to let Trump and the MAGA propaganda machine to set the narrative on this as they have done so many times in the past over many years with little to no response by Democrats.

This also comes after we endured 4 years of Trump and Republicans blaming Biden using lies and disinformation after every single natural disaster, train derailment, war overseas between other countries, on an on. They blamed Biden for everything despite zero evidence and used a firehose of lies, fake videos, and coordinated disinformation.

We did our best to fight it, but honestly we didn’t have much help from the Biden admin pushing back because too often their strategy was to just ignore it. But you can’t ignore it because it is like a cancer that just spreads and gets worse if you do.

We got criticism even from some Democrats along with the typical vicious personal attacks and threats from MAGA. I started to see my DMs fill up with the usual blue-checked right-wing chuds after the story was published with threats and venom. I’ve gotten so many over the years opposing not just Trump but the entire MAGA movement that I don’t even hardly notice or care anymore.

They can’t scare or intimidate us. But we also got some comments from a few Dems scolding us for “politicizing a tragedy.”

Well, we are not interested in being polite or giving the benefit of the doubt to Trump and his minions like Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Russ Vought (left, a top Trump White House budget advisor and former leader of the Heritage Foundation's comprehensive "Project 2025" to slash federal spending and cut taxes for the rich in a new Trump administration), Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, right, Karoline Leavitt, et al.

We question everything because they lie to us about everything and try to cover up what they are doing across government. If that means we sometimes get accused of “politicizing” tragedies by some on our own side, so be it. If we can endure daily threats from MAGA, we can handle criticism from some squeamish old guard Dems and legacy media about our aggressive and relentless methods.

Now the NYT and other media organizations have joined in with stories documenting how cuts in NWS and other federal agencies may have made this tragedy much, much worse. We were alone out there for most of the day yesterday with our story and got a lot of criticism, but we stood by it because this is a new day and we are determined to make the Democratic Party tougher, more fearless, with thicker skin, and to go on offense against the Trump admin rather than constantly playing defense.

 

Whistleblower, author, podcaster and former Donald Trump supporter Lev Parnas, accompanied by his wife (File photo).

Lev Remembers via Facebook, Opinion: A Sunday Message from Lev Parnas, Lev Parnas, author of Shadow Diplomacy, right, July, 6, 2025. Turning Fear Into Power. 

I want to begin today with something simple, but deeply felt: I See You, I Hear You, and I am With You

These past few weeks — these past six months — have been more than chaotic. They’ve been historic. They’ve been terrifying. Every day, it feels like we wake up to a new attack on our rights, our democracy, and the truth itself.

Let me start by saying this clearly:

• You have every right to be scared.
• You have every reason to be worried.
• Because what we are facing is real. It’s dangerous. And it’s not coming — it’s already here.

Over the past six months, we’ve watched Donald Trump and his enablers in Congress — some of the “finest” elected officials money and fear can buy — dismantle protections we once thought untouchable. From defying court orders to weaponizing the DOJ against immigrants and dissenters, to pardoning extremists and cracking down on media, it’s been one move after another designed to erase accountability and consolidate power.

• We’ve seen him openly deport Americans.
• We’ve seen ICE raids increase.
• We’ve seen him lift sanctions on Putin while Ukraine burns.
• We’ve seen him push a “beautiful” immigration bill that’s anything but.
• We’ve seen him threaten governors, judges, and whistleblowers.
• And now — he’s pushing the most dangerous piece yet:
• What he calls “election reform.”

But let’s be clear — it’s not reform. It’s a plan to rig the system permanently.

That’s why I say this to you from the heart: Now is the time to turn our fear into power.

Because even in the chaos — I promise you — there are cracks forming. I told you they would come. And they’re here.

Inside the Republican Party. Inside MAGA itself. Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Tillis, Thomas Massie — they’re speaking up. They’re breaking ranks. They’re calling him out.

And today, Elon Musk just drove a dagger into the MAGA narrative. Just yesterday, he announced the formation of a third party — the American Party — which he himself is going to fund. This is the worst thing Donald Trump could have imagined. My sources are telling me that Trump’s retaliation will be ferocious. So stay tuned.

Donald Trump knows it. That’s why he’s lashing out harder than ever. He’s threatening to primary them. He’s threatening to deport Elon Musk. He’s threatening democracy itself. That’s why he’s desperate to silence voices like mine. Like yours.

• But I’ll tell you this right now: I’m not going anywhere.
• Not while we still have breath.
• Not while this movement is still alive.
• I get threats every day. They try to shut me up. But I keep going. Because of you.
• I have no big corporate sponsors.
• No bodyguards.
• No party machine behind me.
• I have YOU.

And together, we’ve made Lev Remembers the number one political Substack two weeks running. We are louder than their lies — and we are just getting started. But I need you to take the next step with me.

 

Editor's Note: Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, a longtime journalist at the Hartford Courant and elsewhere in Connecticut from 1970 to 1988, knew and greatly admired the recently deceased Don Noel, hence the lengthy excerpt of the obituary below.

Hartford Courant, Don Noel, longtime Hartford Courant political columnist and former TV reporter, dies at 93, Christopher Keating, Updated, July 3, 2025. Don Noel, a longtime political columnist for The Hartford Courant who recently surprised his friends by writing his farewell on Facebook, died Monday. He was 93.

As the former editor of The Hartford Times before joining The Courant, Noel, right, ranked among the state’s top journalists in his heyday as he wrote columns about major political figures like Govs. William A. O’Neill, Lowell P. Weicker, and John G. Rowland.

Noel’s passing came after the recent deaths of two other journalistic stalwarts of that era, Tom Monahan of Channel 30 and Mark Davis of WTNH, Channel 8. All three were respected as veteran reporters who personally knew scores of politicians and top political leaders across the state.

Noel stunned many of his colleagues with a detailed farewell note on June 22 on Facebook, where he has more than 1,000 friends.

“Why ‘final”?” Noel wrote. “Several have asked. I am in the fifth day of not eating or drinking, to hasten my death. When I was diagnosed with neuropathy decades ago, I was told to expect a long slow loss of mobility, and so it has been. I need human and mechanical help for most basic functions. Ahead are further intrusions into self-sufficiency. I choose not to go there.”

He added, “I have had a wonderful life, joined for 65 years by a wonderful wife. I have, I hope, earned at least some of the journalistic prizes and plaudits given me, and I hope I have been able to contribute something to all of the various communities in which I have lived and worked. I leave a satisfied man.”

After an outpouring of written remarks by 157 of his friends, Noel posted again on June 23.

“Thanks to all 157 of you,” he wrote. “I am embarrassed, chastened, buoyed up. Someone quoted Campbell: living in memories of those left behind is not to die. I am grateful for that thought.”

Journalists, politicians and friends responded to Noel’s post, thanking him for his candor.

“This is difficult to read and painful to think about,” wrote former Courant columnist and radio host Colin McEnroe. “For decades, you set a standard that most of us struggled to live up to. You may have mobility issues now, but you always walked the walk. You told the truth; you stuck to your principles; and you did it with grace. And now, even your final exit is graceful. Thank you for giving the rest of us a chance to tell you how much your work and your example meant to us.”

Another former Courant columnist, Dan Haar, wrote, “To the end, you are an inspiration. I carry on in your old job with awe and love and respect for all you’ve done connecting people and ideas and the message of what is right, with clarity and feeling that almost no one can match — certainly not me. Farewell friend and mentor.”

Former state senator and gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry, whose family lived next door to Noel in Hartford when Curry was 12 years old, visited his friend recently and remarked about his multifaceted life. A world traveler, Noel lived with his family for a year in Cambodia and Romania after winning a journalistic fellowship, and the family visited Russia, India, Jordan, Japan, Austria and Greece, among others.

“I truly love the man. He’s one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met,” Curry told The Courant in an interview. “He bicycled to The Courant through downtown Hartford streets. … He had a house in Jamaica. He was in Israel not very many years after its founding. It was an amazing life that he led. Whip smart. He could sit and listen to the longest and most technical presentation, and when it was concluded, just write down a summary that was proof-perfect.”

Curry added, “In case you thought there was no such thing as a Renaissance Man in the 21st century, there he was. Where he found so much energy for family, for work, for community, for physical recreation, for his spiritual life. I don’t know anyone who did all of that so fully and so well.”

A Hartford resident for 50 years, Noel lived with his wife, Elizabeth Brad Noel, in the North End in an African-American and Jamaican neighborhood on Ridgefield Street. They later moved in 2016 to Bloomfield to live in the Seabury retirement community and were married for 65 years.

A graduate of Cornell University with a degree in American studies, Noel traveled with his family as an Alicia Patterson Fellow in 1966 to Cambodia and Romania. The family later left Bucharest and went camping in Russia before returning home.

During 17 years at the now-defunct Hartford Times, he served as editorial page editor for six years and spent a year as the top editor at the newspaper. He also worked in television for 10 years at WFSB, Channel 3, including hosting the “Face The State” program that is still broadcast on Sunday mornings. Later in life, he became chairman of the ACLU of Connecticut.

When Noel retired after 12 years at The Courant in 1997, longtime Courant columnist Denis Horgan wrote a column that fondly remembered his friend.

“In a dozen years here, some more at a television station and many more at the long-gone Hartford Times, Don O. Noel Jr. moved with surety, self-assurance and style across the state’s political vistas,” Horgan wrote. “As absolutely must happen over such a span, he trod on toes, left and right. This is not a guy who was going to be buffaloed by some here-today, gone-tomorrow politico or party hack — although they tried their feeble best to do just that again and again. His direct and enduring elegance was built atop a foundation of granite: He was representing something far more important than the politician with fleeting authority before him. He was standing in for the reader, for the public. Fools did not prosper under his gaze.”

Carolyn Lumsden, who worked with Noel in the days when The Courant had 17 people working for the editorial page, said, “Don was unique. He dressed like a gentleman with a fresh flower in his lapel. He took the role in meetings of a Socratic teacher, questioning our ideas to sharpen our writing.”

Lumsden added, “I later found out he was a talented short-story writer and superb gardener. He cared so deeply about the community. We won’t see his kind any time soon.”

July 5 

Meidas Touch Network via Substack, Commentary: URGENT MeidasTouch Message by Founder!!I, Ben Meiselas, I left July 4 both pissed and inspired to work harder. I wanted to urgently write to you, since it seems we are heading into a new phase of the Trump regime. He will escalate. We will need to fight back harder.

Before getting into my observations, I want to say thanks to our current subscribers to this Substack. The MeidasTouch Network has grown with no investors and we need to keep this momentum by growing our subscribers today.

Trump’s propaganda event at the White House on July 4 was bizarre and dystopian. Trump continued to lie about the disaster budget bill that he signed into law. I am quite confident he never read the bill.

Trump claims the bill provides for no tax on Social Security, which is not in the bill at all. Trump claims the bill does not touch Medicaid, which is egregiously false.

Trump’s latest line he said yesterday was that the bill is going to keep you alive—and if it was not passed, you would have died.

He says the most absurdly false things over and over again.

At the event yesterday, Trump spent millions of our taxpayer dollars to have a B2 Stealth Jet fly over the White House with other fighter jets.

He posted photos of the propaganda images on his social media all night.

Trump did not address the tragedy that struck Kerr County, Texas yesterday, where flash floods from the Guadalupe River caused at least 13 people to die and 23 young girls from a summer camp called Camp Mystic to be unaccounted for.

Sadly, the death toll is expected to rise.

Trump does not give a crap about the duties of his office.

If he did, he would at the very least show empathy for what had taken place and address the disaster in a timely manner.

One of the stories that has gone underreported—except on the MeidasTouch Network and a few others—is the amount of deadly natural disasters over the past few months across the United States and Trump’s refusal to even acknowledge the disasters are taking place.

Trump sees storms and the resultant death as a sign of weakness, so he refuses to so much as acknowledge it—just as he did with COVID.

As you may know, Trump is in the process of defunding FEMA, NOAA, and NWS.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to be asking how impaired our weather systems are right now and whether they are capable of detecting storms and issuing the appropriate warnings, and the correlation with the recent fatal events.

This is especially important as we are in hurricane season.

I woke up this morning after the events of yesterday, recognizing how important it’s going to be for the people to fight back harder against Trump.

I saw a ton of No Kings Parades that popped up across the nation yesterday. We covered it on the MeidasTouch Network, while corporate news refused to cover it. Corporate news was focused on Trump’s propaganda and portraying Trump getting the disaster budget bill passed as a “win.”

I wanted to send this to you this morning since I know these last few weeks have probably worn you out a bit. We had a ton of momentum with the No Kings Protests from last month, but I know it must feel tiresome day in and day out dealing with this demented regime as we head into the dog days of summer.

I wanted you to hear from me directly that the MeidasTouch Network is not going anywhere. We have a great announcement this week about expansion into Canada I can’t wait to share. We are hiring more hosts and editors and producers. Days like yesterday actually inspire us to grow faster and bigger and smarter to adapt to the changing tactics of the regime.

We are here to listen to you. We are here to fight for you. We are here to keep building the news network you always wanted as corporate news has failed. We will never submit. We will go on the offense. We will reclaim our nation together.

Please subscribe to the MeidasTouch Substack today and support our independent reporting. We get more views than any cable news network and more podcast downloads than Joe Rogan, and we’ve done it with zero investors. That’s why we need to keep growing our subscribers—to compete and win against these entities being run by Trumper billionaires.

I am ready to fight harder and build the MeidasTouch Network even bigger.

July 2

New York Times, Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit, Benjamin Mullin, Michael M. Grynbaum, Lauren Hirsch and David Enrich, July 2, 2025. President Trump had sued over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The company needs federal approval for a multibillion-dollar sale.

Paramount said late Tuesday that it has agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” an extraordinary concession to a sitting president by a major media organization.

Paramount said its payment includes Mr. Trump’s legal fees and costs and that the money, minus the legal fees, will be paid to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library.

As part of the settlement, Paramount said that it had agreed to release written transcripts of future “60 Minutes” interviews with presidential candidates. The company said that the settlement did not include an apology.

The deal is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Trump’s ability to intimidate major American institutions extends to the media industry.

Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information.

But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Mr. Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval.

After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal ahead of a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. Another deadline loomed: Paramount was planning to make changes to its board of directors this week that could have complicated the settlement negotiations.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the settlement was “another win for the American people” delivered by the president, who was holding “the fake news media accountable.”

The size of the settlement, $16 million, is the same sum that ABC News agreed to pay in December to settle a defamation case filed by Mr. Trump against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. Paramount’s board was concerned that paying a higher amount to settle the case could increase the company’s exposure to potential legal actions from shareholders accusing them of bribery.

The sale of Paramount would end the Redstone family’s decades-long control of CBS News and Paramount Pictures and put it in the hands of David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, a tech billionaire who has backed Mr. Trump.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said that the president’s lawsuit against Paramount was not linked to the F.C.C.’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance. Paramount has also said that the two issues were unrelated.

Within the CBS newsroom, a prospective settlement was seen as a low moment in the near-century-long history of a network that once housed Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, whose famed rebuff of McCarthyism in the 1950s was recently depicted on the Broadway stage by George Clooney. “60 Minutes,” which pioneered on-air investigative reporting, recently completed its 51st consecutive season as the country’s most-watched news program.

Mr. Trump sued Paramount for $10 billion last year, claiming that “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris in order to interfere with the election. 

Democracy Docket, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, CBS bends a knee. I never will, Marc Elias, July 2, 2025. Earlier this year, I appeared on “60 Minutes” to stand up to Donald Trump’s threats against law firms. As anchor Scott Pelley said in his introduction, I was “the only lawyer the president has named who was willing to appear” on the show.

During the episode, I spoke plainly about the damage large law firms were doing by cutting deals with Trump. I made it clear that their actions threatened the rule of law and democracy. I warned that other businesses would be next.

I agreed to speak out then — and continue to speak out now — because democracy is under attack in our country. The president is weaponizing all aspects of the federal government to punish his political opponents and the institutions that seek to hold him accountable. And if those of us with platforms retreat and stay silent, he will succeed.

Today, we received the news that CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has joined the ranks of disgraced institutions that have bowed down to Trump. The once-proud Tiffany Network agreed to pay $16 million to settle a bogus lawsuit Trump filed over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.

Some in the media and business world are already trying to justify this as a necessary — or even savvy — business move. They couldn’t be more wrong. I will call it what it is: shameless capitulation. If our largest media outlets will not stand up to Donald Trump’s baseless lawsuits, why should we believe they will stand up to him in their reporting?

Sadly, CBS is not alone in bending the knee to Trump. ABC News did the same thing earlier this year when Disney settled a similarly meritless lawsuit. The owner of The Washington Post has not only handed over money without any threat of legal action but has also crippled the editorial page’s coverage of Trump.

I could go on and on with further examples of legacy media organizations failing to meet the moment in order to please — or at least not anger — a vindictive president.

I started Democracy Docket in 2020 to be an independent source of news, information and analysis of what is happening to democracy and the courts. Since then, it has grown to more than 20 employees and over 425,000 subscribers. Many more access its free website, where it provides news and the most comprehensive free database of voting and election cases anywhere.

To better serve you, Democracy Docket has recently expanded its YouTube channel, which now offers short- and long-form explainers and interviews about the threats facing our democracy.

Democracy Docket has no corporate parent or overlords. It will never back down. It will never compromise. It will not obey.

In light of today’s news, I’m resending the piece I wrote right after my “60 Minutes” episode aired in May. I was overwhelmed by the positive and encouraging messages people sent after reading it, so I thought I’d share it again.

 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Muskenfreude: When an oligarch confronts an autocrat, guess who wins? Paul Krugman, right, July 2, 2025. So the Senate has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. True, it could still be blocked if House Republicans stood by their principles. But they won’t. This monstrosity will become the law of the land, and tens of millions of Americans will suffer so that billionaires can pay lower taxes.

Looking forward, those of us who care about a decent society will have to do what we can to make sure that Americans understand who ruined their lives and make the people responsible pay a heavy political price. But there will be plenty of time for that, so I thought I’d devote today’s post to a more pleasant topic: The humiliation of Elon Musk (shown above in a file photo).

Does taking some satisfaction in Musk’s demise make me a bad person? Maybe, but I’m only human. Should I go easy on Musk because he came out against the terrible bill that just passed? No.

For one thing, Musk’s opposition predictably made no difference. Musk and other oligarchs will soon learn just how little political power their wealth gives them in the political environment they helped create. More on that in a minute.

Beyond that, Musk was against the bill for all the wrong reasons.

The whole DOGE story remains remarkable on a couple of levels. It’s not just that Donald Trump temporarily gave immense power over federal spending to someone who had no legitimate basis for that power — he was neither elected by voters nor, as is normally required for senior officials, approved by the Senate. Beyond that, Trump gave that power to a man who clearly understood nothing about what the government does and what it spends money on — but who, in his arrogance, assumed that he could eliminate trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.

He couldn’t, of course, and he should have been fired on the spot after making the absurd claim that millions of dead people were receiving Social Security checks. But he wasn’t. For months after that episode Musk remained in a position to create chaos and degrade the functioning of the government — oh, and condemn large numbers of children to death.

Now he’s on the outs — but he still lacks the honesty and courage to admit what he got wrong. Here’s Musk condemning the Beautiful Bill: What is the “insane spending” and “pork” of which he speaks? If there’s huge wasteful spending going on, well, Musk had months of unprecedented power and access to find it — and came up empty. The truth is that this bill will explode the deficit because of the huge tax breaks it’s offering to the wealthy and corporations. But Musk can’t handle the truth.

What about Musk’s threat to form a new political party? It will go nowhere if he tries. But I don’t think he’ll get anywhere near making good on that threat. As Trump might say, Musk just doesn’t have the cards. My prediction is that very soon one of two things will happen. Either Musk will slink off, tail between his legs. Or he will see his wealth destroyed, faster than he imagines possible.

Most immediately, Musk’s business interests are unusually dependent on federal support, and hence on the good will of whoever is running the government. I’m not sure whether Musk is really the most subsidized businessman in history, but Trump basically got it right here: Beyond that, even great wealth offers little protection from the people in power under an authoritarian regime.

 

Three years ago NPR’s Planet Money newsletter published a article titled “How Putin conquered Russia’s oligarchy” that people like Musk really should have read before throwing their support behind Trump. As the article explained, Russian oligarchs played a large role in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. But a few years after his ascent, Putin summoned the wealthiest among them to the Kremlin to explain who was in charge:

Putin, shown above left, offered the oligarchs a deal: bend to my authority, stay out of my way, and you can keep your mansions, superyachts, private jets, and multibillion-dollar corporations (corporations that, just a few years before, had been owned by the Russian government). In the coming years, the oligarchs who reneged on this deal and undermined Putin would be thrown into a Siberian prison or be forced into exile or die in suspicious circumstances.

And oligarchs who refused to come to heel were replaced by a new breed of oligarchs, who have accrued wealth and power under Putin: the siloviki, which translates roughly to "men of force."

It can’t happen here, you say. Trump can’t arbitrarily punish wealthy men or seize their property. After all, that would be against the law. And the rule of law still prevails in America, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re not the kind of country where masked men claiming to be government agents kidnap people off the street. Oh, wait.

Still, Musk is a U.S. citizen, which gives him protection, right? Except the Department of Justice has already announced that it will soon be seeking to revoke citizenship for many naturalized Americans. And Trump is already fantasizing about sending Musk back to South Africa.

OK, I don’t expect things to go that far for Musk or any of the other Trump-backing oligarchs who may be having second thoughts — not because I think there are limits to what Trump is willing to do, but because I don’t think any of these guys will have the courage to stand up to him.

Just to be clear, much as I hate what Musk has done, I don’t want to see him exiled or falling out of a window, because I don’t want to live in that kind of country. But if we do become that kind of a country, people like Musk will bear much of the responsibility — and, whatever they imagine, may pay part of the price.

 

New York Times, Investigation: Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback, Russ Buettner (who reviewed 2,000 documents filed in a legal action against Donald J. Trump for a more complete understanding of his financial state than was previously known), July 2, 2025. Contrary to the president’s assertions, records filed in a fraud case against him suggest that his riches were not the product of a steady and strong empire.

Last spring, even as Donald J. Trump’s march back toward the White House dominated public attention, his finances, largely out of view, faced serious threats.

His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf coursesregularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up.

And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.

Then, with his clinching of the Republican nomination, everything began to change.

In the following months, Mr. Trump, along with his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr., refocused the family business, forming a series of partnerships, especially in cryptocurrency, with investors who were willing to bank on his victory.

Once Mr. Trump won the presidency in November, that approach kicked into overdrive.

His family business announced numerous new deals that would financially benefit Mr. Trump directly, even as he made policy decisions that affected those industries or that involved countries in which the United States had political interests. Most glaringly, Mr. Trump is now both a partner in several crypto ventures and, as president, crypto’s chief policy regulator, and he has signaled that he wants his administration to have a hands-off approach to digital currencies.

Today, those moves are seen by Mr. Trump’s detractors as a money grab of historic proportions. But an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of pages of internal Trump Organization documents filed in one of the legal actions against him suggests a more urgent motivation for Mr. Trump’s behavior: a need, rather than simply a desire, for easy money to keep his empire intact.Editors’ Picks:( Microsoft’s ‘Blue Screen of Death’ Is Going Away20 Books Coming in JulyLike Chaucer’s Pilgrims, but With a Sports CarImagePresident Trump’s five children, seen from above, standing in a government building beneath an American flag.Donald Trump Jr., front right, and Eric Trump, behind him, have shifted the focus of the family business from real estate development to deals that monetize the family name and now, intentionally or not, the office of the presidency.Credit...Pool photo by Kenny Holston

In late 2023, Mr. Trump boasted of having between $300 million and $400 million in cash when he testified as part of that legal action, a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that accused the Trumps of defrauding their lenders. His cash stockpile, Mr. Trump said, showed “how good a company I built,” and, he added in earlier testimony, “especially for a developer.”

Contrary to those assertions, records filed in the fraud case suggest that Mr. Trump’s cash was not the product of a steady and strong empire. His balance had fluctuated wildly, hitting a low of $52 million in 2018, a small figure for the size of his operation. The subsequent increase came largely from the sale of properties and a payout of more than $150 million from a passive investment.

Moreover, the version of Mr. Trump’s business that he projects — a real estate development company that executes large, complex tasks — hasn’t existed for a nearly a decade, since the Trumps’ last two major construction projects failed to make money. 

New York Times, Investigation: What We Know (and Can’t Know) About Trump’s Wealth, Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany July 1, 2025 (print ed.). Asset Values:

• Cryptocurrencies: As much as $7.1 billion
• Stocks, bonds and cash: At least $2.2 billion
• Real estate and other business holdings: At least $1.3 billion

New York Times, Live Updates: Sean Combs Acquitted of Sex Trafficking but Found Guilty on Lesser Charges, Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs, July 2, 2025. The music mogul celebrated after being found not guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He was convicted of transporting people for prostitution and could be released on bond.

Sean Combs, right, was acquitted on Wednesday of sex trafficking and racketeering charges, but convicted of transportation to engage in prostitution after an eight-week federal trial.

A jury in Manhattan found Mr. Combs, 55, not guilty of the most serious charges against him. Prosecutors had accused the famed producer of coercing two former girlfriends, Casandra Ventura and a woman who testified pseudonymously as “Jane,” into unwanted sex with male prostitutes, aided by a team of pliant employees.

Even with a partial conviction, the result is something of a victory for Mr. Combs, who faced a possible life sentence had he been convicted of other counts in the case. He faces up to 20 years in prison on the two transportation for prostitution charges. Each of the counts carries up to 10 years in prison, but the final sentence will be up to a judge.

Here’s what else to know:

• Racketeering: Jurors said on Tuesday that there were “unpersuadable opinions on both sides” in regard to the racketeering count. Racketeering law was once intended to combat the Mafia but has become central in cases against R. Kelly, Young Thug, Wall Street executives, gang members and President Trump. 
• The jury: The racially diverse panel of eight men and four women, ranging in age from 30 to 74, sent several notes to the judge during deliberations, both asking for evidence and expressing concern about a juror. 
• Felony charges: Had he been convicted of sex trafficking, Mr. Combs would have faced a sentence of 15 years to life in prison. The charge of racketeering conspiracy also carries a potential life sentence. 
• Prosecution’s case: Mr. Combs was portrayed as the head of a criminal enterprise who “used power, violence and fear to get what he wanted” in the government’s closing argument. A prosecutor said Mr. Combs used violence, financial control and threats to manipulate his girlfriends into physically taxing sex sessions with hired men, while he masturbated and filmed. Read more >
• Defense’s case: In its closing argument, Mr. Combs’s defense team told jurors that the government’s evidence contradicted its case. It acknowledged that Mr. Combs had engaged in domestic violence and drug use, but argued that the accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or criminal ringleader was “badly exaggerated.” 

 July 1

 

New York Times, Bush, Obama and Bono Commend USAID Staff Members on Their Last Day, Christopher Flavelle, July 1, 2025 (print ed.). Two ex-presidents and a rock star thanked the outgoing workers of a doomed agency.

As most staff members at the U.S. Agency for International Development marked their final day with the agency, they got thanks from two presidents and a rock star.

The Trump administration has eliminated most U.S. foreign assistance programming, saying that it fails to advance American interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the former Trump adviser Elon Musk worked to dismantle U.S.A.I.D., arguing that its staff was insubordinate. But in recorded messages shared with employees on Monday, former presidents painted a very different picture of the agency and its place in American foreign policy.

“You’ve shown the great strength of America through your work, and that is our good heart,” former President George W. Bush told the staff in a video message played during a videoconference. The video, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, was reported earlier by The Associated Press.

Mr. Bush, shown at right in an official photo from his presidency, cited the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which he initiated, and which has been estimated to have saved 25 million lives. That program’s future, like much of U.S. foreign aid, is unclear.

“Is it in our interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is,” Mr. Bush said. “On behalf of a grateful nation, thank you for your hard work, and God bless you.”

Former President Barack Obama, shown at left on a magazine cover, said in a separate message that the decision to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. would “go down as a colossal mistake.”

“Ending your presence and your programs out in the world hurts the most vulnerable, and it hurts the United States,” Mr. Obama said, citing the agency’s efforts to prevent disease, fight drought and build schools.

“To many people around the world, U.S.A.I.D. is the United States,” Mr. Obama added. He encouraged the agency’s staff to take pride in their work, even as they looked for new jobs.

Bono, the U2 frontman and longtime advocate for developing countries, offered a lyrical send-off in a video of his own.Editors’ PicksCondo or Co-op: Which Is Better for First-Time Buyers?They’re Tiny. They’re Slow. And People Are Obsessed.A British Summer Dessert That Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

“They called you crooks — when you were the best of us, there for the rest of us,” he said. “And don’t think any less of us, when politics makes a mess of us.”

“It’s not left-wing rhetoric to feed the hungry, heal the sick,” Bono added. “If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”

 

New York Times, Ford Foundation’s New Leader Is From Yale Law School, Alan Blinder, July 1, 2025. Heather K. Gerken, the dean of the law school, will run the powerful philanthropy, known for pushing for social justice.

Heather K. Gerken, right, the dean of Yale Law School, will become the president of the Ford Foundation later this year, the group said Tuesday.

Ms. Gerken, who was seen last year as a contender for the Yale presidency, will take over one of the country’s wealthiest and mostinfluential philanthropies at a time of especially fraught debate about social justice and inequality, two of the foundation’s touchstones.

In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Gerken said she was looking forward to working at the foundation “to protect democracy and the rule of law and further our mission to create a more just and fair world for everyone.”

Ms. Gerken will succeed Darren Walker, who announced last summer that he would conclude a 12-year tenure in 2025. About a decade ago, he began to redirect Ford’s philanthropy toward combating inequality, writing then that the foundation would work on “not just wealth disparities, but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity.”

It was a shift in focus for the philanthropy, which was founded in 1936 by Edsel Ford, the only child of Henry Ford, the auto magnate. For many decades, the foundation’s giving was wide-ranging. An early grant helped create what ultimately became PBS, and the foundation went on to spend on everything from orchestras to disaster relief. In 2014, after the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the foundation was at the center of a daring effort that limited the cuts to retired city workers’ pensions and protected the Detroit Institute of Arts. (The foundation, whose endowment is valued at roughly $16 billion, has also supported journalism programs, including some at The New York Times.)

The Ford Foundation remained a powerhouse after it adjusted its focus. In its most recent publicly available tax return, it reported spending more than $600 million on contributions, gifts and grants, with hundreds of millions more scheduled to be paid in the future. Much of the money recently has gone toward projects it classifies as related to “civic engagement and government,” but it still spreads its largess on an array of initiatives.

In June, for instance, grant recipients included the American Civil Liberties Union’s foundation in Louisiana, the Clinton Foundation, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the National Down Syndrome Congress and Spelman College.

But the foundation has powerful critics who have called for changes to its tax status. As a candidate for Senate, Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that Ford and other foundations were “fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities.” Mr. Vance then asked why Ford should not have its assets seized.

New York Times, Critic’s Notebook: Lauren Sánchez Bezos Commits to the Corset, Vanessa Friedman, July 1, 2025 (print ed.). At her wedding to Jeff Bezos, the bride took her love of a nipped waist to the next level.

Has any woman loved a corset as much as Lauren Sánchez Bezos? Mae West, perhaps, but that was back in the heyday of her Hollywood career, almost a century before Ms. Sánchez Bezos burst into the public consciousness as the new object of the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ very public affection.

Now that she and Mr. Bezos have made their union official, and the foam and fervor surrounding the wedding that riveted the world has (somewhat) settled, so, too, her affiliation with that garment was made complete.

In many ways, Ms. Sánchez Bezos’ penchant for a constricting garment most associated with monarchs and courtesans has become a symbol of the complicated, impossible-to-ignore feelings that their relationship, and wedding itself, have engendered. The ones rooted in age-old stereotypes about feminism, wealth, class, women’s advancement and how it all looks. Or should look.

Rarely has one woman’s style become such a talking point. For every bosom-boosting bustier Ms. Sánchez Bezos has worn, the criticisms have rained down. “Inappropriate,” shrieked a host of online commentators after she wore a crimson off-the-shoulder corseted gown by Rosario to the state dinner for Japan in 2024.

Megyn Kelly was even less diplomatic on her podcast after Ms. Sánchez Bezos wore a white Alexander McQueen pantsuit with a lacy white corset underneath to President Trump’s swearing in ceremony in January. “She looked like a prostitute!” Ms. Kelly said. “She looked like a hooker!”

And yet, Ms. Sánchez Bezos doesn’t seem to care. She has refused to conform to the archetype of the demure, W.A.S.P. upper class. Bombshell Sophia Loren was her bridal inspiration, not Babe Paley.

 

June

June 30

 

New York Times, Guest Essay: What the University of Virginia Should Have Done, Timothy J. Heaphy (the former university counsel for the University of Virginia), June 30, 2025. Protesters at the University of Virginia showed their support last week for President James Ryan, shown above in a file photo. 

On Friday, Jim Ryan stood on the lawn of Carr’s Hill, the residence of the president of the University of Virginia, alone in the center of a crowd of supporters. He offered brief remarks about his inability to fight the forces arrayed against him, including the Trump administration. No one stood alongside him — it was just the university president, Mr. Ryan, explaining why he had made the difficult decision to quit.

The moment perfectly illustrated how Mr. Ryan was abandoned by the same people who were supposed to protect the university. Under investigation by the Justice Department, the university had a strong defense, if only it had the courage to assert it. Instead of fighting back against what I believe to be false accusations that the university was violating federal law, and the even more outrageous demand that Mr. Ryan resign as a remedy for those alleged violations, the university’s Board of Visitors pushed out a popular president. Instead of presenting facts and law, the board waved the white flag of surrender. Mr. Ryan’s resignation is a victory for intimidation and fear over the rule of law.

According to The Times, Mr. Ryan’s departure was prompted by “demands by the Trump administration that he step aside to help resolve a Justice Department inquiry into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.” The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has been investigating the university for its alleged failure to eliminate D.E.I. programs and continuing to consider race and ethnicity in various programs and scholarships.

I served as university counsel at the University of Virginia from 2018 through 2022. During that time, it was my job to defend the university from unfounded allegations and investigations. The Justice Department has alleged that the university’s actions violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Had I been university counsel last week, I would have advised my client to challenge what I believe to be a false allegation that the university’s policies are unlawful.

Title VI prohibits racial classifications, quotas or programs that are exclusive to any one race, gender or protected class. It does not prevent federal contractors, such as universities, from pursuing the goal of creating a diverse community, one that ensures all individuals can participate in the learning environment regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, national origin or political ideology. Eligibility for programs and opportunities based on those and other immutable characteristics is illegal. Programs that create a pipeline of diverse applicants are not.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Since President Trump’s executive order on D.E.I. and subsequent guidance issued by the Department of Education, the university has taken steps to ensure that it broadened eligibility for university programs, scholarships and services to all students, regardless of race, ethnicity or other classification. It redesigned (not simply relabeled) certain programs to ensure they fostered the valid policy goal of inclusive excellence, diversity of experience and perspective and ensuring that all students are welcome.

Mr. Ryan supervised this transition that observed the line between illegal discrimination and legal pursuit of the policy goal of ensuring a broadly diverse community.

While the university’s compliance with Title VI is clear to me, it was challenged by the Justice Department. Informed by the advocacy of the America First Legal Foundation, an organization founded by the current White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, the department alleged that the university’s compliance efforts were insufficient, a mere relabeling of D.E.I. programs that broke the law. The department’s proposed remedy was the resignation of the university’s leader — a shocking move that reveals the personal animus behind the investigation. The administration would rather oust a leader than force compliance with a particular policy.

The hammer wielded by the Justice Department was the potential cessation of federal grant funding. The university had viable legal options to block this effort, too. Harvard University has persuasively argued that the university has a First Amendment right to pursue programs that promote a broadly diverse community and deserves due process before grants are removed. While the Harvard case remains pending, most higher education lawyers predict success for the university.

Instead of asserting these valid defenses, the University of Virginia opted to capitulate to the demand for Mr. Ryan’s resignation, tacitly agreeing with the notion that the university somehow engaged in illegal racial discrimination.

Why? By law, the university and all state agencies are represented by the attorney general of Virginia. The current attorney general has been an outspoken opponent of D.E.I. programs. He joined Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, in applauding the university’s dismantling of D.E.I. programs in March 2025. This means rather than having an advocate loyal to the university and its interests, Mr. Ryan and the university were saddled with counsel aligned with the other side.

The university’s governing board took a similar position. The majority of the current board was appointed by Mr. Youngkin, who has said, “D.E.I. is done at the University of Virginia.” In failing to assert these valid legal defenses, the board abdicated its responsibility to protect the university and defend it against unfounded allegations.

In announcing his decision to resign, Mr. Ryan said, “I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government to save my own job.” His candor demonstrates the alliances at work here: the university’s leader standing alone against his own lawyer, the governing board, and the Trump administration. The crowd that gathered on Friday had Mr. Ryan’s back, but they did not have the ability to overcome biased advocates and overseers with a political agenda.

Mr. Ryan was known to urge the university to be both “great and good” in all its endeavors. His departure will result in a less inclusive university community, which will harm all students who choose the University of Virginia. It is a sad day for the university, which will suffer the consequences of this bad decision.

June 27

New York Times, Campus Crackdown: Johns Hopkins Gets the Most Federal Money, but Now Much of It Is at Risk, Vimal Patel, June 27, 2025 (print ed.). The university is not a direct target of the Trump administration but faces some of the biggest cuts, as Republicans seek to trim government spending.

As President Trump unleashes dizzying firepower at the nation’s top universities, he and his supporters have made the argument that the institutions have brought such action onto themselves.

They turned into bastions of leftism hostile to conservative thought and lost the trust of the American people, according to the administration. The universities accrued massive endowments, becoming less like noble nonprofits spreading good to the world and more like corporations taking advantage of government largess, the argument goes.

Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, which receives the most federal funding of any American university, has been listening.

For years, he has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools.

The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money.

The university’s troubles show how a Republican campaign against higher education could decimate the nation’s research enterprise. 

New York Times, Newsom Sues Fox News for Saying He Lied About Call With Trump, Laurel Rosenhall, June 27, 2025. The lawsuit, which seeks at least $787 million in damages, comes as the California governor adopts an increasingly combative style with the president and his allies

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California sued Fox News on Friday, accusing the network of defaming him in its coverage of a phone call he had with President Trump this month.

The suit, filed in Delaware, where Fox News is incorporated, seeks damages of at least $787 million and a court order prohibiting Fox from broadcasting or posting segments that mistakenly say Mr. Newsom lied about his call with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Newsom has adopted an increasingly combative approach with the president since Mr. Trump sent military troops to Los Angeles this month amid his administration’s immigration crackdown. The governor, a Democrat, is taking a page from the president by suing a news media outlet over coverage.

Mr. Newsom’s lawyers also sent Fox News a letter demanding a formal retraction and an on-air apology from Jesse Watters, a host who said on his show that Mr. Newsom had lied about the call with the president. If those conditions are met, the letter states, Mr. Newsom will dismiss the lawsuit.

The punitive damages sought by Mr. Newsom mirror the amount that Fox News agreed to pay in 2023 to settle a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems that accused the network of publicizing false election conspiracies that damaged the company.

“If Fox News wants to lie to the American people on Donald Trump’s behalf, it should face consequences — just like it did in the Dominion case,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “I believe the American people should be able to trust the information they receive from a major news outlet.”

Fox News responded by questioning the sincerity of Mr. Newsom’s lawsuit.

“Gov. Newsom’s transparent publicity stunt is frivolous and designed to chill free speech critical of him,” Fox News said in a statement. “We will defend this case vigorously and look forward to it being dismissed.”

The allegations at the heart of the lawsuit stem from volleys between Mr. Newsom and Mr. Trump after the president invoked a rarely used federal statute to seize control of the California National Guard over the governor’s objections to respond to protests against federal immigration raids.

The two leaders spoke by phone late at night on June 6 in California, which was after 1 a.m. June 7 on the East Coast, according to Mr. Newsom and a cellphone record provided by Mr. Trump. The president activated the National Guard less than 24 hours after the call.

The lawsuit claims that Fox News deliberately mischaracterized the disagreement between the governor and the president to harm Mr. Newsom’s political career. It says viewers who saw Fox’s false reports that Mr. Newsom had lied would be less likely to support him in future elections or donate to his campaigns.

Though Mr. Newsom and California are frequently criticized by Fox News hosts, the governor has made several high-profile appearances on the network in recent years. In 2023, Mr. Newsom sat for a lengthy interview with Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, and participated in a debate with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida that aired on the network.

June 26

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism, Landmark AI ruling is a blow to authors and artists, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, June 26, 2025. In television ads, AI tools appear to work like magic, generating useful information or smooth prose in response to a wide variety of prompts.

In reality, these tools, known as Large Language Models (LLMs), are trained by AI companies on enormous quantities of text and images produced by humans. These AI companies have billions in funding, but in nearly all cases, the authors of these works are not compensated.

In August 2024, three authors — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, which created the popular AI chatbot Claude. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff members. The splinter group believed a new company was necessary to refocus on the purported original mission of OpenAI: creating ethical AI that benefits everyone. The company says it makes "decisions that maximize positive outcomes for humanity in the long run."

Books are particularly valuable for LLMs precisely because humans have taken such care to produce them. If you want to teach a computer the nuances of many different topics — and how to write clearly — there is no substitute for books. But when it came time to train Claude, Anthropic did not start by buying books. Instead, it "downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet," including books by the three authors who filed the lawsuit.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitted there were "many places" where the company could have purchased the books, but it chose to steal them to avoid the "legal/practice/business slog." Over the course of a few years, Anthropic downloaded over seven million books to train Claude. In response to the lawsuit, Anthropic claimed that using these pirated works to train Claude was "fair use."

This week, a federal judge, William Alsup, rejected Anthropic's effort to dismiss the case and found that stealing books from the internet is likely a copyright violation. A trial will be scheduled in the future. If Anthropic loses, each violation could come with a fine of $750 or more, potentially exposing the company to billions in damages. Other AI companies that use stolen work to train their models — and most do — could also face significant liability.

But Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic on a related issue that ultimately may prove more important. While Anthropic originally downloaded the pirated books, it reconsidered that approach. Anthropic began purchasing millions of books, tearing the pages from their bindings, and creating digital copies for training purposes. These new digital copies would then be duplicated multiple times to train various AI models.

Alsup found that as long as the original copy is purchased legally, books can be copied and memorized by AI models without the author's permission. In making this argument, Alsup anthropomorphized AI models, saying what Anthropic is doing is no different than a person reading a book and then using that information to write a new text:

Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable. For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing problems.

Of course, LLMs are not people. They do not read or write. They are software products created by corporations with billions in funding that are capable of storing the exact contents of millions of books. The models, once trained on these books, are capable of quickly producing exact replicas or similar works that could be used for the same purpose.

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Although Alsup claims otherwise, this could significantly degrade the value of the original work. For example, one of the authors who sued Anthropic, Graeber, published a book in 2018 called "The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer." The book documents the development of cancer immunotherapies that culminated in a Nobel Prize. Claude, in part because it was trained on Graeber's book, could create a narrative of the rise of cancer immunotherapies in the style of Graeber. Some Claude users could read that narrative instead of the book.

The ruling, should it be upheld on a likely appeal, would be a major blow not just for book authors but millions of other writers and creatives. The New York Times, for example, has sued OpenAI, alleging that its ChatGPT product uses the New York Times’ copyrighted reporting without permission. If Alsup's ruling were applied to the facts of that case, ChatGPT could train its models on the New York Times reporting for the cost of a single subscription. Similarly, major music labels have sued two companies that "released AI programs that enable users to generate songs from text prompts." Could a subscription to Spotify be all that's required to avoid liability?

Alsup's ruling does have some limitations, as it applies only to the training of AI models. Alsup is open to the possibility that the output of the models could violate copyright law if it were too similar to the original work. Alsup does not consider that issue with regard to Anthropic because the plaintiffs "do not allege… that any LLM outputs infringing upon their works ever reached users of the public-facing Claude service." The judge also says that Anthropic created filters to ensure "no exact copy, nor any substantial knock-off" from being delivered to users. That, of course, entirely depends on your interpretation of the word "substantial." 

 

New York Times, Trump Justice Dept. Pressuring University of Virginia President to Resign, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, June 26, 2025. The Justice Department has demanded that James E. Ryan step down to help resolve a civil rights investigation into the school, three people familiar with the matter said.

The Trump administration has privately demanded that the University of Virginia oust its president to help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood.

The government’s extensive pressure campaign has stripped billions of dollars from elite universities, including Harvard, which has been the target of investigations from at least six different federal agencies. But this is the first time the administration has pushed a university to remove its leader.

The Justice Department has contended to the university that the president, James E. Ryan, has not dismantled the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs and misrepresented the steps taken to end them. A spokesman for the department did not immediately return a request for comment.

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan, right, was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, has also been involved in negotiations with the university. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the law school at the same time as Mr. Ryan.

The people briefed on the back-and-forth between the university and the Justice Department spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing negotiations that were supposed to remain private.

Mr. Ryan, hired in 2018 as the university’s ninth president, has leaned into issues like making the school more diverse, increasing the number of first-generation students and encouraging students to do community service. But his approach, which he says will make the university “both great and good,” has rankled conservative alumni and Republican board members who accuse him of wanting to impose his values on students and claim he is “too woke.” 

 

June 23

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 22 [Fact-Checking White House Claims On Iran], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 23, 2025. Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”

There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.

 

President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside Vice President JD Vance (L), Secretary of State Marco Rubio (2nd R), and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R) on June 21, 2025, following the announcement that the US bombed nuclear sites in Iran. (Pool photo by Carlos Barria for AFP via Getty Images).

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism, A new war based on manipulated intelligence, Judd Legum, right, June 23, 2025. More than two decades after the Iraq War commenced, history is repeating itself.

On March 20, 2002, President George W. Bush began the bombing campaign in Iraq, justifying the attack with manipulated and bogus intelligence. Twenty-three years later, history is repeating itself.

The clear judgment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not authorized a nuclear weapons program. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the nation's top intelligence official, said so publicly on March 25, 2025. "The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003," Gabbard asserted in her opening statement.

Last Tuesday, asked about Gabbard's testimony on Iran, Trump said, "I don't care what she said." On Friday, as his rhetoric became more bellicose, Trump was reminded of that March assessment and asked: "What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon?" Trump did not say that the intelligence community had gathered new information since March. Rather, Trump said that "my intelligence community is wrong." He also publicly rebuked Gabbard again, adding, "She's wrong."

Now, to justify the bombing of several sites in Iran, top members of the Trump administration claim Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, Vice President JD Vance said that the administration believed "the Iranians were rushing toward a nuclear weapons program." That directly contradicts the March assessment by the IC that no such program had been authorized, much less commenced.

New York Times, Inside Trump’s Decision to Strike Iran, Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, June 23, 2025 (print ed.). When Israel began its assault on Iran, President Trump kept his distance. But within days he was on a path that led to an extensive bombing mission aided by political and military ruses.

Standing at the lectern in the White House briefing room on Thursday afternoon, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, read a message she said came “directly from the president.”

Because of the “substantial chance of negotiations” with Iran that could bring the United States back from the brink of jumping into the war in the Middle East, President Trump’s statement said, he would make a decision about whether or not to strike Iran “within the next two weeks.”

Mr. Trump had been under pressure from the noninterventionist wing of his party to stay out of the conflict, and was having lunch that day with one of the most outspoken opponents of a bombing campaign, Stephen K. Bannon, fueling speculation that he might hold off.

It was almost entirely a deception. Mr. Trump had all but made up his mind to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the military preparations were well underway for the complex attack. Less than 30 hours after Ms. Leavitt relayed his statement, he would give the order for an assault that put the United States in the middle of the latest conflict to break out in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Mr. Trump’s “two weeks” statement was just one aspect of a broader effort at political and military misdirection that took place over eight chaotic days, from the first Israeli strikes against Iran to the moment when a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers took off from Missouri for the first American military strikes inside Iran since that country’s theocratic revolution in 1979.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump ‘wags the dog,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, June 23, 2025. Risky military action disrupts the political dynamic.

Donald Trump, without authorization from Congress and without substantive consultation, took a fateful step in ordering the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, based on the false pretext that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear weapon.

The consequences of this move have yet to unfold, and the breathtaking array of outcomes—from another forever war to a failed state in Iran to a quickly negotiated nuclear deal—makes it impossible to predict how this will affect Trump’s agenda and his ongoing assault on democracy. His failure to get authorization for a strike in a war in which the U.S. was acting offensively, despite there being any immediate threat (no one with sense believes Trump’s contradiction of our own intelligence that Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) raises grave constitutional and political consequences.

Despite Trump’s war-talk Saturday night, Vice President JD Vance insists we are not at war. That, as even this crew understands, would require congressional action. On one level, such an assertion is preposterous—as we have indeed become combatants in an extended, ongoing war.

Whatever fiction the administration advances, as Tom Nichols points out, “the enemy gets a vote.” The most likely scenario, he suggests, is not as tidy as Trump would have us believe:

The Iranian regime will be wounded but will likely survive; the nuclear program will be delayed but will likely continue; the region will become more unstable but is unlikely to erupt into a full-blown war involving the United States.

Should we get bogged down in an extended war or face retaliation, Trump’s unilateral action based on a lie (not even DNI Tulsi Gabbard thinks Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) will be viewed as a gross error and a constitutional overstep.

In any case, Trump most certainly has violated the War Powers Resolution (WPR). Just Security explains:

Before the president involves U.S. forces in hostilities abroad (or circumstances where hostilities are likely), the WPR requires the president to “consult with Congress.” The WPR also requires the president to report to Congress within 48 hours whenever certain conditions are met that could lead to the United States getting drawn into a war that Congress hasn’t authorized.

Having failed to consult in any meaningful way, Congress must reclaim its authority.

“The heart of the WPR is its termination provision, which is intended to provide a mechanism to ensure the president does not continue to involve U.S. forces in hostilities without specific congressional authorization,” Just Security notes. “Under the WPR, the president must ‘terminate any use’ of U.S. Armed Forces that were introduced into hostilities … 60 days after the required notification unless Congress has specifically authorized that use of U.S. Armed Forces by statute, passed a law extending the 60-day period, or has been “physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States.”

Regardless of its constitutionality, Trump’s decision to proceed without Congress based on a false pretext is outrageous, especially when the American public overwhelmingly opposes another protracted Middle East war. 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Newsmax Anchor Shared AI Video of Ford Mustang Driving Through Pride Parade, J.D. Wolf, June 23, 2025. The video was captioned “Best Mustang Ad Ford could use.”

Carl Higbie, a pro-Trump anchor on Newsmax, reposted a disturbing video to his Instagram Stories on Thursday. The clip, which appears to be AI generated, depicted a Black Ford Mustang speeding through what appeared to be a Pride parade of some sorts, plowing into a crowd of people waving rainbow flags.Carl Higbie

The caption over the video read: “Best Mustang Ad Ford could use,” suggesting that Ford should embrace the violent imagery as branding of running over people. Newsmax, which went public in March, boasts of Higbie in its pitch to sell ads to advertisers like Ford.

June 17

ProMarket, the publication of the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, How Media Concentration in the Age of Radio Prefigured Today’s Big Tech Debate, Richard R. John, June 17, 2025.

In the 1930s, staffers at the newly established Federal Communications Commission devised a novel rationale for limiting network power in radio, telephony, and the press. While much has changed since the “age of radio,” the concerns they raised inform the present-day debate over the control that social media platforms exert over public discourse, writes Richard R. John. This article is based on remarks that John gave at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference this past April.

Fake news, as Paul Starr documented in his presentation at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference, has long troubled journalists unable to gain access to coveted sources, promoters eager to break into new markets, and lawmakers troubled by bad press. Though the United States in 1920 boasted many more newspapers than any other country in the world—a byproduct of a raft of public policies designed to encourage local reporting—critics charged that news content in publications large and small was skewed in favor of advertisers, government officials, and the powers-that-be.

The pro-establishment bias of news content outraged radical journalist Upton Sinclair, who in 1919 published The Brass Check, a biting indictment of the subordination to vested interests of even the most highly respected newspapers and magazines. The brass check was a token that the patron of a brothel gave to the prostitute of his choice, and, by analogy, the payments journalists surreptitiously received to slant their reporting.

Sinclair’s critique had a solid basis in fact. It was a shock to discover, reminisced veteran journalist John Jessup in 1977, that—or so Jessup learned from colleagues at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency—over half of the news stories in the New York Times in the early 1930s could be traced to the public relations work of press agents. Fully half of all news items in the press, reported one political scientist in 1930, originated in this way. “Many reporters today,” the social scientist concluded, “are little more than intellectual mendicants who go from one publicity agent or press bureau to another seeking ‘handouts.’”

The news bias that Sinclair derided did not lead to calls for the restructuring of the newspaper business. Journalists, and many others, might well have denounced such a proposal had it been seriously entertained—and it was not—as a flagrant infringement of the free expression clause of the First Amendment.

To be sure, public policy shaped print media in myriad ways. Libel law constrained editorial opinion; tariff schedules influenced the cost of newsprint (a major factor in the cost of every print publication); and administrative regulations limited the advertising content of publications that coveted the low-cost postal rates that Congress authorized for newspapers and magazines. Yet Sinclair had a point by stressing the influence on news content of advertising. Advertisers in Sinclair’s day not only supplied much of the content that journalists surreptitiously called news, but they also skewed the journalists’ business coverage to favor the economic interests of their clients. He who paid the piper called the tune. For example, the dubious business practices of the sketchy businesses that peddled quack medical remedies known as “patent medicine” were rarely called out by journalists because their proprietors advertised so heavily in the press.

Radio transforms communications regulation

The commercialization of radio broadcasting that began in 1920 transformed the public debate over news bias. Radio broadcasting presupposed exclusive access to specific wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum was a new kind of “national domain” over which the federal government exercised sovereign authority.

Contemporaries took it for granted that the spectrum was limited, a presumption that made obligatory the establishment of standard-setting protocols. No such presumption had shaped the publishers of newspapers or magazines, transforming almost overnight what had been a debate over news bias into a debate over media concentration.

Regulation was a priority not only for incumbent radio broadcasters—who, or so economist R. H. Coase mistakenly contended, had “captured” the regulatory apparatus—but also for every major interest group with a financial stake in the new medium. Prominent among these stakeholders were the manufacturers of radio sets. From their standpoint, as the social scientists David A. Moss and Jonathan B. L. Decker have documented, the spectrum-scarcity presumption minimized the likelihood that radio broadcasters might render their receivers obsolete by scheduling programming on wavelengths to which they had not been tuned.

The regulation of the spectrum was coordinated through the licensing of individual radio stations, a task that would be performed between 1927 and 1934 by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and after 1934 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The framework that the FRC and the FCC established for the regulation of what would become known as “mass communications” would remain long after the age of radio had come to a close with the commercialization of television after the Second World War.

To help minimize the possibility that radio broadcasting might come under foreign control, the FCC mandated that the owners of radio stations be U. S. citizens. “Country over company” was the taken-for-granted rationale for these restrictions, a convention that the present-day social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg has inverted by professing allegiance to “company over country” in Meta’s quest for global dominance.

The FCC also intervened to shape broadcasting content. For example, to help provide listeners with access to a range of perspectives on current events, the agency mandated what we might call today “viewpoint diversity.” Pluralism was hardwired into the “fairness doctrine,” a checklist of broadcasting “do’s and don’t’s” that shaped the content of radio and television from 1949 until its repeal in 1987. The much-derided conformism of the U.S. in the 1950s had many sources. Among them was the continuing commitment of the FCC to the regulation of radio and television in the public interest.

Three features of communications policy in the radio age would seem to be particularly relevant to the present-day debate over the regulation of the social media platforms that are popularly known at Big Tech. The first is the identification of media concentration as a problem for which a public policy solution could be found. This presumption received a major impetus from the establishment in 1934 of the FCC as an umbrella agency with jurisdiction over every communications medium that relied on electric power: radio, point-to-point wireless, the underseas cable, the landline telegraph, and the telephone.

The FCC in its formative era—a period that stretched from its establishment in 1934 to the end of the tenure of its fourth chair James Lawrence Fly a decade later—has in my view been unjustly maligned as unduly beholden to vested interests, particularly the nation’s dominant radio networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). True, the FCC failed in this period to limit the cross-ownership of radio stations by newspaper publishers, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt had hoped. Roosevelt believed that his administration was likely to receive more favorable treatment from radio broadcasters than from newspaper publishers, since the FCC exercised though its licensing power considerable control over individual radio stations, a power that no federal government agency could claim with respect to newspapers and magazines.

Fearful that Roosevelt might try to expand federal government control over the press, newspaper publishers in New York, Chicago, and several other big cities vigorously championed their prerogatives by defending—or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, and as the cultural historians Michael Stamm and Sam Lebovic have documented, inventing—a libertarian interpretation of the free press guarantee in the first amendment. The ability of newspaper publishers to own radio stations promised to improve their bottom line, while depriving Roosevelt of influence over an increasingly popular medium.

The Federal Communications Commission and media concentration

The FCC proved more successful in limiting “chain” or network broadcasting by weakening the protocols that had been devised by NBC and CBS to restrict the autonomy of their affiliates. Each network was headquartered in New York City, a fact that was not lost on Fly, a proud Texan whose ancestors had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Fearful of the influence that NBC and CBS exerted over their affiliates’ programming, the FCC devised protocols that increased their affiliates’ ability to set their own advertising rates, choose between rival network offerings, and develop original programming. Fly went so far as to order NBC to sell its second network, which became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), a directive that in 1943 received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court in National Broadcasting Company v. United States. The majority opinion, crafted by Justice Felix Frankfurter, a former law school instructor of Fly, offered a sweeping vindication of Fly’s assault on media concentration.

The amassing of information detailing the business strategy of media giants became in the 1930s something of an FCC specialty. FCC economist Dallas W. Smythe helped pioneer the quantitative analysis of media concentration in radio, and, following his departure from the agency, embarked on a long career as a university professor in the emerging field of communications. FCC commissioner Paul A. Walker presided over a massive investigation of the Bell System, the then-dominant telephone network provider. Walker’s investigation created an evidentiary paper trail that featured thousands of pages of testimony, company documents, and statistical charts. This data dump would help to justify the 1949 Justice Department antitrust suit against Bell that culminated in the 1956 consent decree that opened the way for the widespread commercialization of computing in the United States and abroad.

Smythe and Walker were hardly alone. Media concentration as a problem for which regulation could provide a solution was a premise of FCC rule-making in the 1930s. That presumption was built on the unquestioned assumption that, since the spectrum was scarce, it fell on the federal government to ensure that the new medium would be regulated to promote the public good.

The second media-concentration-related concern to emerge at the FCC in its formative era was the relationship between domestic and international point-to-point communications. This concern is unfortunately almost entirely ignored by media critics, such as the late Robert W. McChesney, who remain fixated on the domestic scene. Yet it was of pressing significance to the U. S. Navy. From the standpoint of the navy’s radio engineers, the most threatening media organization was neither NBC and CBS, nor even the Bell System, but the British global media giant Cable and Wireless. Navy engineers regarded media concentration in ocean-borne communications as a national security threat that greatly increased the likelihood that U. S. naval logistics might become subject to foreign control. Intermodal competition became, from this perspective, a hedge against the menace of a global cable-and-wireless cartel.

A final media-concentration-related concern with which the FCC was engaged in this period can be summed up in a single resonant phrase: “listeners’ rights.” The idea that radio broadcasters had an obligation to their audiences that transcended mere profit making had been a staple of popular discourse about the new medium since the 1920s. In no sense was it a partisan issue. Though this principle would be enthusiastically embraced by Fly, a Democrat, it could count among its defenders the Republican stalwart Herbert Hoover.

Radio broadcasters, in Fly’s view, were, by virtue of the limited nature of the spectrum, beneficiaries of a government-granted special privilege. As a result, they had an obligation to put audience above profits even if this proved disadvantageous to their balance sheet. “The radio,” Fly explained in 1941, in an eloquent statement of his resolute listener-centrism, “is the most potent of all instruments for the projection of speech to the millions….The essential function of this publicly owned facility cannot be appraised without primary regard for the rights of the listening public.” Among the listeners’ rights that Fly regarded as the most fundamental were access to locally produced content and exposure to diverse viewpoints on matters of public concern.

The FCC’s commitment to listeners’ rights shaped what is perhaps the most underappreciated major agency ruling in its formative era: the Mayflower doctrine. Promulgated in January 1941, in keeping with the longstanding conviction of President Roosevelt that radio broadcasts should be “entirely factual,” this doctrine proscribed any radio broadcaster from expressing an editorial position on any of the major public controversies of the day. Had this doctrine not been in force when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it would seem likely, given the sharp divide in the U.S. regarding foreign entanglements, that U.S. radio coverage of the Second World War would have been considerably more contentious, and the country much less united in a perilous juncture in its history.

The U.S. never established a government radio broadcasting agency to rival the British Broadcasting Corporation. In retrospect, the advertising-driven regulatory regime that did emerge would be constrained not only by advertisers—as media critics have long contended, echoing Upton Sinclair—but also by the rules of the game. Whether or not the spectrum was scarce was ultimately less important to the Roosevelt administration than whether or not radio broadcasters rallied to the cause.

Conclusion

James Lawrence Fly may well be the most important New Deal administrator most twentieth-century U. S. historians have never heard of. A principled anti-fascist, he defended listeners’ rights to promote a pluralistic vision of the good society. Following the Second World War, the U.S. would export this vision to much of the rest of the world.

All of this may well appear to be ancient history today. Yet, as this brief overview of media concentration in the radio age suggests, interwar U.S. communications policy was shaped less by Benthamite cost-benefit analysis than by what one historian has aptly called a “civic ambition.” The DNA of U.S. media policy is not only commercial—which it has been from the founding of the republic—but also pluralistic, anti-monopolistic, and anti-statist.

Fly built on this legacy. He did not invent it. Among the unanticipated consequences of the FCC’s civic mandate for communications regulation was the hostile response it elicited from big-city newspaper publishers. The origins of what media critic Victor Pickard has dubbed “corporate libertarianism” can be found not in the Reaganite 1980s (which witnessed the demise of the fairness doctrine), but in the interwar period. Hostility to content moderation received a powerful impetus not only from advertisers, but also from big-city newspaper publishers, which, in their contest with the Roosevelt administration, devised precedents that would be mobilized in the decades to come by Big Tech platforms to consolidate their power over the information infrastructure of the digital age.

Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications and is a member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications. His publications include many essays, eight edited books, and two monographs: Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).Popular This WeekEU and US Antitrust Is Converging on Anti-MonopolyChina Is Using Its Market Power To Influence Foreign PolicymakingHow Conflicts of Interest Shape Trust in Academic Work.

ProMarket is the publication of the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. ProMarket is an academic forum focused on topics of special interest capture, antitrust, political economy, and the future of capitalism. Economists have become increasingly technical and specialized, a trend with benefits but also costs: important topics are often ignored by economists because there isn’t sufficient data or theory to analyze them. We want to provide a forum to bridge the gap between specialized academic journals and general outlets like mainstream news. Our aim is to foster discussion and debate of economic ideas with the rigor of the best academic work, but without the pedantry that often accompanies it.

June 10 

New York Times, Fake Images and Conspiracy Theories Swirl Around L.A. Protests, Steven Lee Myers, June 10, 2025. Disinformation spreading on social media platforms has stoked an already tense situation.

Misleading photographs, videos and text have spread widely on social media as protests against immigrant raids have unfolded in Los Angeles, rehashing old conspiracy theories and expressing support for President Trump’s actions.

The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats.

They also added to the confusion over what exactly was happening on the streets, which was portrayed in digital and social media through starkly divergent ideological lenses. Many posts created the false impression that the entire city was engulfed in violence, when the clashes were limited to only a small part.

There were numerous scenes of protesters throwing rocks or other objects at law enforcement officers and setting cars ablaze, including a number of self-driving Waymo taxis. At the same time, false images spread to revive old conspiracies that the protests were a planned provocation, not a spontaneous response to the immigration raids.

The confrontation escalated on Monday as new protests occurred and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced — on X — that he was mobilizing 700 Marines from a base near Los Angeles to guard federal buildings. They are expected to join 2,000 members of the California National Guard whom Mr. Trump ordered deployed without the authorization of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who normally has command of the troops.

The latest deployments prompted a new wave of misleading images to spread — some purporting to show Marines and the military service’s weapons in action. One was a still from “Blue Thunder,” a 1983 action-thriller about a conspiracy to deprive residents of Los Angeles of their civil rights. It features a climactic dogfight over the city’s downtown. 

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Declares Dubious Emergencies to Amass Power, Scholars Say, Adam Liptak, June 10, 2025. In disputes over protests, deportations and tariffs, the president has invoked statutes that may not provide him with the authority he claims.

To hear President Trump tell it, the nation is facing a rebellion in Los Angeles, an invasion by a Venezuelan gang and extraordinary foreign threats to its economy.

Citing this series of crises, he has sought to draw on emergency powers that Congress has scattered throughout the United States Code over the centuries, summoning the National Guard to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s governor, sending scores of migrants to El Salvador without the barest hint of due process and upending the global economy with steep tariffs.

Legal scholars say the president’s actions are not authorized by the statutes he has cited and are, instead, animated by a different goal.

“He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties,” said Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School who represents a wine importer and other businesses challenging some of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Crisis is Mr. Trump’s brand. When he took office the first time, he promised to end “American carnage.” When he announced his most recent re-election campaign, he said he would reverse “staggering American decline.” Ever since he first ran for president in 2015, he has argued that only he can restore the country to greatness.

Now in office again, he is converting that rhetoric into policy. Mr. Trump says that events and circumstances largely considered routine amount to emergencies that allow him to invoke powers rarely sought by his predecessors but embedded in statutes by lawmakers who wanted to ensure presidents could act quickly and aggressively to confront authentic crises.

Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, said the laws Mr. Trump has invoked were premised on a presumption that the flexibility they granted would not be abused.

“Genuine emergencies do occur, and Congress knows that it’s slow,” Professor Bowman said. “It wants presidents acting in good faith to move with rapidity.”

But Professor Bowman said Mr. Trump’s approach was different. “Declaring everything an emergency begins to move us in the direction of allowing the use of government force and violence against people you don’t like,” he said.

 

The Warning with Steve Schmidt via Substack and YouTube, Opinion: Trump WILL Unleash Our Military Against American Citizens, Steve Schmidt, above (former Republican presidential campaign strategist), June 10, 2025. (13:40 mins.). The Warning will tell you what happens in politics before it happens.  

New York Times, Trump Threatens Any Protesters at Military Parade With ‘Very Big Force,’ Erica L. Green and Maggie Haberman, June 10, 2025. “I haven’t even heard about a protest,” at the Saturday event in Washington celebrating the Army, he said, but “this is people that hate our country.”

President Trump said on Tuesday that protesters who assembled during a military parade he planned in Washington on Saturday for the Army’s 250th birthday would be met with “very big force” — a dark warning that made no distinction between peaceful demonstrations and violent confrontations.

In remarks from the Oval Office before he left for North Carolina, where he was scheduled to participate in events at Fort Bragg related to the anniversary, Mr. Trump boasted about the “amazing day” he planned before saying that any demonstrators would be dealt with harshly.

“For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” Mr. Trump said. “And I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”

Mr. Trump’s comments came after the president spent several minutes praising his administration’s deployment of thousands of National Guard and Marines in response to protests that had broken out over the weekend in Los Angeles against sweeping federal immigration raids.

The episodes of unrest have included burned cars, concrete chunks hurled at officers and robberies at spots like an Apple store. Supporters of the California protests who oppose Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdowns have said the protests were largely peaceful, and that the episodes of violence have been amplified by Mr. Trump’s allies and administration. 

 

New York Times, Southern Baptists Endorse Effort to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage, Ruth Graham, June 10, 2025. The nation’s largest Protestant denomination was motivated by conservative Christians’ success in reversing Roe v. Wade,

Southern Baptists voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to call for the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, with strategists citing the successful effort that overturned the right to legal abortions as a possible blueprint for the new fight.

The denomination has long opposed gay marriage, but Tuesday was the first time its members have voted to work to legally end it. Expanding on conservatives’ success in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the vote signals growing evangelical ambitions to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that was handed down 10 years ago this month.

“What we’re trying to do is keep the conversation alive,” said Andrew Walker, an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky who wrote the resolution.

Mr. Walker leads the Southern Baptist committee that gathers proposals from Baptists around the country to be debated and put to a vote at the meeting. Baptists, he said, are taking the long view, inspired by the tactics of the anti-abortion movement. Roe v. Wade granted a constitutional right to abortion that stood for nearly 50 years before activists and legal strategists defeated it, powered by support from Christian conservatives.

The Baptists’ vote against Obergefell took place at the end of the first day of the denomination’s annual meeting, which is being held this year at a convention center in Dallas. Attracting thousands of pastors and church members from large and small congregations across the country, the meeting is being closely watched as a snapshot of evangelical sentiment on a range of political, theological and cultural issues.

Letters from an Americane, Historical Commentary: June 9 [Replacing American Government], 2025, Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 10, 2025. At 10:19 last night, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media: “Stand with ICE. Pass the B[ig] B[eautiful] B[ill].”

And there it is. The Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is the MAGA regime’s attempt to replace the American government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the antidemocratic values of Project 2025. The measure is unpopular. According to a new CBS News/YouGov poll, 60% of Americans think the bill will help wealthy people, while 54% think it will hurt poor people. Forty-seven percent think it will hurt the middle class, while only 31% think it will help the middle class. As Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles noted, it’s “[s]tunning how badly Trump and the Rs have lost the debate on what their reconciliation bill will do.”

The measure changes the nature of the American government by extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and adding significantly more money to immigration enforcement and defense spending. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the measure will add as much as $2.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years; with interest costs of that new debt, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded the measure would increase the debt by nearly $3 trillion.

At the same time that it moves money upward and into the white nationalist project of expelling immigrants, the measure guts federal policies and agencies that serve the American people, apparently with the goal of pushing such policies and agencies to the states. The CBO estimates that as many as 13.7 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage if the measure passes, and cuts of nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will mean cuts of about 30% to the programs on which millions of Americans depend.

Miller’s post underscores the administration’s need to change the conversation around the measure, whose 1,000-plus pages lay out the MAGA vision for the United States. “Don’t kid yourself,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) posted. “[T]hey know they are absolutely getting cooked politically w[ith] their terrible bill and rising prices, and they want to create a violent spectacle to feed their content machine. It’s time for the mainstream media to describe this authoritarian madness accurately.”

Maanvi Singh of The Guardian put the right lens on events in Los Angeles today, noting “Trump’s dramatic escalation” and his vow “to crush opposition to his immigration raids.” Singh identified the administration’s escalation as the trigger for “a roaring backlash.”

 

Democracy Docket, Tracking Trump’s six front war on democracy, Marc Elias, June 10, 2025. In 2019, Steve Bannon laid out the “flood the zone” strategy that Donald Trump has successfully deployed in his second term:

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.

Most observers have interpreted this primarily in terms of policies — the administration signed multiple executive orders at once, making it hard to focus on and fight them all successfully. But this is also the strategy the Trump administration is deploying to capture or destroy the rights and institutions necessary for democracy.

As Bannon suggested, he is attacking them on multiple fronts all at once — at muzzle velocity, he would say. Some have resisted and still look strong. Others capitulated from the start. Most are somewhere in between.

My tip for this week (and the rest of Trump’s term): Pay attention to six key institutions. How well these institutions hold up over the next three and a half years will determine whether our system of government survives. Settle in with a cup of coffee because this is longer than usual, but I have a lot to share.Trump v. Executive Branch

The least surprising of Trump’s attacks has been on the executive branch. Project 2025 was a blueprint for what he would do, and the administration has been following through. Under Pam Bondi’s reign, the Department of Justice has turned into an army of Trump sycophants. They do not pretend to represent the interest of the American people — they serve Trump, and anyone who isn’t ready to fall in line has got to go.

Through DOGE’s mass firings, Trump axed over 200,000 dedicated federal employees. And through his proposal to adopt Schedule F — rebranded as Schedule Policy/Career — which will reclassify career civil servants, the damage will be worse.

Trump’s power grab is extending to independent agencies, too. Agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission are designed to be shielded from the White House, but Trump’s executive order shatters that standard.

Only four months into his second term, and Trump is successfully working his influence into every corner of the executive branch. It is the area he most closely controls and one that the courts seem least inclined to protect.Trump v. Congress

It is often said that we have three co-equal branches of government. As Jaime Raskin, a congressman and former constitutional law professor, is quick to point out, this is not exactly right. The founders envisioned that Congress would be the most powerful branch.

They could not have imagined that Congress would someday be controlled by today’s feckless GOP. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly bent the knee and ceded power to Trump. He is trampling on Congress’ most important power — the power of the purse — by ignoring their directives and refusing to spend on federal programs.

The midterm elections threaten to reset this balance of power. That is why Trump is already focused on ensuring GOP majorities.Trump v. Courts

The judiciary branch has posed the greatest threat to Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional power grab. He’s losing a lot — even before federal judges he nominated. In lawsuit after lawsuit, judges nationwide are standing up for the rule of law and democracy, and Trump is not happy about it.

Trump’s reaction has been evasion, bullying and, when necessary, outright defiance. While the courts have so far held their ground, it is too early to know how this will turn out.

Worse still, Trump is already nominating new federal judges. With the American Bar Association and even the Federalist Society sidelined in this process, the only test these new judges will need to pass is complete loyalty to Trump.Trump v. States

Every student learns in Civics class that we live in a federal system. Indeed, historically, concepts of federalism — often expressed as state rights — have been championed by the right.

In 2013, Chief Justice Roberts relied on federalism to strike down a key pillar of the federal Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. The following year, he reiterated this view: “In our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder.”

With Trump now in power, federalism has fallen out of favor with the GOP. Suddenly, the prospect of Democratic-controlled states exercising power seems less appealing while dictates from Washington, D.C., are in order.

Last weekend, Trump stepped over Gavin Newsom’s head in sending 2,000 National Guard troops in response to protests in Los Angeles. The move was an alarming overreach and abuse of power — but also a warning to governors everywhere. Trump doesn’t see their authority as relevant and is unfazed by any traditional state powers in his quest for a dictatorship. Trump v. Civil Society

As Trump battles for control, it makes sense for him to target major areas of influence: the media, universities, and law firms. So far, we’ve been disappointed by the lack of courage by so many large institutions. Paul Weiss caved, Columbia University wavered and then rolled over, and recently, several media organizations have abandoned journalistic independence to curry favor with Trump. 

National Press Club, National Press Club Condemns Police Targeting of Journalists Covering Los Angeles Protests, Bill McCarren, Updated June 10, 2025. Following multiple disturbing incidents in which Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies targeted, injured, and obstructed journalists covering public protests, National Press Club President Mike Balsamo issued the following statement today:

“Police cannot pick and choose when the First Amendment applies. Journalists in Los Angeles were not caught in the crossfire — they were targeted.

A CNN reporter and crew were forcibly removed from a protest zone in downtown Los Angeles, despite journalists being exempt from dispersal orders under California law, and security personnel working with a CNN team were briefly detained. In another widely viewed incident, an Australian television journalist was struck by a less-lethal round fired by police while reporting live on air. Other journalists were injured, blocked from continuing to report, or denied safe access to observe police activity and arrests.

When police target journalists, they are targeting the public’s right to know. With protests continuing in Los Angeles, police must ensure that reporters can safely do their jobs — not obstruct them or place them in harm’s way. The public depends on their reporting to understand what is happening on the ground.

The National Press Club is calling on Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell and Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna to immediately:

Stop targeting, detaining, or obstructing journalists. Guarantee that journalists can safely observe and report on public demonstrations. Investigate these incidents and hold those responsible accountable.

Thousands of LAPD personnel have received training that includes instruction on how to work safely with journalists during public demonstrations. We urge officers to put that training into practice, and to respect the critical role of the press in keeping the public informed.

A journalist struck by a police-fired round while reporting live. Reporters detained for doing their jobs. A free society depends on a free press — and police must respect that.

Los Angeles officials must act now. The world is watching.”

Associated Press, Florida agency tells newspaper to halt reporting angle on foundation associated with governor’s wife, Mike Schneider, June 9, 2025. Florida’s child welfare agency sent a letter to a Florida newspaper telling it to “cease and desist” its reporting on foster families for a story about a nonprofit associated with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wife that is the subject of an investigation. 

June 9

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 8 [Tanks Into DC; Troops Into LA], Heather Cox Richardson, right, June 9, 2025. Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters.

The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.

In January 2024, Trump pressured Republican lawmakers to kill a bipartisan immigration measure that would have beefed up border security and funding immigration courts because he wanted to campaign on the issue of immigration. During that campaign, Trump made much of the high immigration numbers in the United States after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, when the booming U.S. economy attracted migrants. He went so far as to claim that migrants were eating people’s pets.

Many Trump supporters apparently believed officials in a Trump administration would only deport violent criminals, although Trump’s team had made it clear in his first term that they considered anyone who had broken immigration laws a criminal. Crackdowns began as soon as Trump took office, sweeping in individuals who had no criminal records in the U.S. and who were in the U.S. legally. The administration worked to define those individuals as criminals and insisted they had no right to the due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

There is real weakness behind the regime’s power grab. Trump’s very public blowup with billionaire Elon Musk last week has opened up criticism of the Department of Government Efficiency that Musk controlled. In his fury, Musk suggested to Trump’s loyal followers that the reason the Epstein files detailing sexual assault of children haven’t been released is that Trump is implicated in them. Trump’s promised trade deals have not materialized, and indicators show his policies are hurting the economy.

And the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is raising significant opposition. Today Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) complained about the excessive spending in the bill for ICE, prompting Stephen Miller to complain on social media and to claim that “each deportation saves taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.” But David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute on Friday estimated that the deportation plans in the measure would add almost $1 trillion in costs.

There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state. But in making Los Angeles their flashpoint, they chose a poor place to demonstrate dominance. Unlike a smaller, Republican-dominated city whose people might side with the administration, Los Angeles is a huge, multicultural city that the federal government does not have the personnel to subdue.

Paul Krugman's Substack, Economic Commentary: Nobody Expected the MAGA Inquisition, Paul Krugman, June 9, 2025. But it’s here, and will destroy American science.

It was obvious, if you thought about it, that the second Trump administration would be hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general.

After all, look at some key elements of the MAGA coalition. Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine. (And partisan orientation became a key factor determining whether people were willing to be vaccinated against Covid.) Practitioners of voodoo economics don’t want anyone looking into the actual results of cutting taxes on the rich. Nativists proclaiming an immigrant crime wave don’t want anyone examining who commits violent crimes. And so on.

Even so, the extreme nature of the assault has caught almost everyone by surprise. American scientific leadership and the prestige of our research universities are key pillars of U.S. power and prosperity. Corporate America certainly understands that our scientific and educational institutions contribute to its bottom line. So you might have expected even MAGA enthusiasts to be a bit cautious about killing this particular golden-egg-laying goose.You would have been wrong. Everything points to an effort to effectively destroy U.S. science — not gradually as part of a long-term plan, but over the next year or two.

Start with the money. The preliminary budget the Trump administration released last month called for a cut of almost 40 percent in funding for the National Institutes of Health, more than 50 percent in the budget of the National Science Foundation, the virtual elimination of federal spending on climate and ecological research and a drastic cut in NASA’s research budget. All of this was for fiscal 2026, which begins in October — that is, something like half the federal government’s financial support for science would be eliminated within a few months.

Then there are the attacks on elite universities. First, the administration in effect demanded control over Harvard’s hiring and its curriculum. The university has refused, and has faced a series of attempted punitive actions, most recently a proclamation that the administration will refuse to issue visas for international students trying to attend Harvard and possibly revoke the visas of student already there.

And the administration is threatening to revoke Columbia’s accreditation, which is not a power it legally has, but these days, who knows?

Finally, there’s what clearly looks like an attempt to politicize whatever scientific funding remains. Medical journals have received threatening letters from the Justice Department. An executive order issued May 23, titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” purports to be about restoring “scientific integrity,” but would give political appointees the right to “correct scientific information” and to “forward potential violations to the relevant human resources officials for discipline.”

And can you think of a group you’d trust less to “correct” science and decide who to discipline than Trump and his people?

As an open letter signed by thousands of scientists says, there are obvious parallels between what the Trumpists are trying to do and the corruption of science by past totalitarian regimes.

So it’s clear what they’re doing.

 

Speakers at Friday's town hall (June 6, 2025) included Tompkins County Legislators Rich John and Deborah Dawson, author and organizer Andrew Kreig and Cornell professor Risa Lieberwitz (Photo by Cereese Qusba / The Ithaca Voice).

The Ithaca Voice, Town hall focuses on local impacts of federal spending cuts — so far, Cereese Qusba, June 9, 2025. Fifteen lost truckloads of food pantry supplies. A billion dollars in federal research funding cuts. ICE arrests carried out in Ithaca despite itssanctuary city status.

The Trump administration’s policies have begun to trickle down to the local level, and the impacts are poised to deepen in the coming months.

Tompkins County residents flocked to a town hall on Friday, featuring a Cornell University professor, county legislators, and nonprofit leaders discussing the local and statewide implications and threats of the Trump administration.

The event was organized by Andrew Kreig, a Cornell graduate and a longtime nonprofit executive and author. Kreig offered an opening address, focusing on the influence of media and media framing. He was followed by Risa Lieberwitz, a professor at the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell, who argued that the Trump administration is systematically attacking higher education as part of an authoritarian agenda.

“Authoritarian regimes always attack higher education,” Lieberwitz said. “Because universities are where we find critical thinking, questioning the status quo and organizing for social justice.”

On Apr. 8, the federal government froze over $1 billion in funding for Cornell amid Title VI investigations led by the U.S. Department of Education.

In a statement to the Cornell University community on May 7, University President, Michael Kotlikoff, said that significant medical and military research is halted in response to the federal funding freeze.

“To date, federal agencies have stopped work on or terminated more than 100 research projects at Cornell, abruptly ending ongoing research grants with no official notice of their future status,” Kotlikoff said.

Lieberwitz emphasized the Trump administration’s misuse of civil rights law, remarking that “Trump has weaponized Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—not to protect civil rights, but to silence political speech and dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.”

Rich John, the chair of the county’s Public Safety Committee, highlighted the Trump administration’s disruption of relations between local law enforcement and federal law enforcement, especially when it comes to immigration enforcement.

“So we now appear to be in a fundamentally different world where mutual trust, as we’ve operated under, is not valued,” John said. “The courtesy and respect that was ordinary is not, and we’re not being asked for collaboration.”

John noted that public safety in the local community is built on cooperation, trust and respect, which he said have been eschewed by President Donald Trump’s high-handed tactics. He warned that the administration has militarized immigration policy not just to pursue deportations, but to intimidate and bypass due process, even threatening local leaders.

In 2017, Tompkins County passed a resolution to become a sanctuary jurisdiction and have a limited role in immigration enforcement, similar to sanctuary jurisdictions around the country. John defended the local sanctuary status as a core tenet of the county, promoting confidence and national unity among local governments resisting federal overreach. The City of Ithaca has similar laws on the books dating back to the 1980s, though city officials have recently recommitted themselves to sanctuary laws.

Specifically drawing on the January ICE operation in Ithaca that resulted in the arrest of Jesus Romero-Hernandez, John underscored the breach of trust between the local and federal level.

“ICE can’t meet their deportation goals without help from local law enforcement,” John said. “But trust is the essential cement that holds our law enforcement system together.”

Deborah Dawson, Tompkins County Legislator and former U.S. Justice Department attorney, warned attendees that the Trump administration’s executive actions and the so-called “naughty list” executive order could lead to massive federal and state funding cuts, severely impacting Tompkins County’s budget and local services.

She stated that approximately 35 percent of the county’s budget – roughly 15 percent in federal aid and 20 percent in state aid – is now vulnerable to potential federal funding cuts related to sanctuary policies and immigration enforcement.

Dawson specifically raised alarms about the consequences for Medicaid, SNAP, and nutrition programs, with New York State potentially losing $13.5 billion in Medicaid funds annually and facing $2 billion in new costs. This fiscal stress could cascade down to counties like Tompkins, which already pay $1 million monthly for Medicaid despite having no control over eligibility or benefits.

“The county and our local community simply don’t have capacity to make up the possible 35 to 40 percent cut in federal and state funding, especially as we all face the economic uncertainties created by the administration’s vendetta against the university that is our major economic driver,” Dawson said.

She also highlighted the threat to Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT), the organization that handles the county’s public bus system, which faces federal funding cuts tied to political conditions — such as eliminating DEI programs and cooperating with ICE. Combined state and federal funding represent up to 40 percent of TCAT’s budget, and cuts could mean more residents stranded if routes are reduced.

Dawson warned that the impact would be devastating for local nonprofits and social services, from Meals on Wheels to housing vouchers, healthcare, and reentry programs. The most vulnerable residents—including the 4,700 currently on Medicaid in the county—would be hit hardest. She concluded by describing the administration’s actions as a deliberate fiscal attack on dissenting communities, and called on local leaders to speak out for those who cannot.

“The threat I see is that ultimately these issues may go to the Supreme Court. And God knows, given how politicized that court has become, what the final determination is going to be,” Dawson said in an interview with The Ithaca Voice.

Food insecurity in Tompkins County has spiked since the federal safety nets have begun to collapse, according to multiple speakers at the Tompkins County Legislature Meeting on June 3. Sarah DeFrank, a member of the Food Policy Council and Tompkins Food Future and an employee at the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, spoke at the meeting, warning of the severe local consequences of federal food policy changes.

According to DeFrank, the Food Bank has lost 15 trailer truckloads of USDA food due to the cancellation of the Commodity Credit Corporation initiative, resulting in a loss of 215,000 meals worth over $434,000.

These losses were replaced with lower-quality items, like snack foods rather than full meals, she said.

DeFrank also emphasized the threat posed by proposed federal cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in the House budget. She noted that SNAP currently brings in $1.5 million monthly to Tompkins County, generating $2.2 to $2.7 million in local economic activity.

“If SNAP is cut, it’s not just the families who suffer. It’s our entire local economy,” DeFrank said. Kelly Sauvé, the incoming executive director of Loaves and Fishes – an organization offering free meals, hospitality, companionship and advocacy for those in need – said the organization saw a “nearly 40 percent increase [in meals served] from the year before.”

Sauvé further emphasized that the increased need continues as benefits decrease and as a result, Loaves’ will also need more food to satisfy demand, highlighting the tangible strain on nonprofits, food banks, and volunteers.

Attendees raised questions about how individuals, local communities, universities and advocacy groups can respond to mounting federal threats. The panelists enforced the sentiment that “us” is the answer, urging community members to “get out of their silos” as Dawson said, and join organizing networks like Indivisible, and build systems of support across issue areas such as LGBTQ rights, housing, and environmental justice, encouraging networked resistance.

“We got to all get together and realize that until we defeat Trump’s agenda,” Dawson said, “we all have to stand together and fight it.”

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: From the Biden Book to the Budget Bill, Democrats Keep Falling into the Same Trap, Susan J. Demas, June 9, 2025. Repeat after me: Journalists aren't your friends.

MAGA has always had a kink for Orwellian doublespeak, so it’s not surprising that Republicans formally named their budget reconciliation legislation the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Sure, the bill is a massive executive power grab that yanks health care from millions, shovels tax breaks to billionaires, adds billions to the national debt, and more. But millions of Americans will never read what’s in the 1,100-page monstrosity (indeed, several Republican lawmakers who voted for it now admit they’ve never laid eyes on the text.)

For many, the only passing contact they’ll have with the legislation is hearing its name. And because the “Big Beautiful Bill” sounds positive, it’s easy to tune out criticism or assume it’s overblown.

Let’s face it: That’s a diabolically shrewd move in an era where people’s attention span is measured in milliseconds. No, it’s not thirteen-dimensional chess. But Trump and his minions have a keen understanding of how to message to low-information voters, as the last election just proved.

Many Democratic leaders and strategists are loath to admit this. They find Trump’s tactics as crass and vulgar as he is — and they’re not wrong. But he knows how to tap into people’s basest emotions and his communication style is undisputedly effective. Trump has dominated American politics for a decade; what more proof do we need?

But because so many Democrats can’t help but look down upon Trump’s rhetoric, they fail in their own messaging. Referring to it as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” even sarcastically, just reinforces the name. Liberals have a long, tortured history of accepting the right-wing’s terminology and frame for issues (see the death tax, death panels, welfare queens, special rights, reverse discrimination, etc.) As a result, they’re always fighting from a defensive crouch.And dismissing the budget as the “Big Ugly Bill” is the equivalent of Chuck Schumer’s “strongly worded letter” to Trump in the face of growing authoritarianism — it’s laughably weak and easy to ignore.Take some ownership of the language you deploy.

Tell people the stakes. Be blunt. Call it the “MAGA Murder Bill,” like Joe Trippi and Rick Wilson do. That’s a term that’s hard for people to ignore — even those who hate politics. You can’t help but wonder what’s so bad about it. And we know that the more people learn about the budget, the more they hate it (again, even Republicans who voted for it.)

But here’s a caveat: If you go full firebrand, you have to say “MAGA Murder Bill” with your whole chest. You have to tell your constituents why you’re going to the mattresses over this bill — and be prepared for them not to believe you about just how bad it is. It’s your job to make the case — and not just with numbers. Tell them what this means for their lives, appealing on an emotional level. You can’t be too good to sell your ideas. People can tell — and they absolutely will not trust you.

And yes, you should be prepared for snickering and pushback from the media, which are well-accustomed to thermonuclear language from Trump — (fallen soldiers are “suckers and losers,” Mexicans are “drug dealers, criminals, rapists,” etc.). But naturally, Democrats are held to a higher standard. (This will be particularly challenging for senators who live to be invited on the Sunday shows.)

Do you want to win or not? That’s what it comes down to. And if you do, you owe it to everyone to play the best hand you have. Of course, the right messaging doesn’t guarantee an ideal outcome. There are a million variables in politics, but you control what you can.

One thing you can’t control is the fact that many legacy news outlets have adopted Trump’s terminology for the bill, even though Journalism 101 is not doing PR for any party or cause. Yes, it’s infuriating. Yes, it’s another example of obeying in advance.

June 8

New York Times, L.A. Protests: Live Updates: Tensions Flare Between Protesters and Law Enforcement in L.A, Staff Reports, June 8, 2025. Federal agents clashed with protesters near a detention center in downtown Los Angeles, as confrontations stretched into a third day. About 300 National Guard troops were deployed across the city.

New York Times, L.A. Protests Analysis: The Legal Issues Surrounding Trump’s Plan to Use Troops to Suppress Protests, Charlie Savage, June 8, 2025. President Trump has long mused about using troops to crush violent protests or riots in blue-state cities. He is now moving to do so in Los Angeles.

Setting up a rare use of military force on domestic soil, President Trump ordered the Pentagon on Saturday night to send at least 2,000 National Guard troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles set off by his immigration crackdown.

Mr. Trump has long mused about using military force on domestic soil to crush violent protests or riots, fight crime and hunt for undocumented migrants — a move that his aides talked him out of during his first term. Between his two presidencies, he said that he would do so without the consent of state governors if he returned to power.

The order is a significant step in that direction, but for now it stops short of invoking the most expansive power Mr. Trump could claim a right to use. It remains unclear how matters will play out on the ground — and, potentially, in court.

The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump Wants Riots to Unleash His Authoritarian Playbook, Sam Stein and Bill Kristol, June 8, 2025. Bill Kristol and Sam Stein look at the growing authoritarian impulse behind Trump’s immigration policy, the targeting of journalists, and the political fight with California. The tactics may vary but the strategy is clear and it is accelerating.

The Atlantic, Political Commentary: For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal, David Frum, June 8, 2025. Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.

If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.

But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: June 7 [Perverting History Vs. Presenting History], Heather Cox Richardson, June 8, 2025. In April, John Phelan, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Donald J. Trump, posted that he visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial “to pay my respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941.”

The Secretary of the Navy is the civilian head of the U.S. Navy, overseeing the readiness and well-being of almost one million Navy personnel. Phelan never served in the military; he was nominated for his post because he was a large donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He told the Senate his experience overseeing and running large companies made him an ideal candidate for leading the Navy.

The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is famous in U.S. history as the site of a surprise attack by 353 Japanese aircraft that destroyed or damaged more than 300 aircraft, three destroyers, and all eight of the U.S. battleships in the harbor. Four of those battleships sank, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which remains at the bottom of the harbor as a memorial to the more than 2,400 people who died in the attack, including the 1,177 who died on the Arizona itself.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.

Pearl Harbor Day is a landmark in U.S. history. It is observed annually and known by the name President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it: “a date which will live in infamy.”

But that date was not June 7, eighty-four years ago today.

It was December 7, 1941.

The Trump administration claims to be deeply concerned about American history. In March, Trump issued an executive order calling for “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” It complained, as Trump did in his first term, that there has been “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

The document ordered the secretary of the interior to reinstate any “monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that had been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” It spelled out that the administration wanted only “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

To that end, Trump has called for building 250 statues in a $34 million “National Garden of American Heroes” sculpture garden in order to create an “abiding love of country and lasting patriotism” in time for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. On May 31, Michael Schaffer of Politico reported that artists and curators say the plan is “completely unworkable.” U.S. sculptors tend to work in abstraction or modernism, which the call for proposals forbids in favor of realism; moreover, there aren’t enough U.S. foundries to do the work that quickly.

Trump is using false history to make his followers believe they are fighting a war for the soul of America. “[W]e will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance,” he told a crowd in 2020. “They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” he said. Like authoritarians before him, Trump promised to return the country to divinely inspired rules that would create disaster if ignored but if followed would “make America great again.” At a 2020 rally, Trump said: “The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control. This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for using history to cement his power has little to do with actual history. History is the study of how and why societies change. To understand that change, historians use evidence—letters, newspapers, photographs, songs, art, objects, records, and so on—to figure out what levers moved society. In that study, accuracy is crucial. You cannot understand what creates change in a society unless you look carefully at all the evidence. An inaccurate picture will produce a poor understanding of what creates change, and people who absorb that understanding will make poor decisions about their future.

Those who cannot remember the past accurately are condemned to repeat its worst moments.

The hard lessons of history seem to be repeating themselves in the U.S. these days, and with the nation’s 250th anniversary approaching, some friends and I got to talking about how we could make our real history more accessible.

After a lot of brainstorming and a lot of help—and an incredibly well timed message from a former student who has become a videographer—we have come up with Journey to American Democracy: a series of short videos about American history that we will release on my YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram. They will be either short explainers about something in the news or what we are releasing tonight: a set of videos that can be viewed individually or can be watched together to simulate a survey course about an important event or issue in American history.

Journey to American Democracy explores how democracy has always required blood and sweat and inspiration to overcome the efforts of those who would deny equality to their neighbors. It examines how, for more than two centuries, ordinary people have worked to make the principles the founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence the law of the land.

Those principles establish that we have a right to be treated equally before the law, to have a say in our government, and to have equal access to resources.

In late April, in an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, Trump showed Moran that he had had a copy of the Declaration of Independence hung in the Oval Office. The interview had been thorny, and Moran used Trump’s calling attention to the Declaration to ask a softball question. He asked Trump what the document that he had gone out of his way to hang in the Oval Office meant to him.

Trump answered: “Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration. A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

The Declaration of Independence is indeed very special to our country. But it is not a declaration of love and unity. It is the radical declaration of Americans that human beings have the right to throw off a king in order to govern themselves. That story is here, in the first video series of Journey to American Democracy called “Ten Steps to Revolution.”

I hope you enjoy it.

 

MeidasTouch Network, Political Opinion: Constitution Meets Kevlar — What Could Go Wrong? Michael Cohen, above, June 8, 2025. ICE raids spark protests in Los Angeles, across the countryTrump just deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to California—not for wildfires or floods, but to intimidate protesters. The crack of boots comes before the crackdown.

Let me tell you something, straight up: When the government sends in the troops not to defend the nation but to silence its own people, we’re not just flirting with fascism. We’re buying it dinner, sending flowers, and inviting it to move in. And that, my Substack community, is exactly where we are right now in Trump’s America 2.0. Yesterday, 2,000 National Guard troops were dispatched to Los Angeles—not to provide disaster relief or support wildfire containment, but to suppress protests. Protests, mind you, against the very agencies ripping families apart and deporting people in the dead of night. Against ICE raids that are snatching people from their homes, from hospitals, from houses of worship, even from school pick-up lines.

This isn’t law and order. This is state-sponsored trauma.Subscribed

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again louder for the cult in the back: protest is not only legal in America, it’s sacred. It’s as American as baseball, bad coffee, and political corruption. From the Boston Tea Party to Black Lives Matter, protest has always been the pressure valve of a democracy under strain. But here comes President Trump, stomping through the Constitution in steel-toe boots, declaring protest to be the enemy of the state.

And what set him off this time? Peaceful protesters in Los Angeles and New York City who dared to speak up against the inhumane deportations and raids carried out by ICE. I watched as mothers cried in the streets, students linked arms in front of buses, and clergy begged officers to remember their own humanity. In return? Tear gas, rubber bullets, and arrests. As if shouting “let them stay” is a threat to national security.

But Trump wasn’t satisfied with local cops cracking skulls. No, the moment California’s governor resisted using the National Guard to enforce his immigration crackdowns, Trump pulled a move straight out of the despot’s playbook: he federalized California’s Guard. Just like that. With a stroke of a pen and the smirk of a man who believes democracy is a punchline, he stripped a sovereign state of its control and has called up an army of 2,000 soldiers to “restore order.”

Restore order from what? From people holding signs and chanting slogans?

This isn’t “tough on crime.” This is political theater, starring soldiers in camo and directed by a man who knows deep down that his grasp on power relies on suppressing yours.

New York Times, ABC Suspends Terry Moran for Calling Stephen Miller a ‘World-Class Hater,’ Michael M. Grynbaum, June 8, 2025. Mr. Moran made the comment in a late-night social media post that also derided President Trump. It drew a rebuke from Vice President JD Vance.

ABC News suspended the network correspondent Terry Moran on Sunday after he wrote on social media that Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, was “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and called him “a world-class hater.”

Mr. Moran made the comments in a late-night post on X, in which he also referred to President Trump as “a world-class hater.” The post was later deleted, but screenshots circulated on social media and drew a quick rebuke from Mr. Trump’s allies, including Vice President JD Vance, who called Mr. Moran’s post an “absolutely vile smear.”

An ABC News spokeswoman said on Sunday that Mr. Moran “has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” the network said in a statement. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”

Mr. Moran could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mr. Moran, whose title is senior national correspondent, interviewed Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in April. He joined ABC News in 1997.

In his lengthy post, Mr. Moran said of Mr. Miller that “you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”

Mr. Trump and members of his political movement often accuse major news organizations of anti-conservative bias. In Mr. Vance’s response on Sunday, he urged Americans to remember Mr. Moran’s comments “every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration.”

Last year, ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that Mr. Trump had filed against the network over on-air comments by the anchor George Stephanopoulos. At the time, the agreement was viewed as a remarkable concession to a politician by a broadcast network.

 

May 2025

May 26

 

Gravesite in Great Britain of World War II fatality Beau Bryant [Photo by Carole Green.]

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25 [Memorial Day], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 25, 2025. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.

For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.

When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.

Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.

When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander, Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.

It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.

Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.

I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.

Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.

I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.

And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.

But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name. And now, in anticipation of Memorial Day, people have asked me, once again, to repost his story.

So Beau Bryant, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

The Contrarian, Historical Commentary: What They Died For, Norm Eisen, right, May 26, 2025. Memorial Day has particular meaning for me. I would not be alive if it were not for the US military. It helped save both my parents in World War II—though in very different ways.

In spring 1945, my mom had been in Nazi captivity for a year—transferred from Auschwitz to a slave labor camp in Neuengamme Germany, packing (and when she could, sabotaging) ammunition. When she was flagging, a friendly jailer whispered to her to hang on—the allies were near. But for the US Armed Forces joining the fight, at terrible cost to so many American soldiers and families, my mom would not have survived.

My Dad’s connection was more direct: he actually served in those forces. He fled Europe for the US in 1940, arrived here with no papers, and enlisted in the Army to become a citizen. Who knows what would’ve become of him if the Army hadn't welcomed him. While my parents didn’t meet until years after the war (in Israel, of all places), the US military was their godsend, and so mine. 

I thought of all that this weekend, as I watched a group of veterans process at the Brown University commencement ceremony (I was there for my 40th reunion). The university has a program for veterans to get college degrees. The diverse platoon was composed of about twenty men and women; short and tall; black, brown, and white; all clad in gowns and mortarboards instead of uniforms or camouflage. They were greeted with cheers and whoops for their own accomplishments, of course, but also for the honor of the extraordinary institution they represent.

The American idea, which they and their absent comrades fought and died for, is being attacked from within this Memorial Day. How do we honor those who died for freedom when we see liberty under attack here at home? How do we salute the flag and that idea of America it stands for, when its meaning is being assaulted daily by the very administration entrusted with its care?

I know some might say we should simply remember our lost soldiers today, without tarnishing that tribute by addressing our political climate. But to my mind, looking away squanders their sacrifice. It is our responsibility to be candid about the crisis and to honor their service more urgently than ever.

We can do that by recommitting ourselves to defending our democracy. To memorialize our veterans’ sacrifices is to attend to the fragile, unfinished work of fighting autocracy and building a country worthy of their service. It is to hold tight to the idea of America, even when its practice falters. To do our part, as they did—not on distant battlefields, but on our streets, among our communities, and in our courthouses.

For me, that mission is informed by a Jewish aphorism that my parents, both saved by American soldiering, would sometimes say to me:

לֹא עָלֶיך הַמְלָאכָה לִיגמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חֹרִין לְחִבָּטֵל מִמֶנָה

“Your job is not to finish the work—but neither are you, the child of free people, not to do your share.”

 

 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Commentary: The Economic Consequences of Destroying Harvard, Paul Krugman, rightl, May 26, 2025. Harvard is easy to dislike. It’s rich. It’s elitist. It rejected my application back when I was a high school senior.

But the Trumpist effort to destroy Harvard and other elite universities — for that is clearly their intention — will do vast damage to our nation’s future.

The most important aspect of this campaign of intimidation and disruption is, of course, the attack on freedom of thought. I hope that nobody actually believes the MAGA line that universities are indoctrinating their students in wokeness, DEI, Marxism, whatever. The real complaint, obviously, is that these institutions aren’t indoctrinating their students — that they are exposing young people to a variety of ideas and encouraging them to think for themselves, when they should be preaching right-wing dogma and obedience to whatever The Leader says they should believe.

Given this terrifying reality of the Trumpian war on learning, indeed on scientific thought itself, it may seem crass to examine the economic consequences of the attacks on higher education. Yet it’s important to understand that these consequences will also be disastrous – both for the current economy and for the economy’s long-term future.

Harvard is a major U.S. exporter. The foreign students that the Trump administration is trying to ban usually pay their own tuition — money that shows up as a credit in the US trade balance. But arguably the much larger issue is that Harvard is a crucial element within the Greater Boston economy. This regional economy is one of the crown jewels of the U.S. economy, one of the most important generators of high incomes, specialized knowledge and innovation.

Metropolitan economies are always more than the sum of their parts. Businesses clump together, forming a metropolitan economy, because their positive interactions create an industrial ecology of mutually reinforcing strengths, usually built around some kind of core competence. One famous example is the San Francisco Bay Area, a nexus of global leadership in digital technology. Another is Greater New York, the world’s leading financial center.

What is so special about Greater Boston? The economy of Greater Boston can seem confusing, because its world-beating sectors look quite different from each other on the surface. First, there are the schools: Colleges and universities employ 87,000 people in the Greater Boston area, accounting for a far higher share of employment than they do in America as a whole. Second, there’s a world-class medical complex, treating patients from around the world and also training many of the world’s top doctors. Third, Greater Boston is a leading player in both AI and “tough tech,” which emphasizes how information interacts with the physical world. Fourth, Greater Boston is the world’s leading biotech hub.

What do all these activities have in common? The answer, surely, is that they’re all linked by intellectual curiosity, rigorous thinking, scientific discipline, and an openness to new ideas. All of these qualities engender an openness to the very best talent around the world – students, researchers and entrepreneurs. Moreover, all of the parts are mutually supporting: the intellectual ferment within the universities and medical complex is a prime source of business innovation, and business success brings financial support and acclaim for the schools.

Harvard is by no means the dominant player in this intellectual and economic universe. It may not even be the most important player. At a guess M.I.T. has, in a direct sense, been a larger incubator of new businesses than its neighbor two miles up Massachusetts Ave. But M.I.T. wouldn’t be what it is without Harvard nearby, and vice versa. The same goes for the dozens of other fine universities in the area, and the hundreds — probably thousands — of businesses nearby. The hospitals and the medical research are part of the same ecosystem.

So destroying Harvard, even if the campaign against intellectualism stopped there — which it wouldn’t — would be like pulling a crucial piece out of a Jenga tower. The odds are that the whole structure of the Greater Boston education and innovation ecosystem would collapse. Consequently, America would lose all that Greater Boston does to advance and enrich our nation.

I should also note that Harvard doesn’t just educate many of the children of America’s elite. It also educates the children of elites around the world; that is, if Trump doesn’t prevent them coming to America. One may have mixed feelings about that role, but the reality is that Harvard is an important pillar in the edifice of American soft power.

Do MAGA types understand how much damage their campaign against universities will do to American prosperity and power? Probably not. But I suspect that it wouldn’t matter if they did. From their point of view, making America poorer, weaker and sicker is an acceptable price for keeping the nation suitably ignorant. 

U.S. Army Spc. Seth Wymer, with the 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), and a sentinel at the Tomb of the Unknowns, places a U.S. flag at the foot of one of four crypts at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., May 23, 2013. | DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Megan Garcia, U.S. Army/Released

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Look in the Mirror: Are We Worth their Sacrifice? Evan Fields (a veteran who writes the News from Underground Substack), May 26, 2025. With our country adrift, Memorial Day is losing its meaning for too many.

A young soldier from the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard—stands beneath the blistering Arlington sun. His uniform is immaculate. His face unreadable. And on his shoulders: No rank. A silent gesture of respect to the men entombed behind him—unknown, unnamed, but never outranked. Three unknown young men who died in wars to protect the values and ideals the United States was founded upon.

The soldier walks the black mat in solemn rhythm — twenty-one steps, a pause, twenty-one seconds, a turn. Every movement is calibrated. Every count is deliberate. It’s a living tribute to the highest military honor we can render: the twenty-one gun salute. He commands silence and respect with his presence. Each step cuts through the stillness like a metronome of reflection. Reflection not just on the sacrifice, but on the values they died for.

Today, those values feel further and further away. A lack of political leadership, rising corporate greed, and late-stage capitalism have cheapened Memorial Day into an excuse to grill burgers, drink beer, and buy a discounted mattress. Across the country, people will enjoy the long weekend — rightfully using it to catch their breath from the stress of daily life. But in doing so, we risk forgetting what this day is actually for.

Memorial Day was never meant to be a celebration. It was meant to be a day to reflect on and honor not just the lives lost, but on the values and the country they died believing in. It’s a moment for those of us still living to examine our performance as Americans. The men and women who wear the uniform don’t serve politicians. They don’t lay down their lives for corporations. They swear an oath to an idea—a fragile, radical idea called America. An idea that too many people in power today have either forgotten or sold off.

Freedom. Justice. Accountability. Dignity. Democracy. These aren’t partisan ideals. They’re American ones. And they are the very ideals the fallen gave their final breath for.SubscribedA Mirror for the People

Memorial Day is an opportunity for us to reflect not only on the dead and their sacrifice, but on ourselves. An opportunity for us to look in the mirror and ask some uncomfortable questions:

Do we vote in every election — or only when it feels urgent?

Do we speak up when power is being abused — or wait for someone else to?

Do we fight for truth — or just amplify outrage?

Do we protect liberty and justice for all — or just those who look like us?

These holidays become a reminder that patriotism becomes performance and not a series of actions for the greater good. Patriotism doesn’t look like flags on trucks, slogans on shirts, or fireworks on the fourth of July. Patriotism is espousing and honoring the values that we are supposed to be reflecting on this weekend.

Citizenship in this country is not passive. Every civilian who lives here inherits a share of the burden that these soldiers carried. Reflection doesn’t just belong to the people though. It belongs to those we elect to lead in our name and too many of them refuse to look. Mike Simon, who served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967, takes a rubbing of a fellow Marine’s name from the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall, Nov. 11, 2010. | U.S. Marines photo/releasedA Mirror for Our Elected Officials

Our elected officials swear the same oath as our service members — to the Constitution, not to themselves. But unlike the fallen, they seek power. They ask for it. Campaign for it. So their accountability should be even greater than what we ask of our men and women in uniform. Every single day on Capitol Hill and in the white house we are seeing silence in the face of authoritarianism, partisan obstruction over national interest, trading public services for private gain, and ripping away services that keep people alive.

The soldiers who lie in the Tomb of the Unknown asked for nothing. Maybe a hot meal and a paycheck. The elected officials in Congress continuously ask for everything and give nothing. Power, deference, reelection — they do nothing but take from us and hoard wealth and power. This isn’t just about inefficiency or poor leadership it’s a betrayal of the oath that they took. The same oath that countless men and women have died for in order to ensure a better future for us.What We Owe Them

Our country is at a tipping point. Political and racial violence dominates the headlines almost daily. Democracy is either under threat or completely obliterated depending on the day. And we are at risk for reaching a position where there is no turning back to how things once were. So what do we owe those men and women who sacrificed it all?

We owe it to them to put in the work in espousing the ideals and values that have built this country and made it survive for 250 years. We owe it to them to vote like democracy depends on it. We owe it to them to hold power accountable, even when it’s inconvenient. We owe it to them to protect the most vulnerable members of our population. To speak truth to power even when it costs you something. And we owe it to them to serve our fellow countrymen — not just ourselves.

This Memorial Day we honor the fallen not with words, but by picking up the burden they left behind — and carrying it forward.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Meidas Founder Delivers Memorial Day Message, Ben Meiselas, May 26, 2025. Today we honor the American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

My grandpa Murray Golden (hence our slogan, “Truth is Golden”), who passed away almost 20 years ago, was a tail gunner in World War II. He was a Purple Heart recipient. When we would go fishing in his small pond in Boca, Florida, he would share with me the stories of those he served with who didn’t make it back home. It was very emotional and left a lasting impression on me. I always think about that on Memorial Day. I always reflect on the bravery of those who fought and died for our country, and I hope that in some small way I am making them proud by building out this network.Subscribed

Memorial Day also marks the unofficial start of summer. You’ve heard me call it this before, but this will be known as “Democracy Summer.” We are going to see the largest mass peaceful protests in the history of the country. I can tell that’s where we are headed. The Trump regime has done so much to hurt the people of this country that we will need a collective release of our anger that will also be anchored by our love. The big protest coming up is the No Kings Protest on June 14, where I expect millions of people across the country will show up. Protests will continue to grow from there. We are in touch with all the organizers and will be on the frontlines and embedded to give you the coverage corporate news wants to cover up.

On this Memorial Day, it is worth reflecting on how far we have all come together. Trump and Musk wanted all resistance and opposition destroyed, and they failed. They’ve done severe damage to our country, but they have not shut down the opposition. They captured corporate news and turned it into regime media, but then we grew and grew and grew—became the biggest news network in America. The Meidas Mighty became the most powerful political movement in the country. And we still have a lot of work to do.

As we begin Democracy Summer, I want to first start off by saying thank you for all you do. Next, I want you to know we are always listening to you and what you are experiencing. We will always have your back. We will fight for you always. We will never abandon you. We will never submit or obey the regime. We will never allow our independent reporting to be compromised. I don’t view my leadership of this network as “a job.” I view this as life or death, because I know the trauma this regime is causing you, and I know you deserve a media network like the MeidasTouch Network—whose leadership and hosts are willing to sacrifice it all to fight for you. That is my pledge to you this Memorial Day and always.

We would be honored for you to subscribe to this Substack today and help us hit our monthly subscriber goal so we can head into the summer in a strong position. We need 650 more subscribers this month to hit the goal. You can gift subscriptions to others as well.

New York Times, Tech’s Trump Whisperer, Tim Cook, Goes Quiet as His Influence Fades, Tripp Mickle, May 26, 2025. Apple’s chief executive has gone from winning President Trump’s praise to drawing his ire, deepening the company’s woes in a very bad year.

In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined, said two people familiar with the decision.

The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook.

During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook.

“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.

Later in Qatar, Mr. Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook.” The president praised Apple’s investment in the United States, then said he had told Mr. Cook, “But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.”

On Friday morning, Mr. Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple’s leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25 percent on iPhones made anywhere except the United States. The post thrust Apple back into the administration’s cross hairs a little over a month after Mr. Cook had lobbied and won an exemption from a 145 percent tariff on iPhones assembled in China.

New York Times, Members Only: A New Trump Club, Ned’s Club and the Enduring Old Guard, Elisabeth Bumiller, May 26, 2025. In a Washington rived by political differences, four private clubs reflect the sorting of the city’s establishment into separate corners at a turbulent time.

President Trump’s White House crypto czar, David Sacks, says that Executive Branch, the upcoming Trump-aligned private club in Georgetown that costs as much as $500,000 to join, will be free of stuffy Washington insiders and any worry “that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist” who “we don’t know and we don’t trust.”

Gareth Banner, the director of the parent company of the sleek new Ned’s Club downtown, says his club members are a bipartisan “top 5 percent in their sector professionally," among them Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.

The old guard Metropolitan Club, whose past members include six American presidents, still has “Martini Fridays in the Library” and “Trap & Field News” in the club bulletin. The Cosmos Club, which encourages camaraderie among what it trumpets as “the greatest minds of our time,” displays photos of members who have won the Nobel Prize, among them the late Henry A. Kissinger.

In a 2025 Washington firebombed by political and ideological differences, all four clubs are growing, have wait lists or both. While they have varied levels of snobbery and exclusivity, Executive Branch is an outlier because of the price of its access to the White House and its enrichment of the Trump family.

But all four clubs reflect the sorting of the city’s establishment into separate corners at a turbulent time.

May 24

Billboard, Dan Storper, CEO & Co-Founder of Putumayo World Music, Dies at 74, Isabela Raygoza, May 24, 2025. The globetrotting entrepreneur marked 30 years of his groundbreaking label in 2023.

Dan Storper, the co-founder and CEO of Putumayo World Music, died on Thursday (May 22) at 74, just two days after his birthday. Sources confirm that he passed peacefully at home in New Orleans, surrounded by family, after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jacob Edgar, founder of the label Cumbancha and Storper’s longtime friend and colleague, shared a heartfelt statement with Billboard Español: “Just three days ago, I posted birthday wishes to Dan Storper, the founder of Putumayo World Music and my colleague and friend for nearly 30 years. I knew then that Dan was in his last days, but I couldn’t imagine a world without him. He passed away yesterday after a battle with pancreatic cancer.”

Edgar, who began working with Storper in 1998 after being offered what he called “the dream job no one could dare dream of,” described the late visionary as “an exceptional human,” he wrote. “Funny, energetic, passionate, micromanaging, and compulsive. A workaholic to the extreme. He could drive you crazy, but you loved him anyway because his heart was in the right place, and he was a good soul.”RelatedDan StorperPutumayo Founder Dan Storper Talks 30 Years of Celebrating World Music

In 2023, the globetrotting entrepreneur marked 30 years of his groundbreaking label.

But Storper’s journey with Putumayo began long before the label existed. Originally launched in the 1970s in New York as a store selling handcrafted goods and musical finds from his travels in Latin America, Africa, India, and beyond, the shop gradually shifted its focus to music. By 1993, it had transformed into Putumayo World Music, a record label dedicated to curating global sounds for a wider audience, co-founding it with Michael Kraus.

The label became an international success, celebrated for its uplifting and culturally diverse compilations. Known for its signature brightly illustrated album covers and expertly sequenced playlists, Putumayo invited listeners to embark on musical journeys across continents, introducing many to the rhythms, traditions, and languages of faraway lands. Storper’s leadership helped bridge cultural divides through the universal language of music.

In an interview with Billboard Español in 2023, Storper reflected on what he saw as Putumayo’s mission. “I look back with a certain measure of pride at the fact that we’ve really introduced so many people to music that they were not familiar with — whether it be Latin, African, Caribbean, European, and more,” Storper said at the time, as he reflected on his company’s three-decade legacy. He also mentioned that Carlos Santana met several African bands through the Putumayo catalog that the guitarist later ended up collaborating with.

Storper also spoke fondly of how the label crafted its signature compilations. “Putumayo’s strength is not only selecting some great songs with that human touch, but putting together a sequence to take you on a musical journey, and as we say, it’s guaranteed to make you feel good,” he added.

Even as his health declined, Storper’s commitment to preserving global music remained unwavering. This April, he and Edgar donated their shared archive of 37,000 CDs — a collection built over more than 30 years — to the Harvard Music Library and the ARChive of Popular Music. “He and I listened to almost every one of those albums and scrawled notes over most of them marking out the tracks we thought had a chance to make into a Putumayo collection someday. I’m glad to know that legacy will be preserved,” said Edgar.

May 22

 

 

 

New York Times, Trump Administration Halts Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, May 22, 2025. The move was a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with President Trump’s demands.

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move is likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” according to a letter sent to the university by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

About 6,800 international students attended Harvard this year, or roughly 27 percent of the student body, according to university enrollment data. That was up from 19.7 percent in 2010.

The move is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the school year that begins later this year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students.

A spokesman Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ms. Noem posted the letter on social media later on Thursday.

In a news release confirming the administration’s move, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”

 

New York Times, Divided Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma, Abbie VanSickle, May 22, 2025. In a 4-to-4 decision, the court upheld a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the school.Listen to this article · 2:51 min Learn more

A divided Supreme Court rejected a plan on Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine.

The court split 4 to 4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.

That deadlock means that an earlier ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court will be allowed to stand. The state court blocked a proposal for the Oklahoma school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, and aimed to incorporate Catholic teachings into every aspect of its activities.

Because there was no majority in the case, the court’s decision sets no nationwide precedent on the larger question of whether the First Amendment permits states to sponsor and finance religious charter schools, which are public schools with substantial autonomy.

 

AlterNet via Raw Story, 'Gonna look kind of bad': ABC News head told 'The View' hosts to tone down Trump criticism, Carl Gibson, May 22, 2025. ABC News head told 'The View' hosts to tone down Trump criticism.

Hosts for one of the most-watched daytime news shows were recently asked to back off from criticizing President Donald Trump, according to a new report.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that both ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic and Disney CEO Bob Iger communicated to the hosts of "The View" that their political coverage should be toned down in favor of softer, more celebrity-focused segments. The Beast cited unnamed sources who confided that the hosts didn't take kindly to the suggestion, with co-host Ana Navarro pointing out that a major sector of their audience watches them for political analysis.

The source emphasized that the request to talk less about the Trump administration was not an "edict" and that the hosts still had free rein to decide what topics to discuss for each episode. But the show's on-air talent still reportedly bristled at the suggestion.

"This is what our audience wants," one of the hosts reportedly said during the exchange with executives. "Isn’t it gonna look kind of bad if we’re all of a sudden not talking about politics?

"The View" co-host Ana Navarro reportedly had a private conversation with Iger in which she thanked the Disney CEO for allowing them editorial control. And while Iger communicated that he still supported the show and the hosts, he echoed Karamehmedovic's wishes that the show's five hosts tone down their Trump criticism.

The Beast's source said that the suggestion from network executives to focus less on political topics was "based on viewer feedback," but the outlet noted that "The View" was the #1 daytime news show for the first quarter of 2025, beating out its top competitor shows on Fox News and NBC.

ABC — which is owned by Disney — settled a defamation lawsuit that Trump filed against the network last year, agreeing to pay him $15 million (along with an additional $1 million for legal expenses) with Trump arguing that ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos defamed him when saying that Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll. Technically, the verdict was for sexual abuse rather than rape, though U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case, later clarified that in terms of the public's understanding, the two were the same.

May 21

 

Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times Sunday insert contains 10 AI-generated fake books in summer reading list, Robert Channick, May 21, 2025 (print ed.). A special section inserted into the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times featured page upon page of fun summer activities, including a list of 15 books to bring along while lounging by the pool or relaxing in a favorite reading spot.

The only problem: The authors are real, but most of the books don’t exist. Artificial intelligence, employed by a Chicago freelance writer, simply made them up.

Readers looking to fill their carts with titles such as “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende, “The Collector’s Piece” by Taylor Jenkins Reid or “Hurricane Season” by Brit Bennett were likely disappointed to find the elaborate plot summaries were themselves fictionalized.

Several news reports and a wave of social media backlash to the fake books followed, creating an early summer storm for the Sun-Times, which released a statement Tuesday.

“We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” the Sun-Times said. “This is licensed content that was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom, but it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate. We value our readers’ trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”

The 64-page full-color Sunday insert, “Heat Index,” is a summer entertainment guide featuring stories about everything from outdoor cooking and camping tips to “8 unforgettable summer drives across America.”

The summer reading list contains 10 fictional fiction titles, including “The Rainmakers” by Percival Everett, described as a near-future story set in the American West where “artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity,” leading a “precipitation broker” to question the ethics of his profession.

Another fake book, “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, is described as the latest science fiction thriller from the author of “The Martian” that “follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness — and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”

In a “Matrix”-like paradox, artificial intelligence played a key role in putting together the fake book list.

Veteran Chicago freelancer Marco Buscaglia, who wrote the entire “Heat Index” section for King Features, a syndicated newspaper content producer owned by Hearst, said he used AI to compile the summer reading list. He then made the mistake of trusting it to be accurate.

“I just straight up missed it,” Buscaglia, 57, told the Tribune on Tuesday. “I can’t blame anybody else.”

Buscaglia, who also contributes articles to the Sunday Careers section produced by Tribune Content Agency, among other publications, said he writes four seasonal sections for King Features each year. He put together the summer feature in February.

Unable to find early summer reading lists from Amazon or other sources, he said he turned to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, which churned out 15 potential blockbusters written by well-known authors. Buscaglia submitted the list without his byline, but unfortunately, the robot contributors made up most of the book selections.

“It obviously completely backfired,” Buscaglia said. “They must have had a hard time finding new books, too. So they just made them up.”

Beyond the fake plot summaries, the summer reading list did contain five actual books, including “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury and “Call Me By Your Name” by André Aciman.

While Buscaglia used AI to help gather material for other stories in the special section, he said he does not know if they contain similar errors.

A King Features spokesperson issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the use of AI in the piece and severing ties with Buscaglia.

“King Features has a strict policy with our staff, cartoonists, columnists, and freelance writers against the use of AI to create content,” the spokesperson said. “The Heat Index summer supplement was created by a freelance content creator who used AI in its story development without disclosing the use of AI. We are terminating our relationship with this individual.”

The fallout in Chicago media circles, however, is growing.

In March, more of than one-fifth of the staff at the Sun-Times, including some prominent journalists, took a buyout ahead of potential layoffs in a sweeping cost-cutting initiative by its nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media.

The Sun-Times Guild issued a statement Tuesday distancing its diminished ranks of union journalists from the third-party content used by the newspaper.

“We’re deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work,” the union said. “The fact that it was sixty-plus pages of this ‘content’ is very concerning — primarily for our relationship with our audience but also for our union’s jurisdiction.”

In a statement posted on its website Tuesday afternoon, the Sun-Times said subscribers would not be charged for the premium section and that it would be excised from the e-paper version online.

The paper also said it would be more transparent about identifying third-party editorial content going forward and is “reviewing” its relationship with the national content partner.

“We are committed to making sure this never happens again,” the Sun-Times said. “We know that there is work to be done to provide more answers and transparency around the production and publication of this section, and will share additional updates in the coming days.”

May 20

New York Times, Guest Essay: The President Will Destroy You Now, Thomas B. Edsall, May 20, 2025. One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before "been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been 'destructive,'” let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate."

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

New York Times, Live Updates: House Republicans Hunt for Votes on Policy Bill, Staff Reports, May 20, 2025. President Trump pressured Republicans to unify around a bill to deliver his domestic agenda, as party leaders haggled with holdouts over changes to the legislation.

President Trump pressured House Republicans to unify around a wide-ranging bill to deliver his domestic agenda, as party leaders haggled with important holdouts over changes to the legislation aimed at winning their votes.

Joining House Republicans at their weekly closed-door party meeting, Mr. Trump pushed them to drop their reservations about the legislation and embrace the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which leaders hope to bring to a vote by the end of the week. Later, negotiations with the holdouts appeared to be progressing.

New York Times, Republican Plan to Tax Elite Colleges Could Hit in Unexpected Places, Stephanie Saul and Steven Rich, May 20, 2025. A plan for a hefty new tax on university endowments was crafted to target “woke” schools, lawmakers said. But a small Kansas college and a Texas medical school might also be hit.

McPherson College, in the middle of Kansas wheat country, is a small school that accepts the vast majority of its applicants, many from surrounding towns. It is best known for its degree in classic car restoration.

The college might still end up a potential target in a Republican plan aimed primarily at the Ivy League, which would impose billions in taxes on the investment returns of several dozen private colleges and universities.

The goal of the proposal, laid out in a report last week from Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, is to hold accountable “woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations.” McPherson could be on the list because it has an endowment of $1.6 billion, thanks to an anonymous donation a few years ago.

An analysis by The New York Times shows that at least 58 schools would potentially be subject to the tax, based on the size of their endowments and enrollments. The list includes highly selective and wealthy institutions like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but also smaller schools like Berry College in Georgia and DePauw University in Indiana.

The tax idea has been discussed by Republicans since at least President Trump’s first term, when a 1.4 percent tax was imposed on some endowments. Momentum to broaden it grew in 2023, when JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio, proposed a 35 percent tax on endowments of $10 billion and larger.

Now, as President Trump has made challenging the nation’s wealthiest colleges a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, the endowment tax could become a potent weapon. During Mr. Trump’s second presidential run, his campaign promised to collect billions “by taxing the large endowments of private universities plagued by antisemitism.”

The tax, part of the House proposal that President Trump has called the “big, beautiful bill,” would be tiered depending on the size of the school’s endowment and enrollment, with a top rate of 21 percent for those with endowments of at least $2 million per student.

That rate would hit nine schools, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The proposal threatens to cost Harvard about $850 million a year, Yale $690 million year, and Princeton $586 million a year, according to estimates by Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, which would also be subject to the tax.

The stated aim of the tax, according to the proposal, is to ensure elite schools in the country “can no longer abuse generous benefits provided through the tax code.”

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: CBS Gave US ALL the Middle Finger… MEIDAS RESPONDS!! Ben Meiselas, May 20, 2025. I am pissed off!!

It appears that CBS and its parent company Paramount are moving closer to settling a BS lawsuit filed by Donald Trump—to pay Trump directly as a quid pro quo for the U.S. government approving the merger between Paramount and a company called Skydance. The merger would put approximately $5 billion in cash into the hands of Paramount shareholders, including its controlling shareholder Shari Redstone.

Shari Redstone inherited Paramount—once called Viacom—from her dad, Sumner Redstone. Shari wants to sell her shares to Skydance so she can make billions.

The merger requires approval by various United States government agencies, like the FCC. Trump’s FCC has threatened to withhold approval of the merger.

Trump personally sued Paramount and CBS (which owns 60 Minutes) in Texas federal court, forum-shopping to get a Trump-appointed judge. He claims he was injured under Texas consumer laws because 60 Minutes lightly edited its interview with former VP Kamala Harris in October 2024.

Trump was too scared to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes in this election cycle. Yet he claims he was injured to the tune of $20 billion based on how CBS presented its interview with Kamala Harris.

May 19

Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: Attack of the Sadistic Zombies, Paul Krugman, right, May 19, 20225. The GOP budget is incredibly cruel — and that’s the point.

Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.

But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.

And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

To get a sense of how extreme this legislation is, do a side-by-side comparison of the impact on different groups of Americans between this bill and Trump’s one major legislative achievement during his first term, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It looks like this:

Paul Krugman is a Neo-Keynesian economist, Nobel laureate, academic, author, and media columnist, known for his work on international trade theory and economic geography. Considered one of the world's most influential economists, Krugman is renowned for redefining existing theories of international trade and either founding or co-founding several new disciplines in international economics, from New Trade Theory (NTT) and New Economic Geography (NEG) to models of financial crises and exchange rate movements.

Steady, Commentary: One Big Bad Bill, Dan Rather, right, May 19, 2025. Johnson is trying to sneak the shocking details past us.

Donald Trump and his MAGA buddies in Congress are attempting to slip one by the American people. The mega-spending bill that Trump calls “one big, beautiful bill” is 1116 pages long, contains huge spending and tax cuts, and was dropped on the U.S. House of Representatives just seven days ago. The first committee vote was taken on Sunday night, in case you missed it. And many Republicans hope you did.

Speaker Mike Johnson, below right, is pushing for a vote on the massive domestic policy bill by the end of the week, in time for Memorial Day.

Someone needs to call a timeout, or this massive remake of the federal government could be a done deal faster than you can say three-day weekend. The incredibly short timeline is no accident. Trump and Johnson don’t want to give anyone time to read the fine print.

Because then folks would know that the bill would cut $625 billion from Medicaid, pushing more than 8 million of our most vulnerable from its rolls.

People would also be aware that cuts to the food stamp program would target families with children, seniors, and veterans.

Voters would find out that someone making less than $15,000 a year would see their federal taxes increase by 74.3% by 2031. That is not a typo.Trump claims all of these cuts are necessary to make his $4.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires and corporations permanent.

Now you understand the reason for the rush. Get it signed, sealed, and delivered before the ink is dry, and Americans will be none the wiser. Though it will still have to be reconciled with the Senate bill.

The timeline is so short that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not had time to fully vet the bill and produce estimates of its budgetary impact. How can lawmakers read, research, and debate the bill in mere days? They can’t.

Even with the absurdly short timeline, Johnson is facing opposition from both ends of his party. Four hardline fiscal hawks stalled the bill in committee but ultimately allowed it to move to the full House. They didn’t vote in favor of the bill; they just voted “present.”This does not bode well for the speaker, who will have to make significant concessions to appease the hawks and get them on board. But every concession he gives them will likely mean a “moderate” Republican will balk. Republicans have only a seven-vote majority in the House.

May 16

 

White House Chronicle, Commentary: How Technology Built the British Empire, Llewellyn King, above,May 16, 2025. As someone who grew up in the last days of the British Empire, I am often asked how it was that so few people controlled so much of the world for so long?

The simple answer is technology underpinned the British Empire, from its tentative beginnings in the 17th century to its global dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries and most of the first half of the 20th century.

America filled the gap left by Britain as the dominant force in the world, admired, copied and envied. But underpinning that state of esteem and financial ease was tech leadership, medical leadership, and cultural leadership through film and television. America became the techno supremo.

Now government research funding is being butchered across the board from advanced energy to, most shameful of all, the philistine slashing of the National Institutes of Health’s research budgets. Changing times doomed the British Empire, America’s future is at stake and it will be determined by technology and medicine. If we underfund research, the future is known.

May 13

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Cuts Another $450M in Funding From Harvard, Troy Matthews, May 13, 2025. Yes, why would the U.S. want more doctors? The Trump administration announced it was pulling an additional $450 million in funding from Harvard University this week, after freezing $2.2 billion in grant funding last week. The White House called the cuts punitive as a result of a failure of Harvard to address race discrimination and antisemitism on its campus.

The cuts represent funding from eight different government agencies, including from the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, which have typically given Harvard and other Ivy League schools funding for advanced research in medical sciences.

“There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support," the Trump Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement.

"Harvard, and its leadership group who are tainted by the egregious infractions under its watch, faces a steep, uphill battle to reclaim its legacy as a lawful institution and center of academic excellence." Harvard, "will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," university President Alan Garber said recently. "Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government."

May 11

Robert Reich via Substack, Commentary: Moral clarity in a time of monsters, Robert Reich, right, May 11, 2025. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

We are living in a time when monsters roam the globe: Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Modi, Erdoğan, and others.

They are destroying countless lives, fueling hate, spreading fear.

What is our moral obligation as human beings in the face of this? How do we maintain integrity in a time of monsters?

Some people I know are in denial. They’ve stopped listening to the news. They’d rather not know what the monsters are doing.

I understand. It’s all too painful — the abductions and deportations in the United States, horrific deaths in Ukraine and Gaza, abuses of human rights in China’s Xinjiang region and in Turkey, violence in Kashmir.

Why learn of it? they ask. Nothing can be done anyway, they say.

Others are immobilized with grief. They cannot abide the inhumanity and suffering, so they’ve collapsed into despair.

Nothing will be done, they say.

Some others I know are resigned to what’s happening and believe their only real choice is to keep quiet. They don’t speak out against the monsters for fear of reprisal.

It’s the only practical choice, they say.

These are all completely understandable responses. If you are in denial, despair, or submissive silence, you should not feel guilty. You are only human.

But it’s also important to know that these attitudes help the monsters thrive and grow.

When most of us believe that nothing can be done, or assume nothing will be done, or think that silence is the only practical choice, we fuel more monstrosity.

We are in a national emergency, as is much of the rest of the world. If you are in denial or despair or in fearful silence, you are hardly alone.

But if enough of us stand up as Emily did, the monsters cannot win. We will prevail. We will end up with a democracy stronger than it was before the time of monsters.

Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century.

New York Times, How One Ivy League University Has Avoided Trump’s Retribution So Far, Vimal Patel, May 11, 2025. Some 600 college leaders recently signed a letter opposing the Trump administration’s interference in higher education. The only Ivy League president who did not sign the letter was Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College.

Dartmouth College is not on the Trump administration’s target lists and its funding remains intact, unlike the rest of its peers. Its president may be why.Instead, she wrote her own letter to her campus, saying that higher education institutions should strive to do better, “to further our standing as a trusted beacon for knowledge and truth.”

“Reflection does not mean capitulation,” she added.

It is the kind of message, her critics and supporters say, that has so far helped to keep Dartmouth out of the Trump administration’s cross hairs.

Six of the eight Ivies are facing major funding threats, to the tune of billions of dollars, as the federal government attempts to punish them over concerns about antisemitism and other issues. Harvard University alone could lose over $2 billion. And every Ivy but Dartmouth is being investigated over allegations that they have allowed antisemitism on campus.

The onslaught is unlike anything universities have experienced, academic leaders say. In addition to stripping schools of research money, the administration has threatened to increase taxes on university endowments, reshape college accreditation and even revoke tax exemptions from schools.

While Dartmouth hasn’t been targeted specifically, it would not emerge unscathed if the Republican administration gets its way. Higher endowment taxes could bring a significant financial blow, for example. And the administration’s visa crackdown has entangled some current and former Dartmouth students.

Dr. Beilock’s supporters see her as a champion of free expression and dialogue among people with different political viewpoints. They say she has been consistent, supporting these ideas long before the Trump administration or even the Hamas attack on Israel complicated campus politics.

May 8, 2025

Cornell University, overlooking Cayuga Lake in New York

Cornell University, Cornell President’s Message To Cornellians, Michael I. Kotlikoff, Ph.D., President, shown at right, May 8, 2025. Today, across all of our campuses, Cornell scientists are developing new technologies, finding better ways to treat and cure diseases, and continually expanding our understanding of life, on earth and beyond.

The real-world impact of this work is incalculable. It strengthens our national security, protects the safety and stability of our food supply, and ensures the progress and resilience of our nation.

For decades, federal agencies have relied on Cornell and other research universities to perform the highly specialized research and development work that improves and enhances our lives. This partnership has been critical to advancing and maintaining America’s economic, political, and military strength in the postwar era. Now, recent federal actions and funding freezes have imperiled that partnership—and the work on which so much of our national wellbeing and strength depend.

The impact of this funding freeze is immediate and devastating. Grants that support research to prevent midair airplane collisions, find new treatments for drug-resistant prostate cancer, develop new materials for jet fighter wings, and build a miniature heart-assist pump for infants with life-threatening congenital heart disease have all been halted.

To date, federal agencies have stopped work on or terminated more than 100 research projects at Cornell, abruptly ending ongoing research grants with no official notice of their future status. Media reports have suggested that more than $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell will be suspended.

While the university is doing what it can to protect the infrastructure of our research enterprise, finding stopgap ways to pay research faculty and staff and cover the expenses of running their labs, the financial loss is not sustainable. Every campus, every college, and every school at Cornell has been impacted.

• How Cornell is responding

• Three ways you can help

May 5

The Bulwark, Opinion: Our Megalomaniacal President, William Kristol, right, May 5, 2025. Trump has always been a narcissist. But it’s gotten much worse. 

Why is Donald Trump’s second term so much more dangerous than his first? Trump has always been a narcissist. But what do you call it when success and power go to a narcissist’s head? Megalomania?

As Trump said in his recent interview with the Atlantic: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys . . . And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Now, most presidents wouldn’t say in the first place that they “run the country.” They might recognize that other branches of government play a role, and that other national institutions matter. They might grasp the fact that this is a free country, not one the president “runs.”

So the narcissism is jarring. But Trump’s self-described progression from “I run the country” to “I run the country and the world” seems to represent a progression from narcissism to megalomania. Running the world sounds . . . God-like.

Tariffs are one of the miraculous ways that Trump believes will enable him to run the world. As he explained to Time magazine:

You have to understand . . . I’ve made all the deals. . . . The deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. . . . So I will set a price.

What an image: The United States as Trump’s department store. It’s a store where he sets the prices, where neither Congress nor companies nor markets nor other countries have any say. It’s all him.

Democracy Docket, Commentary: My time on 60 Minutes and why I refuse to stay silent, Marc Elias, right, May 5, 2025. I have been fighting Donald Trump nonstop for a decade. I officially became general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign on April 12, 2015. A month later, on June 16, Trump announced his campaign.

People often forget that in 2016, Trump and his campaign were fixated on undermining free and fair elections. I was equally determined to protect them. That year, I led litigation efforts in several battleground states aimed at defending voting rights. Our efforts were in vain. While we won some of the lawsuits, we lost the election.

Even after he won the 2016 election, Trump’s disdain for democracy remained central to his identity. Donald Trump became the 45th President as an avowed election critic, vote suppressor and someone who bore a personal grudge against me.

The basic outlines of his grievances against me are well known. He hates me for working for Hillary Clinton. He despises me for humiliating him in court after the 2020 election. He is livid that I call out his lies, refuse to back down and continue to defeat him and the GOP in court.

I have endured his scurrilous attacks for years. He has sued me for racketeering — and lost. He has unleashed his right-wing army of online trolls. Since his reelection, he has threatened me, defamed me and singled me out by name in two executive orders.

The latest development in this saga took place late on Friday, when a federal judge permanently blocked Trump’s executive order seeking to punish my former law firm for my work while I was a partner there. As the court dryly explained:

“Perkins Coie’s representation of President Trump’s political opponent in the 2016 presidential campaign and representation of other clients in connection with election litigation has drawn President Trump’s attention and ire, as reflected in his public statements and his filing of a lawsuit against the Firm.”

The judge offered several examples of those statements. For instance, the court noted that in March 2024, Trump posted an article on his social media platform entitled “Marc Elias Is Scared…And He Should Be.”

More ominously, the court noted that Trump twice, in the fall of 2024, posted “his intent, if elected, to investigate and prosecute ‘Lawyers’ and others he perceived to be helping political opponents and ‘involved’ in what he perceived to be ‘unscrupulous behavior.’”

Which brings me to my appearance Sunday night on 60 Minutes.

Several weeks ago, a producer from the broadcast reached out to say they were working on a story about Trump’s targeting of law firms. I had already written about the topic, expressing my outrage at Trump’s actions and my deep disappointment with the legal industry’s failure to unite behind the targeted firms.

After I shared my views, the producer asked if I’d be willing to discuss the topic on camera. I was unsure. I had previously appeared in a 60 Minutes episode in 2020 about GOP plans to attack voting rights, so I knew the drill — lots of time talking, for a clip or two in the final cut.

However, I quickly learned that few other lawyers — particularly partners at large law firms — were willing to speak on television. The same fear that had prevented Big Law firms from standing up to Trump was now making their partners unwilling to speak out publicly. Even the targeted firms remained quiet.

In 2020, I created Democracy Docket to expose Trump’s lies about elections and democracy in court. Over the years, it had grown into a full-fledged media company. In 2024, I began writing more frequently and doing more on its YouTube channel. It, too, faced a crossroads.

If Kamala Harris had won, I might have scaled back. I could have continued practicing law and writing, without maintaining the same grueling schedule I’d kept for three decades. I had even planned to take time off to write a book.

But with Trump back in office, I decided all of that would have to wait. I promised myself that I would continue to fight Trump and his authoritarian vision for this country with everything I have.

So, I agreed to talk to 60 Minutes, and I promised myself I would not pull punches.

From the opening words of Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion — “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit” — to the 60 Minutes closing credits, this has been an emotional weekend for me personally.I have no doubt that Trump’s hateful words are not behind me. I am certain he will escalate his campaign of political retribution. But, for my part, I will not stop fighting. I will never back down. And I will always speak out.

May 4

CBS 60 Minutes, How law firms targeted by Trump are responding to White House pressure, Anchor Scott Pelley, right, May 4, 2025. In recent weeks, President Trump has signed orders targeting several law firms. Some lawyers warn that the president's assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself.

New York Times, Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution, Jonathan Swan, May 4, 2025. President Trump repeatedly said he didn’t know when asked in a TV interview whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he did not know whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, despite constitutional guarantees, and complained that adhering to that principle would result in an unmanageable slowdown of his mass deportation program.

The revealing exchange, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was prompted by the interviewer Kristen Welker asking Mr. Trump if he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that citizens and noncitizens in the United States were entitled to due process.

New York Times, Trump Battles Academia, but Especially the Ivy League, Elisabeth Bumiller, May 4, 2025. Beyond the politics is a brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never accepted him.

There it was for all to see, President Trump’s tangled relationship with the Ivy League, delivered in a burst at his rally in Michigan on Tuesday night.

“He’s the top,” the president said of Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity doctor he chose to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. “I mean, he went to Harvard.” But then: “I shouldn’t even mention that anymore because that used to be a good thing. Today it doesn’t mean much.”

There was this about Gen. Mark A. Milley, the president’s first-term choice as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “You know, he went to Princeton,” Mr. Trump said in 2019. “And he went to Columbia.” But then: “I’m not sure, was that a good thing or a bad? Did I like it or not?” The president never answered, although he called General Milley, whom he has since reviled, a “smart cookie.”

And on Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “He was, I believe, No. 1 at Yale,” Mr. Trump said in 2018 of his Supreme Court nominee. “Is that a correct statement?” It was not, since Yale does not calculate class rank.

What is correct is that the president’s war on academia has focused intensely on the Ivy League, the richly endowed collection of eight schools, most founded in the colonial era, that cost $90,000 or more a year, send a disproportionate number of graduates into America’s leadership class and accounted for less than 1 percent of the nation’s undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 2022.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination. Officials in higher education acknowledge failures, but call the president’s crackdown a perilous threat to academic freedom.

The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.

Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Mr. Trump, said the president’s ire about the upper echelon of academia was not surprising. “He has a long track record of criticizing elites that he desperately wants to be accepted by,” Mr. O’Brien said. As far as the Ivy League, he said, “he could barely wait to get in himself.”

May 1

 

Cornell Daily Sun, Commentary: U.S. Universities in Crisis: The Implicit and Explicit Threat of Nationalization, Daniel R. Schwarz, right, May 1, 2025. Using the threat of withholding research funds and taxing endowments, Trump and his acolytes are trying to nationalize universities. Under the guise of fighting antisemitism, they want to put universities under the auspices of various kinds of monitors, perhaps in some cases judges, who will control what universities do.

Disregarding democracy, autocrats are bullies who stifle dissent and debate to impose their worldview. The Trump administration lives by intimidation, whether it be directed at the press, the legal establishment, cultural resources or the media.

Defending the right to express fact-based opinions and different interpretations of the same facts, universities must resist intimidation by an authoritarian regime that seeks compliant silence in the face of outrageous demands. Universities’ leadership must not follow the example of some leaders of the U.S. media, medical, educational, legal and corporate worlds who have been cowed into silence and succumbed to threats.

Despite Columbia University agreeing to his conditions, it still has not had its $400 million released because Trump’s end game is to continue making new demands on universities until they capitulate to his conditions on admission as well as his stipulations for muzzling free speech, hiring conservatives, testing the politics of foreign students and dismantling programs that encourage diversity and inclusion.

The failure of the GOP majority in Congress to resist or challenge Trump enables him to rule by executive order, which means ruling by decree. As Frank Bruni and others have remarked, we have entered a world of unpredictable darkness.

A personal note: When I was a guest at Peking University four years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protest demonstrations, which ended with the army massacring 200 protestors, the university was run by the army. Professors were humiliated when they came to work, having to show their credentials every day. I was told my lecture would be heard by party factotums whose reports could jeopardize my hosts. That is what happens when universities fall under government control.

U.S. universities must be independent of government control. Those who understand the role of universities in a democracy applaud Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, who refused to capitulate: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” Nor, I would argue, can the great public universities submit to government interference even though they are vulnerable to state interference.

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University where he has been a faculty member for 57 years.

 

April News

April 30 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion:Trump’s First 100 Days Shows Mainstream Media Is Almost Dead, Susan J. Demas, April 30, 2025. Long Live Independent Media. 

Watching esteemed news outlets bend the knee for Trump has been excruciating. But their obsequiousness has created an opportunity for something better.

April 29

ABC News, HHS firings, questioning safety of vaccines: How the Trump administration may be 'attacking' science, Mary Kekatos, April 29, 2025. Officials have been questioning what is believed to be established science.

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second term have been filled with mass firings, cancellations of research grants, university funding cuts and questions over what should be studied.

Thousands of people have been let go at federal agencies and critical research has been put on hold. Additionally, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines and antidepressant medications despite dozens of studies proving they are safe and effective.

Doctors and public health specialists critical of the administration tell ABC News they view these actions as an "attack" on science, damaging the reputation of respected agencies and by questioning what is believed to be established science.MORE: RFK Jr. said HHS layoffs are needed as 'Americans are getting sicker.' Here's what the data shows.

"It's completely unprecedented," Steve Cohen, senior vice dean of Columbia University's School of Professional Studies and a professor of public affairs at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, told ABC News. "It's frankly a little unhinged. I've never seen anything like it."

The White House did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

An HHS official told ABC News that framing the actions of the admiration as an "attack" is "fundamentally dishonest."

"Further reviewing pharmaceutical products with gold standard science and common sense is not an '"attack on science' — it's what the American people have asked for and deserve," the official said. " Let's be clear: Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability."

Earlier this month, HHS began to lay off 10,000 workers as part of a massive restructuring plan.

Sources previously told ABC News that affected offices included most of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, key offices in the Center for Tobacco Products, most of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the entire assisted reproductive technology team at the CDC.There have also been local impacts in communities due to federal layoffs. ABC News previously reported in March, the CDC was poised to send its lead 'disease detectives' to Milwaukee amid an ongoing lead crisis in schools, but the entire division was cut under sweeping HHS layoffs, leaving local health officials without help they were relying on.

Scientists have also been laid off at NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cohen said these firings have put studies on hold and have greatly reduced the capacity of the federal government to review research.

"Scientists inside agencies, whether they're environmental scientists or medical scientists or people focusing on vaccines or drugs, are being fired, and so some of the research capacity in Washington, in the federal government is being eliminated, and also their ability to judge proposals from universities," he said.

"The only place I haven't seen [firings] happen yet are the laboratories," Cohen added.

Cuts that are currently proposed or have already been implemented include the elimination of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Policy, created by Brett Giroir, the former U.S. assistant secretary for health.

Giroir, who helped convince Trump in his first term to set a goal to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S., wrote in a post on social media last week that the president could ruin his legacy and mission with such cuts.

Millions of dollars' worth of grants have been terminated at the National Institutes of Health related to studies involving LGBTQ+ issues, gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) because they do not "effectuate" the "priorities" of President Donald Trump's administration, according to copies of termination letters sent to grant recipients and viewed by ABC News.

Dr. Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and former director of the NIH, said these terminations are "detrimental" because they may be affecting people in the middle of clinical trials, or affecting the early stages of experimental work.

Research projects focusing on minority populations have major benefits, Varmus noted.

"The purpose of health research in this country is to address problems faced by everybody and to explore every facet of a population that may affect their health," he said. "To single out certain categories of individuals who would not be appropriate to study seems ludicrous to me ... one of the great strengths of America is that we are diverse."

April 21

The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah, Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I'm Going to Teach It Anyway, Karen Attiah, right, April 21, 2025. This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism.

When I got the opportunity to teach at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in the fall of 2023 for the spring 2024 semester, I was elated. My dream of teaching in a global environment had come true.

I wanted to use that opportunity to build a course I never had when I was an international affairs student studying human rights and media at SIPA—one that examined how constructs of race and identity are formed, and how mass media has historically shaped our understanding of race and the global order. I knew that race and identity were rarely taught in international affairs schools—or many journalism schools, for that matter. And I rarely had the opportunity to learn from a professor who looked like me.

The class became one of the most popular at SIPA last year. I enjoyed every minute of teaching, even while knowing that across the country, academic offerings on race, identity, and history were under siege. My students came from around the world and across industries, and I learned just as much from them as they did from me and each other. Some even went on to publish their class assignments in local and national media.

A few months later, the course was canceled, and the department it was housed was dissolved. Despite the grief and lack of clarity, I’ve kept quiet….. until now.

Since then, it has been heart-wrenching to watch Columbia’s administration pre-emptively cave to pressure, especially in placing Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under special provost supervision or receivership. It’s been terrifying to see institution after institution across the country cave on diversity, freedom of speech, and academic integrity, not to protect students and faculty, but to protect donors and reputations.

I’ve been thinking of what to do to help others in this moment. So for starters, I’ve decided to liberate my teaching work.

This summer, I will be offering a version of my Columbia course on Race, Media, and International Affairs as an independent, public offering, for this moment.

This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear.

As I said on BlueSky, I don’t know what the future of academia in America will look like after all this. I am both grateful to Columbia for how it shaped me, while also grieving what feels like the loss of the institutional home I knew and loved.

But I do know that in a moment of profound crisis, we cannot wait for elite permission or institutional approval to share knowledge and create learning communities.

I put out a simple post. Over 3,000 people liked it. More than 100 said they would support the course financially. Many said they’d be willing to pay more to offset the cost for someone else. The response was overwhelming.

April 18

Cornell Review, Why the Endowment Won’t Solve Cornell’s Problems, Staff Report, April 18, 2025.  Cornell is facing many challenges, particularly the Trump Administration is suspending $1 billion in federal research grants due to alleged antisemitism and improper diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

For the year ending June 30, 2023, Cornell received $157 million instate and federal appropriations, $826.5 million in federal grants, and $70.7 million in state grants. This compares with $307 million in grants from the private sector. Yet, all of these are small parts of Cornell’s $5.9 billion in annual operating expenses.

In response, many people are asking whether Cornell can withstand this challenge by using its endowment to fill the gap. As of March 2025, the endowment was worth $10,332,429,674, which is the 14th largest in the country. However, most experts claim that a better measurement is the endowment per student, and Cornell ranks 71st by that measure.

April 8

New York Times, Trump Administration Freezes $1 Billion for Cornell and $790 Million for Northwestern, Officials Say, Michael C. Bender and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, April 8, 2025. The funding pause amid civil rights investigations into both universities sharply escalates the Trump administration’s campaign against elite colleges.

The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern amid civil rights investigations into both schools, two U.S. officials said.

The funding pause involves mostly grants from and contracts with the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.

The moves are the latest and largest in a rapidly escalating campaign against elite American universities that has resulted in billions in federal funds being suspended or put under review in just over a month. Other schools that have had funds threatened include Brown, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.

Cornell and Northwestern are both facing investigations into allegations of antisemitism and into accusations of racial discrimination stemming from their efforts to promote diversity.

Cornell officials said in a statement that they had received more than 75 stop-work orders from the Defense Department on Tuesday, but that they had no information to confirm that more than $1 billion in funding had been suspended. The affected grants, they said, supported research that they described as “profoundly significant to American defense, cybersecurity and health.”

“We are actively seeking information from federal officials to learn more about the basis for these decisions,” said the joint statement from Michael Kotlikoff, the university president; Kavita Bala, the provost; and Robert Harrington, provost for medical affairs.

Jon Yates, a spokesman for Northwestern, said that the university had not been notified by the federal government that funding had been frozen.

Northwestern, a Big Ten university, is the first non-Ivy League school to have funding from the Trump administration targeted under investigations of alleged discrimination. The university issued a “progress report” last week that highlighted its efforts to protect Jewish students, including mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff.

“Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and lifesaving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker, and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease,” Mr. Yates said. “This type of research is now at jeopardy.” 

March 21

 

Michael I. Kotlikoff  (Cornell University Photo by Ryan Young)

Cornell University / Cornell Chronicle, Michael Kotlikoff named Cornell’s 15th president, David Nutt, March 21, 2025. The Cornell Board of Trustees today voted to appoint Michael I. Kotlikoff, who has served as interim president since July 2024, Cornell’s 15th president, effective immediately.

“Over the last eight months as interim president – and his 25 years on Cornell’s faculty – Mike has demonstrated the leadership and vision that the university needs right now,” said Board of Trustees Chair Kraig Kayser, MBA ’84. “His institutional knowledge, expertise and passion for our shared mission will continue to help him lead Cornell through a period of great uncertainty and provide much-needed continuity at a critical time.”

As interim president, Kotlikoff has sought to foster connection and dialogue on campus and to highlight the unique attributes of Cornell – including its history and its ethos.

“I’ve spent 25 wonderful years at Cornell, and serving this university is an honor and a privilege,” Kotlikoff said. “I’m committed to finishing my career here, leading an institution I love through these challenging times. As higher education across the U.S. navigates difficult political, financial and societal headwinds, I hope to guide Cornell in ways that reflect our core principles as an institution committed to doing ‘the greatest good.’”

A professor of molecular physiology, Kotlikoff arrived at Cornell in 2000 to build a new department in biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). He also launched and led the university’s Mammalian Genomics Life Science Initiative. He was named dean of CVM in 2007, and he became university provost in 2015.

“Mike has been a dedicated advocate and champion for Cornell for decades,” said Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, chair of the Board of Trustees Executive Committee and the incoming board chair. “His values, knowledge and insights are deeply appreciated by all who know him. I and the other trustees look forward to working with Mike in the months and years ahead.”

Previously, Kotlikoff was professor and chair of the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his B.A. in 1973 and VMD in 1981, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1984. A professor of molecular physiology, Kotlikoff arrived at Cornell in 2000 to build a new department in biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). He also launched and led the university’s Mammalian Genomics Life Science Initiative. He was named dean of CVM in 2007, and he became university provost in 2015.

“Mike has been a dedicated advocate and champion for Cornell for decades,” said Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, chair of the Board of Trustees Executive Committee and the incoming board chair. “His values, knowledge and insights are deeply appreciated by all who know him. I and the other trustees look forward to working with Mike in the months and years ahead.”

Previously, Kotlikoff was professor and chair of the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his B.A. in 1973 and VMD in 1981, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1984.

By the time he was hired at Cornell in 2000, his research interests had expanded from studying ion channel proteins that control muscle excitability to using genetics to understand the fundamental processes that underlie and limit repair of the damaged mammalian heart. His arrival opened new opportunities for studying mouse genetics at the university. His lab’s breakthroughs included developing optogenetic signaling molecules that can be expressed in mice to explore cell function; ways to use cell therapy to treat cardiac arrythmias in injured hearts; and an understanding of the limits of precursor cells in heart repair. He has published 152 papers and his lab, which he closed in 2021, was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since he began his research career. He has served in numerous roles at the NIH, including chairing the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and serving on the NIH Council of Councils.

Kotlikoff also has the distinction of having been Cornell’s longest-serving provost and served as chief budget officer in addition to chief academic officer. As provost, he helped steward many large and complicated projects, such as the creation of the SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy; the Radical Collaboration initiative; the North Campus Residential Expansion; and the university’s COVID-19 response.

His wife, Carolyn McDaniel, retired in 2024 as a professor of practice in CVM. They have two children: Phoebe, a lawyer and former submarine officer with the U.S. Navy, and Emmett ’16, who graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and currently works for Google.

 

January 2025

Jan. 25

White House Chronicle, Commentary: The Struggle To Save the Printed Word and the Challenge at The Washington Post, Llewellyn King, Jan. 25, 2025.  The printed word is to be treasured.

Two decades ago, I would have written newspapers are to be treasured. But the morning newspaper of old — manufactured in a factory in the middle of the night, shoved onto a truck and trusted to a child for delivery — is largely over. It follows the demise of its predecessor, the afternoon newspaper. These fell to competition from television in the 1960s and 1970s.

The word nowadays is largely carried digitally, even though it might have the imprimatur of a print publication. All the really big names in print now have more virtual readers than traditional ones. These readers may never have the tactile enjoyment, the feel of “the paper” they read, but they read. Increasingly, I am one of those.

I plow through The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I dip into The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times.

I also read — and this is an interesting development — a number of magazines which are de facto dailies. These include The Economist, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

The Economist is the only publication to which I have a digital and a paper subscription.

Much as I have loved newspapers down through the years, I am resigned to the fact there will be fewer going forward, and a generation of young people will find them more a curiosity than anything else.

But the importance of the written word hasn’t diminished. I make the point about the written word — and I distinguish it purposely from the broadcast word — because it has staying power.

I have spent my entire career working on newspapers and making television programs. It is words that are written on paper or online that last, that are referenced down through time.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle.".

Jan.19

New York Times, TikTok Goes Dark in the U.S., Sapna Maheshwari, Madison Malone Kircher, Eli Tan and Meaghan Tobin, Updated Jan. 19, 2025. The popular video app stopped working shortly before a federal law barring U.S. companies from hosting or distributing TikTok was set to take effect today.

The popular video app stopped working shortly before a federal law barring U.S. companies from hosting or distributing TikTok was set to take effect on Sunday.

“Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now,” the message read.

Hours before a federal law banning TikTok from the United States took effect on Sunday, the Chinese-owned social media app went dark, and U.S. users could no longer access videos on the platform. Instead, the app greeted them with a message that said “a law banning TikTok has been enacted.”

“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution,” the message said. “Please stay tuned!”

In addition, TikTok’s sister app, Lemon8, stopped working and showed U.S. users a message saying that it “isn’t available right now.” Both TikTok and Lemon8 are owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet giant.

Apple said it removed TikTok and other ByteDance apps, including Lemon8, from its app store, and users said that Google’s U.S. app store also removed TikTok.

Jan. 17

New York Times, Justices Back Law Requiring TikTok to Be Sold or Banned, Adam Liptak, Jan. 17, 2025. Unanimous Decision Sets Up Ban as Early as Sunday. The decision came a week after the justices heard a First Amendment challenge to a law aimed at the wildly popular short-form video platform used by 170 million Americans that the government fears could be influenced by China.

The Supreme Court ruled against TikTok on Friday, rejecting the social media company’s First Amendment challenge to the law that effectively bans it in the United States starting on Sunday.

The unanimous decision may deal a death blow to the U.S. operations of the wildly popular app, which serves up short-form videos that are a leading source of information and entertainment to tens of millions of Americans, especially younger ones.

“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement and source of community,” the decision said. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

President Biden signed the law last spring after it passed in Congress with wide bipartisan support. Lawmakers said the app’s ownership was a risk because the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies allowed it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread covert disinformation or propaganda.

Although TikTok’s lawyer told the justices last week that the app would “go dark” if it lost the case, it was not clear how quickly a shutdown would play out. At a minimum, app store operators like Apple and Google face significant penalties imposed by the law if they distribute and update the TikTok app.

The app stores and cloud providers have a strong incentive to comply with the ban on TikTok. Under the law, those companies would pay penalties as high as $5,000 per user who is able to gain access to the app inside the United States if the ban takes effect.

• Influencers react to a world without TikTok.
• Publishers and authors wonder: Can anything replace BookTok?
• Here’s why Beijing could have the last say on any TikTok deal.

New York Times, A Timeline of TikTok’s Rise and Fall, Madison Malone Kircher and Remy Tumin, Jan. 17, 2025. What started as “the dance app” spawned countless memes, launched lucrative careers and shaped entire industries. Here’s how it got here.

In its infancy, TikTok was often described as an app for teenagers’ dance videos. In 2025, it’s a juggernaut with 170 million users in the United States and, according to the Justice Department, a national security threat that must be eliminated.

The platform’s path from a whimsical dance app to the target of a federal ban has been dotted with recipes, niche drama, micro trends, new entries into the popular lexicon and overnight megastars — as well as legal troubles, Senate hearings and, finally, a widely watched Supreme Court case.

Here’s a timeline of the app’s meteoric rise, and a reminder of the videos that dominated your algorithm, whether you wanted them to or not.

New York Times, U.S. Ban of TikTok Is Set to Deal a Major Blow to ByteDance, Its Chinese Owner, Erin Griffith, Jan. 17, 2025. While TikTok remains hugely popular in Brazil, Indonesia and other markets, its 170 million users in the United States are its most valuable.

The ban of TikTok in the United States is set to create a glaring hole in social media. For ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in China, it also could create a glaring hole in its business.

The ban, which was signed into federal law last year and upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, is a major blow to ByteDance, the world’s second-most valuable private technology company, worth $300 billion. At least a chunk of the company’s value is tied to its success in the United States, where TikTok has 170 million monthly users, according to analyst estimates.

TikTok has a larger audience outside the United States — it has 1.2 billion to 1.8 billion monthly users around the world, with its largest markets including Indonesia and Brazil — but the app’s American users are the most valuable, analysts said. TikTok makes money through ads, as well as by selling goods through its TikTok Shop, which pays influencers a commission to hawk beauty products, gadgets, clothes and other items. Social networks typically get their highest “revenue per user” in the United States.

“The U.S. market is the most profitable market of any market by a long shot,” said Mark Zgutowicz, an analyst at Benchmark Company. TikTok took in an estimated $10 billion in revenue in the United States last year, he said, out of a total global revenue estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion.

Jan. 16

New York Times, Zuckerberg Will Host a Party for Trump’s Inauguration, Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, Jan. 16, 2025 (print ed.). Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, is one of several tech leaders expected to play a high-profile role in celebrating the new administration next week.

Mark Zuckerberg, right, the Meta chief executive who has tried to keep a distance from politics, is warming to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Zuckerberg is among several Big Tech executives who are expected to be front and center at Mr. Trump’s inauguration next week. He will be one of four hosts of a black-tie reception on Jan. 20, joining the longtime Republican donors Miriam Adelson and Todd Ricketts in hosting a party “celebrating the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance,” according to a copy of the invitation seen by The New York Times. The event was first reported by Puck.

Corporate leaders often argue that supporting an inauguration is a patriotic act that does not amount to political support for the president. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, declined to comment.

Mr. Zuckerberg rarely attaches his name to political events. He did not play a similar role at President Biden’s inauguration in 2020 or at Mr. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2016.

Jan. 14

New York Times, MSNBC's President Rashida Jones Stepping Down, Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum, Jan. 14, 2025. The president of MSNBC, Rashida Jones, is stepping down from that position, the company said on Tuesday, a major change at the news network just days before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office.

Rebecca Kutler, senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC, will succeed Ms. Jones as interim president, effective immediately. Ms. Jones will stay on in an advisory role through March.

“Rebecca is the ideal leader to guide us through this moment, and I look forward to collaborating with her as we shape our collective future together,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, said in a note to staffers.

Ms. Jones’s exit comes amid industrywide pressure for the cable news industry, which has seen declining ratings after the U.S. presidential election. MSNBC has been the second most-watched cable network during that period, ahead of CNN but behind longtime ratings leader Fox News.

Executives at the network are hopeful that audiences will return as Mr. Trump takes office and viewers seek to dissect his early policy moves. On Monday, the company announced that Rachel Maddow, its most popular host, would temporarily return to broadcasting her one-hour show every weeknight at 9 p.m. Eastern for Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office.

MSNBC is among a bundle of cable channels that its parent company, Comcast, is planning to spin out later this year into a new company. CNBC, another news channel in Comcast’s cable portfolio, is also being spun out, along with entertainment networks like USA and Syfy.

Ms. Kutler is a cable news executive with experience in the streaming business. Before joining MSNBC in 2022, Ms. Kutler was a key architect of CNN+, the ambitious streaming news service that was shut down by Warner Bros. Discovery that year.

Jan. 7

New York Times, Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship C.E.O., Joins Meta’s Board, Kate Conger, Jan. 7, 2025 (print ed.). Mr. White, a close ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, further strengthens the social media giant’s connections with the incoming administration.

Mark Zuckerberg, right, said in a Facebook post Monday that Meta had added Dana White, the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, and two other executives to its board.

Meta is adding Mr. White, a longtime friend of President-elect Donald J. Trump, to the social media company’s leadership amid a series of moves to strengthen its ties to the incoming administration. Last week, the company shook up the top of its policy team, appointing a longtime executive known for his Republican ties as head of global policy. Meta has also donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund.CAGE-MATCH POLITICSHow Donald Trump helped transform U.F.C. into a cultural powerhouse.

In recent years, Mr. White and Mr. Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, have bonded over their passion for professional fighting, including mixed martial arts, which Mr. Zuckerberg took up in 2022.

“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in his post. “I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.”

In 2023, Mr. White attempted to broker a cage match between Mr. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX.Mr. Musk, who has become a close ally of Mr. Trump, eventually backed out of the battle, citing an old injury. He claimed Mr. Zuckerberg was at fault for not making himself available to fight later on.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, created three new board seats for the appointments, bringing the total number to 13. Mr. Zuckerberg said the company had also added John Elkann, the chief executive of Exor, a European-based holding company that controls Jeep and Ferrari, and Charlie Songhurst, a tech investor who previously worked at Microsoft and has recently advised Meta on artificial intelligence projects.

“We have massive opportunities ahead in A.I., wearables, and the future of social media, and our board will help us achieve our vision,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

The Bulwark, Political Opinion:The Curious Case of Lindy Li, Kyle Tharp, Jan. 7, 2025. How did a “Blue MAGA” influencer and fundraiser turn on Democrats so fast?

Last March, I found myself sitting in a White House briefing with two dozen pro-Democratic digital creators, listening to high-level administration officials preview President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

Among the handful of administration leaders who briefed the room was Anita Dunn, at the time one of Biden’s most powerful consiglieres. It was pretty conventional stuff. She spent a few minutes talking us through the president’s remarks and answering questions from starry-eyed social media influencers who planned on publishing content cheering on the speech the next day.

I was attending on behalf of my then-employer, a pro-democracy media company, and knew most of those in attendance. There were some political YouTubers, a few up-and-coming Democratic TikTok stars, and a cohort of folks from other emerging news outlets like MeidasTouch and Betches Media. But there was one attendee I didn’t recognize: a woman named Lindy Li.

Li had earned an invite to the White House that day by being a very energetic Democratic personality on cable news, and for having grown an audience of over 300,000 followers on X by shooting off hyperpartisan, pro-Democrat, red-meat content. One example of her style and approach came in a tweet she authored in 2022: “When push comes to shove, Democrats take care of you regardless of party. Republicans try to get you murdered.”

A former congressional candidate, Li had also held various fundraising roles in the past for Democratic candidates and the national party committee.

She was, if nothing else, a reliable party ally. And at the White House gathering that day, she played a similar role. She did not waste an opportunity to shower praise on Biden and the administration writ large, and proudly display her unwavering gratitude and support for the White House. She was the classic attendee who raises a hand to ask a question, but instead launches into some unrelated speech about whatever happens to be on her mind.

At one point, Li delivered a mini-lecture declaring how much she loved Joe Biden, while offering up her various credentials, including that the governor of Pennsylvania had named her to some commission. While some creators in attendance asked Dunn questions about the White House’s economic messaging, Li made sure White House officials recognized she was a team player. “Teacher’s pet. . .” one of my friends in the room texted from underneath the table.

Throughout the rest of the year, I kind of forgot about Li, having dismissed her as just another “Blue MAGA” Twitter person. For months, she continued enthusiastically to support Biden, and later Kamala Harris, both on cable news and X, where she would tweet predictable messages of support for their campaigns. By August, she said she had raised several million dollars for the Democratic ticket.

Her social media accounts became filled with adoring posts featuring herself at events with the president, vice president, and other top Democratic elected officials like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “There will never be another like her,” she said of Pelosi. She also was part of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Democratic National Convention this summer.

Then, after Election Day, Li was suddenly everywhere. But instead of maintaining her overeager support for Biden and Harris, she adopted a new persona, eagerly attacking Democrats and the campaign nonstop. In this new role as a Biden and Harris antagonist, she has been quoted or mentioned in the mainstream press hundreds of times and become a fixture on Fox News.

Appearing on Fox in mid-December, Li declared that Biden was in “no shape” to carry out his duties as commander-in-chief. “The president has not been cognitively fit to assume the duties of the Oval Office for a number of years now,” Li told Fox’s Kevin Corke.

It was a wild turnaround from her effusive praise of the man and her defense of his age and cognition just months prior. In fact, Li was a frequent and outspoken critic of journalists who covered the president’s age issue. “To those of you who said Biden was cognitively impaired . . . WE AWAIT YOUR APOLOGY,” Li tweeted in March.

When Biden ultimately dropped out of the race in July, Li told Fox that if Democrats skipped over Kamala Harris in favor of another candidate to lead the ticket, it would be “a catastrophic mistake.” She urged her followers to “unify behind Kamala Harris.”

Here too, Li has seemingly changed her tune. Days after the election, she told Fox that Biden’s endorsement of Harris was “an F-You to the party.”

THE LIST OF POST-ELECTION reversals goes on: Li now claims that she “has been a conservative all my life,” that Pelosi is “notorious” for “insider trading,” that Democrats are to blame for failing to secure the southern border, that there will be a “new era of prosperity” under Donald Trump, and that “The markets & consumer confidence have been booming under Pres. Trump[.] Americans are loving his transition.” She also called Democrats “delusional,” said the Democratic party was like “a cult.” She referred to Pete Hegseth, whom Trump tapped for secretary of defense despite allegations of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and financial corruption, as “a pretty good guy.”

Democratic digital creators who joined Li at the White House briefing last March have dismissed her recent shift as cringeworthy opportunism. “She’s a liar and a clout chaser!” tweeted Kenneth Walden, a pro-Harris TikTok creator. “It’s very clear where this is going,” remarked journalist Aaron Rupar. Democratic strategist and YouTuber Keith Edwards tweeted “How long until she’s wearing a MAGA hat?”

“We have people who want attention, pick a side, say things to get in a room, and then when things get tough, they’re the first people to dip,” Edwards told me recently. “I don’t think she believes in anything.”

LI WAS HAPPY TO ADDRESS her critics in a brief interview with me last week. “I haven’t switched parties. I’m not a Republican. I’m not out for anything, I would never work for the government, and who would I even get a contract from?,” she said. She defended her change of heart on the president’s age issue by noting that it happened after the June 27 debate between Biden and Trump. “After the debate I stopped defending his cognitive fitness. You will notice that I never said anything about that post-debate.”

But even here, Li seems to be casually disregarding her very public past. In a tweet she authored two weeks after the debate, she attacked critics of the president’s age. That tweet has recently been deleted.

Flip-flopping is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics. Trump has perfected it. So too have his hangers-on (see: Gabbard, Tulsi). But Li’s head-spinning pivot still illustrates a broader trend we’ll see escalate in the years to come.

Our tribal political culture creates remarkable incentives for those who defect from one side to another. The act of defection is treated by the party to whom the defector has gone as an affirmation of their cause. The defector is not only lavished with praise and love from those new party members but loads of attention from allied media, who reward shamelessness with more coverage and clout. For example, Fox News producers and bookers, knowing friendly fire can help drive ratings, love to feature Democratic voices willing to turn on their own.

I asked Li specifically about Fox News, and whether she was being paid for her appearances, or whether she was in conversations to become a contributor for the network, as some of her critics have assumed.

“I’m not going to discuss any conversations that I've had with private individuals, but I have not been paid a single dime by anybody for telling the truth,” said Li. “Not even a penny.” Pressed further, she clarified that she was not currently “in discussions with any executives at Fox News.”

But her sudden celebrity, whether compensated or not, doesn’t change the fact that the media incentivizes this type of behavior.

As online political creators become more mainstream—sometimes more even than the legacy political press—more like Li will emerge. Many political creators’ entire personas and livelihoods rely on “feeding the beast” more content—and more controversy.

Relevance is more important than ideological consistency. And as the bizarre evolution of Lindy Li shows, being willing to say just about anything may be the political attribute that matters most.

“We’re in a post-shame culture now,” said Edwards.

Jan. 6

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Steady, Political Opinion: Take This Billionaire, Please, Dan Rather and Team Steady, Dan Rather and Team Steady, Jan. 6, 2025. Why is Jeff Bezos (shown above in a photo via Getty Imagaes) hurting, not helping, journalism?

When a journalistic institution is the one making headlines, it’s rarely good news. Such is the case for a revered American newspaper, The Washington Post. A mothership of American journalism, whose reporters helped topple an American president and inspired generations of young reporters, is listing and taking on water.

As Donald Trump and his army of “alternate” truth-tellers get ready to take the reins of government again, the country desperately needs the best and brightest journalists watching and reporting on their every move. And yet we wake to news that the Post is expected to lay off dozens more staffers the very month Trump returns to power.

The 147-year-old newspaper is apparently bleeding money, a problem of its own making. When billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos pulled the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election, a reported 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions in protest. That accounts for 10% of the paper’s online audience.

“I just cancelled my Washington Post subscription. The web site asked why, and the closest option was ‘concern with the content.’ There was no option about surrendering to fascism, but that’s the real reason,” a former subscriber posted on X.

For Bezos, founder of Amazon, the Post’s financial losses are peanuts considering his $200 billion plus net worth. But his love of the paper and his passion for quality journalism seem to be shrinking.

Back in 2013, when Bezos bought the Post from the family of venerated publisher Katharine Graham, he said he wanted to transform it from a regional newspaper to a global one. He provided money — big money — to expand the newsroom and encouraged reporters to extend their reach by embracing the “gifts of the internet.”

Over the ensuing decade, his interest in the paper ebbed and flowed, but he mostly stayed out of the editorial decision-making. Then he pulled the Harris endorsement causing an exodus of top editors, opinion writers, and reporters.

But Bezos wasn’t done burnishing his rep with the former president. After the election, he pledged $1 million to help pay for Trump’s inauguration and agreed to stream it live on Amazon Prime (an additional $1 million in-kind contribution). Just before Christmas, he was seen at Mar-a-Lago, kissing the ring with fellow super-rich guy Elon Musk. And he has green-lit a documentary about Melania Trump to air on Prime. I’m guessing it will be what’s known in the trade as a “sweetheart profile.”

While it isn’t great that the owner of one of the most important papers in the country is cozying up to an incoming president who says he will be a dictator on “day one,” Bezos’s actions aren’t surprising. He didn’t become a billionaire by being selfless.

But on Friday, things took another turn at the Post. Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes (shown above) quit in protest after a cartoon of hers (shown in draft form) was killed.

In a piece she published on Substack, Telnaes explained that “there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.”

Jan. 5

New York Times, Trump Transition: ‘A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6, Dan Barry and Alan Feuer, Jan. 5, 2025. President-elect Trump and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol attack, spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom.

In two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely in his name.

Directly behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons. To his left, the spot where roaring rioters and outnumbered police officers fought hand to hand. To his right, where the prostrate body of a dying woman was jostled in the bloody fray.

And before him, a dozen marble steps descending to a lectern adorned with the presidential seal. The same steps where, four years earlier, Trump flags were waved above the frenzied crowd and wielded like spears; where an officer was dragged facedown to be beaten with an American flag on a pole and another was pulled into the scrum to be kicked and stomped.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.

This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.

That day was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But with his return to office, Mr. Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called “a day of love.” He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new administration, while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.

Jan. 4

 

Donald J. Trump, who has described himself in semi-religious terms and imagry as "The Chosen One."

Lance's Substack, Political Commentary: What Is Trump Doing With A January 19th Rally? Lance F Rosen, Jan. 4, 2025. Just what you would expect of a stochastic terrorist.

It should be obvious. He is calling in his movement of extremists comprised of QAnons and Nazis, psychotic fundamentalists and bonkers conspirophiles in an outdoor version of his pre-election Madison Square Garden hate-fest.

And his purpose? To essentially deliver the threat of a mailed fist to Congress, not just to the Democrats but to any lingering dissidents within his own party.

Lance’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What he is conveying as his message with this rally is, in effect, "If you dare to oppose me on the deportations, the budget, my plans to use the military domestically, or try anything to obstruct my nominees, I will send my mob after you and they will get you, wherever you are."

That is his purpose. It's not a photo op. It's not to prove he can draw big crowds. It is a message to all, including the January 18th pro-democracy rally attendees, that there will be blood.

You will see it in the faces of the people there. Don't be surprised if there is violence, though I expect Presidential security and reinforcements will be there in force, therefore not likely. The relevant point is that he now has official immunity, and will be pardoning the January 6th criminals to augment his private army of Brownshirts.

The media has dropped any reference to the Madison Square Garden Nazi rally which Trump organized because for the most part they have been broken by a barrage of terroristic threats from Trump to pull their licenses and shut them down, to use government agencies to investigate and destroy them, to acquire them through hostile takeovers, or to incite stochastic terrorism against their ownership and editors. That is why you've heard nothing about the Madison Square Garden version of Trump, and instead are getting drowned by mindless coverage of the juvenile squabbles within the GOP.

So, if you were curious about this rally, now you know what it is. He is taking a page from his mentor who used to have them at Nuremberg. And don't be surprised if the staging of it looks eerily similar to this.

 

New York Times, Washington Post Cartoonist Quits After Jeff Bezos Cartoon Is Nixed, Benjamin Mullin, Jan. 4, 2025 (print ed.). Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said on Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

In a brief statement posted to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has worked at The Post since 2008 — called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer" that was “dangerous for a free press.”

“In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”

Ms. Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of the Walt Disney Company.your times access

David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement that he respected Ms. Telnaes and all she had given to The Post “but must disagree with her interpretation of events."

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

Mr. Shipley added that he had spoken with Ms. Telnaes by phone on Friday and had asked her to reconsider resigning. During the call, Mr. Shipley said he wanted to speak with Ms. Telnaes on Monday, after they had taken the weekend to think things over. He later encouraged her to hold off on quitting to see if they could work out the situation in accordance with her principles.

Ms. Telnaes did not respond to requests for comment.

Matt Wuerker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for Politico, called the decision to kill Ms. Telnaes’s cartoon “spineless,” adding that the storied Post cartoonist Herbert Block, known as Herblock, and Ben Bradlee, a former editor of The Post, were “spinning, kicking and screaming in their graves.”The cartoon, by Ann Telnaes, depicted the owner of The Post, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Trump.

Jan. 1

 

 

BBC News, Elon Musk changes his name to Kekius Maximus on X, Tom Bayly and Patrick Jackson, Jan. 1, 2025. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has sparked speculation after changing his name on his social media platform X to "Kekius Maximus."

The tech mogul - and close confidant of US President-Elect Donald Trump - offered no immediate explanation for the name or his new profile image which depicts the character Pepe the Frog - a meme that has been used by far-right groups.

The move has sent ripples through the cryptocurrency world, sending the value of a memecoin - a digital currency inspired by internet memes - that shares the same name skyrocketing.

In the past, Mr Musk has influenced crypto prices with his social media commentary, but it was not immediately clear if he had any involvement in this particular memecoin.Elon Musk A picture of Elon Musk's X profile with a picture of Kekius MaximusElon Musk

"Kekius" appears to be a Latinisation of "kek", a word roughly equivalent to "laugh out loud" popularised by gamers but now often associated with the alt right.

"Kek" is also the name of the ancient Egyptian god of darkness, who is sometimes depicted with the head of a frog.

Many people would link "Maximus" to the name of Russell Crowe's heroic character in the film Gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius.

Mr Musk's new profile image depicts Pepe in Roman military dress holding what appears to be a game console.