2025

 

December

Dec. 29

Status, Sunday Spotlight: CBS’ New Year ResetI, Natalie Korach, Dec. 28-29, 2025. With a stalled “60 Minutes” segment, Tony Dokoupil’s national tour kicking off, and ratings pressure mounting, Bari Weiss enters 2026 needing to prove the network is driven by the news and not the Ellison noise.

Next Monday, CBS News will embark on another new era for the “CBS Evening News,” with Tony Dokoupil, right, taking the reins of the venerable nightly broadcast. His first two weeks on the job will include a 10-cities-in-10-days “Live from America” tour—originating from Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and more—intended to reset the network’s connection with the broader country.

A lot is riding on the experiment. The appointment of Dokoupil and the kickoff tour serve as one of the first major programming decisions linked to Bari Weiss since becoming the network’s editor-in-chief. Yet the idea of a reset also applies to Weiss herself, who needs to demonstrate at least some acumen in the new-to-her realm of television news after a rocky start to her tenure—one marked by ratings blows, difficulty luring top talent, and the recent public relations fallout surrounding the network’s flagship news program, “60 Minutes.”

As it stands, Weiss is signaling a strategy intended to strengthen CBS News’ bond with viewers—and introduce Dokoupil in his new capacity after leaving the network’s morning show—by meeting audiences where they are.

Weiss, however, who came to CBS via Paramount’s acquisition of her “anti-woke” Substack site The Free Press, arguably hasn’t come even halfway in addressing the concerns of employees—including, most recently, her controversial decision to yank a “60 Minutes” segment hours before airtime, a move that rattled staff and fueled speculation about corporate pressure intruding on editorial discretion.

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Seemingly undaunted by the internal and external blowback, Weiss reiterated her confidence in her decision to pull the segment on Wednesday, citing the need for additional reporting, and contending that the news division needs to earn back viewers’ trust. “No amount of outrage—whether from activist organizations or the White House—will derail us,” Weiss said. “We are not out to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media.”

That contention, however, provoked a fair amount of skepticism, largely because the role of Paramount chief David Ellison looms over all of Weiss’ decision-making, especially with perceptions that the company is willing to make concessions at CBS News to win regulatory favor from the Trump administration. According to reporting by The New York Times’ Teddy Schleifer, Donald Trump has privately said that Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father and chief investor, assured him that CBS News would become more “conservative” under his son’s ownership.

That’s the backdrop to everything currently unfolding at CBS News, including the latest tumult surrounding the “60 Minutes” segment. Whether the White House has been asked again for an interview, what the new timeline looks like, and where correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sits inside that process all remain unclear, especially after her memo decrying Weiss’ move as “political.” But if CBS continues down the path Weiss is insisting upon, adding further reporting to air during a future episode, the refreshed segment certainly won’t be able to escape comparisons to the original episode leaked in Canada, just ahead of Christmas.

The unintentional virality of the “60 Minutes” CECOT story stands in contrast to the “Evening News” rollout, where social media amplification is explicitly part of the plan. Weiss has made clear to staff that Dokoupil’s tour should be engineered to travel on social platforms, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The network’s recent town hall with Erika Kirk, which drew shy of 2 million live viewers but generated what CBS calls its most-watched interview on social media ever, has been pointed to internally as proof of concept.

Dec. 28

Meidas Touch Network, Sunday Afternoon News Updates, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 28, 2025. Most importantly, I am following the meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Trump’s actions this morning tell us everything we need to know. Right before he was set to meet with Zelenskyy, Trump made a point of announcing who he spoke to first. Can you guess who?

If you guessed Vladimir Putin, ding ding ding, you’d be correct.

Trump proudly posted that he had just enjoyed a “good and very productive” call with the Russian dictator ahead of his meeting with Zelenskyy. Here’s how the order of operations work when it comes to Trump: Putin first. Ukraine second. America last. Every time.

By the way, if this story sounds like a repeat, you’re not wrong. This is the same exact strategy Putin employed the last time Zelenskyy and Trump were set to meet. And because Putin was the last person Trump spoke with prior to meeting with Zelenskyy, that meeting completely blew up both in public and behind the scenes. We’ll see if today’s meeting meets the same fate.

Then of course, we need to talk about the setting of today’s meeting. Trump scheduled the meeting with Zelenskyy in the main dining room of Mar-a-Lago. Not the Oval Office, but the dining room in his private club. The disrespect is as obvious as it is intentional.

The disrespect didn’t stop there. When Zelenskyy arrived in Florida, no U.S. officials were there to greet him. He was met only by Ukraine’s own ambassador. As journalist Julia Davis (creator of the Russian Media Monitor) noted, not a single American official showed up. Contrast that with the red-carpet treatment Trump gave Putin in Alaska, where American soldiers were literally photographed on their knees rolling out a red carpet.

And we’ve seen this movie before. Russian state media and Kremlin-aligned voices immediately began spinning the narrative. Illia Ponomarenko of the Kyiv Independent perfectly captured the pattern: “Let me guess — Putin again whispered sugary compliments to Trump about how he’s the greatest world leader in history, told him that Russian full victory is just five minutes away, promised his family a chance to make money off another round of “business projects,” and Trump melted. And now he’s once again going to start throwing maps around and swearing at Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago.”

While all of this was unfolding, Trump was also busy flooding his social media feed with lies, racism, and dangerous admissions. He falsely accused former President Barack Obama of funding Iran’s nuclear program. He reposted vile propaganda claiming Democrats want to replace Americans “with uneducated Mexicans who would be easier to enslave.” The text was written alongside imagery of nuclear annihilation.

Trump also reposted claims about “double tap strikes” under Obama, and in doing so, effectively admitted to engaging in them himself. He tried to blur the distinction between an actual war and U.S. forces killing people in boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Trump once again declared peace between Thailand and Cambodia, congratulating himself for ending “breakout fighting” that, conveniently, keeps “ending” every few weeks in his posts. War breaks out. War continues. And Trump constantly tries to spike the football as real lives hang in the balance.

I know my plea falls of deaf ears inside corporate media newsrooms, but please, stop playing along with what Trump says. He’s a liar. A fraud. A cheat. Don’t give him the headlines he is looking forward. Instead, expose the truth. Inevitably, you’ll find that Trump’s claims are about as legitimate as a FIFA Peace Prize.

In other news, Trump’s billionaire head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Loeffler, right, went on television claiming small business owners are thrilled with tariffs, thrilled to pay taxes, thrilled with an economy that actual small business owners will tell you is crushing them.

At HUD, officials were asked to defend Trump’s floated idea of 50-year mortgages, a proposal that would trap generations in permanent debt and do nothing to solve the housing crisis. HUD Secretary Scott Turner noted that “more research needs to be done.” The truth is, these officials have no answers. They are put on TV simply to defend Trump’s insanity, and as we all know, loyalty to Trump is valued over the truth.

Even Republican members of Congress, like Rep. Mike Turner, struggled to answer a basic question: which side is Trump on in the Russia-Ukraine war? That should be an easy one! “I, you know, clearly, umm, Trump is on the side of peace,” Turner sputtered.

Amid all of this, I do want to highlight one voice cut through the noise. Senator Bernie Sanders raised alarms about the unchecked spread of massive data centers, their environmental impact, and their role in driving up energy costs.

Speaking on CNN, Sanders remarked: “I think we need to be thinking seriously about a moratorium on these data centers. Frankly, I think you gotta slow this process down. It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, ‘It’s coming, you adapt.’ What are they talking about? Are they gonna guarantee healthcare to all people? What are they gonna do when people have no jobs? Make housing free?”

It’s always important that we level set and highlight the issues having the most impact on the American people, especially as Trump tries to distract.

 

A 1980s poster promotes a film festival in France featuring 18 movies of the iconic French star Brigitte Bardot, who died this week at age 91.

New York Times, From Sex Appeal to the Far Right, Brigitte Bardot Symbolized a Changing France, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Dec. 28, 2025. In the decades after becoming a megastar, the French actress became as known for her politics as she once had been for her acting career. 

The actress, singer and activist Brigitte Bardot, who has died at 91, personified France in a literal way: In 1969, she became the first celebrity to be used as the model for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic that has adorned the country’s City Halls as well as official documents, stamps and coins since the French Revolution. Just over a year earlier, she had kicked off her TV special “Le Show Bardot,” wearing little besides thigh-high boots and a French flag, as the national anthem played and then quickly morphed into a peppy new pop tune.

B.B., as she was known, was a new France: bold, free and unconventional.

Yet Bardot wasn’t a consensual figure. You might even say she was among the first problematic stars of the modern era: Admired and reviled in turns, or even simultaneously, she was a star accused of being a bad actress, a cranky, unfiltered misanthrope doubling as an emblem of modernity and liberation, and a tireless crusader for animal rights who cottoned to the far-right National Front and was convicted multiple times for “inciting racial hatred.”

Bardot did not need anyone to cancel her, though: In a way, she did it herself, quitting acting in 1973 before she turned 40. Unlike many star retirements before and since, this one stuck. Many may argue that this left her with enough time on her hands to get in trouble, but for better or for worse, she wanted agency, and she got it.

 

New York Times, New College of Florida Was Progressive. Then Gov. DeSantis Overhauled It, Anemona Hartocollis, Dec. 28, 2025. Gender studies is out, ‘The Odyssey’ is required reading and a Charlie Kirk statue is coming. Has one ideological bubble replaced another?

April Flakne strides into the classroom to teach a course on “The Odyssey,” a new requirement at New College of Florida.

She has taught philosophy at the small state college for 25 years, but this class is different — seven weeks on one classic book, required of all students. Normally, her focus is on philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir, and their theories of totalitarianism, revolution and feminism.

This class on Homer is a turnabout from all that, and marks a signature accomplishment for conservatives who want to redirect higher education.

In early 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican (shown above in a file photo), executed what many viewed as a conservative takeover of New College, a struggling state school. With fewer than 1,000 students, the liberal arts college had long been a draw for nonconformists, where grades were verboten and students designed their own classes and majors.

It was “a little Club Med” for people who were “all ideologically the same,” said Richard Corcoran, the school’s new president.

Under a new board and president, and as required by a new state law, the school has installed a curriculum emphasizing the traditional Western canon, with “The Odyssey” serving as a foundational text. It has created new teams for sports like baseball, basketball and beach volleyball and recruited athletes to fill out their rosters. It has hired dozens of new professors, some with conservative backgrounds and a few who are known for their vocal opposition to liberal orthodoxies, like Spencer Klavan, a lecturer at the college last year, and host of the Young Heretics podcast, about classical education.

In September, it announced that a statue of Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative activist, would be placed on campus.

And the college was among the first to say it would sign the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which links preferential access to federal funding to a willingness to adhere to federal policies and demands, and which better known schools have scorned.

The school has also shed D.E.I. initiatives and gender studies.

About 20 faculty members and 200 students decamped within the first six months of the makeover, according to the college. 

Dec. 26 

 

Demonstrators, including Nadine Siler, of Waldorf, Md., dressed in a pink frog costume, hold up signs at a designated protest point in front of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on Dec. 20, 2025, a day after a Trump-appointed board voted to add President Donald Trump's name to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC (AP photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson).

Associated Press via Politico, Kennedy Center criticizes musician who canceled performance after Trump name added to building, Staff Report, Dec. 26, 2025. Board president Richard Grenell said he would seek $1 million in damages “for this political stunt,” in a letter to jazz artist Chuck Redd.

The president of the Kennedy Center on Friday fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with The Associated Press.

In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1 million in damages “for this political stunt.”

Redd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A drummer and vibraphone player, Redd has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to The Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Congress passed a law the following year naming the center as a living memorial to him.

According to the White House, Trump’s handpicked board approved the renaming, which scholars have said violates the law. Kennedy niece Kerry Kennedy has vowed to remove Trump’s name from the building once he leaves office, and former House historian Ray Smock is among those who say any changes would have to be approved by Congress.

The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.

New York Times, Data Center Surge Reaches India as American Tech Giants Invest Billions, Alex Travelli and Pragati K.B., Dec. 26, 2025. Megacities in southern India are attracting enormous investments to help build artificial intelligence infrastructure to serve the world’s most data-hungry country.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, was striding across a stage in New Delhi, extolling his company’s $17.5 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the benefits it would bring to his native country’s 1.4 billion people. While he was speaking, Amazon made a rival announcement, promising to throw $35 billion into A.I.-driven projects across India.

A flood of money for data centers, cloud computing and other hardware has come to India. Two months before the near-simultaneous Microsoft-Amazon announcements, Google committed $15 billion to data centers in partnerships with two of India’s biggest conglomerates, the Adani Group and Bharti Airtel.

That $67.5 billion, to be spent over the next five years, is just the crest of a wave. A fourth American tech giant, Meta, is having a plant built near Google’s, as are India’s other biggest industrial houses, Reliance and Tata.

“This is going to be one of the largest single-sector investments that India’s ever seen,” said Somnath Mukherjee, chief investment officer at ASK Wealth Advisors in Mumbai.

These investments are vast in proportion to everything except for other A.I.-related investments. Trillions of dollars are at stake in this boom worldwide. In India, companies see a market with lots of room to run.

India hosts nearly 20 percent of the world’s data but only 3 percent of its storage. The United States has vastly more data centers than India, but India’s population, already the largest on the planet, is still growing, and its economy is expanding even faster.

“India is the largest consumer of data in the world, but with barely 5 percent of American data capacity,” Mr. Mukherjee said.

The enormous bets on India by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta underscore the seemingly limitless reaches of the A.I. boom. President Trump stunned India with 50 percent tariffs this summer, casting a pall over the friendly and longstanding economic relationship between the countries. Negotiators from Washington and New Delhi are still trying to find some accommodation on trade. Yet artificial intelligence money plows ahead.

India’s economic strengths and weaknesses look like a mismatch for the A.I. investments. The data centers will require cheap land, abundant electricity and water. India’s whole territory is packed with farmland, and much of it suffers from unreliable power grids and scarce water supply. It does need jobs for a huge and semi-idle labor force, but data centers require minimal staffing

But India doesn’t want to miss out on the A.I. gold rush. It also doesn’t want to rely on data servers overseas.

Since 2018, India has been weighing laws that would require digital functions to be based on servers in India. For national security’s sake, the government already insists that banks and WhatsApp, which Meta owns, keep their data local. Mr. Mukherjee said the possibility of officials’ widening those demands was motivating foreign companies to install servers within India.

Another reason to keep the data centers closer to the people who will be using them is that data slows the farther it has to travel. Delays of even milliseconds between faraway servers can pile up during complex processing, causing whole systems to lag. Until a few years ago, most of India’s data was stored on servers in Singapore, 1,800 miles away across the Bay of Bengal.

The data centers for Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta will join a growing number of smaller centers spread between India’s biggest urban areas. Most are along the coasts, where they can be connected to undersea cables.

Luring giant plants to Hyderabad, an inland city of 11 million, required a feat of salesmanship on the part of the local government. That job fell to Jayesh Ranjan, a special secretary in charge of tech and investment for the state who devised India’s first data-center policy in 2016.

Hyderabad’s first data centers, which were built before A.I. started demanding more capacity, are already saturated. Now there are four.

Industrial-grade electricity is hard to come by in most of India. But Hyderabad’s data parks are connected to multiple energy sources and flooded with abundant power at wholesale prices. India’s electricity grid is balky, but in the aggregate it now generates more power than it needs  and most of it is renewable. American electricity costs an average of 18 cents a kilowatt-hour, but Hyderabad’s data centers pay only 7 cents.

Dec. 25

 

An annual Christmas Eve jazz concert was canceled by its host after President Trump’s name was added to the Kennedy Center building (New York Times photo by Eric Lee).

New York Times, Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Show Canceled After Trump Name Added to Building, Francesca Regalado, Updated Dec. 25, 2025. Chuck Redd, a jazz musician, said he canceled his annual concert after President Trump’s name was affixed to the Washington building’s facade.

An annual Christmas Eve jazz concert scheduled for Wednesday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was canceled by its host after a board appointed by President Trump added his name to the building.

Chuck Redd, a musician who has hosted the show for nearly two decades, said that he decided last Friday to call off the performance after learning that the name was being changed on the building in Washington.

Last week, the center’s board, chaired by Mr. Trump, announced that the Kennedy Center would be renamed the Trump Kennedy Center. Early this year, the Trump administration removed board members appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., including its chairman David M. Rubenstein, and replaced them with people handpicked by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s name was added to the building’s facade on Friday, and the center’s website has been updated to reflect the new name. Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, sued Mr. Trump on Monday, claiming that an act of Congress is required to rename the building.

Congress designated the center as a “living memorial” to President John F. Kennedy in 1964. Relatives of the slain 35th president opposed the change in posts on social media.

Mr. Redd said seven musicians were scheduled to perform on Wednesday. The concert had been held at the Kennedy Center for 20 years and was previously hosted by the jazz bassist Keter Betts, who died in 2005. Mr. Redd took over in 2006.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment after business hours. It was unclear whether ticket holders for the jazz concert would receive refunds.

Dec. 24

 

Billionairre Trump supporter Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

New York Times, A Father, a Son and Their $108 Billion Push for Media Moguldom, Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 24, 2025. Larry and David Ellison didn’t always have a close relationship. Now they’re one of the most intriguing partnerships in business.

When David Ellison became a teenager, his father, Larry, bought him a gift not usually bestowed on a 13th birthday: his own Katana stunt plane. The two had spent little meaningful time together. But with their own aircraft, the father and son could bond in the air, practicing aerobatic flips and ruling the skies together.

Now, Larry Ellison is trying to help buy his son a media empire so they can rule Hollywood and news together.

What was once a relatively weak father-and-son relationship has transformed into one of modern media’s most intriguing business partnerships. Towering behind almost every move made by David Ellison, now 42 and the chief executive of Paramount, is his swaggering 81-year-old father, the billionaire co-founder of the software giant Oracle.

The two have formed an unusual tag team in their pursuit of major media deals, according to more than two dozen people with knowledge of their interactions. They bought Paramount this summer, and now they are hunting Warner Bros. Discovery with a $108 billion hostile bid.

On Monday, David Ellison made it clearer than ever that his father is the centerpiece of this bid, telling Warner Bros. that Larry Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion for Paramount’s offer. David Ellison has referred to the deal as something “we” — or “the Ellison family” — were pursuing. Both have sought to arm-twist Warner executives.

Father and son speak about five times a week — sometimes about their tennis matches or their joint philanthropy at the University of Oxford. But these days, often the topic is deal-making. David Ellison consults his father at length on every deal-related decision, one person with knowledge of their interactions said.

They discuss how to navigate President Trump, whose administration must approve any major acquisition. Larry Ellison has taken the lead in making the case to the president for why Paramount and not Netflix, its rival bidder, should win control of Warner Bros., two of the people said. Mr. Trump has pledged to be “involved” in any decision about whether to approve a deal.

A Silicon Valley celebrity for decades, Mr. Ellison co-founded Oracle five decades ago and turned it into a $252 billion personal fortune. He has been deferential to his son on this year’s deal talks, a person close to the process said.

When talking about the hostile bid for Warner Bros., he has often referred to his history of hostile acquisitions during the 1990s and 2000s, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. His son, who interned at Oracle for two summers during that time, watched him work through some deals, the people said.

 

President Trump and his administration have targeted Harvard University with some two billion dollars in research funding cuts and demands for control over such university policies as admission and faculty appointments that are widely regarded at Harvard and among education experts elsewhere as intending to transform the university into a pro-Trump model for other universities and colleges. Enforcement, ostensibly on the grounds of opposing anti-semiitism, is via the Trump Justice Department and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, a billionaire Trump ally who made her fortune along with her husband Vince McMahon in creating fake wrestling entertainments.

New York Times, In Private Letters, Harvard and Trump Administration Escalate Duel, Michael S. Schmidt, Alan Blinder and Michael C. Bender, Dec. 24, 2025. It is the latest twist in the marquee battle of the administration’s campaign to rein in colleges and universities it views as too liberal.

The letter landed with a thud on Saturday in the inbox of Harvard University’s president, Alan M. Garber.

The message, from Linda McMahon, President Trump’s education secretary, conveyed an understanding of an emerging deal between Harvard and the White House that flew in the face of the terms the university had been insisting on.

Dr. Garber felt he had made clear in recent negotiations that the university would not agree to pay the federal government to settle a monthslong battle with the Trump administration over antisemitism on campus and other matters.

But Ms. McMahon’s Saturday message said the opposite. In it, she thanked Dr. Garber for what she portrayed as his commitment to sending $200 million to the government as part of a deal.

Dr. Garber wrote back to clarify Harvard’s position. But, in response, the administration doubled down, introducing terms that were so far-reaching that university officials saw them as nonstarters.

It was unclear whether Ms. McMahon’s interpretation of Harvard’s proposal resulted from a miscommunication or from a deliberate effort to force the university into a year-end deal after months of faltering negotiations.

Whatever the case, it was the latest twist in the long-running dispute between Harvard and the Trump administration, which has shaped up to be the marquee battle in the administration’s effort to exert more influence over elite colleges and universities it views as too liberal.

The episode also underscored the emerging role played by people inside the administration who want to extract more concessions from Harvard. And it raised new questions about whether some of those voices were more interested in preserving the power of the government’s threat against Harvard as a message to other universities than in reaching a settlement with the nation’s wealthiest university.

While the interactions between Dr. Garber and Ms. McMahon plunged the sensitive talks into deeper turmoil, they also highlighted the unpredictability of the Trump administration. They showed how even high-stakes negotiations that could shape the direction of the country were defined by inconsistencies, confusion, communication breakdowns and combativeness.

This account of the negotiations between Harvard and the Trump administration is based on interviews with three people with direct knowledge of the talks and a New York Times review of some correspondence between the government and the university.

Harvard declined to comment. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, and the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.

The rupture in recent days stands out amid the twists and turns that started when the White House targeted Harvard because it saw it as an incubator of liberalism that violated the civil rights of white and Jewish people.

The university has acknowledged that antisemitism had spread through parts of Harvard, affecting to some extent hiring, coursework and the culture of the campus in Cambridge, Mass. Dr. Garber, who is Jewish, has said he was “sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community,” and has taken steps to combat antisemitism at Harvard.

The Trump administration, though, has routinely depicted Harvard’s efforts as tardy and insufficient. And Mr. Trump has suggested that he is looking to punish Harvard for both perceived past misdeeds and its defiance this year.

The conflict blew open in April, when an administration lawyer mistakenly sent Harvard’s lawyers a batch of demands that included policies on admissions and hiring, and a push for Harvard to shut down any programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Outraged by the demands and the government’s subsequent move to choke off billions of dollars in research funding, Harvard sued and received praise from students, faculty and alumni for standing up to Mr. Trump.

The university won a significant victory in that lawsuit in September — the Trump administration last week filed a notice of appeal — but it has also faced a blitz of federal investigations and a threat to disqualify it as a government contractor.

And although the university has an endowment of roughly $57 billion and nearly four centuries of history, Harvard officials concluded in the spring that it was probably untenable to overcome so many threats from Washington, especially since Mr. Trump was not scheduled to leave office until 2029.

It opened settlement talks, which proceeded in fits and starts. Mr. Trump publicly declared that a deal was imminent, writing online in June that it would “be ‘mindbogglingly’ HISTORIC, and very good for our Country.” By mid-August, Harvard and Trump officials alike were convinced that they had a framework for an agreement.

But personnel changes in the West Wing convulsed the talks, and Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has seemed to undermine proposed agreements with Harvard in private meetings, according to two administration officials involved in the discussions. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the claims.

Significantly, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, Harmeet K. Dhillon, has gained increased influence over the talks, which she has argued have teetered too much in Harvard’s favor.

The White House initially broached the idea with Harvard over the summer of having it spend $500 million on work force training programs to resolve the dispute. But now the administration is insisting that $200 million of that sum be paid as a fine to the federal government.

Tensions over that demand helped shape the talks between Ms. McMahon and Dr. Garber, even as Harvard spent weeks awaiting feedback from the government on other possible adjustments to settlement language.

New York Times, They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship, Adam Satariano, Dec. 24, 2025. The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg lead a German legal aid organization that assists individuals facing online abuse and violent threats.

Clare Melford runs a British group that helps identify disinformation.

Imran Ahmed is a British activist who runs an organization that has chronicled anti-vaccination content on social media.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration accused all of them of a campaign of censorship against Americans.

The four individuals, along with a former senior European Commission official, Thierry Breton of France, were barred from entering the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “radical activists” who undercut free speech.

On Wednesday, European officials including President Emmanuel Macron of France criticized the Trump administration’s decision.

“These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Mr. Macron said on social media. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

Thomas Régnier, a spokesman for the European Commission, said, “Our digital rules ensure a safe, fair and level playing field for all companies, applied fairly and without discrimination.”

The travel ban is a major escalation in a dispute between the Trump administration and Europe over the regulation of online content and social media.

In the United States, free speech protections allow social media companies to set their own content policies. And Mr. Trump and others on the right have successfully pushed social media firms to roll back moderation rules that they viewed as silencing conservative voices.

In Britain and the European Union, there are certain restrictions on hate speech and open bigotry. In 2022, the European Union passed a law called the Digital Services Act that requires social media companies to meet transparency standards and to remove certain racist, antisemitic and violent content if it violates national laws.

The Trump administration sees the Digital Services Act as an attempt to force American platforms to censor speech globally — an allegation European officials deny.

The issue came to a head this month when the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X $140 million. The commission said that the site had violated the Digital Services Act by selling verification check marks that allow users to mislead others about their identities, by maintaining opaque advertising practices and by refusing to provide researchers with data access. In response, Mr. Musk said the European Union should be abolished.

Mr. Breton helped draft the digital services law when he was a European commissioner overseeing digital policy.

The other individuals facing a travel ban were involved in nonprofit organizations that the Trump administration accused of targeting American social media companies and users.

 

Trump's U.S. Department of Justice releases fake "Epstein" letter (above) purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to imprisoned fellow rapist Larry Nassar, supposedly confessing theirs and Donald Trump's attraction for "young, nubile girls." Columnists ponder: Why would Justice Department act this way?

Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: New Dead Pedo Bestie Files drop, leaving more questions than answers, Jeff Tiedrich, right,  Dec. 24,2025. Just a brief rant today for Christmas Eve.

So there we were, minding our own damned businesses, when the DOJ dropped a s_____ of new Dead Pedo Bestie Files on us — and right in the center of it was one eyebrow-raising stunner: a jailhouse letter written (below) by Jeffrey Epstein, days or hours before he epsteined himself.

Let’s let CNN lay it out for us.

“… thirty thousand pages of documents from the Epstein files released overnight, including one which was a letter sent by Jeffrey Epstein — apparently in the days before he took his own life — to convicted sex abuser Larry Nassar (below right), who, again, convicted of abusing so many US gymnasts over the years. In that letter, Epstein wrote to Nassar, ‘our president’ — and he was referring it seems to President Donald Trump at the time — ‘our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls.’”

Just two convicted pedos, shooting the s___ via jailhouse letters — as one does, am I right?

But CNN is burying the lede. the entire passage in the Epstein letter goes into a bit more detail.

“Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

That’s not a smoking gun — that’s an entire ammo depot on fire. Or is it?

Think about it. Doesn’t the sudden appearance of this letter seem a little too good to be true? Donny’s DOJ, who had been carefully curating the release of the Dead Pedo Bestie files so as to minimize any mention of Dear Leader, suddenly drops this bomb on us?

Remember, Epstein and his pedo besties talk like mobsters. They don’t come right out and confess shit. They speak in hints and whispers about the ‘wonderful secrets they share.’ It seems totally out of character for Epstein out of the clear blue to be writing about ‘grabbing snatch.’

I wouldn’t put it past Donny’s corrupt Department of What Used to be Justice to seed the Epstein trove with ginned-up files, in order to discredit the whole thing.

Oh, look who agrees with me: Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. In a thread on Bluesky, he’s calling bullshit on the Epstein-Nassar letter.

1. Keep your eye on the ball, people That Epstein-Larry Nassar letter has fake written all over it -- N. Virginia postmark, after JE’s death, in a handwriting that appears not his own It’s hard not to think DOJ WANTED this out there to then be debunked and thus discredit every mention of Trump...

2. ...Just in case you still didn’t get this, read DOJ’s ham-handed statement today that the new documents include “untrue and sensationalist claims” about DJT. They hope one obvious fake will discredit all the things about Trump that are true We’ve seen this before in 2004 when fake Nat’l Guard...

3. ... documents about GWB were swallowed up whole by CBS News, which ended a genuine Bush controversy. It was hard not to believe that those fakes were created by Team Rove

Bunch reminds us that we’ve seen this movie before. Back in 2004 — when George W. Bush was president — Dan Rather was working on a piece for 60 Minutes about Bush’s draft dodging. It had been suspected for years that strings had been pulled so George Junior could spend the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard, instead of getting his ass shot off in some jungle — and Rather announced that he was going to blow the whistle on the whole thing.

What happened next is that someone purposely passed along to Rather some convincing-looking but very fake documents, which he used in his reporting. it discredited the whole story, and Rather’s career went f____-bye.

Donny’s DOJ is desperate for a win right now. wouldn’t it be super-convenient if they could ‘prove’ the existence of ginned-up Dead Pedo Bestie files, blame it all on ‘radical leftist lunatic Democrats,’ and make it go away?

Sure enough, the DOJ immediately started screaming fake! “The Department of Justice is currently looking into the validity of this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar and we will follow up as soon as possible. In the meantime, three facts stand out: -The postmark on the envelope is Virginia, not New York, where Jeffrey Epstein was jailed at the time. -The return address listed the wrong jail where Epstein was held and did not include his inmate number, which is required for outgoing mail. -The envelope was processed three days AFTER Epstein’s death.”

Excuse me, the DOJ is doing what? They’re looking into it now?

These files have supposedly been in the FBI’s hands since forever. Didn’t hundreds of FBI agents spend thousands of hours poring over this shit, flagging every mention of Donny? So why are they acting like this document is complete news to them?

And why is the DOJ working as Dear Leader’s personal law firm, trying to prove Dear Leader’s guilt or innocence?

and — oh look! the shortest investigation in the history of the FBI has been concluded. it took them just two hours to pronounce that the letter is fake fake fake. and the ‘evidence’ they cite is the ‘evidence’ they already cited. Not to go all dime-store Alex Jones on you, but doesn’t that seem convenient?

So either the letter is fake and the FBI just ‘proved’ it’s fake, or the letter is real and the FBI is claiming it’s fake. I’m not sure which is worse.

and just to muddy the waters, the existence of this letter has been known about since 2023 — but the alleged text of the letter wasn’t revealed until yesterday. Which proves nothing. The text could have been partially or completely altered from the original. How would we know? The FBI spent an entire two hours investigating it and called the case closed.

Iif only we had an administration we could trust not to lie to us about every ____ thing. Merry Christmas.

Sample News Coverage of Fake Epstein Letter to Nassar

The New Republic, Epstein Said Trump Shared Love of Young Girls in Apparent Suicide Note, Edith Olmsted, Dec. 23, 2025. In a letter to convicted sex offender Larry Nassar, Jeffrey Epstein appeared to reference his suicide plan—and mentioned Donald Trump.

What do Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, and Donald Trump all have in common?

Buried in the latest trove of documents released by the Justice Department Monday, a postcard addressed to “L.N.” or Larry Nassar, right, the former U.S. gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of women and girls, mentioned Trump by name—and more.

“As you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” Epstein wrote, appearing to reference his later death by suicide. “Good luck! We shared one thing… our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair,” he continued, signing off “J. Epstein.”

The government also released an image of the envelope, which was addressed from Epstein to “inmate” Nassar, and was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein died at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City. The letter, marked as return to sender, was addressed to Nassar at USP Arizona, where the high-profile pedophile had been held before he was transferred in 2018.

The Hill, FBI says Epstein letter to Larry Nassar was a fake, Rebecca Beitsch,The Justice Department on Tuesday said a postcard depicting Jeffrey Epstein indicating President Trump loved “young” girls was a “fake,” saying the document had been flagged for the FBI at the time.

The writer portends [sic] to be Epstein writing to Larry Nassar — the former sports doctor convicted of serially sexually abusing underage female gymnasts — while they were both in prison.

However, the postcard was sent three days after Epstein’s death and was also sent from a Virginia prison. Epstein was held in New York.

“The FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE. The fake letter was received by the jail, and flagged for the FBI at the time,” the Justice Department wrote on the social platform X.

In the postcard, the writer says that “Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls.”

“When a young beauty walked by, he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair,” it reads.

In a 2005 audio recording that was released in 2016, Trump was heard bragging about how being famous meant he could “grab [women] by the p‑‑‑‑.”

The note was postmarked Aug. 13, 2019, three days after Epstein’s death. The letter also appears to reference Epstein’s suicide.

“As you know by now, I have taken the ’short route’ home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential,” the letter reads.

The Justice Department said Tuesday it was “looking into the validity” of the message, writing that beyond coming from the wrong prison, the postcard also did not include Epstein’s inmate number, which is required for outgoing mail. Shortly thereafter, the department said the letter was a fake, adding that the handwriting did not appear to match Epstein’s.

“This fake letter serves as a reminder that just because a document is released by the Department of Justice does not make the allegations or claims within the document factual. Nevertheless, the DOJ will continue to release all material required by law,” the department wrote on X. 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Calls Colbert 'A Dead Man Walking,' Says CBS Should 'Put Him To Sleep,' Troy Matthews, Dec 24, 2025. More deranged violent language from the president in his latest attack on the free press.

Donald Trump appeared to threaten late night host Stephen Colbert in a deranged rant on Truth Social Tuesday night. After calling Colbert a "pathetic trainwreck," Trump said Colbert was a "A dead man walking!" and said "CBS should, 'put him to sleep,' NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do!"Screenshot 2025-12-24 at 11.39.32 AM

Trump then posted that if networks and their newscasts are "almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party" that they should have their broadcast licenses pulled, in yet another attack on the freedom of the press.

CBS announced in July that Colbert's contract would not be renewed in 2026. The news came almost immediately after Colbert criticized the network for settling in a lawsuit brought by Trump against the news program 60 Minutes.

The effects of that decision became evident this week, when CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled a segment from 60 Minutes at the last minute that featured an investigation into Trump's deportation of Luis Muñoz Pinto – a Venezuelan college student who sought asylum in the United States – to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, where he was tortured.

Weiss said the segment needed time for additional reporting, despite already having passed multiple rounds of editorial review, and being cleared by both CBS legal and standards and practices divisions.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won an Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards in September. Trump never won an Emmy for his reality TV show, The Apprentice, though he was nominated several times. 

Dec. 23 

 

False Flag via The Bulwark, Candace Owens Brings MAGA to the Conspiracist Horizon, Will Sommer, Dec. 22, 2025. Arguments between the antisemitic influencer’s supporters and critics dominated the proceedings at TPUSA’s AmFest.

The right has emerged from the AmericaFest conference more divided than ever. So much for the truce brokered by Candace Owens and Erika Kirk! Today, I wanted to take a look at the very bad blood among those on the right after AmFest, and what it might mean for the future of MAGA, not to mention the 2026 midterms.

The leading lights of the conservative movement headed to Phoenix over the weekend for AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s signature annual convention. But what was meant to be a celebration of slain founder Charlie Kirk soon dissolved in recriminations between Kirk’s former friends.

As things started to go south, Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, joked that the conference was starting to feel like “a Thanksgiving dinner where your family’s hashing out the family business.” Who doesn’t love that! But judging by the cutting speeches at the event, this feels a bit more like the Christmas dinner in The Bear.

Ben Shapiro kicked things off on Thursday, responding to the wave of antisemitism and conspiracism that has been swamping the right for months. His targets included Candace Owens for suggesting Erika Kirk murdered her husband (“baseless trash”) and personalities like Megyn Kelly for condoning it (“cowardice”). And, in the case of Steve Bannon, Shapiro asked, why was he doing PR work for a billionaire pedophile? He encouraged the audience members to look it up.

But Shapiro saved his harshest remarks for Tucker Carlson, whose friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes almost two months ago continues to roil the right today.

“There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes and indeed even chided Dinesh D’Souza for debating him,” Shapiro said. “He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility. And that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did. He built Nick Fuentes up, and he ought to take responsibility for that.”

Shapiro’s remarks were a frank, honestly remarkable, salvo against onetime fellow travelers in the conservative movement. But he suffered from the fact that

he was booked on the earlier side of the speaker’s list.

Kelly, Carlson, and Bannon all were slated to speak after Shapiro. And they didn’t take the jabs lightly. Reaching back nearly a decade to the incident that prompted Shapiro to quit Breitbart under Bannon’s leadership, Bannon warned the audience that Shapiro is “like a cancer, and that cancer spreads.” He claimed that Shapiro’s ultimate goal was to acquire TPUSA for himself.¹

There was, still, a pro-Shapiro faction at the gathering, who used their speeches to defend him. That included Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy and talk-radio host Steve Deace, who said it was important for Gen X conservatives like himself to “go hard” to help stop young conservatives from becoming incels.

But there’s a third faction at play here: the group that would really not like to talk about any of this ahead of the midterms. Extremely online Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon, using exactly the kind of language you want to hear from the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, declared on X that she was “bored af” with the squabbling. Benny Johnson said he was “sick of the division” and was “calling it out . . . to its face.”

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance, without saying Shapiro’s name, effectively told Shapiro to stop talking about these growing fissures on the right.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said.

But by urging everyone to just look past these issues, that third group is essentially siding with Owens and Fuentes. The question of whether racists and antisemites are welcome in the MAGA movement isn’t just influencer drama. It’s a serious thing. So is the question of whether it is acceptable for members of that movement to speculate that Erika Kirk may have been involved in the death of her husband, whose brutal assassination was witnessed by the entire world.

“There is only one moral side here: Erika Kirk’s side,” Shapiro said. “You know, the side of the widow with two children whose husband was shot live on camera in front of all of us. Friendship with the person accusing TPUSA of a coverup of Charlie’s murder is no excuse for cowardice.”

Whatever truce Erika Kirk and Owens agreed to on Monday was shredded by Thursday, when Owens put out a video with a “witness” who claimed to have seen Kirk at a military intelligence base the day before her husband’s murder—we guess, in Owens’s view, to plot his death??? A day later, Owens weighed in again with a staggeringly antisemitic video where she called Shapiro and his father “belly creatures who slither on” and urged her audience to read The Talmudic Jew, a nineteenth-century anti-Jewish tract that became popular with the Nazis.

Owens is now, arguably, the most influential online force on the right with a podcast ranking among the top in the country and the merit of her ideas being debated at the Republican party’s most important convention. To get a sense of how truly hateful her worldview has become just take a look at what she said as she held up this book and addressed Shapiro:

You have absolutely no values that exist outside of the Talmud. You describe yourself as a Talmudic Jew, and I’ve learned what’s in that Talmud, and I encourage other people at home to learn what is in that Talmud so that you know what Ben thinks of you, because he doesn’t just hate me—he hates you, too, white men. He hates all black people. Okay? If he’s following the rules of the Talmud—I mean, when I say hate, they think that we’re animals: that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them, that they have a right to lie to us, that they have a right to sue us and take everything that we have, that they have a right to deceive us.

That’s some sick stuff that would have been utterly disqualifying not too long ago. Yet only a few hours after that episode went live, Kelly said from the AmFest stage that she welcomed Owens’s questions about whether Israel was involved in Charlie Kirk’s murder.

“I don’t think Israel had anything to do with it,” she said. “But why did I have an obligation to stop Candace from asking those questions? I didn’t, and I didn’t call her out because I favored her asking them.”

The antisemitism controversy didn’t just hover over AmFest, it erupted within the crowd. Amrou Fadl, a dating podcaster for the popular “Fresh&Fit” YouTube show, wore a sweatshirt featuring Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, a tray of cookies, and the message: “Let ’em cook.”

While that might seem innocuous, it appears to be a reference to a Holocaust denial analogy popularized by Fuentes, who during a livestream with his groyper followers read and riffed on a viewer’s comment comparing Cookie Monster to Adolf Hitler and murdered Jews to cookies baked in an oven. As further proof of his intention, Fadl has called the Holocaust “the ‘cookie monster’ event” and used the cookie monster analogy himself.

Rather than being shunned, though, Fadl was a celebrity amid the AmFest crowd, even wearing the hoodie for a picture with right-wing personality Jack Posobiec, who frequently spoke during the conference. With stuff like that going on, the deck seemed stacked against Shapiro. It also made his speech that much more important.

Leave a commentLament of the slapped groyper

Last week, I covered the saga of Hayden McDougall, a misogynistic and racist young groyper social media personality whose star was diminished after a stout man in suspenders slapped him outside a gala.

McDougall’s case offered a chance to see the jungle rules of right-wing media in action. Could McDougall recover his reputation as a manosphere macho man after being publicly humiliated? Would he resort to violence himself?

The answers would come at AmFest. McDougall and his tormentor, conservative podcaster Kevin Smith, met up again in Phoenix at James O’Keefe’s “Make America Rave Again” party. The pair, naturally, were surrounded by onlookers, many of themselves aspiring influencers filming videos of the faceoff.

This second round of their feud was inspired by the fact that, while Smith had “apologized” to McDougall for the initial slap, Smith clearly was soaking up the attention the viral slap had earned him at the TPUSA conference. And perhaps Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s admonition to McDougall—that he would never be whole until he slapped Smith back—was still ringing in his ears.

“People are calling you a patriot because you bitch-slapped me,” McDougall said. “You caught me off guard while I’m blackout-drunk and alone, and you sucker-slapped me.”

“That doesn’t sound very conservative, to be blacked out,” said influencer Cam Higby, watching from the side.

That prompted McDougall to thrash in Higby’s general direction, and a broader scuffle broke out. After one onlooker made a quip at McDougall’s expense—and then said “oh, hit me, hit me”—McDougall slapped him, too.

Unfortunately for McDougall, the reaction online has once again favored Smith. So let that be a warning—don’t get slapped if you’re a right-wing TikTok guy. For his part, McDougall said in yet another video fuming about his fate that he’ll never be drunk and alone in public again.

Dec. 22

 

 

Members of the "Mara 18" and "MS-13" gangs are seen in custody at the CECOT maximum security prison in Izalco, Sonsonate, El Salvador, on Sept. 4, 2020 (AFP Photo by Yuri Cortez via Getty Images).

The Parnas Perspective, Political Commentary, CBS Cancels 60 Minutes Episode to Prevent White House Backlash and Epstein Survivors Blast Justice Department, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 22, 2025. This week is already shaping up to be intense—but I need to start with something deadly serious.

Media is dying in real time. Bari Weiss killed a 60 Minutes segment on the CECOT terrorism facility because it would upset the White House. That is censorship—plain and simple.

This morning, one of my videos on TikTok was censored for quoting statements directly from Epstein survivors. That is also censorship. This isn’t accidental. It isn’t moderation. It’s control.

That’s why independent media matters more now than ever before. I am not afraid of this White House. I am not afraid for my safety. I do not answer to political power, corporate media, or tech platforms. I answer to you.

If you believe in independent journalism, if you believe the truth should not be filtered to protect the powerful, subscribe today and support my work. Together, we will challenge those in power and expose the stories they want buried.Subscribed

The truth doesn’t need permission—and we’re not asking for it. Here’s what you missed overnight:

This morning, I have obtained a new statement from more than one dozen Epstein survivors blasting the Department of Justice for failing to redact the information of survivors and failing to communicate with survivors. The statement calls for immediate Congressional action to ensure that survivors are protected and to force the Department of Justice to follow the law when releasing the files. This is the most forceful statement from survivors to date.

CBS News pulled a planned 60 Minutes segment about a maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent Venezuelan deportees, saying the piece required additional reporting; the late decision, made under editor in chief Bari Weiss, sparked massive internal criticism. This is the trailer of the 60 Minutes episode Weiss does not want you to see:

Sharyn Alfonsi, right, told fellow correspondents that she learned at the last minute that CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss had pulled a planned 60 Minutes segment on a maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent Venezuelan deportees. In a Sunday email to colleagues including Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper, Alfonsi said the story was “spiked” and argued the move was political rather than an editorial judgment. 

While CBS won’t report what’s happening at CECOT to avoid criticism from the Trump Administration, I will. A joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal found that Venezuelan migrants deported by the United States government to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison were subjected to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and systematic torture—including beatings, incommunicado confinement, and sexual violence—despite many having no criminal records, concluding that both the US and El Salvador government violated international human rights law and the principle of non-refoulement.

Donald Trump appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, reviving U.S. ambitions to bring the self-governing Danish territory under American control and triggering sharp criticism from Denmark and Greenlandic leaders, who stressed respect for Danish sovereignty and Greenland’s right to decide its own future.

MSNBC reports that FBI Director Kash Patel, right, has drawn scrutiny for requesting and using specially armored luxury BMW SUVs—departing from the bureau’s traditional use of Chevrolet Suburbans—and for previously pressing, unsuccessfully, for a costly new FBI jet, fueling criticism from lawmakers and former officials who argue the moves reflect questionable use of taxpayer-funded security resources despite Patel’s claims of cost savings and operational necessity.

NBC News reports that deep tensions have emerged within the Trump administration over diplomacy on the Russia–Ukraine war, with special envoy Steve Witkoff repeatedly sidelining Secretary of State Marco Rubio through unilateral travel, opaque negotiations, and a Russia-leaning peace plan, raising concerns among U.S. and European officials about coordination, security lapses, and whether U.S. foreign policy is being shaped by an informal power broker rather than the State Department.

A Guardian investigation found that the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to distribute nearly $90 million in congressionally approved funding for organizations that support survivors of human trafficking, forcing more than 100 groups to cut services, housing, and staff and prompting lawmakers to accuse the Trump administration of illegally withholding funds and putting vulnerable survivors at risk of homelessness, deportation, and re-exploitation.

Reuters has confirmed that the U.S. Coast Guard is actively pursuing a sanctioned “dark fleet” vessel off the coast of Venezuela that U.S. officials say is evading sanctions by flying a false flag and operating under a judicial seizure order, marking a potential third U.S. interdiction in the Caribbean as tensions escalate between Washington and Caracas. The pursuit has drawn condemnation from ALBA, whose members accuse the United States of piracy and illegal seizure of Venezuelan oil, while the Trump administration signals a tougher posture that could further strain bilateral relations.

The Trump administration has escalated pressure on Venezuela by seizing a second sanctioned oil tanker and pursuing a third, prompting President Donald Trump to plan a public announcement alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as critics warn the actions—framed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as targeting sanctions evasion—risk provoking wider conflict, disrupting oil markets, and drawing bipartisan concern, including warnings from Sen. Rand Paul about a slide toward war.

According to NBC, Paramount has strengthened its hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery by adding a $40.4 billion personal guarantee from Larry Ellison and raising the breakup fee, even as Warner Bros. Discovery presses ahead with a competing deal to sell key assets to Netflix, a battle that has also drawn attention to political sensitivities around CBS News and the recent pulling of a “60 Minutes” segment under editor in chief Bari Weiss.

Kansas Reflector reports that Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Marla Luckert will resign as chief justice on Jan. 2 and retire by early February following an October stroke, a decision that will elevate Justice Eric Rosen to chief justice and give Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly another appointment to the court as voters prepare to weigh possible changes to the state’s judicial selection system in 2026.

This is the 60 Minutes trailer of the horrific conditions at CECOT that CBS News has scrubbed. I think everyone should see it.

New York Times, ‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political,’ Michael M. Grynbaum, Dec. 22, 2025 (print ed.). Sharyn Alfonsi, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, criticized the network’s decision to remove her reporting from Sunday’s edition of the show.

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Ms. Weiss, right, said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

Sunday’s unusual events have once again placed “60 Minutes” at the center of a media and political fracas.

Ms. Weiss was appointed in October after David Ellison, the owner of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, acquired her independent news and opinion site, The Free Press.

Mr. Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount earlier this year was approved by the Trump administration after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit that President Trump had brought against “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Ellison is currently making a hostile bid to outmaneuver a rival company, Netflix, and acquire the media behemoth Warner Bros. Discovery. He has been courting Mr. Trump’s support for his bid, but the president has used recent episodes of “60 Minutes” to suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s stewardship of CBS.

“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.

The segment was focused on Venezuelan men who were sent by the Trump administration to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison in El Salvador. In a news release on Friday promoting the segment, CBS News said that Ms. Alfonsi had spoken with several men now released from the prison “who describe the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.”

Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.

One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.

Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.

In her note, Ms. Alfonsi said that her team had requested comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote.

“We have been promoting this story on social media for days,” Ms. Alfonsi added. “Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”  

 

Billionairre Trump supporter Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

New York Times, Larry Ellison Personally Guarantees Paramount Bid for Warner Bros., Lauren Hirsch, Dec. 22, 2025. Mr. Ellison’s personal guarantee is meant to address concerns that the Warner Bros. Discovery’s board had expressed about Paramount’s original offer.

Paramount said on Monday that Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, is personally guaranteeing the roughly $40.4 billion in equity that the company is offering as part of its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

The announcement of Mr. Ellison’s personal guarantee is meant to address concerns that the Warner Bros. Discovery’s board had expressed about Paramount’s original offer.

Warner Bros. Discovery recently announced an $83 billion deal to sell a large part of its business to Netflix. Warner Bros. said Netflix offered a better deal for its shareholders than Paramount’s $108 billion bid to acquire the full company. After the Warner Bros. Discovery board rejected Paramount’s bid, it brought the same offer to the company’s shareholders.

Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery advised shareholders to reject Paramount’s offer. One of the main concerns Warner Bros. Discovery mentioned in its recommendation was the lack of a personal guarantee from the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. According to the terms of that offer, a revocable trust in Mr. Ellison’s name would back the bid, and the board worried that it would have limited recourse if it fell apart.

Paramount said on Monday that the deal would now include a personal guarantee from Mr. Ellison, putting one of the richest men in the world on the hook if the deal fell apart. He is expected to get financial contributions from other partners for the deal, including roughly $24 billion from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds as well as debt financing from a group of banks.

“Paramount has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to acquiring WBD,” David Ellison said in a statement. “We expect the board of directors of WBD to take the necessary steps to secure this value-enhancing transaction and preserve and strengthen an iconic Hollywood treasure for the future.”

Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery were up more than 3 percent in morning trading. A company representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paramount made other revisions to the deal to address Warner Bros. Discovery’s concerns. It increased the amount it would pay Warner Bros. Discovery if regulators blocked the deal to $5.8 billion, up from $5 billion. Netflix has offered to pay Warner Bros. Discovery $5.8 billion as part of its deal.

Mr. Ellison has been a key figure in David Ellison’s efforts to amass a media empire. Larry Ellison helped finance his son’s $8 billion deal for Paramount, which closed this summer. He also met with Warner Bros. Discovery executives as he backed his son’s monthslong courtship of the media giant.Editors’ PicksGive Thanks for the Winter Solstice. You Might Not Be Here Without It.Behind the Curtain of Luxury Room Service at the Plaza HotelHow to Master the Treadmill

In those efforts, Larry Ellison’s friendly relationship with President Trump has taken center stage, given the president’s frequent interest in media deals. The Ellisons’ acquisition of Paramount, which owns CBS News, dragged on for months as it grappled with a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” The deal closed shortly after Paramount agreed to settle the suit for $16 million.

On Sunday, “60 Minutes” again found itself in the spotlight, after it abruptly removed a segment that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador. 

Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion: First they came for the white people, and I didn’t speak out, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Dec. 22, 2025. Sunday round-up.

Is there some kind of Nobel Prize for being repellent? Could we get FIFA maybe to work on one? 

[JD Vance, above, "a lock to win such a thing"] was at Turning Point’s ‘Americafest’ yesterday. Check out the word-adjacent mouth-sounds that seeped out: “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

Oh, thank God. Finally — all those centuries of oppression are over for white people.

‘I can’t believe I had to apologize for being white,’ said no white person ever.

White people have been at the top of America’s food chain since day one — and yet, no one ever went broke selling MAGA on the fever-swamp fantasy that it’s the white people who are the real victims. It’s the easiest grift in the world.

Hindu wife Usha sure looks thrilled to be married to a guy who eagerly tossed away his reputation as a well-respected author and embraced his inner Nazi.

Wow, CBS’ flagship news show 60 Minutes is doing a segment on that notorious Salvadoran slave-labor gulag that Donny’s fascist thugs have been disappearing innocent immigrants into.

Check out the trailer:

“It began as soon as the planes landed. the deportees thought they were headed from the US back to Venezuela — but instead, they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras, and delivered to CECOT, the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.”

This looks awesome. Donny’s massive abuse of human rights is an important story, and we should all be looking forward to seeing it.

Oh no, wait, we can’t see it — because hours before it was set to air yesterday evening, CBS yanked the episode from their broadcast schedule.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

Bari was just doing the job that her corporate overlords at Paramount had hired her to do: ensure that anything critical of Dear Leader never sees the light of day.

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

That’s the whole reason Bari Weiss was hired — to pull CBS News all the way to the extreme right, turning it into a sort of Fox News for people who know which fork is for salad.

Even the once-respected Margaret Brennan has now been reduced to carrying water for Donny’s sewer clowns.

Here’s Brennan yesterday, defending the DOJ’s Dead Pedo Bestie Files — and insulting the intelligence of her guests, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie:

“This isn’t everything you asked for just yet, but would you acknowledge that they are complying with the spirit if not the intent of your law?”

Jake Tapper, can you come in here for a second and show us (as above this weekend with the blacked-out Justice Department Epstein "disclosures') what the Brennan considers ‘complying with the spirit of the law’?

The pre-Weiss Brennan would have never taken Donny’s side on any issue. she would have nailed Pam Bondi to the wall and ripped her several new ones. But she’s now traded her reputation as a serious journalist for a handful of Paramount’s magic beans. I hope it was worth it, Meg.

Weiss, CBS News and their new overlords at Paramount are being short-sighted — because when all this is over, we’re not going to forgive the institutions that failed us.

Fascist regimes come, and fascist regimes go. When this current nightmare finally runs its course, no one is going to say, ‘Wasn’t it awesome how CBS slobbered all over Dear Leader’s shoes?’

Oh look, Bari Weiss isn’t finished with us. Apparently, she wants to play a round of ‘easy questions, easy answers.’

“Has feminism failed women?”

 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: A Message to CBS from MeidasTouch, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 22, 2025. What an utter embarrassment you’ve become, CBS.

You were once the gold standard of journalism.

I grew up admiring you and your award-winning programs like 60 Minutes.

Your reporters had the utmost integrity. You gave a voice to the voiceless. You broke the biggest stories of the day. You commanded respect.

Now, you are no different than Newsmax or Breitbart or Fox.

You have become state regime media.Let me briefly explain what happened, for those who don’t know.

Last night, 60 Minutes was supposed to air an episode exposing the torture and abuse inflicted on Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump regime from the United States to the CECOT detention center in El Salvador without due process.

With just a few hours before the show was going to air, the new Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss, canceled the episode since it was critical of the Trump regime. Bari Weiss claimed she didn’t like the use of the word “migrant,” and she wanted more interviews with Stephen Miller to be in the episode, despite the fact that Miller and the Trump regime refused repeated requests to be interviewed.

The 60 Minutes staff was caught off guard and said the episode went through every level of rigorous vetting and legal review. In the end, Bari Weiss simply did not want to make Donald Trump upset, so she canceled the episode. This follows Trump attacking 60 Minutes for its interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene earlier this month, where Trump demanded an apology from CBS. You will also recall that CBS settled a frivolous lawsuit Trump filed against it back in July as a quid pro quo for Trump to approve the sale of CBS to a company called Skydance, which now controls the company.

This has been the weekend of cover-ups, and CBS is complicit. Trump has been covering up the Epstein files, his health records, the video of the strike on survivors from a fishing boat by Venezuela in an initial strike, and now the refusal to air this 60 Minutes episode exposing Trump’s attacks against migrants.

In a short time, Bari Weiss has fully destroyed CBS. It’s ironic that Bari pretended to be a free speech absolutist and against censorship, while herself engaging in the type of censorship we’ve seen in places like Russia and North Korea.

Last night, I thanked CBS for handing MeidasTouch its audience. As CBS and other corporate news outlets destroy themselves for a collapsing Trump regime, their viewers are coming to the MeidasTouch Network. Already, MeidasTouch gets significantly more YouTube views and engagement than CBS. MeidasTouch digital views exceed CBS digital views by multiples.

As we look ahead to 2026, one of the things I want MeidasTouch to build out is a show like 60 Minutes.

I want to let brilliant reporters and teams of journalists engage in long-form investigative pieces that can be made available on our network, free from any influence by the regime. That’s one of the pillars of the future growth of MeidasTouch, in addition to international expansion and getting more on-the-ground reporters on Capitol Hill.

As CBS and corporate news destroy themselves, it has led to the rapid growth of MeidasTouch. It’s ironic that Bari Weiss, who started on Substack many years ago and was ahead of her time for doing so, would abandon it and run a legacy media property like CBS into the ground.

 

President Trump promoted on his Truth Social website images portraying him and Vice President J.D. Vance as American kings and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries,, below at left, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as adorning themselves with sombreros. Meanwhile, construction crews were demolishing part of the White House East Wing exterior to build a ballroom rump wants while security personnel forbade nearby Treasury Department employees from recording the deconstruction on their cellphones.

New York Times, Trump Administration: Are Trump’s Actions Unprecedented? We Asked Historians (Again), Francesca Paris, Alicia Parlapiano and Josh Katz, Dec. 18, 2025, featured Dec. 22 (interactive). Since the start of his second term, President Trump has cut budgets, made demands on public institutions, and attacked the media and speech in actions regularly called unprecedented.

In April, we asked presidential historians if they could come up with comparable examples in previous administrations — and to tell us when they couldn’t. You can read that earlier article here.

We went back to the historians (and some political scientists) to help us categorize the administration’s actions and pronouncements that have happened since: whether they’re unprecedented, relatively common or somewhere in between.No clear precedent

President Trump has taken some actions that do not have a comparable historical example, according to historians.Used the military to attack and kill suspected drug smugglers

TRUMP’S ACTIONS

President Trump has ordered the military to kill people aboard boats he says have been smuggling drugs, claiming the power to redefine drug trafficking as armed conflict.

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Storytelling We Need to Rebuild Belief in Government, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Dec. 22, 2025. As we look ahead to the new year, we need to figure out ways to tell the story of the damage Trump caused so we can hold him accountable.

After Trump spent a year destroying government, there have been several attempts in recent days to tell the story of what Trump took away with his assault on government. This is a story we need to tell, and tell far better, in the new year if we want to hold Trump accountable and not just reverse the damage he did, but use his destruction as a way to rebuild better.

Consider this WaPo story, “The year Trump broke the federal government.”

It tells the stories of hundreds of Federal workers, including those who left and those who stayed through the DOGE and Russ Vought massacres. It is great! But it also only mirrors the full story (and potentially buried in a holiday weekend).

It very poignantly captures the cruelty of Trump’s firings, such as this anecdote about a woman killing herself just after Elon Musk’s Five Things emails started.

In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.

While it describes many benefits shuttered, it doesn’t describe what happened to the people affected by these losses.

What happened, for example, when those working a suicide prevention line could no longer offer their clients privacy?

Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background.

What happened when LGBTQ+ veterans stopped showing up for counseling appointments?

The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.

What is the impact of rising rates of mental illnesses among service members, now left neglected in the wake of another firing?

Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.

What happened when the government fired a bunch of people focusing on educational access for Native Americans (even while moving health experts to Indian Health Services)?

Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.

You might ask what happened to the people Erica Hagen might be harmed in advance of her firing.

She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.

But a number of people have told the story of what happened with Marco Rubio cut USAID, both in sheer terms — the hundreds of thousands who’ve already died and the 14 million who may one day die, but also the children dying of hunger in Kenya or the cholera outbreak in South Sudan.

What happened to those who might benefit from sustainable energy programs that got cut?

At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”

What about FDA inspections that didn’t happen? Who got sick?

A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work.

One I’m self-interested in, as a former Great Lakes resident, what happened when they cut the carp program?

In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?

The answer, I think, is that this is one of the few things Gretchen Whitmer won by normalizing Trump.

The story describes how Trump’s cuts delayed efforts to prepare Colorado for fire season — ostensibly something Trump cares about. But did it exacerbate fires or did we get lucky?

In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.

The nation’s parks and forests are rotting from neglect. What does that look like?

In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure.

Like the USAID cuts, this is story that is already getting told elsewhere; it is a story that is generating a lot of localized anger.

This great video from Molly Jong-Fast, which includes a bunch of great regulators — like Lina Khan, Alvaro Bedoya, Doha Mekki, and Elizabeth Wilkins — who got fired addresses many of these impact questions.

I’m a big fan of all these people and Khan (who’ll have a platform working for Mayor Mamdani) can explain the import of regulation to anyone. All of these fired experts are exceptional at explaining how overturning regulation harms people, like construction workers or taxi drivers or renters or chicken farmers.

But imagine a video that started from one or another harm that mentioned repeatedly — such as the harms, including encouraging suicide, caused by bots and AI. That’s a story that would resonate with mothers, as opposed to primarily Democrats who want to strategize how to reverse Trump’s destruction.

To be sure: at 39:00, Wilkins talks about how important story telling is. She describes that we need to explain all this in terms of villains. “Tell the story of who is the bad guy in this story, who is the hero of this story.” But we also need to invite every American into the story, because they’ve lost something from Trump’s assault on government.

One (very) simple example really resonated with me, at least. In a piece explaining the value of NCAR to Americans in advance of Trump’s assault on it, It’s just a list of eight things that are not (as Russ Vought targeted) “climate alarmism.”

In accessibly wonky terms, it translates some of the things NCAR does — like making flights safer — into things people care about.

As a child, I remember hearing news stories about commercial airplanes crashing due to wind shear. Microbursts, which are localized downburst of sinking air associated with thunderstorms, were often the culprit. The Low-Level Wind Shear Alert System developed by NCAR researchers has helped to virtually eliminate microburst-related wind shear crashes. Such advances, along with Terminal Doppler Radar, are examples of the R&D machine at work for our benefit even as you may not realize it as your plane takes off or lands safely. Additionally, many of the computer algorithms used to alert pilots and airline managers about turbulence were developed at NCAR. Likewise, NCAR’s aircraft icing products have been a staple in the aviation industry and distributed by NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center.

Regular fliers are already outraged by the continued enshittification of air travel, including Crash Sean Duffy’s reversal of consumer protection rules imposed by Pete Buttigieg.

Here’s one aspect, turbulence, that Trump is actively planning to make worse.

Again, I think all of these are really good stories. I’m just looking ahead — not to elections, or even to what Khan will do as a key aide to the Mayor of New York — but to ways we can better tell stories about what Trump took away, about what Trump stole from the American people, so we can hold him accountable.

Epstein Cover-Up Protests  

Politico, Bill Clinton spox calls on DOJ to release Epstein files referencing the former president, Jacob Wendler, Dec. 22, 2025. The former president’s spokesperson accused the DOJ of weaponizing the documents against him.Bill Clinton speaks.

A spokesperson for Bill Clinton, shown above in a file photo, on Monday called on the Department of Justice to release any documents related to the former president in its ongoing release of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The rare statement from Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña comes as the Trump administration has attempted to make him the GOP’s new boogeyman in a monthslong saga related to the files that has plagued the White House, sparking sharp rebukes from allies and MAGA firebrands.

“What the Department of Justice has released so far, and the manner in which it did so, makes one thing clear: someone or something is being protected,” Ureña said in the statement. “We do not know whom, what or why. But we do know this: We need no such protection.”

The Justice Department released its first batch of a vast trove of files Friday but stopped short of publishing all of the federal government’s documents related to various investigations into the disgraced financier, as mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last month.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week that the DOJ was reviewing the material in its possession in order to protect victims’ identities and would be releasing potentially hundreds of thousands of additional files in the coming weeks.

He also said that “there’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name.”

The DOJ on Friday released multiple photos of Clinton with Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and individuals with redacted faces, among the thousands of photos and other records it disclosed. The law allowed the DOJ to redact material related to active investigations and records that “contain personally identifiable information of victims.”

Ureña said that if the DOJ declines to comply with Clinton’s request, it will confirm the administration’s intention of “using selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years, under Presidents and Attorneys General of both parties.”

The White House deferred to the DOJ, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ureña’s statement.

Clinton has been linked to Epstein since the early 1990s, with the two having been photographed together several times, although the former president has said he was not aware of Epstein’s crimes, and he has never been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to Epstein. As has been previously reported, Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane in the 1990s to several international locales, and the former president’s spokesperson stated that his Secret Service detail was with Clinton during the trips.

Blanche, the second-highest ranking official at the DOJ, has insisted that the Trump administration is complying with the law despite heavily redacting and omitting substantial materials from the Friday release. Bipartisan lawmakers have accused the administration of “flouting” the law, although the act does not provide a clear legal penalty for failing to release all the mandated files within the 30-day timeline.

Blanche also defended the DOJ’s decision to temporarily take down several documents published in the initial release, including one that featured a photo of Trump, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker during an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press” that the photo was taken down in response to concerns raised by victims and that it would be reinstated following a review. 

The Atlantic, CBS and CNN Are Being Sacrificed to Trump, Franklin Foer, Dec.  22, 2025. Media conglomerates want the president’s permission for mergers—and control of news outlets is at stake.

The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

Read: The apocalyptic potential of the Netflix–Warner Bros. Deal

Such coercion isn’t just the product of Trump’s brazen indifference to procedural restraints; it’s possible because the underlying business of the media has become terrifyingly vulnerable to coercion. Recent history is a study in false promise. After the explosion of cable and the internet in the 1990s—technologies that promised radical decentralization—the media sector reconsolidated. Google and Meta devouredthe advertising market that once sustained journalism: The United States now has just three newspapers that provide deep, authoritative national coverage; local outlets have closed by the thousands. Six television streaming services command nearly 90 percent of the audience—and, no matter which bidder Trump favors, those six stand to become five.

That tendency toward consolidation always posed a danger: As the number of competitors shrinks, an aspiring authoritarian can far more easily commandeer the system. But the specific architecture of modern media conglomerates creates a unique fragility. Many are burdened by debt; all are subject to government regulation. These companies are not just concentrated—they are compromised. Their weaknesses tempt them to submit to the undemocratic whims of the president.

Even if a small and shrinking fraction of the country watches cable news, Trump is a member of that cohort of aging, politically obsessed couch potatoes. And he is unmistakably fixated on how he is portrayed on those networks, especially CNN. That’s a fact that David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has exploited in his bid to acquire Warner Bros. According to The Wall Street Journal, Ellison conveyed to Trump that he would overhaul the network if the president allows him to buy it.

It wasn’t a hollow promise. Ellison—the son of Larry, the founder of the software giant Oracle and a Trump supporter—was already building a media empire that is more sympathetic to the president, or at least less hostile. After he bought CBS earlier this year, he installed new leadership to propel its news division rightward.

The early signs are ominous. Last week, Trump complained on Truth Social that 60 Minutes was treating him “far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before.” On Sunday, CBS suddenly pulled a 60 Minutes segment about Trump’s policy of deporting people to an infamous prison in El Salvador. The story, according to correspondence reviewed by The New York Times, had been fully vetted and was ready to air. Bari Weiss, the new head of the news division, said that she wanted producers to add context to the piece. Regardless of whether Ellison shares the president’s politics, he has an incentive to crush CBS’s independence and similarly renovate CNN, because the ultimate success of his conglomerate hinges on Trump blessing his bid for Warner Bros.Recommended Reading

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Not that long ago, media conglomerates weren’t nearly so politically pliable. When Katharine Graham ran the Washington Post Company, she controlled a local monopoly, whose fate did not hinge on regulatory favor. That insulation—not merely her sense of civic duty—is what enabled the Post to defy Richard Nixon’s efforts to suppress the Pentagon Papers. Even when Nixon allies challenged the broadcast licenses of her company’s television stations during the Watergate era, Graham could resist shareholder pressure to bend. Her family owned a special class of shares, so it retained control of the company. And television was a secondary asset, not the foundation of the company’s health.

A large chunk of today’s conglomerates lack that insulation. Their profit margins are thinner. They scrape for growth in stagnant markets. In newer markets, they face brutal competition: With the exception of Netflix, streaming has yet to prove itself as a stable replacement for the businesses it cannibalized.

Survival, therefore, is contingent on consolidation. Having acquired Paramount, David Ellison understood that owning a giant conglomerate wasn’t enough to create a viable competitor. His company still lacked the audience, the library depth, and the global footprint to vie with the likes of Netflix, Disney, or Amazon for dominance of the streaming market. Paramount could never grow enough organically, because subscriber growth has slowed across the industry. That left one path: buying scale. The whale that is Warner Bros. Discovery—one of the last conglomerates with a massive vault of beloved shows—is not a vanity purchase, but a business imperative.

Because the modern media conglomerate is so dependent on mergers, it is uniquely dependent on the state, which has the power to approve or nix them. That means the industry is uniquely dependent on Donald Trump.

During the first Trump administration, the president blustered about his desire to block Time Warner’s merger with AT&T—and his Justice Department set out to fulfill his wishes in court. (Trump’s disdain for CNN, then part of Time Warner, was reportedly the basis for his opposition.) But the judiciary deemed the deal perfectly legal.

The days when corporations could turn to saviors in robes feels like another era. The whole system, including the courts, can no longer be counted on to provide a buffer against Trump. Over the past several months, Trump has transformed once-independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission into extensions of his will. (And the Supreme Court is likely to lend its imprimatur to this power grab in the Trump v. Slaughter decision it will hand down next year.) Those agencies were created, exuding the ethos of the Progressive era, with a simple mandate: to make technocratic decisions that transcend partisanship. That is why they were required to be bipartisan in composition. Strip them of that independence, and regulatory approval becomes something closer to royal favor.

Media conglomerates have internalized the new reality. Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, demanded that broadcast companies “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel as retribution for views the administration deemed noxious; he was picking at a vulnerability. Nexstar, a company that owns more than 200 local stations, was in the process of buying Tegna, which owns 64 of them. To expedite the FCC’s approval of its deal, Nexstar seemed to preemptively do Carr’s bidding by pulling Kimmel’s show from the ABC stations it owned. (Nine days later, it restored the show.)

Even a behemoth like Disney has little leverage—it has its own difficulties to surmount. The golden days of ESPN raking in profit from cable bundling and Marvel scoring box-office hits are over. Having bought Comcast’s stake in Hulu, Disney is now under immense pressure to prove to its shareholders the wisdom of its streaming bet. Furthermore, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threatened to eliminate the autonomous “improvement district” that had long allowed Walt Disney World to govern itself, he exposed the parent company’s vulnerability to regulators. All of that breeds an instinct to genuflect before Trump—which Disney did when it paid his presidential library $15 million to settle his defamation suit against ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Given the declining reliance of traditional media outlets today, this might seem like an antiquated concern. But the crisis of democracy is a crisis of information—citizens make bad decisions, in part, because they are starved of the facts. And it can get worse.

A portion of the media will travel down the Hungarian path as Trump follows the example set by Viktor Orbán, who forced the transfer of outlets to his allies, effectively blunting a source of opposition. But the greater risk is that conglomerates simply give up on news entirely. Comcast has already shed MSNBC, dumping the network, now called MS NOW, into a spin-off composed of fossilized cable channels. Even before Netflix and Paramount began circling Warner Bros., it developed plans to similarly maroon CNN in a castaway company, isolating it from the parts of the empire better poised for growth. Journalism has become the epitome of a high-risk, low-return proposition—one that conglomerates seem to prefer expunging from their portfolios.

The grim reality is that as American media shrinks, Trump’s coercion yields an outsize return. When Jeff Bezos neutralized The Washington Post’s editorial page—after Trump threatened his other commercial interests—he didn’t just quiet a single outlet; he neutered the institutional voice of one of the three remaining national newspapers. And if Trump succeeds in remaking or destroying CNN, he won’t just be wounding a network. The president will have effectively dismantled one of the two cable-news networks that covers him skeptically. And the nature of his temperament is that when he scouts a weakness, he keeps striking at it. If Trump gets his way with CBS and CNN, he will turn to fresh targets, until everyone in the kingdom submits.  

Dec. 21

New York Times, Media Year In Review: 329 Days of Trump, Trump, Trump, Michael M. Grynbaum and Stuart A. Thompson, Dec. 21, 2025 (print ed.). The president dominates the collective consciousness. The Times broke down how he has relentlessly pursued attention in his second term.

To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.

The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.

The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.

Dec. 18

 

New York Times, F.C.C. Chair Says Agency ‘Isn’t Independent,’ Breaking From Tradition, Cecilia Kang, Dec. 18, 2025 (print ed.). The comment from Brendan Carr, a Republican, raised concerns from lawmakers about how President Trump might use the agency.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said in a hearing on Wednesday that the agency was not independent, stunning Democratic lawmakers concerned that President Trump could use the government office as a tool for censorship.

The Republican chair, Brendan Carr, said in an agency oversight hearing by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that “formally speaking, the F.C.C. isn’t independent.”

Democrats grilled Mr. Carr in the hearing over a series of threats he had made to broadcasters about revoking local broadcast licenses for content that is not in the public’s interest. In September, he threatened to take away local licenses of ABC stations that aired Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show because of Mr. Kimmel’s remarks about the killer of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Sinclair and Nexstar briefly suspended Mr. Kimmel’s show on local ABC stations that they own, and ABC, which is owned by Disney, temporarily pulled it off the air. Mr. Carr has also opened investigations into all of the major broadcasters, including NPR, for content decisions and advertising.

Mr. Carr has argued that local stations that carry the television and radio content are held to a “public interest” standard. Mr. Trump has pushed for the F.C.C. to use its powers over the broadcast industry to retaliate against coverage that he has deemed unfavorable to him. The agency’s main power over the industry lies in its approvals of mergers and of licenses to broadcasters to use the public airwaves.

In Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Carr, a career telecommunications lawyer, said the 1934 Communications Act did not explicitly describe the president’s authority over the agency. “So I can be fired by the president for no reason or any reason at all,” he said.

Democrats balked at his remarks. Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts said the use of broadcast license renewals to pressure media that have mergers and other regulatory matters before the agency would be “weaponizing the public interest standard.”

Several Democrats noted that the F.C.C. website’s mission statement describes it as an independent agency. As of Wednesday afternoon, the word “independent” did not appear on the agency’s mission page.

“Trump is not your boss, so the American people are your boss,” said Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey. 

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Breaking precedent, networks interrupt prime time for Trump political diatribe, Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims, and Judd Legum, right, Dec. 18, 2025. 

On Wednesday night at 9 PM Eastern, President Trump (shown above) delivered a prime time address to the nation that was aired by all major broadcast networks. It preempted the season finale of “Survivor” on CBS, one of the network’s most highly-rated shows, the season finale of “The Floor” on Fox, and holiday specials on ABC and NBC.

Typically, networks will interrupt their primetime schedule for presidents to address wars, crises, or very significant new policies. In his remarks on Wednesday, Trump delivered his standard talking points, bragging about his mass deportation policies and tariffs and attacking Democrats and the Biden administration. The only crisis was Trump’s sagging approval ratings.

“Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history,” Trump said during the speech. “There’s never been anything like it.”

Trump blamed the Democrats for the increased cost of health insurance. “You see that now in the steep increase in premiums being demanded by the Democrats, and they are demanding those increases, and it’s their fault,” he said. Millions of Americans will see their insurance rates increase after Republicans refused to extend government subsidies that will expire at the end of the year.

The speech's partisan political content was not a surprise.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, right, said that Trump would address the country “about all of his historic accomplishments over the past year” and “all that he’s done to bring our country back to greatness.” Specifically, Leavitt stated that Trump would likely discuss “border security and lower gas prices.”

The networks decided to break precedent and air it anyway.

The networks have declined to air prime time speeches from the last two Democratic presidents, claiming they were too political. In 2022, for example, broadcast networks declined to air a prime time speech by former President Joe Biden where he warned about threats to democracy, deciding the speech would be too “political.” Instead, NBC ran a rerun of “Law & Order” and CBS aired a rerun of “Young Sheldon.”

In 2014, major networks also refused to air a speech by former President Barack Obama about immigration reform, claiming it was too partisan. The speech outlined a plan to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, which the Washington Post called “the most significant presidential intervention to alter the U.S. immigration system in nearly three decades.” But instead of airing the speech, CBS opted to air “The Big Bang Theory” and NBC aired “The Biggest Loser: Glory Days.”

The Obama White House made a comparison to a decision by networks to air a 2006 speech by former President George W. Bush that also covered immigration policy, but networks argued that Bush’s announcement was “bipartisan,” while Obama’s speech was an “overtly political move by the White House,” a network insider told Politico at the time.

But major broadcast networks did air a 2019 speech by Trump about the border wall, which did not have bipartisan support. Network officials argued that the speech should be aired because of its “newsworthiness.” One official told the Washington Post that while the Obama speech was “very political” and had “no crisis around it,” Trump’s speech happened during the “backdrop of the crisis of a government shutdown.”

After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded equal airtime, networks gave Pelosi and Schumer less than five minutes of airtime directly following Trump’s speech. The networks did not air any Democratic response to Trump’s Wednesday night address.

A pattern of capitulation

During his second term, the networks have consistently capitulated to Trump’s demands.

In December 2024, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to contribute $15 million to his presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees. Trump sued ABC after anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly said on air that Trump was found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll, when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse. Legal experts believed Trump’s case was weak.

Another concession to Trump came in July when CBS settled a lawsuit over the editing of an October 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris for $16 million. Trump’s lawyers alleged that he experienced “mental anguish” over the interview and that it had been edited to make Harris look better.

After the settlement, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, got Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for a proposed merger with Skydance Media. The merger made David Ellison — son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison — Paramount’s CEO. Since then, CBS has made changes favorable to Trump.

As a condition of approval for the merger, CBS appointed an ombudsman to evaluate “any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.” The network chose Kenneth Weinstein — the former president of a right-wing think tank and frequent defender of Trump — for the job. Then, Paramount made Bari Weiss, an anti-woke pundit with no broadcast news experience, the editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Fox’s broadcast channel shares the same corporate parent as Fox News, which airs hours of pro-Trump programming daily. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and an undisclosed amount to finance the Trump ballroom. 

Dec. 16

More On Media, Culture, Politics

 

Actor-Director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (File photo via Getty Images).

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: What Rob Reiner believed, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Dec. 16, 2025. Rob Reiner, an actor, writer, and director, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, a photographer and producer, were found dead at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday. Their son, Nick Reiner, who has struggled with drug addiction, was booked for murder and is currently being held without bail.

Reiner was best known for his involvement in iconic television shows and movies, including All in The Family, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. He was also a progressive political activist.

Just hours after his death, President Trump attacked Reiner. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” According to Trump, Reiner “was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”

Reiner was an outspoken critic of Trump. But he leaves behind a rich political legacy that began long before Trump’s political career. Reiner redefined celebrity political advocacy, not only lending his voice to important causes, but also implementing strategies that brought change.

Reiner, who played the character “Meathead” on All in the Family, said his activism was influenced by Norman Lear, the creator of the show. “What I learned from Norman was that you could use your fame, your celebrity, whatever, to actually do some things in the political sphere,” Reiner said in a 2024 interview. “Norman was a tremendous inspiration to me.”

Reiner was a champion for young children

In 1997, Reiner created the I Am Your Child Foundation to raise awareness about the importance of the first three years of childhood development. That year, Reiner was invited to speak at the White House Conference on Early Development and Learning , where he made the case for supporting children from age zero to three.

If we want to have a real significant impact, not only on children’s success in school and later on in life, healthy relationships, but also an impact on reduction in crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse, welfare, homelessness, and a variety of other social ills, we are going to have to address the first three years of life. There is no getting around it. All roads lead to Rome.

In 1998, Reiner was the driving force behind California’s Proposition 10, which imposed a tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products to support early childhood development. He recruited Republican Michael Huffington as a co-chair to ensure it would be a bipartisan effort. After the initiative passed, Reiner served as chairman of the California Children and Families Commission, now known as First 5 California Ca, for seven years.

Twenty percent of the revenue generated by the tobacco tax goes to First 5 California to advance “early care and education, child health and development, family resiliency, research, and community awareness” statewide. The remainder of the revenue is distributed to California’s 58 counties to fund programs tailored to each area. In fiscal year 2023-24, the tax generated over $300 million in revenue.Reiner played a critical role in establishing marriage equality as a federal right

After the 2008 passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, Reiner established the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER). Reiner used the group to finance the legal battle challenging the ban. Bucking much of the liberal establishment, Reiner insisted on a high-risk legal strategy that sought to challenge Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.

AFER recruited Ted Olson, a prominent conservative lawyer, and David Boies, a top liberal lawyer, to lead the legal effort. Olson and Boies had squared off against each other in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, which decided the 2000 election.

In an appearance on MSNBC, Reiner argued marriage equality was a core civil rights issue. “We don’t believe in separate but equal in any other legal position except this,” Reiner said. “We feel that this is the last piece of the civil rights puzzle being put into place.”

The couples represented by AFER lawyers won their case in federal district court. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed the appeal on standing grounds, effectively restoring same-sex marriage in California. The case paved the way for the eventual establishment of a federal right to same-sex marriage in 2015.

After the victory, Reiner continued to speak out for equal rights for all people. “We have to move past singling out transgender, LGBTQ, Black, white, Jewish, Muslim, Latino. We have to get way past that and start accepting the idea that we’re all human beings,” Reiner said at a Human Rights Campaign event in 2019. “We’re all human beings, we all share the same planet, and we should all have the same rights, period.”Reiner opposed the Iraq War, saying protesters were patriots

“This is the greatest support we could ever give to our troops because what we are trying to do is protect them from going into harm’s way needlessly,” Reiner said in a 2003 CNN interview. “There is no God-awful reason to go to war at this moment. There is no reason to rush into this war, and what we are trying to do is protect our troops from sending them into harm’s way.”

Reiner frequently compared the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. “I just couldn’t believe we were going to war twice based on lies in my lifetime,” Reiner told The Independent in 2018. Reiner produced a movie, Shock and Awe, that highlighted the work of Knight Ridder journalists who were among the few that questioned the official Bush administration narrative.Reiner warned of the rise of Christian Nationalism

One of Reiner’s last projects was God & Country, a 2024 documentary about the growing Christian Nationalist movement. Reiner sought to distinguish Christianity, the religion, from Christian Nationalism, which is a political ideology.

“We have experts in the film, very conservative, devout Christians, leaders, thinkers, pastors, who talk specifically about how this movement is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” Reiner explained in a February 2024 podcast. “And that really is what you have to focus in on, because the idea that you could promote a political agenda in the name of God and that would give you permission to resort to any means, to get what you want up to and including violence, which we saw on January 6th, is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, which is love thy neighbor, do unto others, and so on.” 

Associated Press, How an AM radio station in California weathered the Trump administration’s assault on media, Byron Tau, Dec. 15-16, 2025. Before Jimmy Kimmel, there was KCBS.

Just six days into President Donald Trump’s new administration, the San Francisco Bay-area radio station KCBS-AM reported that immigration agents were in the area — driving “unmarked vehicles including a black Dodge Durango, a gray Nissan Maxima and white Nissan truck.”

The brief story — also reported by other outlets — quickly drew the ire of conservative influencers who attacked KCBS’ report as endangering agents’ lives, sparking a deluge of complaints from listeners and callers.

That was just the start of KCBS’ troubles. The Trump administration’s top broadcast regulator, Brendan Carr, soon accused KCBS of failing to operate in the public interest and said he was opening an investigation.

By targeting KCBS, Carr revealed his willingness to expand the Republican administration’s offensive on perceived media foes beyond major broadcasters like ABC, CBS and NPR. In KCBS’ case, the radio station took steps to mitigate the potential of drawing further attention from conservative influencers or Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, according to eight current and former station employees who insisted on anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.Related Stories

Trump attacks ABC reporter after question about killing of Saudi journalist Khashoggi

When journalists were given permission to pursue politics or Trump administration policies, some of the staffers said, the tone of the stories was heavily scrutinized.

Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.

“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.

FCC scrutiny has eased in recent months, and the station has been increasingly willing to tackle more topics that might draw attention from the administration and conservative critics, the staffers said. The station, for example, assigned a reporter in October to cover the No Kings Day protests of the Trump administration, which the staffers described as a welcome change.

In a statement, KCBS said it would not “comment on internal personnel matters.”

“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”

The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s enforcer

In Trump’s second term, Carr has emerged as a top enforcer of Trump’s agenda, using his perch to take on one of the president’s favorite targets: media outlets.

His threat to ABC in September that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” led to Kimmel, a late-night host and comedian, being briefly pulled off the air by parent company Disney over statements in one of his monologues about the political reaction to the slaying of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist. ABC and CBS settled what some experts said were long-shot libel lawsuits by Trump at the same time their parent companies had significant interests before the FCC. NPR and PBS affiliates came under scrutiny over whether they were crossing the line into commercial advertising.

When the FCC later approved a merger involving CBS’ parent company, the network’s new owners committed to making “significant changes” at the broadcast network — a move the FCC chairman praised in his statement approving the 

More On U.S. Law, Justice, Crime

deal. And in November, Carr reshared a Trump social media post that called for comedian Seth Meyers to be fired from NBC. 

New York Times, At Many Top Law Schools, Black Student Enrollment Continues to Drop, Stephanie Saul, Dec. 16, 2025. The New York Times examined data from 18 of the nation’s top law schools and found that first-year Black enrollment had increased at only four, including at Harvard.

The number of Black students entering many of the nation’s most elite law schools declined this year, according to data released on Monday by the American Bar Association.

The drops, including at the University of Virginia and Northwestern University, continue a trend that began in fall 2024 after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions a year earlier.

The New York Times examined the A.B.A. admissions data from 18 of the nation’s top law schools and found that first-year Black enrollment had increased at only four, including at Harvard, which enrolled 50 Black law students this fall compared with 19 last year. At Georgetown University, first-year Black enrollment jumped to 67 this year compared with 30 last year. Two other elite law schools, Columbia and Stanford, saw a slight upward tick in the number of Black students.

The changes have implications for the long-term racial make up of the profession, including who oversees and argues cases in the nation’s top courtrooms. Top-ranked schools typically supply graduates to the nation’s elite law firms and federal courts, where they serve as clerks and go on to be judges. Currently, all but one member of the Supreme Court attended either Harvard or Yale Law.

David Wilkins, a law professor at Harvard, who has argued that diversity in law is important because most of the world is not white, celebrated the increase in Black first-year students at his school.

“The Supreme Court decision is clearly making things more difficult,” Professor Wilkins said. He also attributed the broader declines to the “mood in the country from the administration and others,” referring to President Trump’s campaign to end diversity programs and preferences in schools.ImageYale Law School in New Haven, Conn.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

The American Bar Association recently suspended the use of law school diversity standards in accrediting schools, under pressure from the Trump administration.

Opponents of diversity efforts in university admissions argue that they undermine merit and create an unlevel playing field, and that they could possibly stigmatize those they are seeking to help by suggesting they are inferior.

Edward Blum, whose nonprofit organization, Students for Fair Admissions, filed the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court, argued for expanding opportunities for students early in life, not racial preferences, as the solution to increasing diversity.

“Law schools applicants should be evaluated on their academic qualifications, personal achievements and economic background — not on their race or ethnicity,” he said in a statement.

The demographic shifts at law schools mirror broader admissions trends at selective undergraduate programs that previously relied on race to create more diverse freshman classes.

But law school classes are typically small, complicating efforts to measure trends, even as experts caution that one or two years of data may not reflect long term trends. Still, several top law schools saw changes this year that, on a percentage basis, were significant.

At the Carey Law School at the University of Pennsylvania, 10 Black first-year students enrolled this year compared with 19 last year and 22 in fall 2023, according to the A.B.A. data.

Dec. 15

 

Top Tech Titans and Authoritarians (Source: The Authoritarian Stack).

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: MAGA, the Broligarchs and the Media, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 15, 2025. This isn’t just about business; it’s about democracy.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix.But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.

Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.

First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.

Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:

[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.

Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.

As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”

But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.

Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:

In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.

Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition that faced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.

Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project, which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”

As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.

Consistent with their agenda of disabling a pluralistic, democratic society, the broligarchy is engaged in an effort to seize control of media, both traditional and social. With Donald Trump’s blessing, they are trying to control media so that, as in Orban’s Hungary or Chavez’s Venezuela, the only political news that we see is what the authoritarian powers want us to see.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post were early stages in this campaign. Since Musk’s acquisition, the app formerly known as Twitter has become a bot- and Nazi-infested hellhole. My own account was hijacked by an entity in Saratov, Russia, and I have never attempted to reclaim it.

Then there is the sad story of the Washington Post. While it first appeared that Bezos would continue to run it as a quality news source, the owner’s increasingly blatant political agenda has led the once-great paper to hemorrhage both talent and readers.

Under Trump II, the broligarch campaign to take down independent media has gone into overdrive. And Larry Ellison is at the wheel.

This last summer Paramount merged with Skydance Media, whose CEO is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. The main prize the Ellisons sought via the merger was control of Paramount-owned CBS News. Likewise, in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner, the prize that the Ellisons are seeking is control of CNN. And they are not even trying to hide their Trump-serving agenda. CNN has been among the major outlets most critical of Trump, in direct, unvarnished and courageous reporting. As a result, Trump has openly called for drastic changes at CNN. When a CNN reporter asked why the Pentagon isn’t releasing footage of airstrikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs, he denounced it as “an arm of the Democrat Party”.

The true intent of the broligarchs’ actions is revealed by the financial numbers: these media outlets make only very modest amounts of money, yet the broligarchs are throwing billions at them. Moreover, previous takeovers have shown that the outlets make even less money when they are forced to serve a right-wing agenda. The Washington Post is bleeding talent and subscribers, while X/Twitter has lost so many advertisers as well as readers that Musk has sued former advertisers, claiming that their decision not to spend money on his platform is an illegal boycott.

Yet another example of the decline of a media outlet in the aftermath of a Tech Right takeover is CBS. After the Ellison takeover, Paramount put Bari Weiss — whose career was built on attacking mainstream media for alleged left-wing bias — in charge of CBS News. How’s that going? On Saturday, when Weiss led a news special featuring an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, major advertisers were conspicuously absent. Instead, as Variety put it,

commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data.

And let’s not forget the recent episode in which Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Disney immediately capitulated and suspended Jimmy Kimmel, but quickly backtracked in face of widespread subscriber backlash.

So there’s every reason to expect a financial debacle if the Ellisons succeed in capturing Warner and degrading CNN. But financial losses on media capture are immaterial to the broligarchs because the money is irrelevant. What they are after is buying favor with Donald Trump and, more broadly, advancing their own authoritarian agenda.

However, there are reasons for hope in stopping the destruction of CNN. One, both mergers – the one proffered by Netflix as well as the one proffered by Paramount – are very likely illegal under an objective assessment of their anti-competitive consequences. Clearly, this is something that should not go unnoticed by a future Democratic administration, which could quite plausibly reverse the merger. And, second, the shaky terms of Paramount’s bid along with the Oracle’s dire financial condition appear to have put off Warner’s shareholders.

But it’s a terrifying prospect that we are so close to authoritarian media capture. Just take a look at Hungary or Venezuela to see what that leads to.

 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, The Murder of Innocents, William Kristol, right, Dec. 15, 2025. 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The cascade of murders of innocents this past weekend—students preparing for final exams at Brown, Jews celebrating the festival of Hanukkah in Sydney, Rob and Michele Reiner in Los Angeles—hit home for me, as I imagine it did for many of us, with particular force.

And so this morning, though I’d jotted down notes last night on several possible topics for this newsletter, I find I don’t really want to address any of them yet. I’m not quite ready to move on.

Mind you, it’s not that I have any great insights to share on the terrible events of the past weekend. It’s not as if I have compelling or comforting words to offer in the face of these tragedies.

And it’s not as if I claim especially close connections here. I’ve been friendly with Brown students and faculty, and I very much admire the Australian Jewish community. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Rob Reiner a bit in the last decade. But there are so many others who have been and who are so much closer to those worlds than I. They’re speaking eloquently about their loss, and ours. They’re offering moving tributes to those who are gone. They’re discussing the various policy issues raised by the events.

I respect and admire those contributions.

For my part, words fail me when I read that Alex Kleytman, an 87-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, was celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach with his wife of 57 years, also a Holocaust survivor. He was killed while shielding Larisa from the bullets with his own body.

What can one say? We can bow our heads in respect—to him, and to all this weekend’s victims and their families and friends. We can take a moment to reflect. We can vow to remember. And then we can move forward, re-dedicating ourselves to creating a world in which such horrors are less likely in the future.

Our community is dedicated to trying to make our politics a little less horrible. If you’ve been reading Morning Shots for a while, we’d love for you to join us. Start a free trial today. You can also give Bulwark+ memberships as gifts this holiday season. And as always, money should be no impediment to membership, so if you want to join but can’t swing it right now, send us an email and we’ll work something out.

Dec. 11

 

  

The Triad via The Bulwark, Trump and the Oligarchs Are Killing Corporate Media, Jonathan V. Last, Dec. 11, 2025. The oligarchs only care about money. The dictator only cares about power. They can make that arrangement work.

1. This Is CNN

Our oligarchs and our strongman operate on two different incentive structures that happen to be in total alignment.

Remember when David Ellison bought Paramount Global? Why did he want to own that corporation? Because it gave him a bunch of valuable assets:

A viable streaming platform in Paramount+

A vast library of intellectual property—including famous franchises like Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Paranormal Activity—which can be monetized for decades

A broadcast television network with a vast advertising business and live TV assets, such as rights to NFL broadcasts

A movie studio that generates new intellectual property and vertically integrates with the rest of the pipeline

Did David Ellison give a shit about the CBS News division? No. If you listed the top thirty pieces of the Paramount Global business, CBS News would not be in it. Qua business, it was an afterthought.

But why did Donald Trump direct his government to approve Ellison’s purchase? Trump did not give a shit about Paramount+, the Paramount film catalogue, or any of that stuff. The only thing Trump cared about was that CBS News be put under the thumb of a reliable owner who was beholden to him.

Trump and Ellison had entirely different interests—yet they were completely aligned.

And now it’s happening again.

You have probably seen the story about Ellison attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros.-Discovery. Why does Ellison want to own this business, too?

By merging HBO Max with Paramount+ he could have a true third competitor to the Netflix/Disney goliaths, and so would own the last seat at the streaming table.

The Warner Bros. film library is even more valuable than the Paramount library and by combining the two his streaming service would have a major point of differentiation from Netflix and Disney+.

The addition of Warner-owned cable networks would give the ad business he now owns (via CBS) more inventory and more leverage over advertisers.

Every act of consolidation in the entertainment sector advantages the surviving players by eliminating competition, giving them more power to control costs and dictate terms.

One of the pieces of Warner-Discovery is CNN. Like CBS News, CNN is a tiny piece of the overall business. It is also a declining piece. CNN is the last-place cable news network and its revenue is (a) modest and (b) in free fall.

I want to be very clear about this: CNN is a small player in a dying category. In a world where David Ellison only cared about economics, I suspect he’d pay good money not to own CNN.

Yet if Ellison is to succeed in his takeover of Warner-Discovery, he will need President Trump’s help. And the only thing Trump cares about in this deal is getting CNN under Ellison’s control. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the president yesterday:

“I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent,” Trump told reporters during a roundtable with business executives at the White House.

“I don’t think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer. So I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately,” he added. “I think CNN should be sold along with everything else.”

That’s how oligarchs and autocrats work. The oligarchs want political power to advantage their businesses. The autocrat wants key businesses to be controlled by allies in service of strengthening his regime.

These arrangements work out nicely for everyone until the oligarch accidentally falls out of a window.Subscribed

2. Size as Vulnerability

I do not mean to impugn the character of journalists at CBS News and CNN. Many of them do fine work. But it is a fact of life that unless a media company owns itself, its independence is conditional.

CBS News is already changing under the direction of its Trump-approved editor-in-chief. Spoiler: It is not changing in ways that challenge el presidente. If Ellison gets control of CNN, it, too, will change.

I spend a lot of clock cycles obsessing over the business side of The Bulwark—not because I want to buy a yacht but because revenue leads to control, control leads to independence, and independence leads to honesty.¹

We’ve grown more slowly than we could have. But we didn’t want to blitz scale because that would have left us vulnerable. We grew step by step, bringing in new voices, establishing new products, and rationalizing the products into mini-businesses of their own.

There is a drawback to this model: It’s hard to get really big when you’re independent. The reason people take corporate money is because it gives them the resources to do important work. You can send reporters into the field. You can throw an entire news team at a breaking story. You don’t have to pick and choose; you can flood the zone.

Independent media companies don’t have that ability. It’s a tradeoff. You work with scarce resources, but you’re allowed to say exactly what you think without your owner and his Dolores Umbridge trying to screw you.

You trade resources and scale for control and independence.

In normal times, the corporate media side of this trade can be pretty reasonable. When liberalism is bedrock, good journalists can do great things when they get corporate-scale resources. And whatever marginal independence they lack might be worth the sacrifice.

But in illiberal times, it’s a foolish, dangerous trade. When the power of the state is wielded by an autocrat, the decline of independence isn’t be marginal.

Here’s the thing, though: Independent media companies can get bigger. The Bulwark has gone from two email newsletters and a podcast to something like a genuine media company. In the last couple of years we’ve added real reporters who break news. We’ve created a podcast empire and a wildly successful video channel. If the business keeps growing, our capabilities will keep growing, too.

But corporate media can’t get more independent. There’s no path to independence for them, no way to get out from under an oligarch. Once you hand someone else control, it’s gone. For forever.

I doubt David Ellison either realizes this fact or cares about it. But I promise you Donald Trump does.

3. Dept. of Cucks

Mother Jones (another independent media company) has a piece about what happened after a reporter submitted a question to the DoD press office about Pete Hegseth’s mentor:

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.

Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago.

Read the whole thing here.

 

 

Mother Jones Magazine, Personal Commentary: I Asked the Pentagon About Pete Hegseth’s Mentor. Then the Threats Started, Dan Friedman, Dec. 11, 2025. Journalism in the second Trump administration gets personal. After the author contacted the Pentagon for comment, he heard from far-right influencer Jack Posobiec.

Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec, right, asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”

That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”

I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.

Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my inquiries…This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.

I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.

The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”

Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.

Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.

Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email’s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.

My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.

I have done reporting that angered other well-known figures on the right—Roger Stone, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon—and that drew some doxxing and half-assed personal attacks from their allies. But I am not famous. Who cares about me?

The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers—and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.

This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a “DC-area liberal reporter.” After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.

That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones, and perhaps an expansion of the administration’s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.

We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec’s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.

My emails to the Pentagon and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.

We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J—Geressy’s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy’s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, that mention Geressy’s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.

A screenshot of the Goodreads "Currently Reading" page for user Eric. The list includes six books: "The Key West Wife Swap" by Macy Townes, "The War on Warriors" by Pete Hegseth, "Memoir of a Peacetime Soldier" by B.T. Smith, "American Warfighter" by J. Pepper Bryars, "Living in Thailand 2" by Dante x, and "Thai Wife Sharing And Watching" by Dante x.Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.

The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy’s, along with a MySpace page that includes what looks like a photograph of him.

Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.

I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That’s a British organization whose platform matches personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy’s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can’t tell you for sure who signed up, “it’s 100 percent that that email has an account.” In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.

I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon’s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.

“It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you. It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.

For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.

Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy’s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy’s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.

Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.

Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself “the World’s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,” and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as “the most famous name in infidelity.”

The presence of Geressy’s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.

But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jones, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. “It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,” Sipher said. “It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”

And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump’s executive order that argues that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that is concerns itself with subordinates’ private lives.

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger.

In The War on Warriors, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. “From my perspective,” Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, “overwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.” According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. “If SGM Geressy was a transvestite—or gay, or black, or a woman,” Hegseth wrote, “he would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.”

The Pentagon is already beset by scandals in which top officials, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics have argued that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery he acknowledged during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy’s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department’s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept.

Hegseth has reacted furiously to reporting on some of his missteps. He has raged over coverage of his sharing of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic. (The department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec’s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.

Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department’s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.

But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. “This is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army’s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,” Parnell said.

That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded: “Your mom did.”

Similar truculence drives the Defense Department’s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policy that bars reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused. (The New York Times recently sued the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group of pro-Trump influencers who accepted the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants access to is largely composed of far-right activists.

The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department’s press secretary, occasionally appears on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked him for agreeing to the department’s restrictions. “Now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” she said.

On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was “finalizing my story,” and wanted to know if me, my wife, “or your in-laws” wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was “finalizing this story.”

Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?

The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.

I have worked to be fair—and honest. This attempt won’t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn’t feel shitty.

But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I’ll live with. 

 

Erika Kirk speaking during a CBS News town hall.Erika Kirk’s message to Candace Owens.

New York Post, Erika Kirk’s blunt, one-word response to Candace Owens’ nonstop attacks, conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Patrick Reilly, Dec. 11, 2025. Erika Kirk had a blunt one-word plea when asked to respond to conservative podcaster Candace Owens, below right, who has been attacking the widow since her husband was killed and spreading conspiracy theories about his murder.

“Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop,” Kirk told CBS Editor-in-Chief Baris Weiss during a tell-all town hall on Wednesday, the outlet reported.

Kirk has been on a media tour pushing back on unfounded theories spread around the internet about her husband’s death — many comingfrom Owens, whom Charlie Kirk once considered a close friend.

In the weeks since Charlie Kirk was shot dead at Utah State University, Owens has spouted outrageous conspiracy theories about his death — including that Kirk was “betrayed,” that the federal government lied about the investigation, and even that Israel may have been involved in his death.

Owen has also attacked Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, where she once worked.

 

False Flag via The Bulwark, Right Win Media: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Candace? Will Sommer, This week, the big story in right-wing media isn’t affordability, or a pending war with Venezuela, or even Secretary of State Marco Rubio banning Calibri from department documents for being woke. It’s—surprise!—Candace Owens, and how her former friends in MAGA media just can’t stop her from profiting from Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Today, I’m going deep on conservative media’s thorny Candace Owens Problem.

ERIKA KIRK WENT ON FOX NEWS on Wednesday to mark the three-month anniversary of her husband Charlie’s assassination.

But her goal wasn’t just to commemorate that tragic moment. It was to staunch the cataracts of conspiracy theories that have been promoted by Candace Owens, who’s earned tens of millions of YouTube views for her wild, unfounded speculation about Kirk’s death.

Without naming Owens, Erika Kirk, right, jabbed at an unnamed person making “hundreds and thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love.”

“My message to them is to stop—to stop,” Kirk said, turning directly to the camera.

As the segment ended, Kirk held up her late husband’s new, posthumously published book and said its title, giving it an imperative intonation to reinforce the apparent message to Owens: “Stop, in the Name of God.”

If the message rang familiar that may be because two days earlier, podcaster Tim Pool had launched his own, somewhat less rousing salvo against Owens.

Fuming after an unidentified person allegedly fired shots at his rural West Virginia compound, Pool blamed Owens for injecting a new level of mania into MAGA media, even slamming his hand on his table for emphasis.

Describing in detail what he believed to be Owens’s own minimal security setup, Pool raged that he, by comparison, is forced to live in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia to deter assailants.

“Candace Owens is a fucking evil scumbag,” Pool said. “She is a degenerate cunt. She is burning everything down, and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it.”

Pool and Erika Kirk are parts of a broad new coalition coalescing on the right with the goal of stopping Owens and her conspiracy theories, many of which have targeted Charlie Kirk’s friends and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. Their efforts are a testament to the tremendous clout Owens now wields. But timing is a major factor, too: TPUSA’s big annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix is kicking off next week, and prominent conservative figures have been open that they fear the proceedings could go sideways because of Owens’s claims.

Personalities as disparate as pro-Israel commentator Ben Shapiro, antisemitic and white-nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, and even the Internal Revenue Service have all attempted to debunk Owens’s claims this month. The groypers and the evangelical tradmoms have united in distaste for her.

It’s hard to understate how broad the stop-Candace coalition has become. Conservative pundit Will Chamberlain dubbed her “the single most evil person” on the right. Multiple media figures, including one former member of the Pussycat Dolls, have suggested Owens may be a victim of demonic oppression. Alex Clark, a TPUSA host prominent in the Make America Healthy Again movement, has dubbed Owens’s ideas “psychosis” and “Q anon level mind rot.”

But so far, Owens has been undeterred. In the eyes of her fans, she is the only person asking real questions about the assassination. Efforts to debunk her are only further proof that there is a conspiracy to hide the true nature of Kirk’s death. And Owens can defend herself, too—she was unmoved by Pool’s diatribe, for example, quipping on her own show that the perpetually beanied podcaster was merely making a “display of estrogen.”

THE BACK-AND-FORTH has some parallels to how Democrats have long struggled to find the proper way to push back against Donald Trump, oscillating among direct confrontation, dismissiveness, mockery, and just trying to ignore him. And it raises a troubling question, in the modern media age, especially on the right: Can you stop a charismatic charlatan?

And Owens certainly has charisma, albeit with a heavy heap of recklessness added on top. Less than a week after Kirk’s death, she started putting forward conspiracy theories about the assassination, implying that Israel was somehow behind his murder. Numerous red herrings followed—that there were too many attendees at Kirk’s Utah Valley University event in military-esque maroon shirts, or that an Egyptian plane had been tracking Erika Kirk’s movements.

Since late November, though, the storyline she’s promoted has converged on the real star of this story: Owens herself. Owens is already being sued by French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over Owens’s claims that Brigitte is transgender and both Macrons are part of a centuries-old criminal cabal. In late November, Owens started to claim that, actually, it was a multinational team of assassins dispatched by the Macrons who were involved in Kirk’s death—and further, that the team was now out to kill Owens.

Owens claimed she notified the Trump administration about the attempts on her life. The FBI, the White House, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to my requests for comment. A Pentagon spokeswoman was oddly noncommittal when asked whether France, a NATO ally, was trying to murder a high-profile American media figure on American soil.¹

And Owens has lately turned her focus on yet another supposed culprit in the Kirk assassination: the organization he founded and led. Charlie Kirk (shown above in a file photo) was “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA,” she tweeted last week. Owens also launched numerous attacks on specific TPUSA employees, claiming that one senior employee was having gay relationships with younger men and alleging that Charlie Kirk was concerned about how the organization’s finances were being managed. Last week, the Treasury Department took the unusual step, at Erika Kirk’s request, of issuing a letter confirming that TPUSA and its affiliates are not under IRS investigation.

Owens at first shied away from explicit attacks on Erika Kirk. (In fact, she said early on that the widow was the only person, aside from Owens’s own husband, who could tell Owens to stop looking into Charlie Kirk’s murder.) But after Erika Kirk slammed her on Fox News on Wednesday, Owens made clear on her own show that the widow would now be fair game, too. She compared Erika to Meghan Markle—a reviled figure on the right—and said “You don’t just get to be widowed into the position of chairman and CEO.”

“It feels elite,” Owens said of Erika Kirk’s refusal to answer theories about the assassination. “‘I don’t have time for the little people, I don’t have time for small-pocket donors.’”

ONE GROWING WORRY on the right now appears to be that Owens’s rantings won’t just harm TPUSA but could hurt Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections by depressing voter turnout. After Pool voiced this concern, Owens shrugged it off. “They killed Charlie Kirk in broad daylight, and we don’t care about your stupid midterms,” Owens said on a December 4 episode of her show. “We just don’t care.”

Geoffrey Martin, a far-right ideologue who posts on X under the name “Captive Dreamer,” approvingly posted a message from an unnamed friend blaming Owens for channeling “literally generational hatred towards the left” away from real political goals and toward momentum-killing speculation and nonsense.

“When you say ‘Who cares about the midterms,’ you’re saying ‘Who cares about Charlie’s vision?’” said conservative business-bro podcaster Patrick Bet David.

“Truly pathetic stuff,” moaned TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez. “We deserve to lose.”

OWENS’S CAVALIER ATTITUDE—and the audience she has grabbed with it—has been a green-light signal to others of that ilk. Provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,.below left, has also begun raising questions about the Kirk assassination, including where he was buried. It prompted Erika Kirk to acknowledge in her Fox News appearance that decisions about her husband’s body are being kept private—an understandable disclosure, but one that could end up fueling even more conspiracy theories.

In an effort to stop Owens’s conspiracizing once and for all, TPUSA challenged her to an in-person broadcast meeting this coming Monday in Phoenix. But Owens is, for now, unwilling to appear in person.

The coordinated TPUSA backlash to Owens may not convince grassroots Republicans of the official FBI narrative of the shooting, but it could still serve to warn conservative media elites that associating with Owens will carry heavy penalties, much as Charlie Kirk did when he tried to blacklist Fuentes years ago.

If that’s the measure, there’s already been one victory. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson made comments on comedian Theo Von’s show that seemed broadly supportive of Owens’s conspiracy theories. That was a surprising move, since Carlson is still set to speak at AmericaFest. But on Wednesday, just a few hours after Erika Kirk’s Fox News appearance essentially put Owens’s theories beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, Carlson walked back his support for Owens’s

IF THE TPUSA SHOWDOWN doesn’t demolish Owens, Fuentes—a one-time Owens fellow traveler who has so far stayed away from her conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing—has vowed to “put [Owens] in a coffin, metaphorically speaking.”

“If they don’t do a good enough job, I think I’m going to have to step up,” Fuentes said on his show. “And I think I’m going to have to expose Candace Owens for what she really is.”

There are a lot of reasons to think this won’t work. For one, Owens may have a bigger audience than Fuentes, and almost all her other critics. For another, pushing back can be difficult because many of Owens’s conservative critics do not always operate in the realm of reality themselves. As Pool raged against Owens on Monday night, his guest was Gary the Numbers Guy, a sort of manosphere numerologist who provides astrology readings for macho far-right figures.

Pool asked Gary the Numbers Guy for his thoughts on Owens.

“I think Candace Owens is born in 1989, the Year of the Snake,” Gary said. “And 2025 is the Year of the Snake. And I think that’s why she’s Number 1 right now.”

Thanks, Gary. That explains it!

Horoscopes aside, there is another explanation for why Owens is causing so much trouble for MAGA right now: Charlie Kirk himself platformed her within TPUSA and at its conferences, and allowed her irrationality, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories to flourish within the Republican party.

Last week, Rochel Leah Boteach Taktuk, the daughter of celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach (himself a longtime Owens nemesis), dared to raise this uncomfortable point when she called Kirk’s alliance with Owens his “fatal flaw.” Now, she said, TPUSA was paying for Kirk’s mistake.

“When you don’t stop the evil immediately—call it out, say it’s wrong—that evil will eventually come to you, too,” she said. “And that’s what we’re seeing now.”

Dec. 10 

New York Times, Jubilant Sykes, Celebrated Opera Singer, Is Stabbed to Death, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Upated Dec. 10, 2025. After the police found the Grammy-nominated performer in his home with fatal wounds, his son was taken into custody, the authorities said.

Jubilant Sykes, a celebrated opera singer, was fatally stabbed on Monday night in his home in Santa Monica, Calif., and his son was arrested in the attack, police officials said.

After the Santa Monica Police Department responded to a call about an assault at a house around 9:20 p.m., officers found Sykes, 71, with critical injuries consistent with a stabbing, the authorities said in a news release. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Micah Sykes, the singer’s 31-year-old son, was found inside the home and was taken into custody without incident.

It was unclear what led to the stabbing. “The circumstances surrounding the incident remain under investigation,” the police said in the news release, adding, “The suspect will be booked for homicide, and the case will be presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for filing consideration.”

Lt. Lewis Gilmour, a spokesman for the Santa Monica Police Department, said in a statement that Sykes’s wife, Cecelia Sykes, had called 911 on Monday to report an assault at their home and that his family had told the authorities that Micah Sykes had a history of mental illness. The police have not determined if that played a role in the attack.

Sykes, a baritone, performed at some of the world’s most prominent stages, including Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and the Barbican Center in London. In 1990, he performed the role of Jake in a production of “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera.

Sykes also sang jazz and spiritual music and performed with many orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, according to his website.

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 9, 2025 [U.S. Cultural, Media, AI, Political Trends], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 10, 2025. When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America.

It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.

When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.

Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”

This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”

Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.

Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.

Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”

As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.

The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.

David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.

Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”

“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”

Dec. 9

 

Elon Musk, left, and Donald Trump shown in separate file photos via Instagram and YouTube.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: America Has Become a Digital Narco-State, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 9, 2025. Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe. 

Imagine what would happen if the United States were to legalize the distribution and sale of heroin — and do so without any restrictions or regulations on how the drug is marketed and who can buy it.

Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.

Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling — and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.

If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.

Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.

A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”

Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top? Not according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, which in 2023 released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (download it now before RFK Jr. suppresses it!), which summarized extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media.

Furthermore, the operators of these platforms know that they’re doing harm. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.

Nor are children and adolescents the only victims. Last month Reuters, after reviewing a cache of internal Meta documents, reported that

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

At the same time, Elon Musk’s X has become a huge promoter of hate speech, with many of its major MAGA accounts based overseas while posing as American patriots.

So social media clearly do considerable harm. But social media giants have been able to use the power of money to block regulation. Last year Congress seemed on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, legislation intended to, yes, protect kids online. The legislation, which would have been the first ever to impose rules on social media, had overwhelming bipartisan support. Ninety-one senators supported it. But then Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.

Other countries’ governments are less easily corrupted. Australia has passed a law, which goes into effect tomorrow, intended to prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. While no one knows yet how well the law will work, it is a worthy attempt to protect Australia’s youth from the pernicious effects of social media.

Under the auspices of its Digital Services Act, the European Commission imposed its first fine last week — 120 million euros, basically a tiny slap on the wrist — on Musk’s X. The Commission’s case is straightforward:

• · X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them without making any effort to verify that posters are who they say they are.
• · X does not provide enough information on advertisements for outsiders to determine whether or not they are scams
• · X refuses to make its public data available to researchers

These are clear violations of European law, and the fine, as I said, was little more than a slap on the wrist. Yet Musk, right, went berserk, declaring that the EU should be abolished and threatening personal retribution against the “woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the fine.

I’m not an expert on European law, but isn’t threatening to take personal revenge against government officials whose decisions you don’t like itself likely illegal?

What makes this episode especially disturbing is that the U.S. government appears to be using its power to support the broligarchy’s fight against European regulation. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.

The key point is that if you think of unregulated social media as dangerous drugs, as you should, then we’ve become a nation in which drug lords control much of government policy. Social media billionaires have enough power to prevent us from protecting our own children. They have enough power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.

America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state.

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kushner and Saudis back hostile takeover of Hollywood giant, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Dec. 9, 2025. Jared Kushner, above right, is funneling $24 billion from Middle Eastern governments to back a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — all while advising President Trump on foreign policy.

On Monday morning, Paramount announced a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), an American media conglomerate that owns an iconic movie studio, HBO, and other news and entertainment properties. The offer is meant to upend Netflix’s deal to purchase WBD for $72 billion, which WBD accepted last Friday.

Paramount’s press release announcing the offer says that the $40 billion in equity financing will be “backstopped by Ellison Family and RedBird Capital.” The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the second-wealthiest person in the world. RedBird Capital is an investment fund based in New York. (The rest of the cash for the purchase will be raised as debt from American banks.)

What is not mentioned in the press release is that while the equity financing is “backstopped” by American individuals and entities, the majority of the equity financing — $24 billion — comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. That fact is buried on page 42 of a separate SEC filing.

$24 billion is a massive investment by foreign governments on Paramount’s behalf. To put it in perspective, the current value of Paramount is just $15 billion.

Also participating in the deal is Affinity Partners, the private equity firm run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nearly all of Affinity Partners’ assets come from the same sovereign wealth funds bankrolling the proposed Paramount takeover of WBD. Kushner collects tens of millions in fees from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries annually.

Kushner’s involvement in the deal highlights the ongoing legal and ethical problems with his dual role. On the one hand, Kushner is operating as a high-ranking official representing the Trump administration in the most sensitive foreign policy matters. On the other hand, he is being paid by and partnering with Middle Eastern governments as they seek to expand their political, economic, and cultural interests.

Any acquisition of WBD requires the approval of multiple federal agencies. On Sunday, the day before Paramount’s hostile takeover bid was announced, Trump warned that Netflix’s planned acquisition “could be a problem“ because the combined company would have too much market share. It was a somewhat surprising comment from a president who has not made antitrust a central issue of his presidency. Trump also emphasized that while he would consult “some economists” he would also personally “be involved” in the decision.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s CEO, reportedly “wooed Trump“ at the White House in advance of the company’s WBD offer. Netflix agreed to pay WBD $5.7 billion if the deal did not receive regulatory approval, one of the largest breakup fees ever. This reflected Netflix’s confidence that the deal would win Trump administration approval — at least before Kushner became involved.

A reporter asked Trump on Monday if Kushner’s involvement with Paramount’s deal could influence his views. “I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’ve never spoken with him about it.”Paramount is willing to conform to Trump’s ideological agenda

Trump may be more amenable to Paramount’s bid for WBD, because Paramount has a history of bowing to Trump’s political demands, especially since David Ellison became CEO in August.

In September, CBS News announced that it hired a Trump loyalist, Kenneth R. Weinstein, to “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” as the company’s new ombudsman. Paramount had promised to create the job to secure approval for itsmerger with Skydance. Weinstein had no experience with producing or overseeing news coverage and previously was the president of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank. Weinstein has an extensive record of praising Trump, and in July 2024, Weinstein donated $20,000 to a committee supporting Trump’s campaign.

In October, Paramount announced that it was hiring anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News and purchasing Weiss’ The Free Press for a reported $150 million. Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor and writer, had no experience in broadcast news. In 2021, Weiss founded The Free Press, a right-leaning publication that often criticizes what it deems the “woke” left and efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ articles found that it repeatedly distorted the truth in order to conform to a right-wing ideological agenda.

Larry Ellison is also a close ally of Trump. In 2020, he held a “six-figure-per-person campaign fundraiser” for the president at his California estate, where guests could pay $100,000 to golf and take a photo with Trump or $250,000 to “also participate in a round-table discussion.” He has also dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sat in on a transition meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and has reportedly met with Trump frequently this year.The foreign ownership problem

Having foreign governments own such a large stake in a company like WBD — which has sensitive financial information about millions of Americans — creates significant regulatory uncertainty. Such transactions frequently require an additional layer of approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

In the SEC filing regarding the offer, Paramount claims that it has structured the deal to be outside of CFIUS’s jurisdiction:

Our other outside financing partners (the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar) and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)) have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments. Accordingly, the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction.

It is telling that Affinity Partners, a U.S. company owned by an American, is lumped into this group. Paramount is tacitly acknowledging that Kushner is using Affinity Partners as a vehicle for foreign influence.

But Paramount’s claim that CFIUS no longer has jurisdiction over the deal is false. A company cannot extinguish concerns about foreign ownership simply by nominally giving up governance rights. There are many other ways that entities providing $24 billion in equity investment can influence the operations of a company.

That’s why CFIUS has jurisdiction to investigate the deal between Paramount and WBD to determine what influence the sovereign wealth funds have and whether that influence raises national security concerns.The creative and economic concerns about Netflix’s takeover bid

Netflix’s bid to buy WBD is also controversial.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised anti-trust concerns about the deal. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who leads a Senate subcommittee on antitrust, said on X that the deal raised “a lot of antitrust red flags” and that he would hold “an intense antitrust hearing.” Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that the deal “looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare.” If Netflix were to buy WBD, it would own two of the top three largest streaming services, Netflix and HBO Max. This market power could allow Netflix to raise prices for its subscription services, which are already increasing rapidly.

The Writers Guild of America said the Netflix deal would “eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers.”

Another issue is the impact that the Netflix purchase could have on movie theaters. Netflix typically does not show its movies in theaters. Netflix’s CEO has said that declines in box office sales show that going to the movie theater is “an outmoded idea” and consumers would prefer to watch movies at home. With WBD films making up roughly a quarter of box office sales in North America, a theater-owner trade group said “the negative impact of this acquisition will impact theaters from the biggest circuits to one-screen independents.” Netflix has said that it would continue showing WBD movies in theaters, although this was met with skepticism from many in the industry.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Owes Larry. Can Larry Collect? Andrew Egger, right, Dec. 9, 2025. I have watched in fascination over the last few days as the negotiations have been ensnared in the court politics of obtaining the personal blessing or disapproval of one Donald J. Trump.

Netflix’s top competitor in the bid to acquire the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max has been Paramount, the media company owned by one of Trump’s inner-ring tech billionaire pals, David Ellison. Ellison had thought the Warner Bros. deal was as good as his, but somehow Netflix managed to outmaneuver him, announcing their deal last week.

Over the weekend, though, Trump cracked the door open. The Netflix–Warner Bros. deal “could be a problem,” he said Sunday from the red carpet at his Trumpified Kennedy Center Honors ceremony—standing in front of a backdrop conspicuously featuring the logo of the event’s main sponsor, Ellison’s CBS. Netflix already has “a very big market share” in streaming, Trump said (correctly). “When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot. . . . I’ll be involved in that decision, too.”

It was the last bit—Trump’s promise to get personally involved rather than leaving matters up to his underlings at the Justice Department and/or the Federal Trade Commission—that likely caused Ellison’s heart to sing. On Monday, he seemed to take the president at his word, launching a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. designed to go around the company’s board by appealing directly to its shareholders. Ellison was offering more money than Netflix, but he also offered a remarkable argument: Shareholders should go with him, he wrote, because he believed Netflix’s bid would face “a challenging regulatory approval process.”

Both Netflix and Paramount have plainly known for a while that getting Trump’s personal buy-in was key to the deal. But while both companies did what they could to curry favor—both courted former Trump adviser Jason Miller to come aboard as an adviser to the deal, for instance—there’s little question Ellison came out better in that department. Part of the financing he lined up for his bid was ponied up by Affinity, the investment group of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. And Ellison has spent the first year of Trump’s term coming through for the president in all sorts of remarkable ways—settling Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, then handing over editorial control of the entire news outlet to contrarian conservative Bari Weiss.

And here, after all that, was Ellison coming to reap his reward, in plain English: Netflix, not Paramount, was the party likely to face regulatory blowback from the White House. Trump wants ME to get it, Ellison might as well have said, not THEM.

Let us be your sherpas through the perverse world of the new-look Trump oligarchy. Join Bulwark+ today!Subscribed

But the court politics can cut both ways. Trump loves being sucked up to, and he loves distributing head-pat rewards to the suck-ups. What Trump does not love is powerful people starting to treat those rewards as something they’ve earned. The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.”

Where did those tropes and stereotypes come from, one wonders?

Ellison’s brazenness may have complicated Trump’s decision tree, but there’s little question the president is still the guy whose say-so will be final.

“In a normal administration, maybe the president would actually have [control of the deal], but he’d never say anything. He’d probably just, like, wink and nod—‘Well, we’ll let the enforcers do what the enforcers do’—and then not claim responsibility,” an administration official familiar with antitrust issues told The Bulwark. “In this administration, the president wants responsibility and wants everyone to know that he blocked the deal or whatever. . . . If the president is dictating, he’s gonna get what he wants. So we’ll see what he wants.”

Status, Ellison's Endgame, Oliver Darcy, Dec. 8-9, 2025. What began as quiet courtship by David Ellison has morphed into a hostile takeover attempt of Warner Bros. Discovery—with the battle only likely to get messier in the days ahead.

David Ellison on CNBC. (Screen shot via SnapStream)

Earlier this fall, on the second Sunday of September, David Zaslav welcomed David Ellison to his Beverly Hills home. Only weeks earlier, Ellison had closed the tortured, much-drawn-out acquisition of Paramount, cementing the Oracle scion’s status as Hollywood’s newest mogul. But if Zaslav didn’t fully grasp Ellison’s ambitions that afternoon, it didn’t take long for the picture to come into focus.

At the meeting, Ellison disclosed that he wanted to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery. His opening offer: $19 a share, split between 60% cash and 40% stock—a 52% premium at the time. He laid out the strategic rationale for a combined company and left behind a letter for Zaslav detailing Paramount proposal.

It was merely the first overture aimed at courting Zaslav. Two days later, David’s father Larry Ellison met virtually with Zaslav and influential shareholder John Malone, reiterating the family’s desire for WBD. And as their offers for the sprawling media conglomerate climbed, the Ellisons kept up the charm offensive…

Dec. 8

 

 

New York Times, Paramount Makes Hostile Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, Benjamin Mullin and Lauren Hirsch, Dec. 8, 2025. The offer to shareholders comes days after Warner Bros. agreed to sell its streaming and studio business to Netflix.

Paramount on Monday mounted a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a brazen attempt to secure a Hollywood prize snatched away by Netflix last week.

Netflix announced an $83 billion deal to buy a big part of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, in an agreement approved by the boards of both companies. In a news release on Monday, Paramount went around the Warner Bros. Discovery board and straight to shareholders with what it called a superior offer.

Paramount said it would pay $30 per share in cash, valuing the company at around $108 billion, including debt. It said it was going to shareholders because the board of Warner Bros. Discovery is “pursuing an inferior proposal” that would lead to “a challenging regulatory approval process.”

Paramount has offered to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including the Warner Bros. movie studio, the HBO Max streaming service and a portfolio of cable channels including CNN. The cable channels are not part of the Netflix deal.

“We believe our offer will create a stronger Hollywood,” David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, said in a press release. “It is in the best interests of the creative community, consumers and the movie theater industry.”

Warner Bros. Discovery had no immediate comment.

Paramount’s hostile takeover attempt is the latest in a series of increasingly strident overtures to Warner Bros. Discovery in recent weeks. Just before Netflix announced it had struck a deal, Paramount sent a letter to David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging that the company ran a “myopic” sale process that “favors a single bidder.”

Warner Bros. Discovery said in a response that it “fully and robustly” complied with its obligations to shareholders. The company ran a weekslong bidding process that also drew interest from Comcast, the cable company that owns NBCUniversal.

Shares of Warners Bros Discovery closed at $26 a share on Friday, after its deal with Netflix was announced. It was up nearly 5 percent premarket when Paramount announced its bid.

A key part of assessment will be whether shareholders expect that regulatory authorities will approve the transaction. The deal between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery would include Warner Bros. movie studio and HBO Max, enhancing Netflix’s market power in streaming even more.

At the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, President Trump praised Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, but noted that the company had a “very big market share,” adding that he would be “involved” in the regulatory review.Netflix is expected to argue that regulators should consider its business as part of the much larger entertainment industry that also includes platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as tech giants like Amazon and Apple. The social media application Meta successfully made a similar argument defending itself against monopoly charges in a recent case.

If the deal falls through because of a failure to get the necessary approvals, Netflix would pay a $5.8 billion fee to Warner Bros. Discovery, according to documents filed with federal regulators. If it accepts a superior unsolicited bid from Paramount, or any other rivals, it would owe Netflix $2.8 billion, according to the documents.

Netflix’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery landed like a bomb in Hollywood, setting off fears that the streaming giant would eventually marginalize theatrical releases for one of the few remaining major film studios. Netflix has pledged to continue theatrical releases for movies from Warner Bros. Discovery, a significant development, but many in Hollywood are skeptical of the company’s long-term commitment to theatrical distribution.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The casino-fication of news, Judd Legum, right, Dec. 8, 2025. New partnerships between the prediction market Kalshi and cable TV networks will transform every news event into a betting opportunity.

Two major news networks, CNN and CNBC, recently announced partnerships with Kalshi, an online predictions market. Kalshi allows the public to place bets on a dizzying variety of news events. There are currently Kalshi markets for the winner of the 2028 presidential election, next month’s unemployment rate, next week’s top TV show on Netflix, whether the announcers will say “Cheesehead” during Sunday’s Green Bay Packers football game, and thousands of other future events.

The CNN deal, which starts immediately, involves the “integration of Kalshi data across CNN programming“ and “a new Kalshi-powered real-time news ticker that will run during segments that feature Kalshi data.” The CNBC deal, which begins in 2026, will “incorporate real-time prediction data into CNBC’s editorial coverage across its TV, digital, and subscription channels.” Kalshi will also create “a CNBC page on its site, featuring CNBC-selected markets.”

The economic terms of the arrangement between Kalshi and the two networks were not disclosed.

Unlike other prediction markets, Kalshi has sought regulatory approval from the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). After winning a lawsuit against the CFTC that allowed it to take bets on the 2024 presidential election, the platform has exploded in popularity. Trading volume is expected to exceed $50 billion in 2025, up from $300 million in 2024.

The new partnerships with CNN and CNBC will not only draw more users to Kalshi but fundamentally change the nature of news. It is no longer just a mechanism to learn about and understand world events. The news is now an opportunity to speculate on future events for financial gain.

“Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in a December 2 press release. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information.” CNN and CNBC, two of the most prominent news outlets in the world, are endorsing and legitimizing this model of journalism.

These deals take a style of reporting popularized by election polls — horserace-style coverage that emphasizes who is ahead or behind — and expands it to virtually every topic. The gamified coverage is paired with the promotion of a company, Kalshi, that allows the public to place wagers on the outcome of these events.How the wealthy can manipulate and distort prediction markets — and the news

Treating Kalshi’s betting markets as “news” is based on the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which contends that a liquid market reflects the best information available. According to this theory, while reporters are biased and polling is flawed, betting markets like Kalshi reveal the best approximation of the “truth.”

There are a few problems with this theory. First, while Kalshi is growing rapidly, it is still very small compared to the stock market. $50 billion in annual volume is about $135 million in volume per day. Most of Kalshi’s trades are related to sports events — over 75% according to one recent study — so the markets for current events are even smaller. In contrast, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), there is about $610 billion in daily trading volume for U.S. equities.

Since volumes are exponentially lower, this leaves Kalshi markets much more open to manipulation than the stock market. Now that movement in Kalshi markets will be treated as news on CNN and CNBC, the incentives for market manipulation are even greater.

If a political Candidate A was facing a corruption scandal, for example, a wealthy benefactor could place a large bet predicting that Candidate A would win. It takes no more than a few million dollars, and usually much less, to move a political prediction market substantially. The change in the market will now be treated by CNN and CNBC as “news” and, potentially, evidence that the corruption scandal is not damaging Candidate A’s prospects. The manufactured positive coverage of Candidate A could also crowd out coverage of the corruption scandal itself.

Alternatively, someone could seed a false rumor on social media that Candidate X was dropping out of the race, then place a large bet on the opponent, Candidate Y. When the price for Candidate X to win moves significantly lower, CNN would report that as news, fueling the rumor mill on social media and driving the price of Candidate Y up further. The originator of the false rumor could then sell their position in Candidate Y for a profit before it became clear that the rumor about Candidate X dropping out was false.

Ultimately, the Efficient Market Hypothesis contends that where people spend their money reflects the truth. But in an era of extreme wealth inequality, treating movements in relatively small markets like Kalshi as news is not justifiable. The movements in markets may reflect conventional wisdom, but they could just as easily reflect what wealthy people want others to believe.The insider trading problem

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a sophisticated system to prevent, identify, and prosecute insider trading. Some insiders are required to sell their shares only at pre-announced intervals to prevent profiting from non-public information. The SEC benefits from the fact that, at publicly traded companies, the people with access to inside information are relatively limited and well-defined.

There are also sophisticated algorithms that identify suspicious trading from people who may be getting tipped off by insiders.

In addition to automated systems, the SEC offers large whistleblower rewards to individuals who tip the agency off to insider trading. Once insider trading is identified, the agency aggressively prosecutes offenders, seeking civil and criminal penalties, including jail time.

In contrast, the CFTC, which regulates Kalshi, does not prohibit the use of inside information. Most markets regulated by the CFTC are used to mitigate risk. This often involves companies using insider information. A major airline planning an expansion, for example, could purchase jet fuel futures, anticipating that its expansion would drive jet fuel prices higher. By buying jet fuel futures, the company locks in fuel at the current price. This is not only legal but is seen as prudent financial management.

The CFTC does have rules against using inside information to manipulate a market. But purposeful manipulation is very difficult to prove.

Further, since the CFTC does not prohibit insider trading, its resources for identifying and prosecuting bad actors are far more limited than those of the SEC. It has no mechanism or experience monitoring the large and diffuse networks of people who could be using inside information to manipulate any of the thousands of markets on Kalshi.

Kalshi’s rules prohibit trading on “material non-public information” or if you “have the ability to influence the outcome,” but it is unclear what resources Kalshi deploys to enforce these rules.Trivializing the news

The integration of Kalshi into news coverage can trivialize even the most sobering events, framing tragedies as money-making opportunities. For example, Kalshi offered a market allowing people to bet on whether there would be a famine declared in Gaza this year: Since the IPC declared there was a famine in Gaza in August, there are people who used Kalshi to profit from the starvation of other people.A bad bet

The CNN and CNBC deals will promote Kalshi to a new audience that may be unaware that news prediction markets exist. These markets are similar to gambling in that they offer variable rewards, making them addictive. Like gambling, most people also lose money.

Stocks, over the long term, tend to go up in value. So purchasing equities, which is also a kind of “bet,” has a positive expected value.

Prediction markets, however, are zero-sum. For every prediction, there is one outcome, and someone wins, and the person on the other side of the bet loses. Because Kalshi collects a fee, its users are guaranteed, on aggregate, to lose money. One academic study found that, even before fees, Kalshi users lost an average of 20%. This suggests that sophisticated bettors have an advantage over typical users.

Dec. 6

New York Times, Angst Turns to Anger in Hollywood as Netflix Hooks Warner Bros., Brooks Barnes and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 6, 2025. Much of the entertainment capital fears that Netflix’s deal will lead to more job losses and theater closings and fewer boundary-pushing movies.

In October, when Warner Bros. Discovery hung a “For Sale” sign on itself, Hollywood was sad. The megaproducer Larry Gordon likened the feeling to a death in the family. In group WhatsApp chats, screenwriters used words like “heartbreaking” and “tragic.”

Now that a sale has been announced, with Netflix striking an $83 billion deal for the Warner Bros. studio and its sibling streaming service, HBO Max, a different emotion is washing through the entertainment capital: Hollywood is mad.

Jane Fonda raged against a deal in a letter to an entertainment trade news publication, calling the end of a stand-alone Warner Bros. “an alarming escalation in a consolidation crisis that threatens the entire entertainment industry, the public it serves and — potentially — the First Amendment itself.”

Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Cinema United, a trade organization that represents 30,000 movie screens in the United States, called the Netflix acquisition “an unprecedented threat” and vowed to fight it. “Theaters will close, communities will suffer, jobs will be lost,” Mr. O’Leary said, noting Netflix’s policy of giving movies only “token” releases in theaters. (Shares in publicly traded theater chains, including AMC Entertainment, IMAX and Cinemark, fell as much as 8 percent on Friday.)

“This merger must be blocked,” the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 12,000 screenwriters, said in a statement. “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.” The Teamsters’ motion picture division also demanded that “all levels” of government “reject this deal.”

Netflix insisted on Friday that it would honor the Warner Bros. business model — that it would continue to release movies in theaters for exclusive runs. “It’s not like we have this opposition to movies into theaters,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said on a conference call with investors.

“Right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros.” to “continue to go to theaters,” Mr. Sarandos added.

But many people in Hollywood viewed his comments with extreme skepticism. (“Key words: ‘right now,’” one agent said.) As recently as April, in response to a question at the Time100 Summit about declines at the overall box office, Mr. Sarandos said: “What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home.” He also called theaters “an outmoded idea” for most people.

 

The Catholic Herald, The Latin Mass and the shaping of the American Right, Tom Colsy, Dec. 6, 2025. Traditionalists, despite their zeal and growth, remain a remarkably small fraction of the 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Yet this strange faction within the Church casts an outsized shadow. This surprisingly disproportionate influence is nowhere better demonstrated than in US politics.

From the likes of William F Buckley to Michael Knowles, from Russell Kirk to Pat Buchanan and Candace Owens, these may not be conservative America’s most recognised names (losing out to the globally iconic figureheads of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan) but they’re certainly up there.

And make no mistake, the intellectual movements and factions these individuals founded, pioneered or represent have become the driving forces that have been carrying the ideational platforms of presidential elections and administrations for decades.

Despite starkly different personas, each share in common exceedingly rare attributes: traditionalist Catholic Faith and sympathy for (or devotion to) the old Latin Mass.

Statistics today suggest that only around 1-2 per cent of Masses celebrated globally are according to this mystical, ancient, prayerful rite (which once served 98 per cent of the Catholic world). So the fact there exists a curious thread running from the suppressed Mass of St Pius V all the way to people formerly or presently prominent in US politics might first appear to only warrant a raised eyebrow from observers for the sheer fact of its statistical rareness.

But, there is another, more pressingly topical, reason why we should turn our attention to this often unspoken connection: the recent outbreak of civil war on the Right of US politics.

The foremost conservative think tank in Washington DC – The Heritage Foundation – has recently been embroiled in controversy as a result of this very conflict. Its president, Kevin Roberts, sparked outrage last month by publicly defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview Nick Fuentes – the foul-mouthed far-right firebrand whose radically anti-Zionist views have long been anathema to mainstream conservatism – against what he called a “venomous coalition” of critics.

Though Roberts – an observant Opus Dei Catholic who has himself made sympathetic overtures on behalf of the Traditional Latin Mass – quickly apologised, claiming ignorance of Fuentes and blaming a now-resigned aide for the script, the backlash included resignations from his “antisemitism task force” as well as a board member resigning, exposing the deepening rift between the old-guard establishment and the surging “America First” insurgents.

What began as a defence of a “close friend” [Carlson] swiftly revealed the deeper fault line now splitting the American Right in two – and, once again, we must observe how the traditionalist Catholic current runs prominently straight through both sides of the divide.

Related to this, is how the American Left-Right divide we know today is, in truth, a comparatively recent invention: the conservative South was Democratic well into the 20th century. By the 1950s, however, a distinct intellectual Right had begun to crystallise – and its first great prophet was Russell Kirk, a convert to Catholicism who attended the Latin Mass daily when he could.

From his rambling Gothic house in rural Michigan, Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind (1953), a book that almost single-handedly gave American conservatism a traditionalist, old-world flavour and a respectable genealogy stretching back to Burke, Aquinas and Aristotle.

At the height of his influence he advised presidents, shaped the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater – and warned ceaselessly against the “behemoth state” and the deracinating acids of modernity.

Iconically archaic, Kirk would be found dressed in his three-piece tweed suit, sitting at the desk of his nostalgically-built home “Piety Hill” where he frequently hosted the homeless – a living rebuke to the suburban industrial optimism of Eisenhower’s America.

William F Buckley Jr – no convert, rather an Irish-German American who was educated in English Catholic independent schools – took a different path. From the Manhattan office that doubled as the headquarters of National Review (the influential magazine he founded which would be regularly read by sitting presidents), he forged what became known as “fusionism”: a grand alliance of traditionalists, libertarians and anti-communist ex-Trotskyists prepared to fight the Cold War by almost any means.

Buckley’s fusionism would come to dominate the thinking of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. He continued attending the Latin Mass throughout his life, even arranging for a private Tridentine rite said weekly in a chapel near his Stamford home by a sympathetic priest.

Both Kirk and Buckley grieved the liturgical upheaval. Kirk lamented the replacement of Latin by “awkward English” and the “tampering with the traditional liturgy”, warning that such changes inflicted “strife and change” upon the Church. He was a founding member of Una Voce America, a branch of the lay traditional Catholic advocacy organisation now led by English academic Joseph Shaw, who is also chair of the Latin Mass Society.

Buckley, more diplomatically, simply continued to attend the Tridentine Mass privately, though he hosted traditionalist critics on Firing Line – his prime-time high-brow TV discussion show – and published anguished symposia in National Review on the “loss of the sacred”.

Yet the political conclusions of these two men diverged sharply. Kirk’s was a parochial, sacramental conservatism of little platoons and permanent things. Buckley’s – shaped by his years in the CIA and his friendships with the neoconservative ex-leftists – became a compromise and consensus model. He criticised multiculturalism as a “religion”, but the alliances he forged and ideas he put forth nevertheless built an inclusive, fighting faith meant to steer the American empire, global finance and perpetual war against the Evil One abroad.

Kirk’s lineage runs forward to Pat Buchanan. He was another daily Mass-goer and defiant devotee of the old rite whose 1992 presidential campaign voiced themes more conservative-minded – trade protection, immigration restriction, hostility to forever wars and “Zionist” funding) – than the Buckleyite era; a baton which would eventually be taken over by the “America First” movement.

Buchanan’s traditionalism was unapologetic: he defended the Latin Mass in print, and warned that a conservatism that forgot Christendom would perish. Though he was viciously attacked – in a pre-Internet age, he was effectively frozen out of the mainstream – his movement can be considered a prefiguration of the Carlson-Fuentes axis today.

Buckley’s heirs, by contrast, are the colour-blind, market-worshipping, fiercely Zionist conservatives of so-called “Conservative Inc.” (the label an accusation of its leaders’ compromised, establishment connections).

This faction – the opposite side of the conflict to Fuentes, Owens and Carlson’s loosely and tenuously united “America First” coalition – is broadly unconcerned about demographic change and presents itself as unwaveringly committed to particularly secular and liberal interpretations of America’s founding philosophy and principles.

Its leaders are behind the National Review of today: the Daily Wire (led by Ben Shapiro) and constitute much of The Heritage Foundation’s leadership class.

For decades the Buckley dispensation reigned supreme: Kirk, Buchanan and their successors were excommunicated as “paleocons” or worse. Yet the wind has shifted with startling speed. Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference drew thousands in 2024; his nightly livestream routinely exceeds 100,000 concurrent viewers – numbers that dwarf the legacy conservative outlets on the same platforms. On Instagram his offensive and brazen tirades are a sensation with youth tired of overcorrect speech.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson – who while not Catholic is a Christian – commands the largest audience of any political commentator in America and advances many of the arguments made by America First Christian nationalists like Fuentes.

Candace Owens – baptised and confirmed in 2024, and a regular at the Latin Mass – has seen her YouTube channel surge past 5.5 million subscribers while she denounces “Frankism” and the “pornographic” nature of liberal modernity.

Even those who try to straddle the divide feel the gravitational pull. Michael Knowles – another traditional Latin Mass Catholic who has appeared in the Mass of the Ages films advocating its place in the Church – is one of the most influential political commentators in America. He can boast 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube and over 1.26 billion cumulative views there.

Working for Shapiro’s Daily Wire, Knowles is conspicuously mute on the debates that serve today as the primary proxy conflict territory between the two American conservative factions: Zionism and interventionism. But he quite radically quotes Aquinas and Louis IX on the state’s duty to suppress public blasphemy and has called for pornography to be banned outright (a heinous affront to civil liberties for Buckley-era liberal conservatives). He is, in effect, the highest-profile post-liberal voice inside the old citadel.

So there you have it, the American Right has been shaped – divided, energised and very nearly conquered – by a thin scarlet thread of traditionalist Catholicism. The Mass attended by scarcely one per cent of the Church’s children has, again and again, supplied the intellectual energy for conservatism’s most consequential rebellions and counter-rebellions.

As a result, one thing is quite clear: the kingmakers still wear mantillas – or, at the very least, remember what a mantilla is for.

New York Times, Olivia Nuzzi and Vanity Fair Will Part Ways, Jessica Testa, Dec. 5, 2025, Condé Nast, the magazine’s parent company, said her contract would expire at the end of the year.

Vanity Fair will be parting ways with Olivia Nuzzi, the magazine’s short-lived West Coast editor, in an effort to extricate itself from a storm of controversy over her past romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.

“Vanity Fair and Olivia Nuzzi have mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year,” Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, and Ms. Nuzzi said in a joint statement on Friday.

The status of Ms. Nuzzi’s contract had been the subject of speculation for weeks after the publication was “taken by surprise” by alarming new claims from Ms. Nuzzi’s former fiancé, the journalist Ryan Lizza, that her involvement with Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign was deeper than she had disclosed. Mr. Lizza also accused her of having another relationship with a reporting subject.

In a separate statement, Ms. Nuzzi said, “I love Vanity Fair, and this decision was made out of respect for the staff and faith in the future of the publication.”

The personal relationship between Ms. Nuzzi and Mr. Kennedy has been known since September 2024. Ms. Nuzzi was the Washington correspondent for New York magazine at the time and had written a profile of Mr. Kennedy while he campaigned for president.

A month later, New York magazine fired Ms. Nuzzi, although it said a law firm it had hired to conduct an investigation had found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her 2024 campaign coverage.

Ms. Nuzzi then went into a self-described “exile” in Malibu, Calif., publicly re-emerging only when Vanity Fair hired her in September — part of a wave of splashy appointments made by the magazine’s new global head of editorial content, Mark Guiducci.

In November, on the same day Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Ms. Nuzzi’s new memoir, “American Canto,” Mr. Lizza began publishing a still ongoing series on Substack about what he had learned about the affair.

“Part 1” was free, though subsequent updates have required readers to pay Mr. Lizza $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year. On Wednesday, he published what he described as a “strategy memo” written by Ms. Nuzzi “to Bobby” during his campaign. Mr. Lizza has not yet disclosed how he came to possess the memo.Ms. Nuzzi has called his weeks of posts “obsessive and violating fan fiction-slash-revenge porn.”

 

New York Times, Elon Musk’s X Hit With $140 Million Fine in Europe, Adam Satariano and Kate Conger, Dec. 6, 2025 (print ed.). The case over online transparency has become a point of contention between the European Union and the Trump administration.

The European Union fined X, the social media company owned by Elon Musk, above, $140 million on Friday for violating one of the bloc’s major laws targeting the technology industry. The case has been seen as a test of European officials’ willingness to aggressively regulate tech companies at the risk of antagonizing the Trump administration.

X is the first company to be fined under the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sweeping law intended to force large internet companies to protect their platforms against manipulation and illicit content. The Trump administration has criticized the policy as an attack on free speech and American tech firms.

Regulators in Brussels said the penalty against X was not about free speech but about the company’s lack of controls to prevent the platform from being abused. That included X’s “deceptive design” that allowed users to mislead others about their identities, opaque advertising practices and refusal to provide independent researchers with access to public data.

“Deceiving users with blue check marks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the E.U.,” said Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy for the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, in a statement. “We are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability.”

X did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk can appeal the ruling, which could set up a prolonged legal battle.

The fine of 120 million euros is smaller than others issued in recent years by E.U. regulators against large tech companies and modest relative to Mr. Musk’s overall wealth of more than $450 billion. A European Commission spokesman said the amount was proportionate to X’s violations.

The penalty landed at a delicate moment for the European Union’s relationship with the United States on issues like the war in Ukraine. Earlier on Friday, the White House published an annual national security strategy, warning that Europe risked “civilizational erasure” for policies seen as undermining liberty, sovereignty and free speech.

Several Trump administration officials posted on X in defense of Mr. Musk’s platform. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, said the penalty was an attack on “the American people by foreign governments.” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, criticized Europe for “suffocating regulations.”

“The E.U. should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” Vice President JD Vance said ahead of the announcement on Thursday.Editors’ PicksWhat Should I Do About the Bully in My Social Circle?My Father Had an Affair While My Mother Was Dying. Should I Tell My Siblings?5 New and Renewed Hotels in the Caribbean,

Mr. Musk responded to Mr. Vance: “Much appreciated.”

The X penalty had been expected to be announced earlier this year, but it was delayed during trade negotiations between the European Union and United States.

The fine may not be the last that X faces in Brussels. A second, more far-reaching investigation is underway into the company’s hands-off approach to policing content.

The European Union is also debating dialing back some regulation of the tech industry to encourage economic growth and advancements in areas like artificial intelligence. But officials have said they remain committed to enforcing laws like the Digital Services Act.

The digital law was passed in 2022 to create more oversight of social media, which many European officials blame for exacerbating political divisions and disinformation. The inquiry into X, which started in 2023, was one of the first major announced cases.

In addition to Mr. Musk’s ties to the Trump administration, he has widening influence in Europe. One of his companies, Starlink, provides key satellite communication technology to Ukrainian troops fighting Russia. Mr. Musk has also become involved in European politics, backing far-right groups like the Alternative for Germany party and the British anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson.

Dec. 5

New York Times, New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights, Erik Wemple, Washington, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.).The lawsuit said the Defense Department’s new set of rules for journalists “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” 

Pentagon in a lawsuit on Thursday of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of new restrictions on reporting about the military.

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, The Times argued that the Defense Department’s new policy violated the First Amendment and “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

The rules, which went into effect in October, are a stark departure from the previous ones, in both length and scope. They require reporters to sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources. Reporters who don’t comply could lose their press passes, and the Pentagon has accorded itself “unbridled discretion” to enforce the policy as it sees fit, according to the lawsuit.

The suit said that “reporting any information not approved by department officials” could lead to punishment, “regardless of whether such news gathering occurs on or off Pentagon grounds, and regardless of whether the information at issue is classified or unclassified.”

The complaint sought a court order halting enforcement of the rules and a declaration that the provisions “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” were unlawful. The Times has retained Theodore J. Boutrous, a First Amendment lawyer who has argued major media access cases in federal court. Julian E. Barnes, a Pentagon reporter for The Times, is listed as a plaintiff alongside the company.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The new rules are the latest step in a monthslong effort by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the access and privileges of the Pentagon press corps.

Mr. Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January after a bruising confirmation process that surfaced allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he said were untrue. Early in his tenure, Mr. Hegseth proposed evicting from the Pentagon a veteran reporter at NBC News who had contributed to some of the coverage.

The department later stripped several national news outlets of their workspaces in the Pentagon, offering them mostly to conservative outlets. Mr. Hegseth has also added limits on where reporters can roam in the complex.

A draft of the new restrictions first emerged in September, and was revised after pushback from lawyers representing news organizations. The final rules were released on Oct. 6, and more than a week later, dozens of credentialed journalists — including six from The Times — surrendered their badges instead of signing the document. The departing outlets have continued reporting on the military despite the access limits.

Many major news organizations released statements in October condemning the Pentagon policy as an incursion on the First Amendment. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” said a statement from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media and NBC News. 

 

New York Times, Netflix to Buy Warner Bros. in $83 Billion Deal to Create a Streaming Giant, Brooks Barnes, Lauren Hirsch and Nicole Sperling, Dec. 5, 2025. The deal to acquire the Hollywood giant’s television and film studios as well as HBO Max will bulk up the world’s biggest paid streaming service.

Netflix announced plans on Friday to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business, in a deal that will send shock waves through Hollywood and the broader media landscape.

The cash-and-stock deal values the business at $82.7 billion, including debt. The acquisition is expected to close after Warner Bros. Discovery carves out its cable unit, which the companies expected be completed by the third quarter of 2026. That means there will be a separate public company controlling channels like CNN, TNT and Discovery.

Netflix is already the world’s largest paid streaming service, with more than 300 million subscribers. Bulking up with Warner Bros. Discovery assets would create a colossus with greater leverage over theater owners and entertainment-industry unions. It could force smaller companies to merge as they scramble to compete.

The acquisition would also complete the conquest of Hollywood by tech insurgents. Instead of acquiring studios, tech companies have mostly grown under their own steam in Hollywood. In 2022, Amazon closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, home to James Bond and Rocky franchises.

November

Nov. 29

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: The President Who Cannot Be Questioned, Michael Cohen, right, Nov. 29, 2025. Trump doesn’t dodge tough questions; he attacks them, revealing a president who lashes out because the truth, not the reporter, is the thing he can’t control.

If you grew up with siblings; or hell, if you survived the emotional Thunderdome known as American grade school, you learned early on that there were lines you didn’t cross. Call your brother “stupid,” you got grounded. Tell a girl on the playground she’s “ugly,” you got marched to the principal’s office by the ear. “Piggy”? 

That bought you a note home, a stern talking-to, and, depending on your zip code, a slipper to the backside. SubscribedBut what do you do when the kid hurling playground insults isn’t eight years old with chocolate milk on his breath, but the 79-year-old President of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, who keeps talking like the world’s oldest third-grader caught in an endless lunchroom tantrum?

Where do you send him? Time-out? Detention? Mar-a-Lago already is detention, only with more comfortable seating.

This week, America got another reminder that something is fundamentally off-kilter inside Trump’s operation, and it’s bleeding straight out of his own mouth. And no, it’s not a diagnosis. It’s not a medical issue. It’s the consequences of pressure, bad advice, and a political strategy built on grievance gasoline with a match permanently lit. When the walls start closing in, Trump doesn’t adapt; he detonates.

Let’s start with Mar-a-Lago, where good questions go to die. CBS’s Nancy Cordes, professional, prepared, and doing the job the First Amendment demands, asked the president about Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the D.C. shooting of two National Guard members. Lakanwal isn’t the cartoon villain Trump’s been selling. The man worked with the CIA in Kabul for a decade. He came in during the evacuation and later received asylum under Trump’s own administration.

Cordes asked a reasonable question: If the inspector general found Afghan evacuees were thoroughly vetted, then why blame Biden?

Trump’s answer? His greatest hit: “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?”

It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t strength. It was a man feeling cornered by facts and defaulting to the same insult arsenal he used as a New York tabloid curiosity. 

This is what happens when a president surrounds himself with people who tell him every problem is someone else’s fault, every question is an attack, and every woman who challenges him is “disrespectful.” Bad advice produces bad behavior, and America is reacting exactly the way you’d expect: with frustration, exhaustion, and increasingly, concern.

But Cordes wasn’t the only target. Katie Rogers of The New York Times co-writes a careful, fact-based piece about the president’s age, mobility, stamina, schedule, and the MRI he disclosed, all documented and observable. Trump shredded her as “third rate” and “ugly, both inside and out.”

He denounced the Times as a “rag” and “the enemy of the people,” never mentioning her male co-author.

Then Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey asked about the Epstein files, a sensitive topic for reasons Trump pretends are obvious “witch hunts” rather than legitimate scrutiny. His response: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

And ABC’s Mary Bruce dared to ask a question about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, a murder U.S. intelligence squarely linked to the Saudi Crown Prince. Trump scolded her for “embarrassing” MBS, then called her a “terrible person” and her question “insubordinate.”Insubordinate.

As if he’s royalty and the White House press corps are disobedient subjects.

So what’s really going on here?

Here’s the truth from someone who lived inside the machine longer than any sane person should:

Donald Trump is under pressure—public pressure, media pressure, political pressure—and the advice he’s getting is telling him to treat that pressure like enmity.

• He’s being told the press is out to get him.
• He’s being told the public doesn’t “understand” him. He’s being told to punch harder, bark louder, demean faster.
• And he listens. He always listens to the worst people in the room.This is not about instability. It’s about deflection.
• It’s about avoiding accountability.It’s about blaming journalists, especially women, because they’re the ones holding up mirrors he can’t bear to look into.

Karoline Leavitt stepped up and called this barrage “honesty” and “frankness,” as if “Are you stupid?” is presidential transparency. As if “piggy” is a bold new chapter in communicative candor. As if calling a journalist ugly is something the press should appreciate.

But America isn’t buying it. People see the hostility. They see the thin skin. They see a president absorbing the weight of a job his own advisers have convinced him is a battlefield, not a responsibility.

So here’s what we know: When presidents feel confident, they lead.

When they feel cornered, they lash out.Trump isn’t lashing out because he’s strong; he’s lashing out because he’s under pressure, badly advised, and increasingly aware that the media questions he hates are questions millions of Americans are asking too.

And the women asking those questions aren’t the problem.They’re the truth-tellers.They’re the accountability he can’t silence.

And that, more than anything, is the truth he’s afraid you’ll hear.

 

Politico, Northwestern reaches $75M deal with Trump administration to get federal funding reinstated, Bianca Quilantan and Gloria Gonzalez, Nov. 28, 2025. The school expects federal funds will start flowing within days and be fully restored within 30 days.

Northwestern University agreed to pay $75 million to the federal government as part of a deal with the Trump administration to restore millions in frozen federal research dollars.

The university said Friday the agreement would end probes by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education on the school’s compliance with anti-discrimination laws. The deal would also permanently close all pending probes by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on the university’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on race in admissions.

In April, the administration froze $790 million in federal research grants and contracts, making Northwestern the first institution outside of the Ivy League to be targeted by the White House in response to alleged civil rights violations, including their responses to antisemitism on campus.

Northwestern expects federal funds will start flowing within days and be fully restored within 30 days. The school will also be treated as eligible for future grants, contracts and awards from the federal government.

“This is not an agreement the University enters into lightly, but one that was made based on institutional values,” Henry Bienen, the university’s interim president, said in a message sent to the school community Friday.

The university had “several hard red lines we refused to cross,” including control over who it hires and what students it would admit, he said.

“Northwestern runs Northwestern,” he said. “Period.”

The university did agree to establish a special committee of the Board of Trustees to ensure compliance with the agreement, continue compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws and provide “safe and fair opportunities for women, including single-sex housing for any woman, defined on the basis of sex, who requests such accommodations and all-female sports, locker rooms and showering facilities.”

The university also committed to taking steps to protect Jewish members of its community.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the deal a “huge win” for the school community and higher education.

“The deal cements policy changes that will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination, and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions,” she said in a statement.

Justice Department officials praised the school for reaching the deal.

“Universities that receive federal funding have a responsibility to comply with the law, including protecting against racial discrimination and antisemitism,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We appreciate the significant improvements Northwestern has made and are gratified to reach an agreement that safeguards of rights of all the university’s applicants, students, and employees.”

Former Northwestern President Michael Schill, who resigned in September, testified before the House education panel last year on his institution’s response to the campus protests. House Republicans slammed Schill’s efforts to deal with student protesters to disband their pro-Palestinian encampments.

New York Times Magazine, The Interview, Simon Cowell Is Sorry, Softer and Grieving Liam Payne, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Nov. 29, 2025. Simon Cowell, the famously caustic judge from “American Idol” and “X Factor,” has mellowed.

Part of that is age (he’s now 66), but he has also suffered the loss of his parents, become a father, gone to therapy and more recently grappled with the death of Liam Payne, whom he discovered on “X Factor” and cast in the megafamous boy band One Direction. So when I met Cowell at his home in southwest London this month, I found him in a reflective mood.

The music mogul started his career in Britain as a talent scout and became known for putting out popular novelty records based on TV shows like “Teletubbies” and “Power Rangers” — music that his label peers used to sneer at. He had his first hit single with the artist Sinitta in the 1980s and his first boy-band success with Westlife before becoming a judge on all the shows (“Idol,” “X Factor,” “Britain’s Got Talent,” “America’s Got Talent” and more).

Cowell is now thinking about his legacy. His latest project is a Netflix documentary series called “Simon Cowell: The Next Act.” In it, Cowell goes back to his roots, auditioning and training a group of teenagers to be in his new boy band. The series shows Cowell’s more nurturing side as a family man and a builder of talent, but also his desire for relevance: It has been several years since Cowell launched artists like Camila Cabello and Susan Boyle from his competition shows, and he is trying to prove to himself, and to people who know him only as the guy mouthing off behind a judging desk, that he can still make a hit (even though he doesn’t have a phone and hates the main driver of new music, TikTok).

I don’t really know if Cowell can pick yet another winner or if the world even wants a boy band that isn’t K-pop, but to me that’s almost beside the point. What interested me most in talking to Cowell was his evolution away from his harsh public persona and what that says about him and the broader culture that he helped shape.

Nov. 28

News Corp. leader Rupert Murdoch, founder and controller of such other outlets as Fox News, is shown at the 2009 World Economic Forum.

Meidas Touch Network, Advocacy: Meidas Responds to Murdoch’s Threats Against Us, Ben Meiselas, right, Nov. 28, 2025. How does it feel, Rupert? Is this what you wanted?

When you and Lachlan ordered Fox executives to attack the MeidasTouch Network and “bring us to our knees,” is this what you expected? I warned you repeatedly to cease and desist or we would respond in a way that would thoroughly embarrass you and Fox. And here we are. We made good on our promise.Subscribed

We just got the digital charts for views and engagement on Thanksgiving Day, Rupert. Fox came in fourth place on the YouTube charts across all genres. That’s respectable, I guess. MrBeast came in at number 2. But guess who was number 1, Rupert? Yup — the MeidasTouch Network. You used your propaganda machine to try to blame Biden for the DC shooting. You thought your rage machine would get you views. We won with the truth and explained that the shooter was granted asylum by Trump in April 2025.

We also covered Trump’s disastrous press conference where he called a female reporter “stupid.” He then went on a rant at midnight and called the Governor of Minnesota “seriously retarded.”

Hey Rupert, your propaganda machine can try to defend the heinous invasive species that is Trump all you want, but the people are leaving you and him, and they are now becoming Meidas viewers.

It’s true that revenge is a dish best served cold. I guess you can say it’s all a dish best served with turkey, as the MeidasTouch Network made a powerful statement on Thanksgiving Day that not only would we not be destroyed by Rupert Murdoch’s billion-dollar machine, but that we would beat Murdoch in front of the entire world on one of the biggest days of the year.

Let’s run up the score, Meidas

Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: All The President's Pigs, Lisa Senecal, Nov. 24, 2025. When Donald Trump called a female reporter 'piggy,' MAGA women rushed in to rationalize the abuse.

No authoritarian leader achieves and maintains power without enablers and enforcers — those who willingly whitewash, normalize, tolerate, and justify the piggish words and deeds of a strongman who uses fear, threats, dehumanization, and denigration to dominate, punish, and silence.

Donald Trump is no different. There are countless examples of Trump’s immediate and aggressive attacks on anyone who dares to cross him. But he reserves his greatest degree of ire and contempt for women who do not show him the deference he believes himself entitled to or, worse still, challenge his authority.

Deference. Submission. Flattery. Unfettered access. Donald Trump’s sense of entitlement when it comes to women and girls is well-documented and might become more so as documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein continue to trickle into public view. Though some who admire and seek to emulate Trump see his treatment of women as evidence of his masculine strength, it seems painfully obvious that it is likely the opposite: a pathological fear of being exposed as weak or lacking in his twisted definition of what makes a man a man. This fear and his resulting desire to diminish and degrade the value and role of women in public and private spaces made him the perfect vessel for the far-right white Christian nationalist movement that is a dominant force in his second term.Subscribed

The current Trump Administration is dominated by white men. Its policies and goals, spelled out clearly in Project 2025, were primarily crafted by and for the benefit of white Christian nationalist men. For those rolling their eyes that this is yet another commentary attacking men, make note of the previous sentence. Trump 2.0 is designed by and to benefit white Christian nationalist men. There’s really no reason to take offense at that description. White Christian nationalist men make no secret about their belief that women should be subservient and deferential to men, and that there are clear gender-prescribed biblical roles by which we should all be forced to live. The offensive part isn’t calling it out; it’s that this subset of misogynists believes all of humanity should have to submit to their worldview.

But it’s not only men who are the enablers. White women who benefit — or are temporarily benefiting and just don’t realize it’s temporary — are some of the most effective enforcers and whitewashers of Trump’s misogyny. Case in point, Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Trump’s longest and loudest supporters, has resigned from Congress after being attacked as a traitor by Trump for insisting on the release of the Epstein files. That Trump considers a person a traitor for urging the release of documents connected to a convicted pedophile is an admission that boggles the mind, but we are where we are. I find it nearly impossible to feel sympathy for the long list of people who were confident they were so unique and special that Trump would not turn on them once they were no longer useful.

It might appear to be a flaw in my argument that there are women who support Trump and his back-to-the-bad-old-days movement who are in positions of power. It’s not. These women, and more specifically, white women, are useful tools, so they are praised and put forward as evidence that there’s really nothing to see here. If we’re offended by Trump’s policies, words, or deeds, we’re mistaken. For example, if Trump lashes out at a female reporter and tells her, “Quiet, piggy,” for asking him a question about the release of the Epstein files, it’s not evidence of his hostility toward women. How silly of us to see it that way. She was obviously asking for it.

An unidentified White House official explained Trump’s behavior this way, stating, “This reporter behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane. If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.”

For the record, this was Lacey’s question that drew Trump’s ire, “Sir, if there’s nothing incriminating in the files …”

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) attributed Trump’s abusive, degrading comment to him being “a very picturesque and difficult and different type of politician.” I’ll give her “difficult” and “different.” As for “picturesque,” Oxford defines the word as an adjective meaning “visually attractive, especially in a quaint or pretty style,” and I just can’t get on board with that as a description of Trump. In Salazar’s defense, I believe she was trying to say that Trump uses evocative language. If so, she was explaining that Trump was verbally painting a picture for us of a woman as a pig. How that is a defense, I will never understand.

Karoline Leavitt, right, Trump’s chief White House whitewasher, went further and explained that women should be grateful that Trump calls them pigs to their faces, rather than avoiding speaking to them at all.

“So, I think the president being frank and open and honest to your faces, rather than hiding behind your backs, is frankly a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration, when you had a president that lied to your face and then didn’t speak to you for weeks, and hid upstairs and didn’t take your questions,” Leavitt said. “So I think everyone in this room should appreciate the frankness and the openness that you get from President Trump on a near daily basis.”

This year, as people gather at their Thanksgiving tables and give voice to what they’re thankful for, America’s women can express their gratitude that we have a president who won’t just call us pigs in private; he’ll say it right to our faces.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: What’s our next story? Judd Legum, right, Nov. 24, 2025. Today, to help guide our future work, we would like to hear from you. We are headed into 2026, a critical election year. What stories should Popular Information focus on in the weeks and months ahead?

You can leave your thoughts in the discussion thread linked below, starting now. I’ll be stopping by later to answer any questions.

 New York Times, Opinion: QAnon Isn’t So Thrilled About the Epstein Revelations, Will Sommer (author of Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America), Nov. 24, 2025. The past few weeks of Epstein revelations — with more expected should the government’s trove of files open to the public — should be a dream for QAnon believers, and for a few of them, it is.

Vincent Fusca, a man whose scruffy good looks and ever-present fedora have led some QAnon supporters to believe he is John F. Kennedy Jr., not-in-fact dead and in disguise, texted me that “of course” the latest batch of Epstein emails proved QAnon right.

“You are finally getting it!” Mr. Fusca wrote happily.

What was harder to explain, for many believers, was why Mr. Trump spent so long resisting the release of the key evidence that would confirm what they suspected was happening all along. Celebrants like Mr. Fusca are outliers; much of QAnon’s response to Washington’s Epstein excitement has been strangely muted, even dismayed. But with revelations about Mr. Trump’s relationship to Mr. Epstein mounting, the default QAnon position has become that Mr. Epstein just isn’t that interesting anymore.

That’s partly because QAnon believers no longer stand out so brightly in the conspiracy-minded Republican mainstream. And because Congress’s mostly sober, evidence-based Epstein investigation bears little relation to the grand fantasies of elite exposure that QAnon dreamed up at its height. But for QAnon, the real problem with the Epstein revelations is that Mr. Trump sits uncomfortably close to the center of them.

A day after the House passed a bill to order the Justice Department to release its Epstein files, Jon Herold, a QAnon promoter who broadcasts under the name Patel Patriot, seemed disappointed that more of Mr. Epstein’s crimes might be revealed. “All the awful things that people are saying, I hope it’s not true,” Mr. Herold said. “I don’t want to see any of it.”

Given that the conspiracy theory doubles as a cult of personality built around Mr. Trump, this sort of reaction isn’t particularly surprising. But the new emails do suggest the conspiracy theorists were right about Mr. Epstein’s significance — albeit not in the ways they thought.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.

Drawing from cryptic message board posts written by the anonymous clue-giver known as Q from 2017 to 2022, QAnon adherents posit a world in which institutions like the Democratic Party, Hollywood and Wall Street are secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping elites. While interpretations of QAnon vary, believers generally think that these elites torture children in rituals and drink their “adrenochrome” — a sort of fountain-of-youth liquid generated by terrified children. Only Mr. Trump can stop this evil, they say, and as president, he is expected to initiate the “Storm,” an apocalyptic day when top Democrats will be arrested, diseases will be cured and the world will be at peace.

Mr. Epstein should matter to QAnon because he was a rare example of the supposed sex-trafficking cabal’s machinations coming out in the open. While Mr. Epstein was mentioned relatively rarely in QAnon before his 2019 indictment, his mysterious death propelled QAnon recruitment and provided endless alleys for its amateur internet sleuths to explore.

But Mr. Trump’s long friendship with Mr. Epstein has always been awkward for QAnon believers to explain. Why was Mr. Trump, supposedly the ultimate avenger of abused children, videotaped palling around with Mr. Epstein? Why was he calling a known sex trafficker who paid dozens of girls, some as young as 14, to have sex with him, a “terrific guy?” Why did he appoint Alex Acosta, the prosecutor in Florida who helped give Mr. Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2007, to his cabinet?

The traditional QAnon explanation for the pair’s closeness has been that Mr. Trump was getting close to Mr. Epstein just to bring more publicity to his crimes. It’s not the most compelling argument, even by QAnon standards, and it’s looked even shakier as more Epstein emails about Mr. Trump have come out.

But maybe the Epstein story provided them with something after all. Interviewing QAnon believers and attending their rallies over six years, I overwhelmingly heard that what drew them together was dispossession. Supporters could pinpoint their moments of radicalization with clarity, often pointing out a moment of personal crisis — a financially ruinous illness, or a child’s mental disability that went ignored at school.

QAnon believers’ responses to the knowledge that they were on their own in America were typically bizarre, if not dangerous. After being denied disability payments for a difficult skin condition, one man I interviewed moved into a desert compound led by a QAnon splinter leader named Baby Q. Deluded QAnon believers have murdered family members, blocked a highway, and fought (and, in some cases, died) in the Jan. 6 riot.

Even so, they sensed that something was wrong with how average people were treated in the United States and they correctly identified that many elites really didn’t care about their struggles. The Epstein emails suggest as much, showing how figures like Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, were still close with Mr. Epstein even after his predatory behavior was exposed.

QAnon’s retreat from the Epstein story is striking because there remain real questions about Mr. Epstein that could make for a rich vein of new theorizing. How exactly did Mr. Epstein get so rich? Why were so many wealthy, powerful men friends with him? Why did he move so easily through the global financial system?

But for most QAnon believers the priority is protecting Mr. Trump at all costs. Even if it means no longer asking questions. Even if it means letting the moment they finally got something right pass them by. Even if it means continuing to thirst for a storm that will never come.

 

New York Times, Former News Anchor Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison Over Pandemic Fraud, Alexandra E. Petri, Nov. 24, 2025 (print ed.). The former anchor, Stephanie Hockridge, who once worked for a Phoenix station, participated in an elaborate scheme that illegally obtained more than $63 million, prosecutors said.

A former news anchor in Arizona who co-owned a company that defrauded a pandemic-era loan program of more than $63 million was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the Justice Department said on Friday.

From about April 2020 to May 2021, the former anchor, Stephanie Hockridge, 42, of Rio Grande, P.R., participated in an elaborate scheme that swindled tens of millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans, the government’s $800 billion relief effort for small businesses, the Justice Department said.

Ms. Hockridge was charged in November 2024, and she was convicted in June on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Ms. Hockridge was acquitted of four counts of fraud in the case, according to court records and her lawyer.

Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sentenced Ms. Hockridge to 120 months in federal prison followed by two years of supervised release. She had faced up to 20 years in prison.

She was also ordered to pay more than $63 million in restitution, the Justice Department said.

Ms. Hockridge worked as a news anchor for ABC15, an ABC-affiliated television station in Phoenix, from 2011 to 2018, according to the station.

Richard E. Finneran, a lawyer for Ms. Hockridge, said in a statement he was confident her conviction would be overturned on appeal.

“Ms. Hockridge was sentenced to 10 years in prison for loans that the prosecutors never proved were fraudulent in the first place,” said Mr. Finneran, of the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.

In April 2020, Ms. Hockridge, with her husband and others, founded a company called Blueacorn to help small businesses obtain Paycheck Protection Program loans, according to the criminal indictment.

The company became a breakout star of the federal aid program and stepped in to help the smallest and neediest businesses, but Blueacorn also helped itself, federal prosecutors said.

As part of the scheme, Ms. Hockridge and others offered a personalized service called “VIPPP” to help potential borrowers complete loan applications. According to the indictment, Ms. Hockridge and Nathan Reis, her husband and co-owner, recruited co-conspirators to work as referral agents and to coach borrowers on how to submit false loan applications.

Federal prosecutors said Ms. Hockridge and her co-conspirators fabricated payroll records, tax documentation and bank statements to obtain larger loans for certain applicants, and they charged borrowers kickbacks based on a percentage of the funds received.

In one instance in June 2020, Ms. Hockridge, with the help of Mr. Reis, submitted a “materially false” application for a software company called Body Politix to obtain a P.P.P. loan of $19,382, according to the indictment. Ms. Hockridge submitted another false application in February 2021 to obtain a loan of $20,832, which was eventually electronically wired into her account, the indictment said. These details were part of a fraud count that she was ultimately acquitted of.

Ms. Hockridge and her co-conspirators processed more than $63 million in fraudulent program loans, the Justice Department said.

In 2022, a congressional panel issued a report that detailed the government’s rush to get cash out the door to help devastated businesses. The report, which was highly critical of Blueacorn, found that weak government oversight created conditions ripe for fraud.

The report portrayed Blueacorn as a tiny company operating with insufficient staffing, lax internal controls and little interest in separating legitimate loan applications from fraudulent ones. 

Nov. 22

 

White House Chronicle, ‘Whacking the Cut’: A Different View of the BBC Crisis, Llewellyn King, above, Nov. 22, 2025. The BBC has fallen on its sword.

The director general has resigned and so has the head of news over the splicing of tape of President Donald Trump's rambling speech on Jan. 6, 2021, which preceded the sacking of the Capitol.

The editor and the technician who did the deed for the esteemed BBC program "Panorama" haven't been publicly identified.

Agreed, they shouldn't have done what they did. But was there malice?

Journalism is a business of serial judgment. It is replete with mistakes — things that we who practice the craft wish we hadn't done.

I have worked as an editor in film, with tape and on newspapers, and I have seen how the paranoia of politicians can cast a whole news organization as a biased enemy when that wasn't the intent.

Before a single sentence or an article appears in a newspaper or a video appears on television, dozens of judgments have been made — not by teams of academics or by ethicists or by juries, but by individuals responding to time pressure and what they judge to be newsworthy.

The unsaid pressure to keep it interesting, to have news worth something, is always there. The reader has to be kept reading or the viewer watching.

After something is published or broadcast, it can be beacon-clear what should have been done or corrected, but in the moment, those defects are opaque.

Let me take you behind the veil.

It is a hot night in 1972. There is a presidential election brewing and among those running for the Democratic nomination is Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the well-known Democratic senator from the state of Washington.

I am working in the composing room of The Washington Post as the editor in charge of liaising between the printers and the editors. The job is sometimes called a stone editor after the "stone," big metal tables that held the pages and where the newspaper was assembled in the days of hot type.

It was a busy news night, and it was when David Broder was the political reporter without rival. He was industrious and thorough, dedicated and prolific. As the night wore on, Broder would often add new stuff to his story, and it would grow in length.

In desperation when things got tough and deadlines were pressing, we would cut back the size of the photos, which had run in the first edition. The editor on duty would just ask the printers to do this: It was known as "whacking the cut."

In short, the photo would be reduced in size by cutting it down physically. The engraving would be put in a guillotine and some of it would be cut off, whacked.

That night, we had a large photo of Jackson addressing a large crowd.

But as the night wore on and different editions and mini editions, known as replates, were assembled, I ordered the cut whacked and whacked again. The result was that by the time the main edition went to press, the good senator was talking to a much smaller audience — although it did suggest that many more were there but not seen.

Jackson thought this was a deliberate bias by The Post to suggest that he couldn't draw a large audience, and he called the legendary editor Ben Bradlee.

Bradlee asked the national editor, Ben Bagdikian, who was to become an authority on newspaper ethics, what happened. When they came to me, I explained how we trimmed the pictures.

While Bradlee was amused, Bagdikian added it to his concern about newspaper ethics.

Journalism is executed by individuals under pressure. It is a business of multiple judgments made sequentially, often without a lot of contemplation.

I once worked at the BBC in London, and the same pressures were present. I was scriptwriter and editor on the evening news. You made decisions all the time: This frame in, those 20 frames out. An outsider might imagine prejudice and foul intent in the way one clip was used and others were not.

In the news trade, judgments trip you up, but judgment is essential. Later the judge is judged, as at the BBC.

Nov. 22 

The Guardian, Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal, Ramon Antonio Vargas, Nov. 22, 2025. The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal.

The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.

Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.

Chomsky, 96 (shown in a 2017 photo at right), had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.The banality of evil: how Epstein’s powerful friends normalised himRead more

The emails disclosed on 12 November by the Republican members of the US House oversight committee generally detailed the correspondence Epstein had with political, academic and business luminaries, including the Bill Clinton White House’s treasury secretary Larry Summers and Steve Bannon, the longtime ally of Donald Trump. Further, they reveal Epstein and Chomsky were close enough to discuss musical interests and even potential vacations.

Perhaps the most telling of the Chomsky-related document in question was a letter of support for Epstein attributed to Chomsky with the salutation “to whom it may concern”. It is not dated, but it contains a typed signature with Chomsky’s name and citing his position as a University of Arizona laureate professor, a role he began in 2017, as first reported by the Massachusetts news outlet WBUR.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and solicitation if prostitution with a minor. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence and was released in July 2009.

“I met Jeffrey Epstein half a dozen years ago,” read the letter of support from Chomsky that was reviewed by the Guardian after its Republican House oversight committee release. “We have been in regular contact since, with many long and often in-depth discussions about a very wide range of topics, including our own specialties and professional work, but a host of others where we have shared interests. It has been a most valuable experience for me.”

It is unclear whether Chomsky sent the letter to anyone. Nonetheless, it exalts Epstein for teaching Chomsky “about the intricacies of the global financial system” in a way “the business press and professional journals” had not been able to do. It boasted about how well connected Epstein was.

“Once, when we were discussing the Oslo agreements, Jeffrey picked up the phone and called the Norwegian diplomat who supervised them, leading to a lively interchange,” the letter read. The letter recounted how Epstein had arranged for Chomsky – a political activist, too – to meet with someone he had “studied carefully and written about”: the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

Epstein had – “with limited success” – aided efforts from Chomsky’s second wife, Valeria, to introduce him “to the world of jazz and its wonders”, the letter continued.

It concluded, “The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”

Another notable communication involving Chomsky and Epstein is a 2015 email in which the latter offers the former use of his residences in New York and New Mexico.

The emails don’t indicate whether Chomsky took advantage of the offer, whose particulars surfaced as certain officials are striving to investigate allegations of crimes by Epstein at a ranch compound he owned outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Interest in the Epstein case has surged in recent months after Trump – a former friend of his – pledged to release a full list of the late financier’s clients while successfully running for a second presidency in 2024. However, after he took office in January, Trump’s justice department declared no such list existed and said that it would not be releasing any additional files related to Epstein’s prosecution, igniting a bipartisan furor that the president sought to dismiss as a Democratic “hoax”.

Yet the pressure was enough that Trump on Wednesday signed a legislative bill directing his justice department to release more of what has come to be collectively known as the Epstein files.

Noam Chomsky Background (From Wikipedia): Avram Noam Chomsky[a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism.

Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.

In 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke and was flown to a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, to recuperate. He can no longer walk or communicate, making his return to public life improbable, but he continues to follow current events such as the Gaza war. He was discharged in June 2024 to continue his recovery at home.

Emails related to the activities of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 revealed that Chomsky befriended him after his 2008 conviction; remained in contact with him at least through 2017; and called him a “highly valued friend.”

 

New York Times, Vanity Fair Is Reviewing Its Ties to Olivia Nuzzi, Ginia Bellafante, Nov. 22, 2025 (print ed.). The magazine, which recently hired the journalist, said it had been “taken by surprise” by new claims in an essay by her former fiancé, Ryan Lizza.

The editor Mark Guiducci has made two big moves since taking the helm of Vanity Fair in June. He decided to put only male actors on the cover of the magazine’s annual Hollywood issue, and he hired the scandal-plagued journalist Olivia Nuzzi as its West Coast editor.

Now, after the publication of an essay that raised new questions about Ms. Nuzzi’s adherence to journalistic ethics, the magazine is looking into the allegations against her, according to a Vanity Fair spokeswoman.

Ms. Nuzzi, 32, lost a previous high-profile job — as the Washington correspondent at New York magazine — when her bosses learned in September 2024 that she had engaged in a close personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she had profiled for the publication the year before.

The concern at Vanity Fair came about in the wake of a Substack essay written by Ms. Nuzzi’s former fiancé, the political journalist Ryan Lizza.

His lengthy piece, “Part I: How I Found Out,” set social media alight when it appeared on Monday. In it, Mr. Lizza claimed that Ms. Nuzzi had engaged in an affair with another powerful man she had written about for New York magazine: Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina and a onetime Republican presidential candidate.

Ms. Nuzzi’s article on Mr. Sanford was published in September 2019, and she appeared to have started a relationship with him months after that, Mr. Lizza wrote.

Asked if Ms. Nuzzi would continue in her new role at Vanity Fair in the wake of Mr. Lizza’s claims, a spokeswoman for the magazine said, “We were taken by surprise, and we are looking at all the facts.”

Ms. Nuzzi declined to comment on the matter.

Hours before Mr. Lizza posted his Substack essay, Vanity Fair’s website featured an excerpt from Ms. Nuzzi’s forthcoming book, “American Canto,” in which she describes her ardent feelings for a Kennedy-like character she calls the Politician.

In response to the allegations in Mr. Lizza’s post, Ms. Nuzzi’s lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld, said in a statement, “In ‘American Canto,’ Ms. Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.”

He added that his client would “not dignify efforts to impugn her character with any future response.”

Nov. 21

The Parnas Perspective, Trump’s Base Fractures Amid Soaring Costs and Chaos Within the Department of Homeland Security, Aaron Parnas, right, Nov. 21, 2025. Trump voters are regretting their support of the President over increasing prices, DHS reverses a policy that would have allowed swastikas and nooses, and FBI spies on activist's signal chats.Nov 21 READ IN APP

Trump voters who have backed him for more than a decade are now openly turning on him over his administration’s failure to lower the cost of living, and most recently, the stunning decision to allow swastikas and nooses in the Coast Guard, a move reversed only after public outrage.

I’m also keeping front and center something the mainstream media has already moved on from: the President of the United States explicitly calling for the execution of lawmakers. We cannot afford to forget that. We cannot normalize it. My reporting has led to those that support the White House calling for my arrest.

The Washington Post editorial board opposed releasing the Epstein files—calling them lacking in public interest despite not having reviewed them—and praised Rep. Clay Higgins for being the sole vote against disclosure.

Vice President JD Vance said he texted Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos urging him to hire Breitbart’s Matt Boyle to run the paper’s political coverage, highlighting Vance’s push to shift the Post further right as critics accuse Bezos of courting Trump while the paper faces internal turmoil and an exodus of veteran journalists.

Nov. 19

 

New York Times, How Trump and Nvidia’s C.E.O. Became Partners on the International Stage, Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson, Nov. 19, 2025.Over the last 10 months, President Trump has become close with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, as the company’s chips have become a tool in trade and peace talks.

At a summit in South Korea last month, President Trump halted a speech he was giving about how he was doing more than any other president ever to build data centers and employ American workers, and asked about a new friend.

“Jensen, who’s an incredible guy, he might be here,” Mr. Trump said of Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia. “I don’teven know. Is Jensen here? I think he’s around. Somebody said he’s here. How is he? Pretty good, right?”

Speaking at a conference in Washington within hours of Mr. Trump, Mr. Huang also had fond words for the president, praising the White House for dismantling regulations and encouraging investment in artificial intelligence. Mr. Trump had “completely changed the game” for A.I., Mr. Huang said. Then he jumped on a flight to try to join Mr. Trump in South Korea.

Those mutual words of admiration spoke to what has arguably become the most important relationship between the Trump administration and the business world, an unlikely pairing of a Silicon Valley engineer turned mogul and a New York real estate mogul turned president.

Nvidia, which makes powerful computer chips that are essential to A.I. projects, has been one of the first American tech companies to follow through on promises to President Trump to bring some of their manufacturing to the United States. And Mr. Trump, who closely watches how the stock market is performing, is keenly aware that Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

The company’s chips have also given the president a powerful bargaining lever with a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Britain and China. They have even a played a role, which has never been reported before, in the administration’s peace mediations between several nations.

Much as the United States offered nuclear technology in the 1950s to countries that agreed to use it peacefully, the Trump administration has discussed selling A.I. technology to countries that end conflicts, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, said two people familiar with the administration’s actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitivities around an emerging strategy.

New York Times, Nvidia and Walmart Could Ease Wall St.’s Jitters. Or Make Them Worse, Joe Rennison, Nov. 19, 2025. After four consecutive down days, the stock market is looking increasingly queasy. Earnings reports from Nvidia, Walmart and Target could hint at what’s ahead.

Two reasons have been repeatedly offered to explain why the economy and the stock market have proved so resilient since the coronavirus pandemic: the unexpected strength of consumer spending and the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence.

Both of those drivers are about to be tested.

After the market closes on Wednesday, Nvidia, the chipmaker that has become the poster company for the A.I. boom, will report its latest quarterly financial results. Its statement will be bookended by earnings from two bellwethers of consumer spending. Target lowered its full-year forecast on Wednesday and warned of slumping holiday sales as consumers pull back on spending; its shares fell 2 percent in premarket trading. Walmart will report earnings on Thursday.

Also on Thursday, the Labor Department will release delayed jobs data for September, with the potential for the numbers to add to concerns about a slowdown in hiring.

It could be a bumpy ride. The S&P 500 is forecast to move 1.4 percent in either direction, according to Citi analysts and based on bets in the options market. Nvidia is expected to move more than 6 percent.

Adding to the uncertainty, the approaching end of the year is a time when investors who have already notched decent returns are likely to pull back from the market, said Stuart Kaiser, an analyst at Citi.

“The calendar really matters,” he said. “It has been a hard year. If you are having a decent year at this point, then the last thing you want to do is risk that.”

New York Times, Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts, Ruth Graham, Nov. 19, 2025. “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” a priest said about the surge of young men drawn to the demanding practice of Christianity. “The Orthodox Church is the only church that really coaches men hard, and says, ‘This is what you need to do,’” said an attendee of All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, N.C

Something is changing in an otherwise quiet corner of Christianity in the United States, one that prides itself on how little it has changed over time. Priests are swapping stories about record attendance numbers. Older members are adjusting — or not — to the influx of new attendees. Parishes are strategizing about how to accommodate more prospective converts than existing clergy can reasonably handle on their own.

Across the country, the ancient tradition of Orthodox Christianity is attracting energetic new adherents, especially among conservative young men. They are drawn to what they describe as a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity. Echoing some of the rhetoric of the so-called manosphere, new waves of young converts say Orthodoxy offers them hard truths and affirms their masculinity.

“In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” the Very Rev. Andrew Damick, an Antiochian Orthodox priest and author in Eastern Pennsylvania, said of the large groups of young people showing up at many parishes. “This is new ground for everyone.”

In the United States, Orthodox Christianity is by far the smallest and least-known of the three major branches of Christianity, representing about 1 percent of the population, compared with about 40 percent who are Protestant and 20 percent who are Catholic. Orthodox pews here have historically been occupied by immigrants from Ukraine, Greece and other countries with large Orthodox populations. Their American-born children often drift to other churches.

But a homegrown Orthodox Christianity is strikingly emergent. Many of the young Americans new to the pews have been introduced to Orthodoxy by hard-edge influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. Critics call the enthusiastic young converts “Orthobros.”

One night this summer, the young adults of All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, N.C., gathered at a bookshop and bar on the city’s north side. At the event’s peak, there were a mere handful of women present, and more than 40 men. The men noticed, and believed they knew why.

Nov. 17

New York Times, New International Student Enrollments Plummeted This Fall, Survey Finds, Alan Blinder, Nov. 17, 2025. The overall number of international students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, including those who enrolled in prior years or who are working after graduation, fell only slightly.

The number of international college students enrolling in their American schools for the first time decreased by 17 percent this fall, according to data published on Monday.

The Trump administration has explicitly sought to curb the enrollment of college students from abroad, and its broader quest to remake the American higher education system has unnerved prospective pupils and led universities to limit graduate school admissions.

In a report on Monday, the Institute of International Education said that the overall number of international students on American campuses — including students who started in prior years — was nearly steady, declining about 1 percent from the last academic year. Although information about international students can be murky and caveat-laden, the slight change roughly aligns with separate Department of Homeland Security data about students on visas.

But the downturn in new enrollments suggests that the United States could see steeper decreases in the coming years, as current students finish their studies or leave their campuses for other reasons.

The data released on Monday, part of a project backed by federal money, was somewhat narrow, stitching together statistics from less than a quarter of the nation’s degree-granting colleges and universities. But it included schools that often account for large international student counts, and is seen by officials in higher education as an important snapshot of enrollment.

The institute said that 57 percent of the approximately 825 institutions that provided data reported decreases in new enrollments from abroad. Amid months of Trump administration wrangling over immigration policy, nearly all of those schools said that concerns about obtaining student visas contributed to falling enrollments, and more than two-thirds pointed to travel restrictions.

The survey found a rise in new undergraduate students, reflecting a rebound from pandemic-era declines, but a 12 percent decrease among new graduate students. (The majority of international students in the U.S. are graduate students.)

Nov. 16

New York Times, Former U.Va. President Details Justice Department Pressure That Led to Ouster, Michael S. Schmidt, Nov. 16, 2025 (print ed.). In an extraordinary 12-page letter, James E. Ryan described the pressure campaign leading to his resignation as akin to a “hostage situation.”

The former president of the University of Virginia, in his most expansive statement since he resigned in June, described in a letter to the faculty on Friday the immense pressure the Justice Department had directed at him and the school in his final days in the position and said that his ouster had been publicly mischaracterized.

In an extraordinary 12-page letter, the former president, James E. Ryan, above, said the school’s board had been unwilling to take on theTrump administration and had essentially traded his resignation for a deal to spare the school investigations and fines.

The Justice Department has said it never told the school to oust Mr. Ryan. The school’s board, however, has said that the department wanted him to step aside. Mr. Ryan said in the letter that on June 26, a member of the board and two lawyers for the university told him that, following a call with a top Justice Department official, he had four hours to resign, or severe punitive measures would be leveled against the school by the Trump administration.

“The call for my resignation, right until the end, seemed so outlandish as not to be entirely believable,” Mr. Ryan said. “It also felt like a hostage situation, where the kidnapper threatens harm if you do not keep information about the demands confidential. I was repeatedly told to keep this threat confidential and scolded for sharing the information with some close colleagues to help me think through the best path.”

Mr. Ryan added: “I worried that if I went public, U.Va. would lose funding and get attacked by the Trump administration, and I would still end up being fired or forced to resign regardless.”

The letter from Mr. Ryan is likely to inflame tensions in Virginia around the school’s deal with the Trump administration, which was announced last month and has become a major political issue in the state. Democrats have characterized it as an act of capitulation, the school’s board has claimed that it protects academic freedom and conservatives have praised the ouster of Mr. Ryan.

On Wednesday, Virginia’s governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, asked the board to put off choosing a successor until after she takes office. The current governor, Glenn Youngkin, has criticized Ms. Spanberger for trying to interfere in the school’s matters before she takes over and said that she does not have a full understanding of the Justice Department’s deal with the school.

A top official in Governor Youngkin’s office said that throughout the entire negotiations it had been of “the utmost importance” to the governor that the school be in compliance with the Justice Department’s view of federal civil rights law, and protect its federal funding. The official added that members of the school’s board had ultimately lost faith that Mr. Ryan could accomplish that.

Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the University of Virginia did not respond to messages seeking comment about Mr. Ryan’s letter.

In the letter, Mr. Ryan described in detail how the Trump Justice Department had ramped up its pressure on the University of Virginia earlier this year, at the same time that it was waging a wide-ranging campaign against Harvard University that threatened its federal funding, ability to enroll foreign students and accreditation. The Justice Department said it was investigating Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies and whether it was complying with federal law and judicial rulings.

While the administration was moving on that front against Harvard, two top Justice Department lawyers who were also University of Virginia alumni took the lead in dealing with the school. One of them was Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the civil rights division.

Mr. Ryan says it all came to a head on a Thursday in late June. The New York Times had just reported that the Justice Department was pressuring Mr. Ryan to step down as a condition for resolving a range of issues with the school, including investigations. Mr. Ryan said he had been told he had to resign within four hours or “D.O.J. would basically rain hell on U.Va.”

Nov. 15

Newsbreak, Arrested Student Raises Jaw-Dropping Funds for Legal Defense Following Anti-Semitic Incident With Dave Portnoy, Manhaz Muntaha, Nov. 15, 2025. Hatred turns into money. This became a ground reality, something nobody saw coming.Student Who Targeted Dave Portnoy Raises $37K Donation for Legal Defense. 

A Mississippi college student, Patrick McClintock, recently yelled antisemitic slurs at Dave Portnoy outside a Mississippi pizza joint. For the obvious reason, he got arrested.

But nobody had imagined that his legal defense fund would explode past $37,000. After hearing the jaw-dropping figure, fans on social media lost their minds.Student Who Targeted Dave Portnoy Raises $37K Donation for Legal Defense

The 20-year-old student confronted Barstool Sports founder Portnoy during a pizza review outside Boardtown Pizza and Pints in Starkville on November 7.

Exclusive footage captured McClintock yelling “F— the Jews” and throwing coins at Portnoy. The clip has since turned viral online. Cops later arrested McClintock on Monday and charged him with disturbing the peace but he got released on a $2,500 bond.

Most surprisingly, a GiveSendGo fundraiser titled “DEFEND PATRICK MCCLINTOCK” has raised over $37,000 according to the latest reports. The campaign description calls him an “American patriot” who got arrested for “mean words.”

Supporters argue that the First Amendment protects McClintock’s remarks and say Portnoy used his influence to shut down criticism. But his own university turned on him.

They confirmed McClintock withdrew from the institution on Monday and is no longer a student there. Mississippi State spokesperson Sid Salter said what happened “didn’t reflect the culture and values of university.” Additionally, campus officials described the behavior as “deeply offensive and not in keeping with campus values.

Nov. 14

 

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican representing the Panhandle region of Florida, has been a fervant supporter of Donald Trump, who reportedly refused Gaetz's request for an open-ended pardon to cover unspecified matters and other associates, according to news reports.

 

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), center, in a 2017 Facebook photo with friends and fellow ardent Trump supporters Roger Stone and Joel Greenberg, the latter a former Florida tax collector now facing trial on multiple federal felony charges alleging sex trafficking.

New York Times, Why Matt Gaetz Is Still Around, Michael S. Schmidt, Nov. 14, 2025. The former congressman has remained a fixture in Washington.

This week, I reported new details about the investigations into former Representative Matt Gaetz, the Trump ally who was scrutinized — but never charged — over allegations of child sex trafficking.

The minor at the center of the investigations, I learned, was a 17-year-old girl who had just completed her junior year of high school, lived in and out of a homeless shelter, and was trying to earn money to pay for braces.

While federal prosecutors never charged Gaetz, investigators with the House Ethics Committee found a range of evidence that he had sex with the girl when he was a freshman in Congress.

The article was a rare look at the story of the girl and how her life was upended. But it also drove home a different point: how, despite the public release of that evidence last year, Gaetz has remained a fixture in Washington.

Tonight, I’ll explain how and why.A damaged reputation, but only to a point

Gaetz, now 43, was elected to Congress the night Trump won the presidency in 2016, and he quickly fashioned himself as a fierce and outspoken defender of Trump.

While he served in Congress, he was investigated by the Justice Department over the alleged sex trafficking of a minor, but he was never charged, partially because prosecutors worried that the girl who said he had paid her for sex would have credibility problems on the witness stand.

A bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation, however, found substantial evidence that in 2017, Gaetz had sex with the girl and paid her $400 for it. The committee made that information public last December.

Gaetz has asserted that he broke no laws, and he told The Times in a text message on Thursday, “I never had sex with this person.”

Last fall, the allegations about Gaetz’s ties to the girl helped sink Trump’s effort to make him attorney general. But the findings of the House Ethics Committee haven’t gotten Gaetz kicked out of Trump’s Washington, nor the broader MAGA movement.

Today, Gaetz,right, hosts a show on the Trump-friendly One America News Network that routinely features prominent Republican politicians like Representatives James Comer of Kentucky and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Recent guests also included Trump administration officials like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general.

And despite the fact that Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration for attorney general, he is still in Trump’s good graces.A popular figure for a base in a bubble

To think about Gaetz another way, try this thought experiment: Why do many Republicans continue to embrace him and shrug off the allegations, even as some G.O.P. lawmakers and many of the party’s voters are pressuring the Trump administration for answers and public accountability on the convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein?

For one thing, Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state-level charges that included soliciting a minor, faced federal sex trafficking charges before his death by suicide in jail in 2019, and was accused of abusing many girls and young women over many years. The allegations against Gaetz were not as serious, and he was never charged.

Another reason is Gaetz’s partisan identity as a fierce right-wing culture warrior, and the currency of popularity within the MAGA movement. He has also been helped by the fact that he comes from a party that nominated Trump for president after he had been found liable of sexual abuse and defamation.

To get an even better understanding of why Gaetz has been allowed to stay around, I reached out to Michael Gold, a congressional reporter for The Times who has written extensively about House Republicans and Trump’s political movement.

Gold said that based on his reporting, Gaetz had benefited from a range of factors, including the base’s warm feelings toward him. Those watching his show and listening to his podcast tend to be the most ardent Trump followers, and Republicans politicians and Trump allies want to tap into that.

“All these guys want a platform and a platform where they can reach the motivated Trump supporters, and people watching and listening to Gaetz shows are fully embracing Trump,” Gold said. “It’s the most pure form of the base and you can get to it through him.”

Gold said that Gaetz had also been helped by Trump’s long campaign to tarnish the investigations against him. That has primed his supporters to view any investigation into a Trump ally as politically motivated.

At the end of the day, the fractured media landscape allows figures like Gaetz to exist in areas where they can often avoid confronting uncomfortable subjects.

Gaetz has turned his show into such a space. In fact, one of the guests on his most recent episode was Chris Dorworth — the lobbyist who owned the home where, the 17-year-old girl testified, she had sex with Gaetz during a party, and was paid for it. (Dorworth has claimed that he was not home at the time, an assertion undercut by phone records that became part of litigation in the case.)

Nov. 13 

 

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL, at center, former Florida State Rep. Chris Dorworth, left, then of the Ballard Partners lobbying firm, and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, at right, posed for the photograph above outside the White House in June of 2019.

New York Times, In Matt Gaetz Scandal, Circumstances Left Teen Vulnerable to Exploitation, Michael S. Schmidt, Nov. 13, 2025. A 17-year-old with a homeless parent wanted money for braces and ended up having sex for money with powerful men. She wants the public to have a fuller understanding of how she was victimized.

She was 17 and a high school junior in Florida. She was working at McDonald’s. And she was living in and out of a homeless shelter.

Hoping to save up to buy braces to fix her teeth, she falsely advertised herself in 2017 as 18 years old on a website that matches men looking for “companionship” with young women looking to make money.

What followed would set off a chain of events that would have a dramatic impact on her life and help upend the political career of one of the men she would encounter, Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican.

Mr. Gaetz was investigated by the Justice Department for child sex trafficking but never charged. Following the election last year, he was President Trump’s first choice to serve as attorney general. He subsequently resigned from Congress, and then withdrew from consideration as attorney general under a storm of scrutiny.

A bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation later determined there was substantial evidence that he had sex with the 17-year-old and the report included testimony from the girl about how she was paid by Mr. Gaetz for the sex.

For all the public furor over Mr. Gaetz — who always asserted that he broke no laws even as the House Ethics Committee found that he violated Florida’s statutory rape laws — little attention has been given to the story of the girl, how she came to be exploited and how she has coped with what happened to her and the ensuing political scandal.

Last month, in response to a request from the McClatchy newspaper chain, a federal judge in Florida unsealed court documents from a related civil case that shed some light on her background. The documents included a description of the girl that said that at the time she met Mr. Gaetz she was “a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler.”

In response to that disclosure, The New York Times reached out to the girl’s lawyer, Laura B. Wolf, who agreed to confirm some basic biographical information about her client, providing details for the first time of how the girl’s circumstances led her to her encounters with Mr. Gaetz. Ms. Wolf said her client believed the public should have a fuller understanding of how she had been victimized.

“The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public,” Ms. Wolf said. “Although my client’s circumstances were revealed outside of her control, I hope it helps for the public to see a fuller and more human picture of her than the press has reported on to date.”

Ms. Wolf added: “Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her.”

Experts in sex trafficking said that the matter involving the girl demonstrated how there is a spectrum of ways girls and women are exploited. In some cases, the girls or women are physically trapped and unable to escape men who are taking advantage of them. In other cases, the girls or women find themselves at the whims of more powerful men after turning to sex trafficking out of economic need.

The girl would emerge as the chief witness against Mr. Gaetz in the Justice Department sex trafficking investigation. The investigation ended with the department declining to bring charges. Among the reasons prosecutors did not move forward was their concern about whether she would be seen as a credible witness after being exposed to cross-examination by defense lawyers, according to people familiar with the investigation.

In response to questions about the girl, Mr. Gaetz said in a text message on Thursday: “I never had sex with this person.”

“This person threatened me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay her $2.3 million dollars,” Mr. Gaetz said. “She never sued me because her story is fiction.”

According to her lawyer, the girl’s path to meeting Mr. Gaetz began during her junior year in high school. In December 2016, she turned 17. Her parents were divorced. One of them was so poor that the parent was living in and out of a homeless shelter. When the girl and her siblings were staying with that parent, they lived with the parent in the shelter.

To make extra money, the girl worked at McDonald’s. But she began looking for other ways to make money and turned to a website that “advertised itself as a ‘sugar dating’ website that primarily connected older men and younger women seeking ‘mutually beneficial relationships,’” according to the report by the House Ethics Committee.

Through the website, in April of her junior year in high school, she met Joel Greenberg, left, a local Florida tax collector who was becoming a friend and ally of Mr. Gaetz, according to court documents.

Much of what followed has been documented in other inquiries and legal proceedings, including the Ethics Committee investigation.

Mr. Greenberg first invited the 17-year-old to a meeting on his boat, according to court documents. At that meeting, they did not have sex, but Mr. Greenberg paid her $400, the documents said. Around that time, Mr. Greenberg gave her ecstasy and told her to try it at home.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Greenberg contacted the girl again, and they ultimately met up at a hotel where they had sex, according to court documents. For that, she was paid another $400, the court documents said. In the months that followed, Mr. Greenberg, using his personal credit card and one for the local tax collecting office he was in charge of, would have sex with her seven times for money before she turned 18, the documents said. Often during those encounters he would give her ecstasy, and he would often pay the girl and other women additional money for taking the drug during sex.

On July 15, 2017, Mr. Greenberg asked the girl and others to attend a party at the home of Chris Dorworth, a former Republican member of the Florida state House of Representatives who at the time worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, which is run by a major Trump fund-raiser.

Court documents described the party as involving “alcohol; cocaine; middle-aged men; and young attractive females.”

Mr. Gaetz, then 35, attended the party along with a girlfriend.

At the party, the girl who was 17 later testified, both cocaine and ecstasy were offered to her. She took the ecstasy and drank, according to court papers. She testified that she danced naked in front of Mr. Dorworth and swam naked in his pool.

The ethics committee heard testimony that the girl twice had sex with Mr. Gaetz that evening, and a court document quotes her as having testified that she had sex with him once on a “pool table or … air hockey table.” She testified that Mr. Dorworth saw Mr. Gaetz have sex with her on the game table and “then laughed about it with other partygoers.” (Mr. Dorworth has claimed that he was not home at the time, an assertion undercut by phone records that became part of litigation in the case.)

The girl later told congressional investigators that she saw Mr. Gaetz use cocaine that night.

For having sex with him twice, the girl was paid $400, according to testimony she gave to the Ethics Committee.

That fall, the girl moved to live with a family member in Texas, according to Ms. Wolf. She did not complete her senior year in high school. She continued to work for minimum wage in the food services industry. Ultimately, between the money she made from her interactions with men and in the food services industry she was able to save up enough money to get braces.

Several years later, Mr. Greenberg came under investigation for trying to undermine a political opponent in an upcoming election by mailing fake letters to the school where the opponent worked as a teacher, claiming that the opponent had sexual relations with a student.

As part of that investigation, the Justice Department learned about Mr. Greenberg’s relationship with the 17-year-old girl, leading the authorities to broaden their inquiry into Mr. Gaetz and others.

During the investigation, the girl hired a lawyer and was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. The girl began mental health treatment around that time, according to her lawyer.

Mr. Greenberg pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor for having sex with the girl in exchange for money. He was sentenced to a decade in prison. But the department declined to charge Mr. Gaetz.

In late 2022, lawyers for the girl sent letters to Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Dorworth about whether they would reach a financial settlement with the girl. The girl never sued. But Mr. Dorworth sued the girl, setting off depositions and an exchange of evidence. Mr. Dorworth would drop the case against the girl, but some documents generated by the case were given to Ethics Committee investigators who later used them in their report.

The documents that revealed that the girl was “homeless” were unsealed in October.

Fritz Scheller, Mr. Greenberg’s lawyer, said that throughout the entire ordeal, including the investigations and the civil litigation, it became apparent that the girl was a “victim that embodied unwavering strength and courage.” 

Nov. 3 

New York Times, The Battle in Virginia Over an Activist Who Protested Stephen Miller, Devlin Barrett, Nov. 3, 2025. Criminal inquiries pit the Miller family’s safety concerns against the First Amendment rights of an activist in Northern Virginia critical of the administration.

Federal and state criminal investigations into a Virginia woman who distributed leaflets disclosing the home address of a White House official, Stephen Miller, have prompted a secret court fight over the balance between personal safety and free speech at a time of rising political violence, recently unsealed court documents show.

The records, which were reviewed by The New York Times, reveal that a local court approved the search of a cellphone belonging to the woman as part of an investigation that included multiple local law enforcement agencies as well as the F.B.I. and Secret Service.

The activist, Barbara Wien, has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.

The dispute captures the fierce tensions over political activism that have become a defining feature of the second Trump presidency, pitting the Miller family’s concerns for their security against the First Amendment claims of a critic of the administration.

In an atmosphere in which political violence against Republicans and Democrats has become more common, administration officials have increasingly voiced worries about their security, citing in particular the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and two attempts in 2024 to kill Donald J. Trump.

But liberal groups and activists say the White House is seeking to demonize its political opponents and use the levers of government to stamp out opposing views in the name of public safety.

At the heart of the clash is whether the involvement of federal authorities in investigating a local act of protest, and the tactics used by state and federal investigators, amount to overkill, or whether Ms. Wien posed a true threat to Mr. Miller and his family.

Nov. 2

The Parnas Perspective, Commentary: Important Sunday Night News Update on Trump 60 Minutes interview, Aaron Parnas, Nov. 2, 2025. I just finished watching Trump's 60 Minutes Interview. As a journalist, I am saddened.

I wasn’t planning to write another post tonight, but after watching the 60 Minutes interview with President Trump, I felt compelled to. I have long been a fan of 60 Minutes, or at least I was. CBS News once stood as the gold standard of journalism, the network of Walter Cronkite, a name synonymous with integrity and truth. That legacy now feels like a memory, replaced by something far more troubling.

Tonight, I write as someone deeply saddened by what CBS News has become. The state of mainstream media has reached a point where independent journalism is not just valuable, it is essential. If I ever had the chance to interview a president, Republican or Democrat, I would insist on accountability. No one should be allowed to lie without challenge. That’s why I took Trump’s claims and fact-checked them for you below.

Subscribe today if you believe in honest reporting, transparency, and the pursuit of truth. Because tonight made one thing painfully clear: the institutions once trusted to hold power to account are no longer doing their job.Subscribed

That is why what aired tonight was so disappointing. In an interview edited by CBS, Donald Trump was allowed to mislead viewers freely, while Norah O’Donnell offered little in the way of meaningful pushback. Her most pointed moments were cut short, replaced by abrupt edits that seemed to serve the network more than the public.

Even more concerning, CBS did not air the full interview. What viewers saw was a fragmented version, the kind of selective editing that Trump himself once sued CBS over when the network interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Here are some key exchanges that deserve attention:

O’DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?TRUMP: Are you ready? I don’t know who he is.O’DONNELL: His crypto exchange, Binance, helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. And then you pardoned him.TRUMP: Here’s the thing. I know nothing about it.

Fact Check: Take a minute and imagine if President Biden did not know who he pardoned. If Donald Trump did not know who he was pardoning, then presumably a staffer used an auto-pen, the same thing Republicans in Congress are investigating Biden for doing.

O’DONNELL: Are we going to war with Venezuela?TRUMP: I doubt it. They emptied their mental institutions and insane asylums into the United States of America.

Fact Check: There is no evidence that supports the claim that Venezuela “emptied their mental institutions and insane asylums into the United States of America.”

O’DONNELL: The stock market doesn’t affect everybody. Not everyone is invested.TRUMP: It does.O’DONNELL: But grocery prices are up.TRUMP: No. 401(k)s. People have 401(k)s.

Fact Check: While the stock market is generally performing well, prices have gone up during the Trump Administration. Grocery prices, including eggs, bread, ground beef, and chicken, remain high despite President Trump’s campaign promise to lower food costs. NBC’s ongoing data graphic tracks national checkout prices from NIQ, showing eggs have fallen from spring peaks, while orange juice is up 10% and ground beef up 7% from a year ago.

O’DONNELL: Can you set the record straight? You’re not planning to run for a third term?TRUMP: I don’t even think about it. I’ll tell you this — a lot of people want me to run.

Fact Check: O’Donnell did not push the President on whether or not he would serve a third term, but Trump has said that while he wants to serve, he looked into it and cannot. Trump’s allies are actively saying, however, that there is a plan for him to serve another term despite it being blatantly unconstitutional under the 22nd Amendment.

Each of these moments deserved serious follow-up. Instead, viewers were left with silence. No correction. No fact-check. No accountability.

What aired tonight wasn’t the journalism I grew up respecting. It was television — polished, produced, and hollow. And it left me convinced more than ever that independent media must rise to fill the void left by corporate journalism.

 

October

Oct. 31

 

 

MSNBC "Last Word" Host Lawrence O'Donnell

Egberto Off the Record, Lawrence O’Donnell slams the media, Egberto Willies, right, Oct. 31, 2025. Lawrence O’Donnell rebukes both the White House Press Corps and the mainstream media for enabling Donald Trump’s misinformation campaign by failing to challenge his false claims—especially about tariffs—and thereby failing the public’s right to truthful, accountable coverage.

O’Donnell slams the press corps for not understanding tariffs: “No foreign country has ever paid an American tariff and never will,” he says, yet the media let Trump claim the opposite.

He points out that the mainstream media repeatedly broadcasts Trump’s events live without doing real-time fact-checking, which he calls a re-run of the 2016 cycle.

The White House press corps, he argues, is the most “policy-ignorant” in the history of presidential coverage—allowing Trump’s lies to cascade unchecked.

O’Donnell calls for independent media to fill the gap, as regular outlets have too many corporate or oligarchic ties to serve the people’s right to know adequately.

He frames this failure of media accountability as a root cause of broader societal ills—polarization, civic ignorance, weakened democracy—and argues that the media must be a tool of the people, not the power structure.In this moment of democratic urgency, O’Donnell’s critique calls on the media to reclaim its public-service mission and stop acting as a conduit for elite power or propaganda. The press must be redirected toward the people—because if the media won’t challenge big lies, then others must step in to protect our civic and political health.

New York Times, Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again), Karen Weise, Oct. 31, 2025. Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.

Four of the tech industry’s wealthiest companies made it clear this week that their spending on artificial intelligence was not about to slow down.

But the outlays from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — which all raised their spending by billions of dollars, saying they needed to meet demand for A.I. — are increasingly feeding concerns that the tech industry is heading toward a dangerous bubble.

Artificial intelligence remains an unproven and expensive technology that could take years to fully develop. How much companies will ultimately get back in return from A.I. products like chatbots is unclear. And smaller companies pursuing A.I. gold, financial analysts pointed out, are not nearly as wealthy.

Last week, the Bank of England wrote that while the building of data centers, which provide computing power for A.I., had so far largely come from the cash produced by the biggest companies, it would increasingly involve more debt. If A.I. underwhelms — or the systems ultimately require far less computing — there could be growing risk.

“This is a fast-evolving topic, and the future is highly uncertain,” the bank wrote.

 

New York Times, How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise, Jacqueline Gu and Cade Metz, Oct. 31, 2025. Sam Altman, above, the chief executive of OpenAI, says that technological revolutions are driven by more than just technology. They are also driven, he argues, by new ways of paying for them.

“There is always a lot of focus on technological innovation. What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model,” he recently said at the site of a data center that OpenAI is building in Abilene, Texas.

Over the last several years, Mr. Altman’s company has found unusual and creative ways of paying for the computing power needed to fuel its ambitions.

Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services.

Industry experts and financial analysts have welcomed the start-up’s creativity. But these unorthodox arrangements have also fueled concerns that OpenAI is helping to inflate a potential financial bubble as it builds what is still a highly speculative technology.

Here are unusual financial agreements helping to drive the ambitions of OpenAI, the poster child of the artificial intelligence revolution.

 

New York Times, The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices, Jodi Kantor, Oct. 31, 2025. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson are split over the best approach: investing in diplomacy inside the court or sounding the alarm outside.

On a yearslong campaign to sway her conservative colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan, right, has mostly refrained from harshly criticizing them. But two years ago she briefly let her discipline slip.

As they prepared to strike down President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s student loan forgiveness program, she blasted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in a draft dissent she circulated within the court, according to several people familiar with the episode.

But before the decision went public, she hit delete. Her final dissent was adamant, but the most heated passages never saw daylight, as she abided by a taboo among the justices against steaming publicly at colleagues or the institution.

For years, as the court has moved right, Justice Kagan has agonized over whether to be more confrontational, confidantes say, and has mostly concluded that to be effective, she must be careful about rocking the boat.

But in recent months, Justice Kagan’s liberal colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, shown at left with a quotation from a recent dissent, has started warning the public that the boat is sinking.

In one opinion after another, Justice Jackson has accused the right side of the court of favoring “moneyed interests,” and of “complicity” that enables “our collective demise.”

At oral arguments, she has taken up far more speaking time than her colleagues, even though the court several years ago tucked timers into the justices’ imposing wood table to tally each of their ticking minutes, according to several people familiar with the devices.

“I’m not afraid to use my voice,” she said at an event for lawyers in Indianapolis in July, describing her blistering dissents.

Along with the senior liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the two jurists are in what people close to them describe as an existential dilemma over their lack of influence.

Badly outnumbered, seated for the long haul of life tenure, Justices Kagan and Jackson in particular are divided on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sentenced to fail.

Ever since Justice Jackson arrived in 2022, friction has been building: between her and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who are more aligned strategically, and between her and the rest of the court, according to more than a dozen associates of the justices, including both liberals and conservatives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to share sensitive details about closely held conversations.

The three liberal justices declined to comment. But increasingly, the tensions are spilling out in opinions, including in the most important case of last term. Justices Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett dueled so harshly that some liberal observers feared that Justice Jackson had alienated Justice Barrett, a key swing vote.

Like many others across the left in the era of Donald J. Trump, the liberal justices are in a generational and philosophical struggle over whether to safeguard institutions from within or protest their decline. But unlike politicians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tradition-bound and decorous that closing an opinion “I dissent” instead of “I respectfully dissent” is considered a dramatic statement.

Their differing approaches will now be tested in a term with vast consequences. The court has been granting Mr. Trump enormous — but mostly temporary — latitude. Climactic fights over his policies and power are just ahead. Next week, the justices will consider whether he can unilaterally impose tariffs.

Justice Kagan’s approach goes like this: Even on a 6-to-3 court, the Democratic appointees can sometimes strategize their way into narrower rulings, smaller losses or even outright victory. To do so, the liberals must generally sway the chief justice and Justice Barrett. Admirers of Justice Kagan say she is prudent to show restraint, displaying her frustration only in flashes. Justice Jackson’s outspokenness could risk those votes, or further erode faith in a court that may yet stand up to Mr. Trump, they say.

Justice Jackson, on the other hand, is aiming for an audience beyond the court, speaking to the public and history. Her proponents argue that Justice Kagan is the one taking risks — of missing the moment and lending cover to a court that is weakening democratic norms.

As the court approaches the pivotal Trump questions, Justice Kagan is the one to watch, scholars and people close to her say.

Her tone in recent private conversations has been despondent, they said. Because of her discipline, her words have special potential to critique the court, they said. Before she deleted the most vehement passages from her student loan decision, she circulated them to other justices — a warning, perhaps, of how scathing she could choose to be.

Now, after many years of mulling, she must decide. The problem with waiting to speak frankly is that “over time you normalize what’s going on,” said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School. She said it might be tempting to hoard influence and leverage for a “cataclysmic case.”

But by the time that happens, she said, “it may be too late.”

Oct. 30 

Nieman Lab, NBC and CBS cuts hit race and culture verticals, Neel Dhanesha, Oct. 30, 2025. On Wednesday, CBS News parent company Paramount — newly merged with Skydance — began laying off more than 2,000 employees, including at CBS News, which recently installed Free Press founder Bari Weiss, right, as its editor-in-chief.

The news comes about two weeks after NBC News laid off about 150 people. Layoffs are common everywhere these days, and particularly in media, but these two in particular are worth writing about because of one commonality: Who was laid off.

From reckoning to retreat: Journalism’s DEI efforts are in declineSeptember 11, 2025Back in September, Hanaa’ wrote about how diversity-related jobs in journalism have been declining in the years since the George Floyd protests, which media companies initially responded to with big promises to hire more people of color and cover underserved and marginalized communities more thoughtfully.

The CBS and NBC cuts underscore Hanaa’s reporting, as it seems many of the cuts at both organizations targeted verticals related to race and diversity. Corbin Bolies reports in The Wrap that NBC disbanded four verticals that covered race or LGBTQ news; in a post on TikTok, former CBS News producer Trey Sherman said CBS laid off all the people of color on his production team while white staff were reassigned.

As Natalie Korach reports in Status, the cuts at CBS were wide-ranging; along with shuttering the race and culture unit and the Johannesburg bureau, CBS also made cuts to its relatively young news data team, its Los Angeles bureau, the streaming companion shows Evening News Plus and CBS Mornings Plus, and radio and TV production units across the country. CBS Saturday Morning co-anchors Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson were also laid off.

An NBC spokesperson told me that the cuts, which affected the whole organization, were precipitated in part by two news organizations — MSNBC (now MS NOW) and CNBC — moving to Versant. The spokesperson said the race and LGBTQ verticals will continue to exist, featuring content from across the newsroom, and that the majority of staffers on those teams will have the opportunity to fill open roles in the general newsroom. CBS did not respond to a request for comment by publishing time.

 

New York Times, Karine Jean-Pierre and a Book Tour Most Authors Would Not Dream Of, Elisabeth Bumiller, Oct. 30, 2025. The Biden White House press secretary (shown above at the White House) is promoting a new book about her time behind the briefing room lectern. Her message has not been well received.

White House press secretaries are supposed to know how to talk to the press. But that has not been evident this week for Karine Jean-Pierre, whose publicity tour for “Independent,” her book about her time behind the briefing room lectern of the Biden White House, has gone viral, and not in a good way.

It is possible, of course, that the adage that all publicity is good publicity will prove true and result in spectacular sales for her book, subtitled “A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”

But so far Ms. Jean-Pierre, who as Mr. Biden’s press secretary relied heavily on talking points although without the insults from the podium common today, has come across in interviews as erratic and defensive rather than as a forceful champion for her old boss.

Her attempts to defend him have come at a difficult time for Democrats, who are not eager to revisit the debacle of last year. Her message has not been well received.

Along the way she has struggled to answer questions. Exhibit A was an interview published on Monday with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, which has been described as “an absolute train wreck” (New York magazine) and “an excruciating case study in denial” (Peter Meijer, a former Republican congressman from Michigan). Others termed it embarrassing and incoherent.

In the book, Ms. Jean-Pierre writes that she became an independent in June because she was upset by the way the Democratic Party had pushed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the 2024 race. But in her interview with Mr. Chotiner, her explanation of her thinking devolved into a word salad that left him, and many readers, perplexed.

Asked why she thought the party had given Mr. Biden the boot, Ms. Jean-Pierre, the first Black and openly gay White House press secretary, responded: “There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense,” Mr. Chotiner responded. “I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump.”

At another point in the interview, Mr. Chotiner asked Ms. Jean-Pierre why she had written in the book that it was an “insult” to former Vice President Kamala Harris that people didn’t want her to be the nominee when she also wrote that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre responded: “But two things could be true, right? The thing I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right?”

 

New York Times, Trump Rule Could Bar Some Public Servants From Student Loan Forgiveness, Tara Siegel Bernard, Oct. 30, 2025. A new rule could disqualify certain employers from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that are deemed to be engaged in “illegal activities.”

The Trump administration released a final rule on Thursday that restricted who could participate in a student loan forgiveness program for public servants, making it easier to push out employers who engage in activities that it deems to have “a substantial illegal purpose.”

Those employers could include organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, for example, or provide gender-affirming care to children under the age of 19, among others.

The Trump administration argues that taxpayer funds should not subsidize illegal activity, but critics of the new rule say it gives the government broad tools to politicize the program and target groups that do not align with its values.

The rule fulfills an executive order that President Trump issued in March. On the new rule, Nicholas Kent, under secretary of the Education Department, said in a statement: “The Trump administration is refocusing the P.S.L.F. program to ensure federal benefits go to our nation’s teachers, first responders and civil servants who tirelessly serve their communities.”

The program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, or P.S.L.F., was created by Congress in 2007 and is open to government and nonprofit employees like schoolteachers, public defenders and librarians. After they make 120 qualifying payments in an income-driven repayment plan — which requires at least 10 years of service in qualifying jobs — any remaining balance is wiped out.

Many public servants have staked their financial futures on the program, and being disqualified could potentially upend their finances. More than one million people have received tens of billions of dollars in loan forgiveness under the program.

The new rule, which takes effect on July 1, will be applied only “prospectively,” according to the Education Department. In other words, borrowers who have been making qualifying payments under the program would not lose payment credits if their employer was deemed ineligible next summer. (The 185-page final rule will be published in the Federal Register on Friday.)

Oct. 27

New York Times, ICE Detains British Media Commentator, Claire Moses, Oct. 27, 2025. Sami Hamdi, who often speaks against Israel, was in the United States on a speaking tour. The Department of Homeland Security said his visa had been revoked.

Sami Hamdi, a British political commentator and critic of Israel, was detained by immigration enforcement officers in the United States and will be removed, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Sunday.

“This individual’s visa was revoked and he is in ICE custody pending removal,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Mr. Hamdi appeared to be the latest person to have an American visa revoked over political speech. Other cases have raised questions about First Amendment protections.

Mr. Hamdi is the managing director of the International Interest, an organization that “advises on geopolitical environments and risks across the globe,” according to its website. He has appeared as a commentator on the British television news channel Sky News and other outlets.

He had been on a speaking tour in the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. He attended the organization’s annual gala on Friday night in Sacramento and was scheduled to speak at a gala in Florida on Sunday night.

Mr. Hamdi was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday morning, according to CAIR, which called for his release. Mr. Hamdi is based in London, according to his LinkedIn account.

CAIR said in a statement that Mr. Hamdi had been detained “because he dared to criticize the Israeli government’s genocide” while on his speaking tour. It called the action “a blatant affront to free speech.”

The Wrap, MSNBC Sets Date for Name Change to MS NOW, Corbin Bolies, Oct. 27, 2025. The network is planning a large marketing campaign around its new brand.

MSNBC is changing its name to MS NOW on Nov. 15, the network said on Monday, ending an era for a nearly 30-year-old cable brand while marking the start of its new identity as its parent company splits from NBCUniversal.

The move marks one of the final acts of transition for the progressive cable news network as it splits itself from NBC News. Staff who jumped from NBC News to MSNBC officially became full-time employees on Oct. 6, while the network ended its shared newsgathering with NBC News last week.

“On the morning of Nov. 15, we will officially make the switch to MS NOW,” MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler told staff in a memo on Monday. “This moment comes after months of meticulous planning and thoughtful collaboration across every corner of our organization. We are facing it head-on, and our success in the months and years ahead will depend on our innovation and entrepreneurial approach.”

Oct. 26

 

New York Times, Under Trump, Voice of America Is Down but Not Out, Minho Kim, Oct. 26, 2025. Buttressed by courts and support from some Republican lawmakers, federally funded newsrooms that President Trump has tried to eliminate have yet to be rendered obsolete.

For nearly two years, Voice of America, a federal news agency dedicated to projecting American values around the world, provided intensive Persian-language coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas. The service regularly reached viewers inside Iran, Hamas’s state sponsor, with the kind of reporting and expert analysis that Tehran typically suppresses.

But Iranians who tuned to V.O.A. in June to learn about Israel’s attack on their country got something different: a two-hour live broadcast of the U.S. military procession in Washington that the Trump administration held to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American army.

“U.S. President Donald Trump has invited Americans to participate in this once-in-a-lifetime celebration that is free to the public,” an anchor declared in Persian.

It was a striking moment for the storied news agency, which was founded in 1942 to fight Nazi propaganda and has won dozens of journalism awards for reporting around the world — but has been targeted for destruction by President Trump.ImageA black-and-white photograph of a person with their back to the camera, sitting in front of a control panel. In the background, two people sit in front of a sign that says “V.O.A.”

Oct. 21 

 

In reaction to the Oct. 18 "No Kings" protests across the United States and in scattered other locales worldwide, President Trump used his Truth Social website to display a brief video of himself created via Artificial Intelligence portraying himself with a crown and piloting a military airplane dropping massive loads of excrement on peaceful protesters in New York City (Screenshot).

New York Times, How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters, Stuart A. Thompson, Oct. 21, 2025. The era of A.I. propaganda is here — and President Trump is an enthusiastic participant.

After nationwide protests this weekend against Mr. Trump’s administration, the president posted an A.I.-generated video to his Truth Social account depicting himself as a fighter pilot, careening through major cities and dropping excrement on protesters.

It was the latest example in a yearslong shift by Mr. Trump to deploy fake imagery, generated by artificial intelligence, as part of his social media commentary.

Mr. Trump has posted A.I.-generated images or videos at least 62 times on his Truth Social account since late 2022, according to a review by The New York Times of his posts to the social network. The fake imagery has included blistering attacks on his political rivals, flattering depictions of himself, and misleading political campaign materials made entirely by A.I. tools.

Overall, he has attacked his opponents, including top Democratic leaders and his Republican rivals, with A.I. imagery at least 14 times.

President Trump promoted on his Truth Social website images portraying him and Vice President J.D. Vance as American kings and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries,, below at left, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as adorning themselves with sombreros. Meanwhile, construction crews were demolishing part of the White House East Wing exterior to build a ballroom rump wants while security personnel forbade nearby Treasury Department employees from recording the deconstruction on their cellphones.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: October 20, 2025 [Trump Floats 'Trump As King' Imagry], Demolishes White House East Wing Wall Section , Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Over the weekend, as millions of Americans attended “No Kings” protests, President Donald J. Trump’s social media accounts responded by posting images not just of Trump as a king—defecating on Americans, even—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future.

In the United States, no man is a monarch: the law is supposed to be king. In January 1776, newly arrived immigrant Thomas Paine published Common Sense, explaining to his new countrymen why they should declare independence from the King of England. He called for a new government based not in heritage or tradition, but in the law. “[I]n America the law is king,” Paine wrote. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

But under Trump, the law is under attack.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley, Aaron Weisz, Aliza Chasan, and Ian Flickinger presented the story of Erez Reuveni, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice (DOJ) who alleges that the Trump administration is destroying the rule of law in America.

Reuveni, shown above at left with Pelley was part of the first administration of President Donald J. Trump, where he defended Trump’s travel ban order, prohibiting travelers from Muslim majority countries from coming to the United States. He was so effective, the journalists note, he quickly took on a prominent role in Trump’s second term.

On March 14, the same day he was promoted to become the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s immigration section, Reuveni and others in his section met with Emil Bove, who had once been Trump’s criminal defense attorney and was then the third-highest official at the DOJ. Bove told the lawyers that Trump would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 100 Venezuelan migrants the administration claimed were terrorists. They would not receive due process.

According to Reuveni, “Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.’”

“I felt like a bomb had gone off,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we might just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”

The next day, some of the prisoners sued, and U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg called a hearing. Boasberg asked Drew Ensign, representing the DOJ, whether the planes would be leaving that weekend. Ensign said he didn’t know, even though, according to Reuveni, Ensign was at the same meeting with Bove he was. Reuveni called that moment in court “stunning.”

“It is the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer’s code of ethics to mislead a court with intent,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes.

Boasberg ordered the planes not to leave and ordered the government to return any planes in the air. But instead, more than five hours after Boasberg’s order, the planes carrying the migrants arrived at the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador.

“And then it really hit me. It’s like, we really did tell the court, screw you. We really did just tell the courts, we don’t care about your order. You can’t tell us what to do,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “That was just a real gut punch.”

Then it turned out that Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador whose deportation to El Salvador a U.S. court had prohibited, had been rendered to CECOT. Reuveni told CNN that one of his superiors called him and ordered him to say that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang and a terrorist. Reuveni said he couldn’t say such a thing because it was a lie.

“What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”

When Reuveni refused to sign a brief calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist, the administration fired him.

John Hudson, Jeremy Roebuck, and Samantha Schmidt of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the day before Reuveni was promoted and Bove called a meeting with him and other DOJ lawyers to tell them “the planes need to take off, no matter what,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a phone conversation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. The Trump administration wanted to send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, but Bukele had a price.

Bukele, right, wanted nine leaders of the MS-13 gang returned to El Salvador with the other prisoners. The individuals he wanted had threatened to expose the relationship between Bukele and MS-13. Bukele’s government has allegedly cut deals with MS-13 leaders to reduce the number of “public murders” to make it look as if homicide rates are falling, a development that boosts Bukele’s popularity.

The Washington Post journalists report that Rubio promised to return the MS-13 leaders. But some of those leaders were informants who were under the protection of the U.S. government. For years, U.S. law enforcement had worked first to capture high-ranking members of the deadly MS-13 gang and then to secure their cooperation with the promise of protection by the U.S. government. Rubio told Bukele the U.S. would renege on those agreements and turn the informants over to the government whose corruption they were exposing.

“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a contractor who had investigated and helped U.S. officials to dismantle MS-13. “Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?”

The 60 Minutes story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”

Republicans in the U.S. Senate confirmed Bove as a U.S. appeals court judge in July, although Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined all Democrats in voting no. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bove: “He has a strong legal background and has served his country honorably. I believe he will be diligent, capable and a fair jurist.”  

 

The facade of the East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. The demolition is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to build a ballroom reportedly costing $250 million on the eastern side of the White House. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images.)

The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary, Demolition President, William Kristol, right, Oct. 21, 2025. In October 1943, the British Parliament debated the rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had been destroyed a couple of years before in the Blitz. Against others who favored using a more modern, semicircular design—more like that of many other parliaments—Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the case for preserving the original shape of the Commons.

Part of Churchill’s argument was simply the case for honoring tradition. But Churchill also argued that the original, rectangular layout of the House, with benches facing each other in close proximity, encouraged vigorous and direct debate between the parties. And he claimed that the small size of the House, with not enough seats for every member, created a sense of intimacy and urgency for the discussion, especially during important moments.

How much did all this matter? Well, as Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Eighty-two years later, the president of the United States is reshaping the White House. In July, Donald Trump announced he wanted to add a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the existing building. The ballroom would dwarf the 55,000 square feet footprint of the main part of the White House. Still, Trump assured one and all, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building.”

It turns out Trump was lying. Shocking, I know. Yesterday, construction workers began the demolition of part of the East Wing in order to build a new, Mar-a-Lago-like ballroom.

Trump hasn’t gotten approval for this project from the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates the construction of federal buildings. The Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf—who, conveniently, is also the White House staff secretary—said during the only public meeting about the matter that the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation.

While Trump is proud of his new ballroom, others in the administration seem touchy. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the Treasury Department instructed employees not to share images of the demolition, after photos of construction equipment dismantling the front of the building made their way online.

It’s unclear what legal authority the Treasury Office of Public Affairs has to tell employees what photos they can take during their lunch break. But why would that matter to the Trump administration?

In any case, Trump—aided and abetted by all the corporations and wealthy donors who have contributed money to his project—will presumably be able to do as he pleases. And perhaps it’s foolish to object. If we’re going to transition under Trump’s rule from a (mostly) dignified democratic republic to an ostentatious oligarchic autocracy, our buildings should reflect and reinforce that progress. After all, we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

 

  

The Triad via The Bulwark, No Kings and the Laws of Power, Jonathan V. Last (JVL), above, Oct. 21, 2025. Understanding the Republican will to power and what Democrats must do to counter it.

Before we get started: The stated policy of every Democrat seeking the presidency should be that the first thing they will do is demolish the Trump ballroom and restore the East Wing of the White House and the White House grounds to their pre-Trump state.

Period. It’s the easiest layup in the history of politics. Trump’s transformation of the People’s House into a presidential palace is undemocratic. Presidents are not kings. Erasing this monstrosity is fundamental statement about the right-ordering of our project in self-government.

Why is this so hard? Why haven’t Democrats already laid out a marker on this?

Oh, and one other question: Is the East Wing teardown and creation of a new structure that dwarfs the existing White House the kind of thing someone does with a rental?

If the Trump 2028 hats he passes out aren’t indicative of the man’s intentions, surely this construction project is?

One last question for the people who keep saying, “Oh JVL, you scamp. Of course Trump won’t try to remain in office after 2028.”

How many elected Republicans can you find who will say, on the record, unequivocally, that Trump cannot run for a third term? I’ll take your answers in the comments.

Now, on to the main event. Because I have some advice for Democrats about how they should be thinking about power.

1. People Power

The October 18 No Kings protests were impressive. Some 7 million Americans showed up. That’s 2 percent of the entire country and 10 percent of the total number of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. They assembled in cities and towns. They did so with no—zero—violence.

These protests were a demonstration of power. But before we get to them, I’d like to show you a different demonstration of power.

Here’s the front page of the New York Times on October 19, the day after the largest coordinated protest in the nation’s history:

The big stories?

• Syrian prisons
• Dems in disarray, “some see it as a missed chance”
• Trump is winning the shutdown
• Italian food in Italy
• Construction of the Obama presidential center

Would you care to read about the No Kings protests? Go to page 23.

What a stunning piece of editorial judgment. What a clear statement of editorial priorities.

Anyway, the No Kings protests were impressive because they showed that the pro-democracy movement is working with what it has. Shut out of power at the federal level, people are organizing at the community level to assemble a mass movement that (hopefully) can be used to mobilize voters in November 2026 and, possibly, to do more than just mobilize voters.¹

But Republicans have also been thinking about power.

New York Times, No Education Department? No Problem, Trump’s Education Secretary Says, Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender, Oct. 21, 2025. The shutdown means there is, essentially, no Education Department.

The latest round of layoffs would leave few workers to enforce special education and civil rights laws.What could it look like if President Trump succeeds in his promise to shut down the U.S. Department of Education?

The last three weeks offer something of a glimpse.

So far this month, the Education Department has stopped most of its work during the government shutdown, and the Trump administration has laid off more than 460 employees, cutting deeper into an agency that had already laid off half of its work force in March.

The new layoffs, if they survive a legal challenge, would functionally wipe out the offices that handle two of the agency’s core functions: dispersing federal money to states and school districts, and enforcing federal special education and civil rights laws. In March, the layoffs eliminated the agency’s research arm dedicated to tracking U.S. student achievement, which for many students is at three-decade lows.

Mr. Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, right, has argued that the latest developments only prove that the Education Department is unnecessary and should be shut down.

“Millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” Ms. McMahon posted on social media last week. “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”

The federal government indeed plays a small role in the day-to-day operations of schools, which are locally run and paid for mostly with state and local dollars. But it is responsible for sending out billions of dollars a year in funding for schools, about 10 percent of all public school funding. And it plays a key role in enforcing federal law in schools and universities.

The latest layoffs would make it nearly impossible for the Department of Education to fulfill those obligations, current and former employees said, potentially bringing the Trump administration one step closer to its goal of shutting down the department.

 

The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary, Assassination Threat, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 21, 2025. Breaking news this morning:

CBS News reports that a man was arrested after sending texts that he planned to “eliminate” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at an event in New York City last weekend. “I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” Christopher Moynihan said in a text message, according to a court filing. “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future.”

The kicker: Moynihan was a convicted January 6th rioter. He was among those pardoned by Donald Trump in January. Happy Tuesday. 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: A month in the manosphere, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 21, 2025. One of the most significant political developments in the last few years is the emergence of the “manosphere,” a loose network of longform podcasts that are especially popular with young men. Although the top manosphere podcasts are not primarily about politics, they have been credited with effectively promoting right-wing viewpoints.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was interviewed by manosphere podcasters Joe Rogan, Theo Von, AndrewSchulz, and Shawn Ryan. On election day, Trump won 56% of the votes of young men 18-29. That was a huge improvement over 2020, when Trump was supported by just 41% of young men.

At Trump’s November 2024 victory party, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White took the stage and thanked Rogan (shown below left in a social media photo), Von, and other manosphere podcasters for contributing to Trump’s win.

Why are these podcasts so influential? What is actually discussed? The answers to these questions are difficult to ascertain. Yes, the podcasts are public, but they are also extremely long. Rogan, for example, puts out around three podcasts a week and each one can be three or even four hours. The only people who regularly listen to these podcasts are fans.

To pull back the curtain on the manosphere, Popular Information reviewed every edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and The Shawn Ryan Show published in September. Collectively, these podcasts have over 30 million subscribers on YouTube and millions of additional listeners on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms. The shows and hosts also have tens of millions of followers on social media platforms like X and Instagram.

In September, these four shows published 35 episodes with a combined runtime of 94 hours and 55 minutes.

Nearly 95 hours of content includes little overt discussion of public policy or political philosophy. But the episodes frequently feature crude racism, outlandish political conspiracy theories, brazen misogyny, medical quackery, and homophobia.

Wealthy Democrats are reportedly spending tens of millions of dollars to identify “the next Joe Rogan” for the left. The people financing these efforts do not seem to have grappled with the kind of content Rogan and other major players in the manosphere create to attract a loyal audience.Rogan: Soy protein gives men “tits”

In a September 2 episode with comedian Dave Landau, Rogan claimed that people who get their protein from soy are being feminized, asking, “Why do I have tits? Why am I lactating? Why am I always crying?” He also asserted that lab-grown meat causes cancer, a false claim that appears to have originated from a Facebook post. Later in the episode, Rogan referred to Beyond Meat as “trans burgers,” prompting Landau to reply, “You’re getting the patty that basically shoots up a school.”Von: The Postal Service is like “handing a letter to a Black guy”

In an episode with comedian and podcaster Jim Norton on September 5, Von insinuated that the United States Postal Service (USPS) cannot be trusted. Using the USPS, Von said, was like “handing a letter to a Black guy and hoping he takes it where it’s supposed to go.” Norton agreed, responding, “Yeah, just here you go. Please bring that… to the government.”Rogan suggests the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is partially true

On a September 4 episode with comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan promoted the false Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which involves the claim that powerful Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant (that does not have a basement). “There’s a lot of misinformation that gets attached to true stories to make the stories goofy,” Rogan said. “This is the Pizzagate thing.” Dillon responded, “Something’s weird with that though.” Rogan replied, “Oh fuck yeah, something’s weird with that,” before offering to “send [Dillon] a documentary” about it.Flagrant guest claims that Israeli agents probably knew about 9/11 in advance

In a September 3 episode, the Flagrant hosts asked guest Andrew Bustamante, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, whether he believed a conspiracy theory that Israeli intelligence agents had information about 9/11 before it happened, but withheld it from the U.S. government. “I think there’s actually probability to it,” he said. “Whether or not Israel nefariously held that information back is a different story.”Rogan: Immigrants are “outbreeding” the English in the UK, creating a risk of Sharia law

In an episode with Dillon on September 4, Rogan complained that immigrants in the United Kingdom are “outbreed[ing]” English people. “But what they’re doing with allowing mass migration in the UK… It’s really weird because like where does this end up?” Rogan said. “Because it seems like it ends up with some places that have Sharia law.”

“Especially when you consider like how many babies they’re having versus how many babies the English people [are having]. I mean they’re openly talking about it. ‘We’re going to outbreed you,’” Rogan said.Ryan: Hollywood stars perform child sacrifices in exchange for power

During a September 2 interview with country musician John Rich, Ryan claimed that certain people in Hollywood have engaged in child sacrifice in exchange for power. Ryan said, “I know that there are people that trade things for power, sacrifices, child sacrifices, all that kind of stuff… Have you seen it?” Rich said that he had been invited to participate in such rituals, but had never actually seen them.Rogan: Nancy Pelosi has “some big yabos”

Rogan and Dillon joked that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband is married to her for her body in a September 4 episode. “Why marry that old witch if you can’t get your beak wet?” Dillon asked. “Because she’s got some big yabos,” Rogan responded. Dillon agreed, saying, “She does have big yabos.”Von: I use the f-word to refer to “gay folks,” but only “really fast”

On September 19, in an episode with comedian Louis C.K., Von said that he doesn’t trust people that “won’t say the f-word about gay folks,” but will say the n-word. Von said that he’ll “say [the f-word] really fast because some people don’t like hearing it,” before saying the slur, which is bleeped out.Rogan falsely claims that “almost every school shooter” used anti-depressants

In a September 9 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Brigham Buhler, founder of a “restorative medicine” company, claimed that pharmaceutical companies “tried to hide” evidence that certain anti-depressants lead to increased suicidal ideation and violent thoughts in children. “They’re also connected to almost every school shooter,” Rogan responded. There is no evidence that SSRIs increase violent behavior and only 4% of mass shooters in the last several decades took SSRIs in their lifetime.Ryan suggests God will soon bring plagues to America

In the September 2 edition of the Shawn Ryan Show, Rich discussed the biblical story of the plagues that God inflicted on Egypt. He wondered when the U.S. would receive a similar punishment. Rich asked, “When is God going to remind America who he is?” Ryan replied, “I feel like it’s coming.”Rogan laments society is “celebrating” women for taking male jobs like CEO

In the September 9 episode of his show, Rogan complained that society no longer celebrates “traditional” roles for women. He said, “We’re criticizing normal femininity, especially like traditional wife roles. But we are celebrating women who assume roles in society of toxic men, which is CEOs. We’re celebrating a woman becoming more manly. We’re celebrating men becoming feminists… Clearly, we’ve lost our way.”Von said he was surprised to meet a Black doctor

In the September 19 episode with Louis C.K., Von said “the first time a Black man touched my hand… was different.” Von went on to describe his first experience with a Black doctor. “I’d never walked into a room in my life with a Black doctor,” Von said. “And I was like, whoa.” Von compared the experience to “like when you’re at Foot Locker and there’s a white woman working in there.”Rogan claims Charles Manson was a CIA asset

On September 11, during an interview with Charlie Sheen, Rogan said it was “very likely [the CIA] had groomed [Charles Manson] when he was in prison and taught him mind control techniques when people were high on acid … [to] shape their mind and even get them to commit murder.” He also claimed that the CIA used Manson as a “psyop” to stop the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Ryan guest compares learning about LGBTQ identities to sexual abuse

John Tiegen — who is a survivor of the 2012 Benghazi attack, a Colorado militia leader, and a two-time Colorado Springs mayoral candidate — said on the September 11 episode of the Shawn Ryan Show that teachers are “forcing all that LGBT… stuff” on students and telling them to hide it from their parents. He compared this to child sexual abusers telling their victims not to tell their parents they are being abused. “If anybody says ‘don’t tell your parents,’ you should be telling your parents [because] what they’re doing is something that is wrong,” Tiegen said.Rogan guest suggests that Epstein might be alive and living in Ohio

In Rogan’s September 4 episode with Dillon, the pair discussed a conspiracy theory that convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is still alive. “Is it possible that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t die in his cell and that’s all horseshit?” Rogan asked. Dillon explained that he heard that there is a “tiny” possibility that Epstein is alive and living in Ohio at the house of Les Wexner, who is the founder of L Brands, the former parent company of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. “If that was true, there would be… a service that delivers masseuses to that house. There’s no way that guy’s stopping doing creepy shit,” Rogan said.Von: Lauren Boebert “got them bumpers”

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases We Could Do Without, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals...’ and antifa too!

White House mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt declared last week that Democrats’ “main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” That followed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson smear of 7 million people preparing to turn out for peaceful No Kings Day protests. Johnson declared that millions of fellow Americans were the “Hate America” crowd, the “pro-Hamas wing and the, you know, the Antifa people.”

Who knew there were 7M such people in the United States?! And how clever they are—terrorists disguised as grandmothers, babies in strollers, aging veterans, young parents, and spirited folks wearing inflatable animal costumes. Those sly “Hate America” types decided to bring American flags, hold up images of the Declaration of Independence, dress in 1776 garb, and reaffirm in hundreds of thousands of signs proclaiming their love for America. It turns out this hateful crowd is everywhere: in big and small cities, rural areas, mountain ranges, and beach towns. The Villages in Florida; Bozeman, Montana; all across Texas; in hundreds of red cities and counties; and even those beyond our borders are stocked with such signs.

To be clear, ten times the number that turned out on Saturday (roughly 70M) turned out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. That’s an awful lot of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Person wearing hoodie with 'make antifascism great again' text. Photo by Alex Gruber

We have to remember that the worst act of domestic violence in our lifetime was perpetrated by anti-democracy extremists on Jan. 6 at our Capitol, where Trump supporters attacked police, smashed windows, defaced the halls of Congress, and bore the flag of traitors (the Confederacy). Trump pardoned all of them, including the most violent criminals.

Yes, on one level it is absurd—stupid, even—for MAGA Republicans to denounce an entire party, tens of millions of Americans citizens, as outside the body politic. (They no doubt helped drive turnout.) Republicans are now effectively suggest that about half of the country should be arrested, deported, or worse. In going full partisan, Trump is in essence conceding that he is not president of the United States; he is just the leader of an increasingly unpopular cult. Likewise, in declaring it open season during the shutdown to hurt Democrats who benefit from programs, fire Democrats who run them, and dismantle programs Democrats like, Trump is only reaffirming that he only cares about those who support him. (Of course, he is hurting those supporters even more severely, given the overrepresentation of red state Americans who benefit from Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.)

This is more than rhetorical hypocrisy. MAGA politicians who, for instance, insist Charlie Kirk’s murder was the result of “hate speech” (notice how—as of yet—no sound evidence has emerged that the killer was motivated by leftwing ideology) have no business demonizing and dehumanizing Democrats. They certainly have no basis to flyspeck Democrats’ accurate descriptions of the views and rhetoric of MAGA politicians (including the vice president, who blithely excuses adults spewing bile about rape, the Holocaust, and Black people, and knowingly fomented baseless vitriol against Haitian immigrants).

If their rhetoric was “merely” irresponsible, hypocritical, and disgusting, MAGA pols’ attacks on millions of Americans would be bad enough, but along with excluding half of the country from “real America,” the administration is simultaneously launching a terrifying legal offensive involving every aspect of federal power from ICE to the IRS to the FBI to the Justice Department.

Trump’s executive order to identify “antifa” as a domestic terror organization becomes all the more dangerous when he and his party label everyone and anyone it dislikes as terrorist, Hamas operative, or a member of antifa. Those phases emerging from the mouths of autocrat bullies have lost all meaning. If “terrorist” or “antifa” can apply to grandmas, parents with kids, veterans, students, teachers, government workers, scientists, elected Democrats, and other patriots who peacefully demonstrate, then these labels applied by Leavitt, Johnson, and Trump apply to millions of Americans become farcical.

It is past time to acknowledge that the whole antifa/Hamas/illegal immigrant/terrorist demonization shtick is a clumsy, unconstitutional maneuver to weaponize the federal government against anyone who does not fall into line in Trump’s autocracy.

Anti-fascist is the most accurate term to describe the vast cross-section of Americans of different ages, races, creeds, ethnicities, beliefs, geographic locations, jobs, specific complaints, and political affiliations who turned out to demonstrate peacefully (unlike ICE agents who kidnap and brutalize Americans in the streets, use pepper spray and other weapons, and show up masked and unidentified).

If Republicans bothered to pay the slightest attention to what demonstrators say, write, and do, they would know that anti-fascism is what has bound them together, just as anti-fascism bound together the Allies in WW2, the men and women who fought Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and liberated the death camps, the opponents of dictators like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro and Vladimir Putin, and the civil rights protestors who marched and died to liberate the Black population from white oppression, violence, and persecution.

So let’s dump these absurd slurs. In their anger, hatred, and panic in the face of a diverse democracy, MAGA politicians have made a mockery of the vocabulary they are using against their opponents. If MAGA wants to declare war on or silence millions of patriots, they cannot complain when we identify them as autocrats or fascists. They define themselves by what they are against.

That still leaves open a question for Trump and his fellow slanderers: If anti-fascists who pay tribute to democracy, free speech, nonviolence, empathy, the rule of law, and our founding documents are the target of MAGA’s ire, what does that make Leavitt, Johnson, Vance, Trump, and the rest?

 

The Bulwark Morning Shots Commentary, The Golden Age of Sh*tpostersI, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 21, 2025. Another young Republican operative just had his insanely racist text messages leaked.

But the latest guy in the barrel isn’t some random right-wing apparatchik. He’s Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s 30-year-old nominee to lead the Office Special Counsel, one of the federal government’s key internal watchdogs. In a Truth Social post from May, Trump, who has shared Ingrassia’s content dozens of times, called him a “highly respected attorney, writer, and constitutional scholar.”

He’s also quite the group-chatter. Politico reported yesterday afternoon on a set of text chains in which Ingrassia, speaking to other young GOP men, offered his opinion about Martin Luther King Jr.—the “1960s George Floyd” whose holiday “should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs”—while admitting that “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time.” Other comments about the merits and demerits of various population groups piled up from there:

“We need competent white men in positions of leadership . . . The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal.”

“Blacks behave that way because it’s their natural state. . . . All of Africa is a shithole, and will always be that way.”

“Never trust a chinaman or Indian.”

What a guy! In response to the story, Ingrassia’s lawyer offered the most hilariously wishy-washy statement imaginable: “In this age of AI, authentication of allegedly leaked messages, which could be outright falsehoods, doctored, or manipulated, or lacking critical context, is extremely difficult . . . We do not concede the authenticity of these purported messages.”

Which to us sounds a lot like: Look, man—Paul says a lot of insanely racist stuff about a lot of ethnic groups. How can we possibly know if these particular instances are real or not?

A few things about all this.

The first and most obvious: As I wrote about a similar story last week, the kids are not alright. For many young Republican professionals coming up today, especially men, performative ultrabigotry is social currency—a way of showing you’re an edgy freethinker who isn’t afraid to hold dangerous opinions and, as importantly, not some crypto-lib. A lot of times it starts out as a posture of semi-irony—before long, it becomes a habit of mind, then hardens into actual belief.

The second is about the Hill response. The timing of the leak is terrible for Ingrassia, who was scheduled to have his confirmation hearing Thursday. If that were still weeks or months out, GOP senators might be able to sit back and wait to see if the story goes away on its own.¹ As it is, they were compelled to respond immediately.

“He’s not gonna pass,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters yesterday.

“I’m not supporting him,” said Florida Sen. Rick Scott. “I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country. It’s wrong.”²

But the White House has so far been silent—which brings us to the third thing. During Trump’s second term, his team has modeled a hard-and-fast rule on scandals like these: Young Republicans are never, ever to face consequences for horrible texts.

The field general here has been Vice President JD Vance, who has rushed again and again to the defense of young MAGA bigots. When 25-year-old DOGE staffer Marko Elez was fired in February over year-old X posts like “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance successfully campaigned for him to get his job back. “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance said.

Last week, it was Vance who laid out the playbook for the GOP response to obscenely racist texts from Young Republican leaders: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.”³

That grace, of course, only extends where Trump supporters in good standing are concerned. Vance has been among the loudest voices, for instance, encouraging the MAGA faithful to try to ruin the lives of anyone posting terrible things about the murder of Charlie Kirk. And he hasn’t had a problem with the administration’s punishing of the social media activity of literal college kids, revoking their visas and booting them from the country.

All this makes the Ingrassia storyline particularly tricky for the White House. It suggests there may finally be a level of shitposting that even loyal MAGA footsoldiers can’t get away with and still expect to get through the GOP Senate. And it shines a 450-watt floodlight on the ludicrousness of Vance’s ridiculous talking point. These “young boys” are too immature and half-formed to refrain from pouring pure hatred against minorities out at all times. But they’re not too immature, apparently, to run major government agencies. They’re the fearless foot soldiers of MAGA who are going to take this country back—but hush, don’t be mean—can’t you see the baby is sleeping?

New York Times, G.O.P. Senators Oppose Trump Watchdog Nominee After Report of Racist Texts, Robert Jimison, Oct. 21, 2025. At least four Republican senators, including the Senate majority leader, signaled their opposition to Paul Ingrassia, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel.

The nomination of Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel, appeared to be in jeopardy on Monday night after Politico reported that he had sent a series of racist text messages.

At least four Republican senators, including the Senate majority leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, have signaled that they will oppose his nomination to the office, which is a traditionally independent corruption-fighting agency that safeguards federal whistle-blowers and enforces some ethics laws.

Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, told reporters on Monday evening that he had spoken with the administration about Mr. Ingrassia but did not share details. He told reporters, “I do not support him.”

Mr. Ingrassia, 30, is set to testify on his nomination on Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Four Republicans opposing him would be enough to kill his nomination if all senators were present and the entire Democratic caucus voted against him.

The New York Times was unable to independently verify the text messages, which Politico said included telling a group of fellow Republicans that he had “a Nazi streak” and that the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”

A lawyer for Mr. Ingrassia did not confirm the texts were authentic and said they might have been manipulated or were missing context, Politico said.

The report of the messages adds to a swirl of controversy around both Mr. Ingrassia, a self-described “constitutional law” expert who hosted a far-right podcast with his sister, and Mr. Trump’s role in trying to bend the Office of Special Counsel to his will. It also comes just days after a separate Politico report showed that young Republican officeholders and activists had routinely used racist and homophobic language and glibly invoked Hitler and the Holocaust in a Telegram chat.

During the 2024 Republican primary, Mr. Ingrassia pushed a fake theory that Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president, which Mr. Trump then promoted on social media. In December 2020, as Mr. Trump was contesting his election loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Ingrassia’s podcast posted on Twitter, “Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election.”

Mr. Ingrassia, who graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile, also represented the “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who is facing rape and human trafficking charges overseas.

Mr. Trump kicked off a legal battle early this year when he fired the previous head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, challenging a foundational precedent that said Congress can limit the president’s power to fire leaders of independent agencies.

Oct. 20

New York Times, Amazon Disruption Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours, Jenny Gross, Oct. 20, 2025. Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, said most services were back up. Hulu, Snapchat and the British government’s official site were among those affected.

A disruption involving Amazon Web Services, the cloud service provider that supports much of the internet, took many websites and apps offline for over two hours on Monday, in the latest outage that showed the fragility of the global technology infrastructure.

The disruption, which affected websites and apps for some major banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, started shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. Amazon said in an update at 5:27 a.m. that most websites and apps relying on its services were working normally again, and that it continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.”

Major services were affected, including WhatsApp, the British government’s website and government tax services, the payment app Venmo, the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and games at the New York Times. Dozens of other companies and retailers — including Amazon, Hulu, Snapchat, Ring doorbells and McDonald’s — also experienced service interruptions.

It was not immediately clear what led to the outage, and there were no indications that it had been caused by a cyberattack.

Meidas Touch Network, MeidasTouch Ranks #1 of all Podcast Publishers in October — Beating Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, NYTimes, Staff Report, Oct. 20, 2025. MeidasTouch Podcast also Remains #1 in Country Beating Joe Rogan.

The MeidasTouch Network has officially been named the #1 publisher in the country and The MeidasTouch Podcast the #1 podcast overall according to new industry data released by Podscribe, the leading independent audio and video analytics firm.

In the rankings published October 15, 2025, Podscribe found that MeidasTouch outperformed every major media company — including Spotify, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM, Wondery, and The New York Times — based on total combined podcast downloads and video views across YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, and RSS feeds over the past 30 days.

Hosted by Ben, right, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas, The MeidasTouch Podcast secured the #1 spot among all shows tracked by Podscribe, surpassing global giants such as The Diary of a CEO, The Daily (NYT), and The Joe Rogan Experience.

The program continues to lead with record-breaking engagement, driven by its sharp political analysis, authentic conversations, and fiercely pro-democracy message.With more than 283.9 million monthly downloads and views across its shows, the MeidasTouch Network claimed the top publisher ranking, marking another milestone in its rise as the largest and most influential independent news and media network in America.

“We’re just getting started,” said Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch. “This milestone proves that the public is ready for a new kind of media — one that fights for truth, accountability, and the democracy-loving people everywhere. 

 

The Bulwark False Flag Reporting, How a Bizarre Healing-TV-Screen Tycoon Is Funding MAGA Media, Will Sommer, Oct 20, 2025. For today’s issue, I drove out to Northern Virginia and paid $60 to take a nap in a dark room, bathed only in the light of some mysterious screens.

Why would I do this? Because some big names in MAGA media believe that these screens not only offer a gateway to vitality and, perhaps, immortality, but could be foundational for the future of their business. I had to find out more. And what better way than by scoping out the scene in person?

To sweeten the deal, I received some bath salts magically “charged” with “energy” “waves” by the devices. Thank you for being a Bulwark+ member—your support makes possible all of our commentary and journalism, including ridiculous stunts important fact-finding missions like this!

TUCKER CARLSON HAS NEVER BEEN AVERSE to appearing alongside idiosyncratic oddball figures. But Carlson’s recent decision to hang out with a wannabe pundit named Elizabeth Lane struck even fellow travelers in MAGA media as confusing.

Lane, a native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, has made no secret of her fondness for Vladimir Putin. Until recently, she had a small presence online, with fewer than 1,000 followers each on YouTube and X. Yet in early October she secured a sitdown interview with Carlson in his Maine cabin. As soon as a preview of it went up on X, others on the right began asking: Why?

“How did she secure an interview with someone as big as Tucker Carlson?” RedState blogger “Bonchie” asked. Elizabeth Lane and Tucker Carlson. (Screenshot via X)

The interview—which saw Lane asking the former Fox News host such newsworthy questions as “What is love for Tucker Carlson?”—did its job: Lane’s following on X is now up to roughly 20,000 people. And while her previous YouTube videos struggled to crack 1,000 views, the Carlson interview has passed a quarter million.

It was, undoubtedly, a boon for Unifyd TV, a burgeoning new right-wing streaming platform where Lane is the most prominent host and chief operating officer.¹

Unifyd pitches itself as a place for “groundbreaking” shows and “powerful investigative content” that, at first blush, appears to be supported by subscription fees ($11.99 per month or $95.88 per year). But that may not actually be its primary funding source.

According to court records, millions of dollars have come in to Unifyd from sales and promotion of a device called the “Light System”—or, if you take prefer the nomenclature of the other side of a bitter lawsuit over its origins, the “EESystem”—whose supporters claim it can cure nearly every ailment, from tumors to autism.

The devices have been compared to a real-life version of medbeds, the mythical medical tanning beds some conspiracy theorists believe will fix anything that’s wrong with you (which recently got a boost from President Trump). The system includes a screen, identical to a computer monitor, running on what looks like a form of the BASIC programming language and flashing symbols of different colors. Those symbols, proponents say, are sending out waves of healing power to anyone who sits in front of one of the screens.Subscribed

Because the promise of these devices is so massive (a person’s health and well-being is basically the whole ball game this side of eternity), the money around them is vast. A twelve-unit system goes for $54,200, according to court filings, on top of a one-time $125,000 licensing fee. More than 800 centers across the world have the machines installed, according to an internal report filed in court and reviewed by The Bulwark for one company that makes the devices. Total revenue for that company is approaching $100 million after just a few years of selling the machines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a presidential candidate, with Jason Shurka in front of EESystem devices in 2024. (Screenshot via Unifyd TV)

But the “Light System” is more than just a machine. It is a key component to a conspiracy theory that a shadowy, benevolent cabal—made up of thousands of people, some essentially immortal and others non-human—is on a mission to elevate human consciousness through things like mass adoption of meditation and veganism, and further, that they’re doing so to accelerate our species’s progress on the way to contact with alien races.

Buckle up: Here’s how this aliens-walk-among-us conspiracy theory and these mystical medical devices are supporting this new right-wing media venture.

The man who has played the central role in pushing that conspiracy is Jason Shurka, a self-styled reverend and the founder of the organization UNIFYD World, whose initiatives include Unifyd TV, the network that hosts Elizabeth Lane’s show on which Carlson mysteriously appeared.

As far as I can tell, Shurka is not your average aspiring media tycoon. He’s an entrepreneur, a conspiracist, a social media presence, and a new-agey spiritualist who operates as a spokeshuman for the aforementioned Light Systems organization. He circulates in powerful political circles and has been drawn into improbably dramatic legal battles.

In 2022, Shurka teamed up on a commercial venture with fellow New Age health practitioner “Dr.” Sandra Rose Michael, a self-described expert in “energy wellness” who claims to have invented the “EESystem” device.² Shurka said he joined forces with Michael because the energy from an EESystem healed his sister’s dog of a large tumor. For two years, Shurka used his social media platform to promote EESystems and to encourage people to patronize the independent centers that had purchased them for tens of thousands of dollars. Sales of EESystems exploded, and everyone profited. Michael’s son, Michael Bertolacini—CEO of EESystem LLC—praised Shurka in an email to me as “the Morpheus that I needed to become my own Neo.”

Shurka courted fellow prominent figures along the way, with motivational speaker Tony Robbins praising the EESystem. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a machine set up in his home for an interview with Shurka in 2024, and later received it as a gift from him. Right-wing undercover video provocateur James O’Keefe even staged an ad for an EESystem center to look like one of his stings, saying in a video that he was bringing in a camera to investigate only to emerge feeling less anxious. According to court filings, Michael’s son gave Shurka $2.8 million to spend on influencer marketing for the devices.

But the relationship between Shurka and Bertolacini went south in late 2024 after Bertolacini refused to buy Shurka’s “Unifyd Healing,” a website and sales platform he used to promote the machines, for $10 million. Bertolacini alleged in a lawsuit against Shurka filed earlier this year that he received sinister letters from the Light System organization warning him of serious consequences if he didn’t pay Shurka. Only belatedly, he claims, he came to believe that the letters were coming from Shurka himself.³

Having been cut off from EESystem LLC, Shurka started marketing his own device. He dubbed it the “Light System.” And he teamed up with Robert Religa, a former EESystem LLC programmer who claimed Sandra Rose Michael actually stole the real “technology” from him.

In January 2025, EESystem LLC responded, predictably, by suing Shurka, alleging breach of contract and tortious interference.

Things got more bizarre from there.

After the lawsuit was filed, Shurka recorded a video with “Ray,” a supposed member of the Light System cabal, who hid his identity by wearing gloves and a hoodie. In the video, Ray said that the EESystem LLC team had fallen out of favor with the Light System cabal and urged Shurka to release damaging, unspecified information on Bertolacini and his mother. “I will only go that route if I have no other choice,” Shurka responded.

In the court filings, meanwhile, EESystem LLC claimed Shurka ripped them off on a joint $500,000 investment they made in the child-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom. Religa, who is countersuing EESystem LLC alongside Shurka, claimed people tried to kidnap him, while his lawyer described, in court, people “portraying themselves as bounty hunters” somehow being involved in the case.

But if these are kooks—and they, uh, certainly give off the vibe—they’re unusually rich ones. A profit-and-loss statement submitted as evidence in one lawsuit claims that EESystem LLC made $86.7 million in revenue since 2002, nearly all of that since 2022. According to a company business report filed in court, EESystem LLC cleared at least $30 million in revenue in one year, boosted by Shurka’s promotion and a pandemic-fueled interest in alternative healing.

Both Shurka and EESystem LLC declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuits.

Oct. 19  

 

 Then-U.S. Congressman George Santos, a Republican representing a New York Long Island district before his conviction for defrauding large numbers of organizations and individuals, flashes the "White Power" sign in Congress (file photo). 

New York Times, Epoch Times Reporter Resigns After Publication Signs Pentagon Rules, Ken Bensinger, Oct. 19, 2025. The reporter, Andrew Thornebrooke, also cited a recent editorial directive to refer to antifa, the far-left ideological movement, as a terrorist organization.

A national security reporter at the right-wing Epoch Times newspaper has resigned after the publication signed on to rules restricting news gathering within the Pentagon.

The reporter, Andrew Thornebrooke, submitted his resignation in writing on Friday. Although he did not have an active Pentagon press pass, he regularly covered issues related to the Defense Department and frequently reported from the cavernous military complex while working at the publication.

In his resignation email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Thornebrooke called The Epoch Times’s signing of the pledge a choice to “abdicate our responsibility as journalists in favor of merely repeating state narratives.”

He also cited a recent editorial directive to refer to antifa, the far-left ideological movement, as a terrorist organization. There is no designation for domestic terrorism under existing U.S. law. The editorial change came soon after President Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a terrorist group.

“I can no longer reconcile my role with the direction the paper has chosen, including its increasing willingness to promote partisan materials, publish demonstrably false information, and manipulate the reporting of its ground staff to shape the worldview of our readers,” Mr. Thornebrooke wrote.

The Epoch Times, which publishes online and also has a weekly print newspaper that is circulated nationwide, did not respond to a request for comment on the resignation. The publication is closely linked to the Falun Gong religious movement, which was founded in China. It is known for its fierce criticism of that country’s Communist government, for spreading conspiracy theories and for its staunch support of Mr. Trump, backing his policies and criticizing his political opponents.

 

New York Times, White House and Government Agencies Join Bluesky, Then Attack Democrats, Aishvarya Kavi, Oct. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The Health and Human Services and Homeland Security Departments were among the agencies posting messages that blamed Democrats for the federal shutdown.

The White House and more than half a dozen government agencies on Friday joined a social media platform popular with liberals and promptly shared posts declaring Democrats were to blame for the ongoing government shutdown.

The posts on Bluesky, a social network whose format is similar to that of X, continued a pattern of partisan attacks from the executive branch after Congress failed to reach an agreement on federal funding and the government shut down on Oct. 1.

The administration has repeatedly thrust normally nonpartisan agencies into the funding fight, including by posting politically loaded language on agency websites, even though the federal bureaucracy is ordinarily expected to stay out of the fray during political disagreements.

In a Bluesky post on Friday, the Transportation Department blamed what it called the “Schumer-Jeffries Shutdown,” referring to the Democratic minority leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, for forcing air traffic controllers, who are required to work through the shutdown, to go without pay. The post was shared alongside a cartoon image of the men in sombreros.

For its part, the Health and Human Services Department repeated a falsehood shared by Republicans: that Democrats had shut down the government because Republicans would not agree to fund free health care for unauthorized immigrants. And the Homeland Security Department’s account posted a taunting message asking people to report “criminal illegal aliens” to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and included a phone number.

Most of the messages were reposted by the White House on its own account, which said in its inaugural post, “We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits.”

 

New York Times, Case Against Bolton Raises Questions Over Justice Dept.’s Use of Espionage Act, Devlin Barrett, Oct. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The allegations in his case are a pointed example of when classified information tumbles into nonsecure places, either by accident or from recklessness by someone trusted to keep it safe.

The indictment of John R. Bolton highlights what national security experts say is the inherent danger of using everyday messaging systems to share government secrets and raises questions about whether the Trump administration is applying the Espionage Act fairly.

Mr. Bolton, who once worked as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser but has for years been an outspoken critic of the president, was charged this week with 18 counts of mishandling classified information by either illegally transmitting or retaining national defense secrets. Prosecutors say he used personal email accounts and a messaging app to share highly sensitive information with two family members who did not have security clearances.

The allegations in his case are a pointed example of what counterintelligence officials call “spillage,” which is when classified information tumbles into nonsecure places, either by accident or from recklessness by someone trusted to keep it safe.

It is a recurring concern that dates back decades. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was investigated for using a private email server to communicate as secretary of state. In March, it emerged that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had relayed the details of a coming military strike in Yemen over Signal, a commercial messaging app, in a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist.

In Mrs. Clinton’s case, national security officials initially feared hackers might have infiltrated a similarly insecure system, though the F.B.I. investigation ultimately found no evidence of that.

In Mr. Hegseth’s case, Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly dismissed the idea of investigating the breach, even though the conversation took place outside the government channels typically used for confidential discussions like war planning.

“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Ms. Bondi said three days after the disclosure of the breach. When Mr. Bolton was charged after having been the subject of a yearslong investigation that gained momentum under the Biden administration, Ms. Bondi declared: “Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”

The inconsistency of the Justice Department’s approach toward Mr. Bolton and current administration officials was striking, national security experts said, acknowledging that every case is different.

“We have no factual basis to believe a criminal investigation was ever commenced with respect to Signalgate, notwithstanding that plans, a term referenced in the Espionage Act, for a military attack were shared on a commercial messaging service,” said David Laufman, who once led the Justice Department section that investigates the mishandling of classified information. 

New York Times, Booking Big Guests and Irked by Leaks: Bari Weiss’s First Days at CBS, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Oct. 19, 2025. Ms. Weiss, an unusual leader for a broadcast news division, has floated ideas for live events and asked journalists why they are seen as biased.

Bari Weiss, right, the new editor in chief of CBS News, surprised senior staff at the venerable news program “60 Minutes” during a meeting on Tuesday when she asked a provocative question:

Why does the country think you’re biased?

The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.

The exchange added to the uncertainty that has settled over CBS News as hundreds of producers, anchors and correspondents take stock of their institution’s unorthodox new boss in her first two weeks on the job.

Ms. Weiss, 41, is unlike any broadcast news leader in recent memory: an outspoken opinion journalist who has never worked in television, and whose rise was powered in part by critiquing the practices of old-line mass media like CBS.

Since her start date on Oct. 6, Ms. Weiss has met with leading anchors and executives, impressing some and confounding others. She has mused about CBS-branded live events, booked interviews for the network with high-profile newsmakers by text message and complained about a flurry of leaks concerning her early tenure, urging executives to identify the leakers in the newsroom.

Still unanswered is how Ms. Weiss plans to juggle her duties at The Free Press, a website she co-founded and runs that mixes opinion and reporting, with her editorial oversight of CBS News, where reporters are discouraged from openly expressing their political views. It is not lost on some CBS journalists that The Free Press has occasionally been among the network’s harshest critics.

This article is based on interviews with 10 people with knowledge of the inner workings of CBS News, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal conversations. Ms. Weiss declined to be interviewed.

On a newsroom-wide conference call on Oct. 9, Ms. Weiss urged her staff to be more aggressive in booking big guests — and announced that during the course of the call, she had personally arranged for three former secretaries of state to participate in a special panel show about the Middle East peace deal.

Only one of the three officials she mentioned, Hillary Rodham Clinton, ultimately appeared on the special, which aired on a weekday afternoon on CBS News’s digital streaming platform. The other two, Antony Blinken and Mike Pompeo, who has an exclusive on-air contract with Fox News, did not.

Ms. Weiss, an ardent supporter of Israel, also helped book an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. She later worked with “60 Minutes” producers to land Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, for this Sunday’s episode.

It is unusual for network leaders to personally book guests. But Ms. Weiss is accustomed to a hands-on leadership style; her website The Free Press, which CBS’s owner Paramount recently acquired for roughly $150 million, is a scrappy start-up with a few dozen employees.

Now she is running a global news organization that for the past year has been caught in the middle of a corporate and political maelstrom.

Mr. Trump sued “60 Minutes” last year, claiming its handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris hurt his campaign, just as CBS News’s parent company Paramount was trying to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance. The deal required approval from regulators appointed by Mr. Trump.

Paramount eventually paid $16 million to settle the case, even though many legal experts said it had little merit, and the Skydance deal was approved shortly afterward. When Skydance’s founder, the technology heir David Ellison, hired Ms. Weiss to run CBS News, some liberals questioned whether her appointment was intended to placate Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Ellison has said he wants CBS News to appeal to what he describes as the 70 percent of Americans who consider themselves center-right or center-left.

For her part, Ms. Weiss has said that change is necessary at CBS News, which aside from weekend programs like “60 Minutes,” lags its rivals ABC and NBC in the Nielsen ratings.

Oct. 18

White House Chronicle, Old Journalism Is Coming in Shiny New Wrappers, Llewellyn King, Oct. 18, 2025. If you know what is going on in Gaza, it is because a journalist told you.

• If you know Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s latest comment about autism, it is because a journalist told you.
• If you know that there was a tsunami off the coast of Indonesia, it is because a journalist told you.
• If you know that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are planning to marry, it is because a journalist told you — in print, over the air or on the web.

Yet when "the media" is discussed, you would think that what is essential isn't journalism, but rather the means of delivery. The death of newspapers is high on the woeful list.

I am a newspaperman through and through. Although I have been involved, often simultaneously, with broadcasting, my heart and soul are in newspapers.

I first set foot in a newsroom when I was 14 — and I left part of me there.

I learned a lot about hot type in my youth, and I love the mechanics of newspapers. At The Washington Post, where I had a roving assignment, I often worked on "the stone," where the type was put in the pages by artisans of extraordinary skill.

But that has gone. Hot type is history. If you want to savor it, tour the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Sadly, I must confess that no printed newspaper is delivered to my home every day. I subscribe to the digital versions of four newspapers, four magazines and several online-only outlets, and I suffer jabs of guilt when I sit before a computer screen.

Nearly all major newspapers and many smaller ones have online editions. The largest ones are grabbing much of the subscription money.

That is a repeat of what happened in big cities toward the end of the golden days of words printed on paper: The winners took all.

The New York Times drove out the Herald Tribune. The Washington Post drove out The Washington Star and The Washington Daily News.

In the case of printed newspapers, those with just a slightly larger circulation corralled all the advertising. Today's chances are that those with a greater offering will drive out those with a robust offering, but not as dominant as, say, The Times.

Big newspapers have adopted the paywall as the model for the future, and others have had to follow. It will be a pity if that prevails.

A better model would be a pay-to-read arrangement where you join a collective such as Visa or MasterCard and pay for what you want to read. That would provide a stable future for journalism and enable much of the innovation that is going on to be on a sound financial footing.

There is innovation aplenty in how the precious commodity, journalism, is brought to you.

The magazines have morphed into something more: They have become daily newspapers with their emailed editions. The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic and The Spectator have taken this path, among others. Even Vanity Fair has an emailed edition.

Additionally, British newspapers have invaded the United States with some spritely email offerings. The Daily Mirror, The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Mail are among them.

Then there are many new entries of purely internet vintage. These include but aren't limited to the leaders, Axios and Semafor — although Axios, with revenues of over $100 million, is the clear winner to date.

This suggests that journalism is alive and well and that its future is online, but its revenue stream isn't certain. One hopes that the winner-takes-all history won't repeat itself and that a vibrant new order of journalism, tempting to talent, grows in importance. After all, at one time big cities had many newspapers; New York had more than 20 daily newspapers.

The threshold of entry for internet publishing is low. A pay-per-view rather than a paywall would establish a new golden era in which skill and talent would carry the day and where the right content would propel its authors and the publications to success.

As to my world of great presses, raging like livid monsters in the middle of night, well, there will be some for a long time. But the new carriers of that critical commodity known as journalism will carry the day.

Oct. 18

Richard Knipel, rear, rushed to grab a man with a gun after witnesses said the man threatened to shoot himself at a Wikipedia conference in Manhattan on Friday (Photo by Bill Adair of Duke University).

New York Times, Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference, Andy Newman, Oct. 18, 2025 (print ed.). After the man walked onto the stage at the “Wiki World’s Fair” event and threatened to kill himself, witnesses said, two members of the audience jumped in to stop him.

The armed man came striding up the aisle at a conference for Wikipedia editors Friday morning in Manhattan, several witnesses said.

The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling.

The audience of well over a hundred people panicked.

“People started yelling, ‘Get down, get down!’ and people started ducking behind their chairs,” said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia.

A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference’s “trust and safety team”: Richard Knipel, the City University of New York’s “Wikimedian-in-residence.” He grabbed the gunman from behind.

Another Wikipedian on the trust and safety team, Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward, too.

“I saw the gun he’s holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down toward the room, and as it swept across me I said ‘Oh, my god,’ and I ducked down, but I still kept moving” said Mr. Lih, a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries.

“I grabbed his arm,” he continued. “He was still clutching his gun pretty hard. I pried his fingers away from it, removed it from his hands and put it down.”

Oct. 17

New York Times, Trump Administration: After Racist Texts, New York G.O.P. Disbands Young Republican Group, Benjamin Oreskes and Nicholas Fandos, Oct. 17, 2025 (print ed.). State party leaders eliminated the New York State Young Republicans’ charter, allowing them to reconstitute the organization with new leaders.

Republican leaders in New York voted on Friday to disband the state’s young Republican group after racist texts among group members became public.

The vote came days after Politico published the messages and reported on how leaders of the New York State Young Republicans and young Republicans in other states had engaged in exchanges that included racist and antisemitic comments. Some participants spoke of raping their political enemies and placing them in gas chambers.

Several members of the New York State Young Republicans — including a recent chair and vice chair — were part of the chat and made offensive comments sent over Telegram.

“The Young Republicans was already grossly mismanaged, and vile language of the sort made in the group chat has no place in our party or its subsidiary organizations.” Edward F. Cox, New York’s Republican Party chairman, said in a written statement.

One state Republican official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the effort to disband the group, which was first reported by Newsday, would allow for a fresh start. By eliminating the group’s charter, the official said, party leaders can reconstitute it and bring in new leadership. 

Oct. 16

 

The Bulwark, False Flag: Racist Young Republican Chat Leaves GOP Stumbling to Respond, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 16, 2025. Split over whether to discipline the offenders or just ignore the whole affair.

IS THERE A PLACE in the Republican operative class for people who “love Hitler”? How about those who like making jokes about black people eating watermelon?

That’s the debate consuming the MAGA movement this week, after Politico published selections from a group chat featuring a faction of the Young Republicans organization using what we will charitably call vile language.

The fallout has morphed into a sort of philosophical debate within the movement: If someone on your own side is caught frolicking in a racist group chat, is it fair to criticize them? Or should you just keep your mouth shut because you agree with them about Trump?

We’ve experienced a version of this debate many times before, often with Republicans choosing to downplay scandals for Trump and his allies. (We still don’t know where “border czar” Tom Homan’s $50,000 ended up, in large part because MAGA personalities have said they don’t give a fuck.)

But this Young Republicans flap is different, precisely because of the low stakes for anyone who wasn’t in the chat. There are no electoral outcomes or Supreme Court appointments hinging on defending the participants here. These mostly wannabe apparatchiks could easily be thrown overboard and replaced in a day. It’s a more or less pain-free way to reclaim some moral high ground—or, at least, to avoid getting covered in the muck.

And at first, that’s what GOP officials and entities tried to do. The Young Republicans national organization called for the chat’s participants to resign and the Kansas GOP suspended its Young Republicans wing, which had members in the chat. Even Roger Stone condemned the content.

But in a sign of the times we’re in, there was an immediate backlash to the backlash. Both the Young Republicans’ and the Kansas GOP’s tweets were quickly inundated with replies calling them gay.

Support this newsletter’s coverage of the right, the far-right, and the far-out right—sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today:Subscribed

Then Vice President JD Vance logged on to announce that he would give no ground in admitting the chat messages were wrong, and said that anyone who cared about the texts was engaged in “pearl clutching.”

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said on Wednesday, referencing group chat members who were in their late twenties and early thirties. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”

THE RESPONSES PROVIDE yet another distillation of the fault lines that have come to define the modern GOP. In one corner is the aggressive “New Right”—a faction that explicitly doesn’t care about hypocrisy and is eager to use whatever power they have to crush their foes. They are typified by Vance, who just a few weeks ago was calling for people who posted social media tweets criticizing Charlie Kirk to be fired. In the other corner are the shreds of pre-Trump standards that remain in the party along with those who believe it makes moral and political sense to abide by them.

That latter, lonely group has been represented a lot lately by James Lindsay, a conservative pundit whose anti-woke crusade during the Biden administration has morphed into a new war against what he calls the “Woke Right.” His target is essentially the new wave of antisemitism and “groyperism” led by figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.

“This isn’t about a group chat,” Lindsay wrote on X. “A ton of younger MAGA is actually like that.”

Lindsay is not lacking for material to work with. On Wednesday the Capitol Police launched an investigation into why a staffer for a Republican member of Congress had an American flag with a swastika displayed in his workspace. And though Lindsay may be waging a lonely fight, he’s not waging it entirely alone. Jewish conservatives, in particular, have grown less than thrilled to find their gentile compatriots so comfortable with gas chamber jokes and even ironic Hitler praise.

“Remember when we watched the left get taken over by its worst voices and wondered how they let it happen?” right-wing personality Arynne Wexler tweeted. “Well.”

Among the arguments that Lindsay’s compatriots have made is that the rule that conservatives should not attack one another only seems to go one way—with figures like Owens and Fuentes seeming to relish tearing into their more traditional, moderate rivals.

Still, I think Vance’s “New Right” will carry the argument here. The motivation is obvious: As long as you never criticize anyone on the right for even smaller-stake scandals, you don’t have to do the same when the consequences are much greater and involve someone like Trump himself.

Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh typified this approach when he posted that conservatives needed to stick together no matter what, rather than “throwing each other to the wolves at every opportunity.”

“The Right doesn’t stick together,” Walsh posted on X. “That’s our biggest problem by far. Conservatives are quick to denounce each other, jump on dogpiles, disavow, attack their allies.”Subscribedh

THE FRATERNAL DEFENSE of the chatters grew so pronounced on Wednesday that some even argued such forums were needed to ease the male loneliness crisis—that disbanding them would deprive participants of the self-love safe spaces they need.

“The group chat is sacred,” wrote popular right-wing meme account Autism Capital. “It’s the only safe space men have left to call each other retards and homos. You don’t take that from a man. That’s evil.”

Like Autism Capital, many on the online right seemed far more interested in identifying and punishing the chat leaker than in dealing with the chat participants themselves. Much of that intrigue has focused on State New York Young Republican Club chairman Gavin Wax, who is an avowed enemy of at least one of the Young Republican officials exposed in the chat leak.

In an affidavit first reported by Politico, one group chat member—a staffer in the Small Business Administration—claimed Wax “threatened” his “professional standing” and issued other forms of retaliation if he didn’t give up the chat logs. In the affidavit, the chat member added that he folded under the pressure and handed the logs over to a Wax “associate,” though he wasn’t sure how they made their way to Politico.

“Seriously fuck Gavin Wax,” Fuentes tweeted. “[He] should be immediately blacklisted from any political circle. Zero tolerance for friendly fire.”

Unlike many of the previously unknown Young Republicans implicated, Wax is a real man-about-town in the young MAGA movement. His New York conservative club has offered a glitzier, naughtier, generally less predictable take on life as a Republican than more staid Young Republican events. At the group’s gala last year, for example, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz inexplicably collapsed onstage.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Wax has been serving in the Trump administration. After an abortive and controversial stint at the FCC, he has been the chief of staff to the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the State Department, meaning he potentially did have more power to threaten the group chat member’s career in the Trump administration. But as a sign of how deep the racism goes, Wax’s boss at State, Under Secretary Darren Beattie, was himself fired from the first Trump administration for speaking at a racist conference.

Oct. 15

National Press Club, National Press Club Warns Pentagon Move to Strip Reporter Access Strikes at the Heart of Press Freedom, Staff Report, Oct. 15, 2025. National Press Club President Mike Balsamo today issued a statement on new restrictions that forced dozens of Pentagon journalists to surrender their credentials:

“The National Press Club condemns the Pentagon’s unprecedented move to strip dozens of journalists of access, a sweeping action that strikes at the heart of press freedom and public accountability.

For generations, reporters have walked the halls of the Pentagon not as guests, but as representatives of the American people — asking hard questions on behalf of those who serve in uniform. To shut them out is to shut out the public itself. This is not a matter of policy or protocol. It is an assault on transparency and an erosion of democratic norms.

The Pentagon may close its doors to reporters, but it cannot close the public’s right to know.

Independent coverage of the U.S. military is essential to public trust and oversight. A Pentagon that limits scrutiny limits understanding and weakens the very institution it seeks to protect. The First Amendment does not stop at the Pentagon’s gates.

The National Press Club calls on the Department of Defense to immediately restore full access for independent journalists and recommit to the principles that have long distinguished this country from governments that fear their own press.

When history looks back on this day, it should see a press that refused to yield and a public that demanded answers. The people’s right to know endures — with or without the Pentagon’s permission.”

Hollywood Reporter, Layoffs Hit NBC News: 150 Jobs Cut Ahead of Versant Split, Alex Weprin, Oct. 15, 2025. The cuts come ahead of Comcast's Versant spinoff, which will see MSNBC and CNBC cleaved off from the rest of the NBC News Group. 

Layoffs hit NBC News on Wednesday, with the network news division facing cuts ahead of Comcast’s spinoff of Versant. About 150 jobs were eliminated, representing about 2 percent of the workforce of the NBC News Group.

The cuts were across the News Group, without specific teams being targeted.

The Versant spin will see MSNBC and CNBC separated from NBC News. NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC are currently all part of the NBC News Group, led by Cesar Conde.

Per a source, the cuts were driven by the fact that NBC News will no longer be providing newsgathering capabilities for CNBC and MSNBC, as well as broader concerns around the overall economic environment for the media sector.

That said, NBC News is shifting resources to other areas, including the forthcoming subscription offering, and new areas of coverage like sports. The division currently has about 140 open job postings, and impacted staff are being encouraged to apply for those roles.

“Coming off the successful creation of our new daily podcast Here’s the Scoop, we are preparing to launch our NBC News subscription service later this year that will feature the best of our coverage and include new premium offerings,” Conde wrote in a note to staff last week. “NBC News is expanding its new Sports Hub, in partnership with NBC Sports, with the NBA returning to NBC, as well as the Milan Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the World Cup on Telemundo. And to support the leading position of NBC News, we will be launching a marketing campaign soon that will reinforce our reputation for rigorous fact-based reporting that is indispensable and accessible across all platforms for all, the first such campaign in modern memory.”

NBC News employees impacted by the cuts are being given 60 days’ notice, as well as a severance package and outplacement services.

The Bulwark Quick Hits, Political Opinion, WHAT THE ZUCK, Sam Stein, right, Oct. 15, 2025.To hear Mark Zuckerberg tell it, one of the great offenses that Joe Biden committed was the use of the government to suppress speech.

The Meta CEO had a specific bone to pick: that the Biden administration had pressured his company to take down posts about vaccine safety and efficacy during the height of the COVID pandemic. But he cast this moment as an almost spiritual awakening. Donald Trump, he argued, would get the government out of the content moderation business. He, himself, would never allow Meta to be jawboned again.

“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg declared. “And we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Few people thought this was sincere. Zuckerberg, right, after all, needed to find a way to ally himself with Trump that didn’t seem totally craven. So he projected the 47th president as a free speech absolutist who wouldn’t do to him what Biden had done. And then Trump did. And Zuckerberg went along.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted that her office had reached out to Facebook and gotten the platform to remove a “large group page that was being used to dox and target” ICE. Bondi was well within her right to do this—as was the Biden aide who pushed Facebook to drop the COVID vaccine entry. Government offices reach out to publications ALL THE TIME to make these requests.

But the outrage that Republicans had over the Biden revelations (there were, quite literally, congressional hearings) were absent Tuesday. And the only comment Facebook would offer was: “This Group was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm.”

Reasonable enough. So too is the case, made by a DOJ official, that their request to Facebook was more grounded than the one from the Biden aide. But, in the end, this proves that there are occasions when content moderation lines can be drawn and that there are instances when “pressure” from an administration can be tolerated. Zuckerberg isn’t a principled actor, he’s a calculating one. Glad we’ve cleared it up.

 

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Fox Declared War on Us, Ben Meiselas, right, Oct. 15, 2025. This doesn’t come as a surprise. Fox has always hated the MeidasTouch Network. Rupert Murdoch (shown in a 2009 file photo above) despises me and my brothers. He thought he was going to hand off the biggest news network to his son Lachlan. The Murdochs poured billions of dollars into it. Private equity poured billions of dollars into Fox.

Yet, here we are—with the MeidasTouch Network, built on this Substack and our subscribers, beating Rupert Murdoch,.

As you know, other than the MeidasTouch Network, my favorite news entity is The Guardian, which is based in the United Kingdom. After expanding out from Australia, Rupert started building his media empire in the United Kingdom. The Murdochs are very much aware of the major stories coming out of their competition like The Guardian.

Apparently, from all of my Fox sources, the profile that The Guardian did on me and the MeidasTouch Network sent Rupert and Lachlan into a spiral. They’ve told several executives privately, words to the effect of, “We are going to war with Meidas and taking down the Meiselas brothers.”

I hear they have an entire digital team at Fox monitoring the work we do each day.In the past, Fox has essentially reported our hosts to the DOJ for accurately reporting on ICE. As you know from my prior reporting, Fox has also gone after several of our hosts on air.

Although the Murdochs may want to make this fight about Murdoch versus Meiselas, I don’t see it that way. I see it as Murdoch versus the Meidas Mighty. I don’t have an ego in this. The MeidasTouch Network has shocked the world and is pummeling Fox in views and engagement because of this Meidas Mighty community.

Whereas Fox deceives and exploits its audience, in my opinion, MeidasTouch uplifts and channels the strength of our community to get out critical messages and the truth during these uncertain times. That is why we will continue to beat Fox and the Murdochs. Rupert and Lachlan will just have to learn that their time controlling the narrative with lies is over.

As The Guardian article pointed out, it’s now time for the MeidasTouch Network to lead the way. Let’s keep building this wonderful network and community together

Oct. 14

Hollywood Reporter, Jeff Bezos’ Ownership Stake in Amazon Dropped Below 10 Percent as Tech Mogul Continued Stock Sell-Off, Alex Weprin, Oct. 14, 2025. The Amazon founder has been selling off his shares at a regular cadence since stepping aside as CEO four years ago.

For what is likely the first time in Amazon‘s history, founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos‘ stake is now less than 10 percent of the company.

In a securities filing Tuesday, Bezos disclosed that he now owns 9 percent of the company’s shares, after selling off more than 100 million shares over the course of the past year. A year ago, Bezos owned 10.1 percent of Amazon, and a proxy filing earlier this year showed that his stake had dropped to 9.6 percent.

When the company went public in 1997, the tech mogul owned more than 43 percent of the company. When he stepped aside as CEO in 2021 and handed day-to-day control over to Andy Jassy, he owned 14.1 percent of the company, per SEC filings. October 14, 2025 1:41pm

Oct. 13 

 

 The Pentagon Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. 

New York Times, Several News Outlets Reject Pentagon’s Reporting Restrictions, Erik Wemple, Oct. 13, 2025. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsmax and others said their journalists would not agree to the Defense Department’s policies on news gathering ahead of a Tuesday deadline.Listen to this article · 4:25 min Learn more

Several news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsmax and NPR, have announced that their journalists will not sign a new set of Pentagon restrictions affecting news gathering in the massive military complex.

“We fundamentally oppose the restrictions that the Trump administration is imposing on journalists who are reporting on matters of defense and national security,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, said in a statement on Monday announcing that the outlet’s staff would not sign the Pentagon document. “The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer-funded military resources and personnel are being deployed.”

The 21-page Pentagon document lays out a number of requirements at odds with freedom of press protections, according to lawyers representing news organizations. One is a provision stating that journalists could be deemed a “security risk” based on several considerations, including whether they disclose classified or even unclassified information without the Pentagon’s authorization. Media lawyers worry that the stricture could expose reporters to punishment for engaging in routine reporting.

The document replaces a simpler, one-page form that outlined access limitations for journalists, according to the Pentagon Press Association.

Implementation of the new policy is on a fast track: Journalists have until Tuesday at 5 p.m. to decide whether or not to sign the form. Those who do not must turn in their credentials a day later.

Other news outlets, including the Guardian and CNN, have also said they would reject the policy. The announcements reflect the news media’s wide-ranging frustration with efforts by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the physical movement of reporters in the building and impose fresh limits on their activities.

“CNN’s mission to report fairly and fully on the Department of War, the U.S. military and the Trump administration will continue regardless of physical access to the Pentagon. We will not be deflected from our duty to hold all three fairly and fully to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and decision-making processes of the U.S. government without fear or favor,” CNN said in a statement last week.

In a statement on Friday, Richard Stevenson, the Washington Bureau Chief of The Times said, “Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy, which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment. Since the policy was first announced, we have expressed concerns that it constrains how journalists can report on the U.S. military, which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually.”

The press association that lobbies for Pentagon reporters issued a statement on Monday saying, “This Wednesday, most Pentagon Press Association members seem likely to hand over their badges rather than acknowledge a policy that gags Pentagon employees and threatens retaliation against reporters who seek out information that has not been preapproved for release.”

The Athletic via New York Times, Investigation: Only five games into Bill Belichick’s first season, UNC football has spiraled from nationally relevant to national punchline, Bruce Feldman, Brendan Marks and Stewart Mandel, Oct. 13, 2025.  Tabloid fodder surrounding the 73-year-old’s relationship with 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson has given way to mockery over the 2-3 Tar Heels’ lopsided losses to TCU (48-14), UCF (34-9) and Clemson (38-10).

North Carolina ranks 133rd out of 136 teams in total offense (263.8 yards per game), and opponents are completing 70.3 percent of their passes, which ranks 131st. 

New York Times, Opinion: The New Julia Roberts Movie Seethes With Anti-Woke Resentment, Michelle Goldberg, right, Oct. 13, 2025. “After the Hunt,” Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller about the fallout from the #MeToo movement, has been in theaters for only a few days, but it already feels dated. It’s a memento of the micro-era, toward the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the backlash against self-righteous progressivism was cresting, and taking on sanctimonious college students seemed, at least in some circles, like a brave provocation.

Now, at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, “After the Hunt” is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.

“It has gotten so hard for me to listen to these kids, when they have had everything, everything handed to them in their lives, insist that the world stop at the first small injustice,” says a school counselor played by Chloë Sevigny, using an obscenity. That peevish spirit animates much of the movie, which turns on not one but two possibly made-up allegations of sexual abuse.

In 2018 the Democratic strategist Aaron Huertas coined the term “reactionary centrism” to describe a style of politics that prides itself on even-handedness while being disproportionately obsessed with left-wing overreach. Always deployed as an epithet, “reactionary centrism” is overused by progressives to inoculate themselves from criticism.

But it describes a real ethos — a loathing of wokeness so intense, it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump. “After the Hunt” brings reactionary centrism to prestige cinema.

There’s nothing wrong with making a movie about the anguish of cancellation, like the brilliant 2022 film “Tár,” or about an ambiguous claim of sexual transgression. “After the Hunt” fails not because of its premise but because it’s overwrought and self-satisfied. It’s about the terrifying power of the mob, with the mob conceived as the unreasonably angry students of the Ivy League.

The movie offers insight into the politics of victimhood, just not in the way its creators intended.