Several major media trends are seriously undermining American democracy and other quality of life issues. Among these developments are:

• Government censorship, falsehoods, restrictions of access or covert manipulation;
• Financial cutbacks in newsrooms eroding professional standards;
• Slanted or otherwise manipulative "news" techniques;
• Heavy-handed political control, increasingly with partisan agendas, over schools, colleges, textbooks
• Outright "fake news" that makes scant pretense of honest coverage.

To counter such practices, we link to significant news reports and commentary below. The materials are in reverse chronological order and are drawn primarily from large news organizations and expert commentators. Most focus on U.S. mass media, but some items related to global press freedom, education, high tech, religion, sports and other entertainment.

• • Andrew Kreig / Justice Integrity Project editor

     

    

    The Justice Integrity Project's editor (shown above during a 2014 lecture shown on C-SPAN, is a public affairs commentator, author and attorney in the communications field

    Andrew Kreig, the editor of the materials excerpted below, is a former newspaper reporter, magazine editor and columnist. Also, he was the president / CEO (from 1996 to 2008) of the Wireless Communications Association, a Washington, DC-based trade association that advocated for wireless Internet services and advanced applications on behalf of members that included leading communications companies. For years, he edited its daily bulletins and supervised its conventions that gathered prominent government officials, companies, educators and other thought leaders in advanced communications.

    Also, he is the author of two books addressing problems in the news media that harm civic life. Read more.

    Based on such experience, the news excerpts below are chosen to illustrate important news and trends. The excerpts cite language from the outlets except for subheads and an occasionally clearly marked 'Editor's note.'
    

2026

Note: This segment of our near-daily summary of Media News encompasses news stories that began in 2021. For previous periods extending back to 2018, kindly visit these links: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

 

October

Oct. 4

 

New York Times, Measles Outbreak in Amish Country Forces Some to Rethink Vaccines, Anemona Hartocollis, Photographs by Madeleine Hordinski, Oct. 4, 2026. The spread of measles in Pennsylvania and Ohio is largely affecting Amish communities where vaccinations levels are low.

The Amish family thought the chills and fever that had hammered their second oldest son was strep throat. Then a ringing came from the phone shack in the yard: A friend was calling to say the measles had been lurking at a horse auction in Lancaster, Pa.

The 15-year-old boy and his father, an Amish horse breaker, had been there just a few days before.

“We knew it was the measles,” Emma Miller, the boy’s mother, said.

Measles cases have been reported in 45 states in 2026. In Pennsylvania — where state officials say five have died in connection with the outbreak — and Ohio, the Amish people are bearing the brunt of the sickness. They are also taking a share of the blame from outsiders, owing to a lifestyle that tends toward shutting out modern medicine, along with other aspects of contemporary life.

But two days of traveling with a health practitioner through the pastoral Amish country of northeastern Ohio found that despite the stereotype, the Amish are not anti-vaccine. Their reasons for rejecting vaccination are more nuanced.

Like most other Americans, many had never seen a case of measles before, and were not aware of how dangerous the virus could be, leading to deafness, brain swelling and even death. They thought measles would not find them, and it did.

The contagion, officially declared vanquished by vaccination, ripped through the Miller family over the summer, sickening six of the seven children and their mother. It skipped only their father, Marvin Miller, and one daughter, Mary Ann. Both had been vaccinated.

Through the fog of her own illness Mrs. Miller struggled to nurse the sick children, including the baby, as she dispensed Tylenol to battle the fever that accompanies measles. It was left to 12-year-old Mary Ann to sweep the floors and do the baking. Neighbors left food at the door.

The family stayed home from church to protect the congregation. But for all their precautions, the sickness jumped to their cousins, who had visited before there was any thought of measles

“I didn’t imagine it would be so bad,” Mrs. Miller said.

The Amish are sometimes depicted as objecting to vaccination on religious grounds, but getting vaccinated was a matter of personal preference, families said, again and again. Often it came down to a matter of family practice, or tradition. If their parents or grandparents had been vaccinated, they probably would be, too.

Vaccinations rates are also low because the Amish generally do not have commercial health insurance or credit cards. They pay for medical appointments in cash. In an emergency, they turn to their mutual aid fund.

The measles vaccine came into use in 1963, when the virus was killing 400 to 500 people a year in the United States.

In 2000, measles was declared eliminated, but not eradicated, a subtlety of terminology that allows for a recurrence of the disease. That status is now in jeopardy. There have been more outbreaks in recent years, as hesitancy over vaccines has been fueled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, who has long been a skeptic of their efficacy.

“The memory of the vaccination coming in and immediately dropping the death count across the country is for some people two to three generations away,” Cleveland’s director of public health, Dr. David Margolius, said. “That, coupled with more vocal people in positions of power saying, ‘Hey, you don’t need these vaccinations anymore.’”

Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak has sickened 977 people as of Oct. 2, with Lancaster County and its large Amish population accounting for about 40 percent of cases.

It has hospitalized 195 people and been associated with five deaths, according to the state’s public health department. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists just two deaths, disputing the state’s tally.

Ohio has logged 206 cases this year, with the highest numbers in three Amish-heavy counties: Geauga, with 49; Wayne, 44; and Ashtabula, 32. Last year there were 46 measles cases statewide. The state has shipped about 7,100 doses of outbreak-related vaccine to providers this year, up from just over 1,000 last year.

The Pennsylvania and Ohio contagions are most likely linked. Health investigators say some of the Ohio contagion began just as the Miller family’s did, with exposure at horse sales in Lancaster, Pa., and in Bloomfield and Sugarcreek, Ohio. From there, it spread to weddings, funerals, parties and church services.

Anemona Hartocollis and Madeleine Hordinski spent two days touring Geauga County, Ohio, with a health care practitioner and talking to Amish people, mainly women, about their attitudes toward vaccination.

 

 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with President Trump and Mehmet Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare services administrator, in the White House in September (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross) 

Politico, RFK Jr.’s movement is in disarray, Amanda Chu, Oct. 4, 2026. Tony Lyons, the leading organizer of the Make America Healthy Again movement, promised to raise $100 million to support Republicans this year. He’s nowhere close.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement is turning on its leader.

Not RFK Jr.

Rather, Tony Lyons, the Kennedy friend and book publisher who is the president of a web of MAHA nonprofits and political groups.

Supporters of Kennedy’s message, that food and pharma companies have conspired with bureaucrats to poison Americans for profit, say Lyons is selling out to business interests who want Kennedy’s ear now that he’s President Donald Trump’s health secretary. Ignoring the grassroots could cost Republicans running in the midterm elections who need it energized, they say.

The latest evidence: fundraising reports from Lyons’ MAHA Political Action Committee that show fewer than 20 donors this year, totaling $1 million, far short of the $100 million Lyons promised to raise to help Republicans allied with Kennedy in this year’s elections. Many of its donors are companies that have interests before the Health Department, POLITICO found. The PAC has spent less than $800,000 to support candidates this year.

A month before the midterms, the PAC has spent no money on races that will help Republicans maintain control of Congress, frustrating MAHA supporters who worry leaders are squandering the movement’s momentum after it helped return Trump to office.

“What a joke!” Alex Clark, a MAHA influencer who works at the conservative group Turning Point USA said of the PAC’s spending. “We’re talking about millions of voters who just fell into our lap like manna from heaven, and we’re just gonna let them walk away.”

Lyons did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment.

He galvanizes supporters on weekly calls with warnings about the “dark forces” in corporate America lobbying to undermine Kennedy’s agenda. “We don’t want Bobby Kennedy or his whole team to be sitting in congressional hearings where they’re just trying to slow things down and make it easier and more affordable for big companies to poison the American public,” he recently said.

The fundraising report came as Lyons hosted an invite-only summit on Sept. 29 at Washington’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel sponsored by companies including Anthropic and OpenAI, artificial intelligence companies contributing to the data center boom, the health impacts of which many Kennedy supporters fear, and Walmart, purveyor of the ultraprocessed food Kennedy decries.

Neither AI firm provided comment when POLITICO contacted them to ask about their sponsorship of the event. Walmart declined to comment.

“What is shocking is how quickly a movement built to challenge that system appears to have reproduced it,” wrote Robert Malone, a scientist who shares Kennedy’s skepticism of Covid vaccines and advised him on vaccine policy until quitting in March, citing disagreement with Kennedy’s staff, in a Substack essay reflecting on the summit.Department of Health and Human Services headquarters are seen.

Lyons galvanizes supporters on weekly calls with warnings about the “dark forces” in corporate America lobbying to undermine Kennedy’s agenda. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

In addition to MAHA PAC, Lyons leads its sister nonprofits, MAHA Center, MAHA Action and MAHA Institute, and moves money between them. MAHA PAC, for example, has transferred $4 million to MAHA Action since January 2025, according to federal filings.

MAHA supporters can join the movement on the MAHA Action website through a series of tiered subscriptions, costing up to $6,000 a year. MAHA Holdings administers the subscriptions. Finn Kennedy, one of Kennedy’s sons, sits on MAHA Holdings’ board.

“These outside entities that have branded themselves as representative of the MAHA voting bloc…they are not helping us,” said Stephanie Stock, president of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, a nonprofit that supports Kennedy’s efforts to convince states to reduce school vaccine requirements.

A MAHA Institute-backed candidate, Stock partially blames her loss in a state House primary in May on lack of funding. Her opponent outraised her more than tenfold and she received no money from Lyons’ MAHA groups.

“These guys are throwing galas, and we’ve just kind of had it,” Stock added. “You look up at the sponsors, and you see Anthropic and Walmart, drug companies, and you’re like, ‘What in the world?’”Will the real MAHA candidate please stand up?

Trump aides have said they hope the president’s embrace of Kennedy as health secretary will benefit Republicans in the midterms. They’ve also credited the alliance with Kennedy with helping Trump defeat Kamala Harris two years ago.

But Zen Honeycutt, one of the MAHA moms who supports Kennedy and founder of nonprofit Moms Across America, is straying.Watch: The ConversationAdam Hamilton on faith, Trump and the fight for Kansas

Less than two months to the midterms, in a windowless conference room by the White House, she rallied candidates at a convention for political independents estranged from both parties.

“I want to empower you to utilize this MAHA movement as best as you can to raise up the independents in this country,” Honeycutt declared to a full room peppered with people who worked on Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.

None of the candidates there were endorsed by Lyons’ MAHA groups, which are backing only Republicans. Honeycutt’s nonprofit aims to endorse 20 of its own candidates across party lines.

In an interview with POLITICO, Honeycutt called MAHA’s issues “nonpartisan.” “That’s not what some of the people in the MAHA world would want from us. They want us to align with the Republican Party, but we will talk to anyone,” she said.

Some candidates supportive of MAHA at the convention are running against an opponent backed by Lyons’ groups. In the room with Honeycutt were Clayton Cuteri and Bill Reeside, independents running in South Carolina’s 1st District race against Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt, who has no relation to Zen. MAHA Action has endorsed Jenny Honeycutt and the MAHA PAC has spent $26,000 on her campaign.

“It’s a civil war out there,” said Larry Sharpe, who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Sharpe called Lyons’ decision to back only Republicans a “strategic mistake,” adding “it’s almost like a split between Eastern Orthodox and Catholics…They both believe in the afterlife. They both believe Jesus is divine, but they’ve gone different ways.”Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, at the 2026 Independent National Convention

Zen Honeycutt, founder of nonprofit Moms Across America, says MAHA is "nonpartisan." | Amanda Chu

Democrats, too, are making overtures to the MAHA movement. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has released a “Building a Healthier America” policy agenda that speaks to MAHA advocates’ concerns about food safety and chemicals in the environment.

A House working group led by New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently recommended that the party woo Kennedy’s followers.

MAHA supporters have expressed growing frustration with the GOP since Trump issued a February order protecting a pesticide Kennedy and his supporters think is a carcinogen. Since, there have been complaints about new Health Department appointees, like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Erica Schwartz, who don’t share Kennedy’s skeptical views about vaccines, and Kennedy’s failure to take mRNA vaccines, like those used to combat Covid-19, from the market.

Candidates endorsed by Lyons’ MAHA groups have had mixed success in the primaries. A POLITICO analysis in June found that most of the winners were incumbents or candidates who previously held office. As of June, 11 of the 12 MAHA Institute-backed candidates who lost their races had never run before.

Lyons scored a significant GOP primary win when Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow defeated incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Kennedy foe on Capitol Hill. And another when Zach Lahn, an entrepreneur, defeated Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra to secure the Republican nomination for Iowa governor. Lyons committed $1 million to support each candidate.

While the PAC has yet to donate to Lahn, the vast majority of its election spending has gone to Letlow, who received 90% of the $790,000 it’s spent this year to support candidates, according to federal filings.

Neither race will help Republicans retain control of Congress. MAHA PAC’s choice to support Letlow also went against the wishes of local MAHA supporters, who wanted the group to back a different challenger. Fiorella Trapani, co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, called MAHA’s endorsement a “punch in the gut.”

“If MAHA wants to represent this movement, its actions, endorsements, and priorities need to reflect the principles and people that built it,” she wrote in a statement.

Of the 85 candidates endorsed by Lyons’ MAHA groups, only six are in competitive races that will determine the balance of power in Congress: incumbent Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida; Tom Barrett of Michigan and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. There is also Derek Morrin, who is running to unseat Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur; Joe Mitchell, who is running for a House seat in Iowa; and John Sununu, who is running to return to the Senate to represent New Hampshire. None of these candidates have received money from MAHA, according to its PAC filings.

Some of MAHA PAC’s top expenses include X, formerly known as Twitter. The PAC paid the platform $810,000 this election cycle, according to filings. Merit Street Media, a media company founded by television host Phil McGraw, known by his stage name Dr. Phil, received more than $500,000. The private Ned’s Club in Washington was another top expense with the PAC spending more than $155,000 on the venue in this election cycle.

Amber Webster, a former Democrat who volunteered on Kennedy’s campaign in Connecticut, called the PAC’s lack of grassroots spending a “missed opportunity.”

“If they have committed to spend $100 million, they should really be honing in on some of these people in these seats that we either need to keep or flip and help these candidates get elected,” she said.

“There is a really big MAHA army out there that could be helping the Republican Party more.”

In 2025, Tahnoon's businesses bought 49% share in the Donald Trump family's cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) for half a billion dollars and bought $2 billion worth of USD1 stablecoins from WLF.[3] Shortly thereafter, the Trump administration ignored national security concerns and committed to provide 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year to the UAE.[3]

Status with Natalie Korach, The Sunday Spotlight: McClatchy Goes Mute, Natalie Korach, Oct. 4, 2026. Weeks after gutting local newsrooms, McClatchy leadership has offered staffers virtually no explanation of what comes next, Status has learned, as the company builds out its controversial A.I. operation.

On the morning of the September 10 layoffs, the Idaho Statesman’s editor stood before a newsroom that was about to lose more than half its staff and read from what one employee described as a “corporate script.” According to that person, the editor appeared to have been given a list of affected names from McClatchy leadership that he didn’t know about until the morning of the cuts.

It was, in some ways, the only real communication Statesman staffers would receive about the cuts. The storied, Boise-based publication is set to lose a staggering 13 of its 22 remaining newsroom staffers, Status has learned, including 10 of its remaining 18 union members. It’s a result of sweeping nationwide cuts across McClatchy, the 169-year-old newspaper chain that since 2020 has been owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. At the end of next week, staffers at the Statesman and dozens of other journalists at McClatchy-owned papers will officially depart their respective outlets.

They are leaving a company that has spent the past year increasingly betting on artificial intelligence to power its newspapers, despite staunch objections from its own journalists. Since the cuts, McClatchy has celebrated new hires for its A.I.-focused “content innovation lab,” while offering almost no explanation of why the layoffs were necessary or what comes next for their newsrooms. And though there’s no indication the cuts were tied to the company’s A.I. ambitions, in newsrooms still reeling from the losses, staffers told me the company’s priorities are hard to miss.

The layoffs were haphazard from the start. Staffers received limited information from McClatchy leadership, and in most cases, their own local newsroom leaders, about just how deep the cuts went. McClatchy has not disclosed the scale of the layoffs, but the News Guild-CWA said McClatchy axed more than 90 unionized employees across 17 publications, representing 40% of the company's unionized workforce—and the total, including non-unionized employees, is almost certainly more. One laid-off staffer told Status that employees across McClatchy papers had to compare notes among themselves to piece together the scale of the bloodletting. “We could see it was all over the board in ways that are going to be crippling for news coverage in a lot of these communities,” the staffer said.

The day of the layoffs, McClatchy’s vice president of local news, Greg Farmer, said in an internal memo obtained by Status that the company was “reshaping” its newsrooms to better align with consumers, pointing to a 41% decline in consumer revenue. Since then, I’m told, corporate has gone almost completely silent—and, tellingly, a spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment. There has been no company-wide town hall to explain the layoffs or how McClatchy intends to restructure its newsrooms. No follow-up memo from leadership addressing the cuts. And certainly no opportunity for staffers to ask questions.

Instead, McClatchy leadership has left the top editor at each local publication to fend for themselves when it comes to justifying the devastating cuts. And the silence hasn’t been lost on staffers.

“For this round of layoffs, they’ve pursued an even more troubling strategy: Not only are they avoiding accountability to the public by refusing to explain themselves publicly, they’re also avoiding any meaningful explanation in our newsroom,” Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the paper’s news guild, told Status.Meanwhile, many of the local newsrooms under the McClatchy umbrella haven’t held independent newsroom-wide meetings to address staff concerns after losing significant portions of their ranks. The Sacramento Bee’s executive editor didn’t address the newsroom for days, when he offered to meet with staffers one-on-one about the restructuring, Lange said, who described the company’s communications strategy as “bizarre.” (Editors at the Statesman and Bee did not respond to requests for comment.) Employees at other McClatchy-owned publications, including The Miami Herald and Belleville News-Democrat in Illinois, described similar experiences.

Adding insult to injury, while McClatchy has remained mute about the cuts and how it plans to reposition its local newspapers for the future, the company did find something to celebrate. Less than a week after announcing the layoffs, McClatchy sent an all-staff memo obtained by Status, welcoming a slate of new hires, even though they had officially joined the company in August. The timing struck staffers as particularly jarring. After gutting local newsrooms, corporate leadership was touting hires who had already been on the job for weeks.

Editorial staffers also noticed that three of the hires were for executive positions at the national level, and three were being tapped as directors for the “content innovation lab,” the team involved in the company’s controversial push to integrate A.I. into its newsrooms.

That effort has already become a major flashpoint between McClatchy and its journalists. Earlier this year, the company rolled out its internally developed “Content Scaling Agent,” an A.I. tool designed to take reporters’ existing journalism and generate additional versions of stories for different audiences. Executives pitched the technology as a way to increase publishing volume and reach new readers, but its rollout triggered immediate resistance across McClatchy newsrooms. Journalists at papers including the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, Idaho Statesman, and Tacoma News Tribune staged a byline revolt, refusing to allow their names to appear on stories generated by the tool.

The Athletic via The New York Times, Inside Arizona State men’s hockey, and the workout that left a player on life support, Katie Strang, Nathan Fenno and Adam Kilgore, Sept. 17, 2026. Greg Powers was going to fix the problem. The longtime Arizona State University men’s hockey coach, the only person to lead the program in its 12 years in Division I, had watched his 2025-26 team lose 10 of its final 12 games and miss the postseason, and he knew why.

In a 247Sports podcast on May 18, Powers lamented that he didn’t get “buy-in” from the players and that the Sun Devils had lost the blue-collar identity that he felt propelled a nascent Division I program to four winning seasons and a 2019 NCAA Tournament berth.

“I hate to say the word ‘soft,’ but that’s what we were,” Powers said. “And it became contagious. It was a team that just didn’t attack adversity.”

This season was going to be different, starting from day one. When players reported for the first official team activity Aug. 20 at Sun Angel Stadium, the workout was not led by the coach. Instead, according to photographs and interviews, Powers wore a pair of slide-on sandals and watched from the side as Tim Ziesel, 39, a former Green Beret, shouted commands at his players.

Powers told the players that the new workout would be challenging, multiple people present said, but if they wanted to be successful, they would get through it as a team.

Among the new players Powers brought in was Matthew Mayich, a St. Louis Blues prospect who arrived from Stoney Creek, Ontario, about a week earlier. Teammates called him “Mayo.” Toward the end of the roughly 45-minute workout, Mayich, 21, collapsed, dropping the medicine ball he had been hauling. An athletic trainer hurried toward him and attempted to cool him down. Emergency responders rushed to the scene. Mayich was taken to a local hospital. He remains in critical condition; a lawyer representing his family said he is unlikely to recover.

Powers and the coaching staff haven’t spoken publicly about what happened that day, and Powers declined to comment through a university spokesperson. Last month, Arizona State, which also declined to comment for this story, announced it was reviewing the circumstances of the workout, repeatedly emphasizing the review was not an investigation. The Arizona State University Police Department opened a probe, a move the university called standard.

The Athletic spoke to more than two dozen people for this story, including many who witnessed the training session or were briefed on it, and reviewed photographs of the workout, as well as text messages and emails, in an effort to understand what happened at the workout and the decision-making surrounding it. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about an incident that is the subject of an ongoing inquiry or out of fear of retaliation.

Powers was determined to toughen up his team, those sources said. His normal preseason conditioning setup was replaced by an unorthodox workout that may have violated NCAA guidelines on acclimating athletes to new climates and training periods.

In the aftermath of Mayich’s collapse, some players are angry that Powers is being allowed to continue coaching while investigators ask them about the incident and the program, team sources said. Some feel trapped as they want justice for a teammate on life support, but their hockey careers are under the control of the coach who greenlit the workout that put him there.

September

Sept. 30

 

New York Times, Times Exclusive: How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes, Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, Sept. 30, 2026. Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”

But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.

It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.

Characterizing its A.I. data centers as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.

Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the I.R.S., in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”

Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.

The move caused some unease within Meta’s finance department. The I.R.S. in the past has challenged companies that claimed the credit for basic supplies. While thousands of companies, including other tech giants, get huge benefits from the research tax credit, they do so overwhelmingly for salaries paid to researchers and engineers — the people carrying out innovation. 

Sept. 27

Big, Monopoly Round-Up and Opinion: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude, Matt Stoller, right, and Lee Hepner, Sept. 27, 2026. The unorthodox development isn’t that politicians caved; it’s that people noticed it.

The most important news is that Paramount and Warner Bros. overcame the key hurdle to closing their deal, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 Democratic state attorneys general dropped their opposition, which I discussed on Monday in detail. It isn’t quite done, the judge hasn’t agreed to approve the consent decree, and there are amicus briefs and a well-received letter from Senator Cory Booker that the judge will hear arguments about. But it’s hard to imagine this one being paused for legal reasons.

It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connectedowner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, feckless, and aligned with capital.

But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond. 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, wasn’t alone in his empire-building ambitions. It takes a village to centralize media. Wall Street was fully on board, as was the defense bar. In August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the state challenge to the Paramount-Warner merger has the potential to “deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system.” Donald Trump pushed the deal, but so did Democrat Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. So did Tom Cruise. So did the Director’s Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. So did California Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra, and much of the state legislature.

The other group were populists on the left, the anti-monopoly world, artists, the Writer’s Guild of America East and West, and the public itself. What they lacked in money and organization they made up for in grassroots support. Most voters do not think the deal will be good, and Californians supported challenging the merger 49-30. This fight was a line in the sand for the masters of the universe, who have been fighting against a pushback on AI data centers, and a billionaire tax, and before that, Lina Khan’s attempt to revive antitrust law. 

Sept. 21

Politico, Judge appointed by Trump will oversee news outlets’ lawsuit over White House ban, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly restored former CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s White House press pass during Trump’s first term.

The emergency lawsuit by three media organizations seeking to lift President Donald Trump’s ban on White House access has landed in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly.

POLITICO, CNN and MS NOW are asking Kelly, right, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in his first term, to quickly declare the president’s ban unconstitutional and restore White House access for the organizations’ reporters.

Kelly, who was randomly assigned to the case Monday, set a Tuesday deadline for the Trump administration to respond to the lawsuit and a Wednesday afternoon hearing to consider the organizations’ demand to immediately lift Trump’s ban.

Kelly presided over a similar lawsuit filed by CNN in 2018, after the White House suspended the credentials of correspondent Jim Acosta following a dispute over his actions during a press conference. Kelly held a hearing on the suspension the day after the lawsuit was filed and quickly ordered the White House to restore Acosta’s press pass, citing a lack of due process for the journalist.

White House officials initially insisted they were only temporarily reinstating Acosta’s pass, though they ultimately opted not to take further action against him. Instead, officials issued new policies around conduct at press conferences. With Acosta’s credentials restored, CNN dropped the suit just six days after it was filed.

In a social media post Monday afternoon, Trump took note of that history and seemed to already be bracing for a loss — at least at the initial stage of the case. He also appeared to express regret about appointing Kelly.

“They have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta, who now seems to have disappeared from the Planet. The Judge’s name is Tim Kelly, and he was, sadly, appointed by ‘TRUMP,’” the president wrote on Truth Social. “In other words, almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal because Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.”

“Why should I have to give ‘access’ to such people? Perhaps Judge Kelly could explain that!” Trump added.

Kelly is perhaps best known for presiding over the six-month jury trial of leaders of the Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. After their convictions, Kelly sentenced the group’s national chair, Enrique Tarrio, to a 22-year prison term, the lengthiest for any Jan. 6 defendant. Kelly recently, and reluctantly, ended the Proud Boys case after the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges in connection with Trump’s grant of clemency to all those charged with Jan. 6-related offenses.

Kelly, 57, graduated from Duke University and earned his law degree at Georgetown. He spent a decade as a federal prosecutor before joining the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as a senior counsel focusing on crime and national security. Kelly was nominated by Trump in 2017 and easily won confirmation in the Senate, 94-2, becoming Trump’s first appointee on the district court in Washington.

 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

New York Times, Paramount Reaches Deal to Clear Way to Create News and Media Giant, Benjamin Mullin, David McCabe, Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall, Sept. 21, 2026. By resolving a lawsuit filed by a group of states, the media mogul David Ellison removed the last major hurdle he faced in buying Warner Bros. 

Paramount reached an agreement on Monday to resolve an antitrust lawsuit delaying its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, eliminating the last significant barrier to the creation of an entertainment and media colossus.

A group of states, led by California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued Paramount in July, arguing that an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would concentrate too much power over cable TV and blockbuster films under one company.

After weeks of on-again-off-again negotiations, Paramount and the states agreed to a number of concessions to complete the deal, Mr. Bonta said at a news conference on Monday. The entertainment giant has agreed to establish a board to ensure the editorial independence of CNN and CBS News and committed to distributing 30 movies in theaters every year. The company also pledged to spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production over the next five years and guaranteed to increase the share of those movies that are made in America.

A completion of the blockbuster deal would create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. It would pair Paramount’s movie studio with Warner Bros., which has made films like “Superman,” “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners.” The combined company would also own two major streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max, and control both CNN and CBS News.

The deal would make David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, backed by the fortune of his father, the billionaire Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison. The Ellison family’s ties to President Trump — which included a dinner David Ellison hosted this spring “honoring the Trump White House” — have made Democrats and many journalists at CNN wary of the deal.

David Ellison praised the settlement in a statement, saying it would help attain the company’s goal of building “a stronger Hollywood.”“Our shared aim was an outcome that best serves consumers, workers and — most importantly — the creative community so vital to the art of visual storytelling,” Mr. Ellison said. “We’re confident this agreement does exactly that.”

Mr. Bonta praised the terms of the settlement but withheld his approval for the deal.

“I want to be clear about something right up front: This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,” Mr. Bonta said. “It is not a blessing of the broader merger. Broadly speaking, we believe further consolidation of markets that are central to American economic life doesn’t serve the American economy.”

As part of the agreement, Paramount must sell off parts of the company if it doesn’t meet its obligations to produce and distribute films, according to the settlement. In an effort to keep cable TV prices down, the agreement also requires the combined company to sell its bundles of cable channels to distributors separately. In addition, Paramount must maintain ownership of the historical studio lots of both companies, a guarantor that production will continue in California, and operate a fund for purchasing independent films.

Paramount stopped short of agreeing to concessions that would alter the fundamental makeup of the combined company, such as selling CNN or one of its movie studios. The concessions were formalized in a consent decree, a mutually agreed upon list of compromises that resolve the lawsuit. A court still needs to approve it.

Shares of Paramount were up about 4 percent, and Warner Bros. Discovery up 11 percent in early afternoon trading shortly after the deal was announced.

Paramount has said the deal was necessary, in part, to create a counterweight to increasingly powerful tech companies like Netflix that were muscling in on Hollywood. 

Monday’s settlement helps culminate Paramount’s yearlong pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, a hard-fought battle with the streaming giant Netflix that required a series of escalating bids from Mr. Ellison. Netflix ultimately dropped out this year, leaving Paramount as the top bidder. The company has spent the last several months fighting the attorneys general in and out of the courtroom, waging a public relations battle and even threatening to leave California.

Labor organizations, which represent thousands of entertainment industry employees, have been split over the deal, with some viewing a settlement with antitrust protections as the most pragmatic option in an industry rocked by economic contraction and technological disruption. But some critics have described Mr. Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros. in stark, existential terms, fearing it would lead to massive layoffs and less competition in Hollywood.

In July, the Writers Guild of America East and Writers Guild of America West, jointly the WGA, filed a separate lawsuit to block the proposed merger, saying it would cause harm to writers and violate federal antitrust law. On Monday, the WGA announced that its members could not alone afford to continue the legal battle and that it had settled that companion lawsuit as well.

CBS News has also been under a microscope since Mr. Ellison last year handpicked Bari Weiss, a contrarian critic of mainstream media, to be its editor in chief. This year, Ms. Weiss purged the senior leadership of “60 Minutes,” the network’s newsmagazine. Many star correspondents, including Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper, either quit or were forced out.

Some of those who exited said Ms. Weiss tried to inject political bias into the segments, a claim that CBS News has denied. In the aftermath, Mr. Ellison called Lesley Stahl, one of the show’s remaining correspondents, to calm the turmoil and promised editorial independence for “60 Minutes.”

William Tong, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut who signed onto the settlement, said in a statement that the state had “wanted and demanded full divestiture of CNN and CBS News” and was “deeply disappointed that we could not do more.”

Sept. 19

 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

The Contrarian, Advocacy and Opinion: We’re Winning, Contrarians — And We Won’t Back Down, Norman Eisen, right, Publisher’s Roundup 85, Sept. 19, 2026. Here at The Contrarian, we have spoken out loudly against Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros.

As of Friday night, press reports were suggesting that state attorneys general are under increasing pressure to settle their lawsuit to stop the merger. Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison are behind an aggressive campaign to persuade the AGs to back down. These are the moments we need you most, Contrarians. That’s why we’re asking you to sign this petition to show your support for the AGs and encourage them to stand firm.

After handling over 300 pro-democracy legal matters in the era of Donald Trump, it’s clear to me what works to combat the Trump regime and restore democracy: protect the rule of law to constrain autocratic power, fight corruption to restore trust and faith in our democracy, and ensure we have free and fair elections to give the people the power to remove autocrats. This week, my litigation colleagues and I did all three, scoring wins in the Kennedy Center, Trump $1.776B Slush Fund, and USPS cases. And we did it all thanks to perseverance and the help provided by your paid subscriptions, Contrarians.Subscribed

Rule of Law: On Tuesday, we won our motion asking Judge Christopher Cooper to block yet another illegal attempt to inscribe Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. Its board, he said in his permanent injunction, “cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.” Shortly after the decision, the board voted to close the center after Trump called in to the meeting, threw a tantrum, and hurled personal attacks at Kennedy Center trustee Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), whom we at Democracy Defenders Action represent in the court case, along with the Washington Litigation Group. Afterward, Trump threatened to demolish the center unless his name was restored to it. He was even seen with a giant poster that appeared to be titled “Kennedy Center Demolished.”People protest Sept. 18 outside the Kennedy Center over the threats by Donald Trump to demolish the performing arts center in Washington, D.C. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

This is, of course, illegal. Congress weighs in on such decisions, and it has authorized no such thing. After the board’s vote, we filed for an emergency hearing; the Justice Department filed a response to this emergency motion; and we filed a reply asking the judge to make crystal clear that the Kennedy Center cannot be demolished at Trump’s whim.

And we won. Judge Cooper issued an order blocking any unlawful attempt to demolish the center without notice so the issue can be fully litigated. (Spoiler alert: Trump will lose.) Not only did the order stop Trump from pulling an East Wing-style snap tear down, but it also granted us discovery into the outrageous demolition threat.

The Kennedy Center belongs to the American people, as was evidenced Friday evening at the lively, peaceful Hands Off Our Arts protest and rally — which The Contrarian broadcast live, on the ground — and we will ensure it remains that way.

Sept. 18

New York Times, Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History, Karen Weise and Mike Isaac, Sept. 18, 2026 (print ed.). Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.

Newly unsealed court documents showed considerable concern within Microsoft and its close partner OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop artificial intelligence systems.

As OpenAI was forging ahead with its work, Microsoft employees debated whether what OpenAI was doing represented the “largest theft of labor in human history” and could create a “doom loop” that could ultimately threaten the quality of the large language models they were building.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” said one internal Microsoft document from 2023.

Inside OpenAI, there was also worry that its ChatGPT chatbot could lead people away from reading news elsewhere. In a June 2023 memo, Nick Turley, who led the team developing ChatGPT, wrote that A.I. posed an “existential threat” to publishers. And in February 2024, he wrote that A.I. products “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

Snippets of those discussions were made public on Thursday as part of a closely watched lawsuit The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Eleven other publishers have joined the suit. Judge Sidney H. Stein of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is considering motions for a summary judgment. Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed as the judge considers those motions.

The publishers argue that the tech companies violated copyright law by scraping millions of their stories off the internet and other databases, and using the text, without approval or pay, to train advanced A.I. systems.

Microsoft and OpenAI contend their work was covered under legal protections for “fair use” of copyrighted material. They say the articles were sufficiently transformed into entirely new work by A.I., and were not substitutes that harm the value of the original work.

A Microsoft spokesman, Alex Haurek, said in a statement that internal memos, written by Brent Hecht, Microsoft director of applied science, did not represent the company’s views.

“Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism,” he said, referring to Microsoft’s A.I. assistant.

OpenAI did not return requests to comment.

In a separate filing, Microsoft said Dr. Hecht was a research academic who also worked at Northwestern University. It said he was not a decision maker and was employed by Microsoft “to present divergent and asymmetric perspectives.”

“The world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior,” Steven Lieberman, who represents the New York Daily News and seven other newspapers in the case, said in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.

The news companies said OpenAI deployed tools specifically to evade the paywalls set up by publishers. According to the documents, when a staffer wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, and told him about developing “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Mr. Brockman responded “ah nice.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, also said in a deposition with lawyers that “anything that is paywalled should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it.” He said that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have invoked Microsoft’s right to require OpenAI to retrain its models.Microsoft’s Mr. Haurek said that Mr. Nadella “spoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information.”

The documents show concern within the companies that the news industry could not survive if its work was taken. Large A.I. models “are a product that destroys its supply chain,” Dr. Hecht wrote.

Some inside OpenAI also had concerns about copying the news articles, according to the unsealed documents. In 2020 Jack Clark, who was OpenAI’s policy director, wrote a memo to Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. Mr. Clark, who later left to co-found Anthropic, wrote that the start-up’s work “is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.”

Mr. Clark warned “OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet.”

PolitcusUSA, News and Comment: RFK’s Daughter Tells Trump To Do His Job And Leave The Arts Alone, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 18, 2026. Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and the sister of RFK Jr. told Donald Trump to focus on doing his job as president and leave the Kennedy Center and the arts alone.

No family name is more synonymous with public service in the United States than the Kennedys. The Kennedy family dedicates itself to serving the public, which, whether he realizes it or not, is why Donald Trump is so obsessed with attaching his name to, or destroying, the Kennedy Center.

Trump has turned the presidency into an institution that serves him. Trump doesn’t believe that he has a responsibility to serve the public. Instead, Trump demands that he be placed above everyone else and served like a king.

PolitcusUSA is 100% independent news and opinion. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

The president’s job is not to attach his name to buildings or threaten to destroy the Kennedy Center. Trump’s job is to serve the American people, but Donald Trump has no interest in doing that job.

Kerry Kennedy was interviewed on MS NOW by Peter Alexander who asked, “ What does President Trump miss about what it means to be a leader as we witness his efforts related to The Kennedy Center?”

Kennedy answered:

My uncle really asked people to serve our country. He believed that government was there to help those who are most in need, and to bring freedom to the widest possible number of people in our country and around the world, and I don't think that's what President Trump is all about.

He wants to put his name on this building. He's trying to put it on the building of the United States Institute of Peace. And this is not service to the people. We're in a place in our country now where people can't afford gas, they can't afford food, they can't afford healthcare, they can't afford childcare. He, President Trump, please focus on your job and leave the arts alone.

Kennedy made it clear that if the Center has a financial crisis, it was caused by Donald Trump. She said:

 His argument is that the center doesn't have the funds to move forward. But in the big, beautiful bill, $256 million were set aside specifically to to do renovations on the Kennedy Center, and the, that's for renovations. So there's plenty of money there for the renovations piece.

But in terms of act... And in terms of money going forward to run the center, there are three places that it comes from. That comes from government funding, it comes from philanthropy, and it comes from ticket sales.

Philanthropy and ticket sales disappeared as soon as Trump plastered his name on the center.

So all he has to do is back off, and those will come sweeping back in. And that's all the courts are saying he should do. It's what the people of Washington are asking for. It's what the arts community is demanding, and that's what- ... democracy is all about.

All of this is because Donald Trump is not being allowed to slap his name on a building.

Kennedy also said that Trump is going after the arts because he is trying to suppress freedom, “ I've worked on human rights issues around the world for the last 45 years, and I can tell you the first place a repressive government goes for is the arts, because that's where people, the people are expressing their hearts, their minds, their future, and their belief in freedom. And that's what he's trying to suppress here.”

Even if Donald Trump demolished the Kennedy Center, he can’t suppress freedom. This president is about to be swept away by a blue wave because he is more interested in his own ego and suppressing dissent than doing the job that he was elected to do.

The New Republic, The surprising issue dividing Senate Dems right now, Emma Janssen, Sept. 18, 2026. While Americans worry about sky-high gas prices and AI safety, the Senate has its sights trained on something entirely different—the world of college sports. Though it might seem like an odd focus for the upper chamber in the last few weeks before the October recess, a bill is sparking substantive disagreements over antitrust policy, racial justice in sports, and workers’ rights.

The bill dividing Democrats is the Protect College Sports Act, which the Senate voted to advance on Thursday. The bill attempts to regulate the lucrative world of college sports by setting a cap on payments to athletes, placing a five-year limit on playing eligibility, and giving the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, an antitrust exemption. Supporters of the bill say that it will bring order to the world of college sports, setting rules on how athletes can use the transfer portal, stopping a "spending spiral" by schools, and putting an end to lawsuits on these issues.

The bill easily passed the vote to consider it, with 77 votes for it and just 22 against it; 19 Senate Democrats voted against the bill alongside three Republicans, moving them closer to a final vote on the legislation. "I think the bill is necessary, and it’s not a perfect bill," said Michigan Senator Gary Peters, who voted for it. "I don’t think we’d ever be able to come up with a perfect bill."

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, an outspoken Democratic supporter of the bill, agreed that the bill does more good than harm. "On balance, this is a compromise that secures a lot of significant benefits and protections for college athletes," he told The New Republic on Thursday. When asked what he thought about his colleagues who were concerned about the antitrust exemption, he mumbled wryly: "Good for them."

Anti-monopoly advocates worry that the antitrust exemption takes power away from student athletes, who in recent years have benefited from competition between schools trying to woo them onto their teams with cash deals. In 2025, the settlement of a 2020 lawsuit gave Division I schools the right to pay players directly. But before student athletes gained the right to make money from their work on the court or field, coaches and athletic directors took home the most cash. "The players were getting pennies on the dollar," said Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the anti-monopoly organization Open Markets Institute. "Even though they were the ones really generating all this money."

Vaheesan, along with lawmakers like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, are concerned that this legislation could reverse these recent financial wins for student athletes. "I think we’re going to rue the day we gave an antitrust exemption this big to the colleges," Murphy said. "It’s going to result in a huge cost increase for consumers and for folks who follow college sports on TV."

Asked why he thought the bill was passing with the support of some of his fellow Senate Democrats, Murphy said: "The Power Five schools have a lot of influence. They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on lobbying."

Coons argued that the bill isn’t too deferential to the interests of colleges. "They did not get the definition of college athletes as never being employees, which was one of the top asks of the conferences and colleges," he said. "That was a concession to those of us who are strong supporters of organized labor and want to retain the possibility to organize."

Meanwhile, all five of the Senate’s Black members—Republican Tim Scott and Democrats Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Angela Alsobrooks—opposed the bill. The NAACP’s president and chief executive strongly opposes the legislation. "Sharecropping is over," he said on a media call this week. "We should not ask athletes, particularly Black athletes, to generate revenue on the football field or basketball court and then share in none of the revenue."

"It does raise concerns about how committed members of the Senate, including Senate Democrats, are to the well-being and welfare of workers," Vaheesan said.

Sept. 8 

 

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Letter to CBS Staff, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This is my open letter to CBS reporters and staff, as well as reporters and staff who work for other corporate news outlets that are continuing to bow to Trump’s fascism and this fatal right-wing propaganda machine.

Yesterday, it was reported that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, was considering hiring Maria Bartiromo after she left Fox News.

Now, I personally believe Maria Bartiromo, shown below right, is among the worst propagandists that there are, and one of the worst Trump sycophants and bootlickers that there are, and that she’s responsible for spreading a massive amount of lies and disinformation.

Now, that’s my opinion. You’re entitled to your own opinion, of course. But after she left Fox, or Fox pushed her out, whatever the story may be, who the heck even knows? Or, frankly, who even cares?

What’s most important is this notorious liar is now apparently being given an exalted position at CBS as CBS further destroys 60 Minutes and its news programs.

Now look, CBS is free to hire or fire whoever they want. They can run their network however they please. And if they want to continue to destroy their brand, go for it. Bring on Maria Bartiromo. I could care less.

But the broader message that I want to make, whether it’s to CBS staffers, reporters, or those who work for other news networks, is there is a place for you in independent news, whether that’s at the MeidasTouch Network or at other independent news outlets.

We’ve grown our independent news outlet here with the utmost focus on building a people-powered movement and growing by promoting top reporters and giving them editorial autonomy to do what they do best.

Other independent media outlets have their own philosophies and views, but as long as they’re fighting for democracy and against Trump fascism, perhaps they can be considered viable options as well. Or you can go out on your own.

I hope what MeidasTouch has helped inspire is for you to know that if me and my brothers, with no political background and no news background, can do it, you can do it also.

But you can’t, in my view, just hope to dilly-dally around fascism.

Over the next 60 days—actually less, over the next 56 days before the midterms—Trump’s going to throw everything he’s got to destroy this democracy.

He’s made an absolute fool of himself on the international stage and the domestic stage. We’ve never had a less popular president in American history than what we have right now.

I use the word demon to refer to him and his spawn because their behavior has been so abhorrent. I can’t find any other word, and I’m not even sure demon does it justice. I can search for lunatic or psycho or evil, but demon is what I keep coming back to.

Not to be hyperbolic. It’s just there seems to be a desire to inflict pain and suffering for the sake of inflicting pain and suffering, even in addition to the self-enrichment and quid pro quos and hoarding of wealth and stealing. There just seems to be a desire to watch and enjoy the suffering of others, which is just sickening to me.

But here’s where we are. Democracy is on the line.

Make whatever decisions you think are in your best interest, but I just want to reflect on this: there’s more to life than this dystopian MAGA madness.

We’re making it out of this. We’re close to getting out of this. Remember that.

And let MeidasTouch or others be an example, I hope. Or not. It’s your call.

But given Maria Bartiromo’s potential move to CBS and Bari Weiss, I just wanted to reflect on all of these things this morning.

This is why I believe independent news is more important than ever. That’s why we’re going to keep on growing here at the MeidasTouch Network.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. I was always likely to write about this NYT article describing Zohran Mamdani’s ties to influencers who celebrate his implementation of policy.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians.

Alex Jacquez, who works at a progressive think tank, posted on X: “Really exciting that NYC is generating operational efficiencies by in-sourcing needlessly outsourced public services and functions, building city capacity. More of this!”

Akilah Hughes, a comedian with more than 200,000 followers on X, reposted a comment suggesting that Mr. Mamdani was an improvement over his predecessor, Eric Adams, who “paid McKinsey $1.6 million to research trash cans.”

Matt Stoller, a political commentator with more than 160,000 followers on X, wrote effusively that the mayor “just cut a $9 million contract that McKinsey has with NYC. And then brags about it publicly. More please.”

Some of the online adulation, like Mr. Stoller’s post, was organic. But some of it was actually part of a campaign orchestrated by City Hall to use social media influencers to boost the image of the mayor and his young administration’s policies.

Mr. Mamdani is a master of new media, and his rise to power has been driven largely by his ease in front of a camera and his ability to harness the seeming informality of social media to connect with broad constituencies.

I continue to find it frustrating that a nucleus of lefty pundits — many of whom came up alongside me in the blogging wave — refuse to understand the current attention economy. Rather than recognizing they are a part of that economy, they fancy themselves above it, tossing instructions to their servants in the Democratic Party who, the conceit appears to be, are the only ones who have the tools, day jobs, or ethical obligations as citizens to engage in that attention economy.

Those lefty pundits spent several days whining about this article rather than doing what they could to help win an election or even, seemingly, reading it to learn how influencers — the inheritors of the mantle we as bloggers used to wield — have been instrumental in making Mamdani successful in the attention economy in a way that many DC politicians are not. A success story of sorts — the kind of success story they’re looking for. They let a story about the attention economy negatively drive their own attention in the middle of a fight with a fascism that succeeds by dominating that attention economy.

To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, NYT spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. It is a shitty article, but not among the top ten most hostile NYT articles targeting Mamdani.

Much of the rest is the kind of article that NYT used to write about us when we came up as bloggers, a threat to their monopoly of the means of narration. We were not sufficiently independent, they said. They don’t understand how we’re funded, they complained. Some of this was and remains hostile gatekeeping from a media under threat from newcomers, as Emilia Rowland, the women being paid $175,000 to help make progressive policies successful insinuated in a comment buried in (roughly) ¶47 and ¶48 of the story.

When asked whether the city has created a code of ethics for its engagement with influencers, Ms. Rowland suggested that traditional media might be in more need of tighter ethical guidelines.

“Is there a recommendation for disclosures from legacy media?” she said, adding that working only through “channels with diminishing reach” might mean failing to reach New Yorkers about important city services.

Notably, for reasons I’ll return to, NYT’s article came out on September 4, five days after WaPo published its own story about how a group of influencers who enthusiastically support Whiskey Pete Hegseth had been doing undisclosed work for the Pentagon, the element of corruption that NYT invented by insinuation for a story about Mamdani. We’ll come back to that.

Before I got a chance to write my own post about the NYT influencer story, Don Moynihan wrote this absolutely spectacular post on it. His story started by explaining why the idea of a news story reporting on the the success of the Postal Service could only appear in the Onion. He provided three reasons why:

Negativity bias: The media covers failure much more than it covers success. Loss aversion means that humans are more emotionally aroused by stories of loss rather than gain, failure rather than success, scandal rather than honest competence. In other words, the media focuses on failure because that is what, as consumers, we click on.Independence: Media don’t want to be seen as the lapdog of politicians, so tend not to uncritically accept good news stories. I’m not going to publish your press release!A bias toward theater: People like stories. Stories that involve colorful characters, human stakes and theatrical tropes, such as deception and conflict, are more compelling. And so media coverage of government reflects such stories, and down-weights other factors that are harder to humanize, such as administrative systems, or structural factors, even if those these factors are often important, as they are when it comes to managing government. Really great writers manage to tell stories about government that incorporate structure while using relatable characters, explaining the stakes, and detailing emotionally arousing conflicts. But sometimes, reporters on a deadline simply do not cover stories that lack the aspects of theater, and focus on the opportunities that do.

Having provided those three reasons (but not yet dug into them), he first laid out Mamdani’s success at selling the nuts and bolts of successful implementation — the equivalent of bragging about how well the Postal Service is doing, but instead focusing on potholes and basketball hoops. He then reviewed the NYT story, showing the lengths it went to to make the reliance on influencers look corrupt. “It is not until paragraph 20 that the reporters clarify that the Mayor’s office does not actually pay the influencers.” Then, brilliantly, Moynihan went back and looked how the NYT covered the very same story, about Mamdani cutting a McKinsey contract, as compared to how NYT covered Mamdani’s hiring of McKinsey partner Anthony Shorris.

Let’s go back to the primary example the story gave, because I think it would have been useful if the reporters grappled with it a bit more. The Mamdani administration cut $9 million in McKinsey contracts as small part of a relatively impressive effort to balance the budget. So how did the New York Times cover this story? I found two mentions of it in their coverage, both of which were passing references in larger stories:

From May 1, in a story titled “What We Know About New York’s Proposed Tax Increases”: “Mr. Mamdani has already begun to explore slashing roughly $3 billion in expenditures, like consulting contracts with companies that his base despises, like McKinsey, and a rental-assistance program called City FHEPS that he once championed.”And from March 23, under the headline “Mamdani Now Plans $1.3 Billion in Cuts in Programs That He Favored”: “Mamdani vowed to cancel New York City’s contracts with McKinsey and other private companies.”

So, the McKinsey contract cancellation was mentioned barely at all by the New York Times, in two stories with relatively unfavorable faming (Mamdani hiking taxes and abandoning programs he favored).

Given this context, working with influencers makes a lot more sense. The Times did not see this story as much of a priority. Of course, the Times is not obliged to cover this topic, but when Mamdani appointed a former deputy Mayor and McKinsey partner to his administration that was the primary subject of two separate stories rather than an afterthought, and mentioned in a third story about his efforts to reassure the business community.

I doubt that Mamdani communicated his hire of a McKinsey partner to his influencers, but it is not clear to me why this is inherently more newsworthy for the Times than his cancelation of contracts with McKinsey. I don’t think the contract cancelation is simply populist point-scoring, but reflects a theory of governance that is substantive, and considers structural aspects of state capacity.

This was brilliant media criticism — a demonstration of how media genres drive and silence certain kinds of stories (the kind of thing I’ve written academic articles and delivered conference talks on).

Moynihan then put on his Public Policy professor hat and (in a Substack post, which phenomenon is itself worth contemplating) explained why the decision to cut the McKinsey contract reflected a theory of governance that could have a real positive impact; click through for that part. Moynihan did the same analysis for a second Mamdani initiative — sort of a reverse DOGE — and explained how that got treated as a boring story, too, even by lefty pundits on Bluesky.

The New York Times did not cover the announcement of the new office.

Some local news covered it, basically reprinting the press release. The other coverage came from outlets working on tech and government, for whom it was a big story. If you are a political advisor concerned about the Mayor generating good headlines, this is a pretty sparse return on his efforts.

I posted about this on BlueSky which is about as liberal and pro-Mamdani space you could wish for. And still, many of the replies argued that the creation of PIT Crew “just not much of a story”; “It feels like a paragraph in a story about the budget.” “A news story can only happen once the PIT crew is something more than a budget line, at which point there will be people to interview and actions to record.” Or that the media should not just cover press releases.

For the reasons I outlined above, I think this is wrong. The story is substantively important example about the model of governance Mamdani is pursuing. If you needed a hook Mamdani creating a tech office in the aftermath of DOGE provides a hook (I provide an example below). His tech team involves some of those displaced by DOGE, who have some pretty impressive achievements that provide a human interest angle.

Of course, DOGE itself was made sexy because the trillionaire troll made it so, often by stoking conspiracy theories designed to undermine trust in government.

After pointing out how hard it is to get even very sympathetic people, like Bluesky pundits, to magnify good news, Moynihan then laid out the 18 stories one or another (or both together) of the NYT journalists had covered, including three on Mamdani’s conflict with Netanyahu, demonstrating the stories — many far more hostile to Mamdani than a story about his influence economy success — NYT chooses to cover.

It was a superb takedown of the limits to legacy media and, because of those limits, the gap in communication that exists where successful leaders will — must! — seek to rebuild trust in government.

You can’t have successful government if the only stories that get told are intentionally negative. But the question is, by whom.

Moynihan then ended with a very gentle scold about how media should be able to tell the good news about government like it tells the bad.

One downside of negativity bias in media coverage is that it has fed a corrosive mistrust of government, which has fueled anti-government forces who then justify that mistrust with mismanagement. We very much need a skeptical media to hold government to account and journalists are doing essential work in that department right now. And big promises of government improvement should invite real investigation of success. But we also need them to tell us when government is working well and trying to do better. Reporters don’t have to become influencers to embrace a little bit of positivity bias.

I would join this scold and note that the same is true of the blogger generation pundits. When Ezra Klein first did a long post on Joe Biden’s frailties only to be followed by a second when Biden did step down, I argued that the guy who got his start explaining the intricacies of policy — the guy who got where he is now by explaining how good Barack Obama’s policies were, as the influencers (and Matt Stoller, who also came up in that blog generation) are now doing for Mamdani — would have done far more for democracy and the Democratic Party in 2024 if he had been doing the same for what were remarkably successful Joe Biden policies. Joe Biden was a failure as President because in a much more intense attention economy, he didn’t have what Mamdani does: a way to tell his very good story. And yes, his age and frailty made all that much harder but that doesn’t excuse Ezra for ignoring those very good stories he is uniquely qualified to tell, to instead observe from on high and toss directions, as if they were coat check tickets, to Democratic operatives.

Joe Biden didn’t tell his story in part because the blogger generation pundits now, for the most part, see their own role (paid or not) very differently, and especially don’t seem understand that they can use their social media platforms to stomp all over Democrats or to combat Trump or even to magnify good things Democrats do that lefty pundits repeatedly confess they’re oblivious to, such as multiple strands of efforts to combat Trump’s corruption, a story which many of them complain is not being told.

Not being told by someone else, they always mean.

Meanwhile, as all this was going down, over on Xitter, a parallel meltdown was playing out. As I noted here and as Bulwark described in all its delectable hilarity, far right troll turned senior State Department official, Sarah Rogers, tried to feed far right troll Jennica Pounds (better known as Data Republican) a bullshit attack on disinformation experts. She fucked up in her effort to seed disinformation about disinformation experts!! That led to Pounds’ self-exposure as a secret troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth. As a bunch of other far right trolls rushed, in unison, to defend Pounds’ ethical failures (or, alternately, to parrot Sean Parnell’s false claims that WaPo had broken the law by telling its readers something China and Iran already know — that US forces are stretched dangerously thin because of the means by which Hegseth is losing the Iran war), one of the journalists those trolls were trying to jail reported that a number of them had secretly been on DOD’s payroll.

WaPo’s story is the counterpart story to the original NYT story (but preceded it by five days). Here, known influencers were secretly working for DOD.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever. [my emphasis]

They weren’t paid to be trolls. They were paid to do policy work, as Thomas Anderson, who is best known as Cynical Publius, justified to WaPo his lack of transparency that he was on the DOD payroll for something else.

“At no time have I ever received any compensation of any kind from any government source of any kind for anything I write or have ever written on X or in any magazine or other source,” Anderson wrote.

The self-inflated Publius has been on a meltdown worthy of a Hegseth stan ever since, misrepresenting how his real name has been discoverable and complaining over and over and over and over that journalists did journalism, in the process revealing to taxpayers what America’s adversaries can discover by watching where US aircraft groups sail.

It’s pretty hilarious stuff.

Another of the trolls, Kurt Schlichter, tried to defuse his exposure by suggesting the WaPo said something it didn’t.

Let’s examine the lessons we can draw about regime media through the lens of how Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp of the Washington Post decided to write a story about what I, @RobManess, and Tom @CynicalPublius Anderson did for the Department of War. The problem for the Washington Post is that what we were doing for the Department of War was boring – three retired colonels with extensive civilian experience did a review of the military war college system to try to help modernize it and make it better at producing future senior officers. Yawn.

The story was sexy because we were all, as the Washington Post acknowledged, Massively Influential Conservative Influencers™, but that was it. So they had to jazz it up by insinuating that we were brought on board to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.” That was false.

Schlichter claimed the WaPo said they were brought in to amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies. The WaPo, instead, said they did so “as they” amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies.

But no one denies they were (or had been, until days before) on the Pentagon payroll without disclosing it, all while repeating Whiskey Pete’s lies.

And thus far, it might be a lesson in comparative use of influencers. Whereas Mamdani reaches out to influencers to celebrate wonky policy decisions, Whiskey Pete reaches out to them to undermine trust in journalism or (in the case of Sarah Howard) to attempt to inflame scandals over packaged bullshit. That’s actually a really instrumental lesson about how we move forward, if we are to be successful. The shitty NYT story was useful for highlighting how Mamdani is succeeding in building his support among New Yorkers, even while doing boring things like replacing missing basketball hoops.

Except for this.

In the period when NYT was “interview[ing] more than a dozen influencers who have worked with Mr. Mamdani’s team and [reviewing] dozens of videos and portions of influencer group chats” for a story about Mamdani, someone — presumably someone else than the two journalists on the Mamdani story — at NYT was deciding that the equivalent story about Whiskey Pete, except, in that case, the influencers were getting paid (albeit to do something else), was not newsworthy.

NYT’s selective decision to chase some influencers and not others is an editorial choice, one that says as much about bias — the political bias NYT attempts to disavow with its scolding about ethical guidelines — as the other far more hostile NYT stories about Mamdani.

But it doesn’t have to stop at NYT.

Yes, NYT is biased and also hostile to Mamdani generally. But the same rules about telling bad stories applies to all of us who can influence politics, especially those of us graced with significant platforms.

The way the world is right now — the rise of fascism — owes a great deal to changes in the attention economy. There are cracks in the far right attention economy, as government employed trolls faceplant in one or another way. But there really is a lesson to move forward.

And some of that really does has to do with being willing to tell good stories.

New York Times, NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun, Katie Robertson, Sept. 8, 2026. A trademark dispute scuttled its plans to relaunch as The Washington Star, so the site chose a different name.

Here comes “The Sun.” The Washington Sun, that is — the new name for the news website NOTUS after a trademark lawsuit several months ago stymied the outlet’s plan to rebrand as The Star.

The name, said the editor in chief, Tim Grieve, is intended to reflect the outlet’s expansion into local news and sports coverage in the wake of The Washington Post’s staff cuts at the beginning of the year. It will take effect Wednesday.

“We really wanted Washington in the name of our publication to more clearly convey that we cover Washington, both sort of political Washington and local Washington,” Mr. Grieve said.

NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.

Along with the rebrand, The Washington Sun will introduce a paywall to its website this month. Subscriptions will cost $9.99 a month; Mr. Grieve said its newsletters would remain free.ImageRobert Allbritton seated in an office with Politico branding.NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. Credit...Ting Shen for The New York Times

At the beginning of the year, the NOTUS newsroom consisted of 45 people. The number, Mr. Grieve said, has now more than doubled, to 110. Many new hires are former members of The Post’s staff, including the food critic Tom Sietsema, the columnist Dana Milbank and a slew of sports reporters.

Mr. Grieve said the newsroom now had a large team reporting on local news and local sports in the Washington area.“I think people are really hungry particularly for the local and sports coverage that has faded away with what’s happened at The Post and with local newspapers around the country,” he said.

Mr. Grieve said The Washington Sun had also entered into an exclusive content licensing agreement with Capital Weather, the forecasting website that was affiliated with The Post for the past 18 years as Capital Weather Gang, and would start running a daily weather forecast for the Washington area.

It’s NOTUS’s second attempt at a rebrand this year. In May, a month after NOTUS said it would rename itself The Star, Dovid Efune, a media executive, announced that he was reviving The Washington Star, a newspaper that had shut down in 1981. Mr. Efune promptly filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS.

Sept. 6

 

Philanthropist and financier David Rubenstein is shown together in a collage with the "Blue" sculpture, which he purchased after President Trump's team removed it from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose board Rubenstein formerly chaired.

New York Times, Ousted Kennedy Center Chairman Buys Dismantled ‘Blue’ Sculpture, Julia Jacobs, Sept. 7, 2026. David Rubenstein purchased the sculpture, which was removed from the center last week, from the artist’s foundation. He will display it at the National Gallery of Art.

A construction worker waves beneath a large blue sculpture shaped like a stick figure. Yellow caution tape is seen in the foreground.“Blue,” by the artist Joel Shapiro, sat on the Kennedy Center’s grounds from 2019 until last week.Credit...The Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Salwan Georges for The New York Times

The billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein has purchased the abstract sculpture called “Blue” that was removed from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week, according to two people familiar with the sale.

It will eventually be displayed in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art, the people said.

Mr. Rubenstein, a major arts donor, was chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board until he was ousted in early 2025 during President Trump’s takeover. He is the chairman of the board of trustees at the National Gallery.

He purchased the sculpture from a foundation dedicated to its artist, Joel Shapiro, which received the artwork after its removal. One of the people familiar with the sale said the price was more than $2 million.

Since 2019, the 24-foot-tall stick figure-like sculpture stood on the grounds of the Reach, an addition to the Kennedy Center that was partly funded by Mr. Rubenstein, who co-founded the private equity giant the Carlyle Group. The sculpture was deinstalled with no prior notice or explanation from the institution, drawing a flurry of questions and objections from local patrons who considered it a landmark overlooking the Potomac River.

Representatives for the National Gallery did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and it was not clear when “Blue” would go on display.

The Kennedy Center board has voted to close for a two-year, $250 million renovation project championed by Mr. Trump. But officials have proposed that the Reach remain open, partly to serve as an active memorial to President John F. Kennedy, which is required by law.

Mr. Shapiro, who died in 2025, had given the sculpture to the Kennedy Center as a gift for the opening of the Reach. After it was deinstalled, it was transferred to the artist’s foundation, which is run by his daughter Ivy Shapiro.

Ms. Shapiro did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the purchase. She said last week that her father would have been “alarmed” by the sculpture’s removal from the Kennedy Center, where it had been originally intended as a permanent fixture.

The aluminum sculpture, painted with a vivid blue, was designed to look like a person mid-kick while dancing on the grass.

“In Joel’s mind, it  was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” Ms. Shapiro said last week.

Sept. 5

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

New York Times, How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry, Katie Robertson, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The feminist icon insisted that women were not a niche audience — and proved it in 1971 with the start of an influential publication owned and operated by them.

When Gloria Steinem started Ms. magazine in 1971, most women’s magazines concentrated on how to keep a house and how to attract a husband. Her publication took a very different focus: liberation.

The magazine, the first owned and operated by women, made the discussion of issues like abortion, domestic violence and equality unavoidable — and revolutionized a generation of women’s writers and publishers.

“The one element that is the foundation of this magazine and makes it different from others is that it simply considers that women are human beings,” Ms. Steinem said of Ms. magazine in a 1973 BBC interview. “That doesn’t sound very revolutionary, but it is, because the other magazines are still arguing about it.”

In some ways, the publishing world is still arguing about exactly what it means to be a women’s magazine. Legacy publications like Glamour, Marie Claire and Teen Vogue have either ended their print runs or withered, while feminist blogs like The Hairpin and Feministing have shuttered.

But the DNA of Ms. magazine inspired a new generation of outlets, said Emily Ramshaw, the chief executive of the nonprofit newsroom The 19th, which focuses on women and politics.

Ms. Steinem “spent her life and career insisting that women were not a niche audience, that our experiences were not side dishes to the main event and that gender-based journalism could be both rigorous and unapologetic,” Ms. Ramshaw said.

Ms. Steinem, who died on Wednesday at 92, didn’t start out as a trailblazer. She began her career as a freelance writer, penning articles for traditional publications like Esquire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and McCall’s. She famously went undercover as a Playboy bunny for a 1963 investigation in Show magazine that exposed the exploitative conditions the women worked under.

She occasionally wrote for The New York Times, including a 1965 article on the plight of women in network television and a 1966 profile of Mary Lindsay, the wife of the mayor of New York City, John Lindsay.

A black and white photograph of Ms. Steinem wearing the Playboy bunny costume.Gloria Steinem went undercover for Show magazine to expose what it was really like to work at New York City’s famed Playboy Club.Credit...Getty Images

But it was at New York magazine that Ms. Steinem honed her voice. Invited by the editor Clay Felker to join a new magazine he was starting, Ms. Steinem became a founding contributing editor in 1968.

She wrote a weekly column, “The City Politic,” where she proved herself a sharp cultural and political observer. She took on subjects like the turning sentiment against President Richard M. Nixon during the Vietnam War, Ed Koch as congressman and a tense New York City in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was among other top-tier writers of 1960s New York, like Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Jimmy Breslin.

But at New York magazine, “I was still the girl writer, and the guys there, whom I loved, their advice about feminism was, ‘Don’t get involved with those crazy women,’” she said in a 2015 profile in The New Yorker.

She didn’t pay attention. She co-founded Ms. magazine with a team of other feminists.

“I realized as a journalist that there really was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women,” she explained in a 2011 documentary.

Ms. magazine first came to life as a 32-page insert in New York magazine’s December 1971 edition. Mr. Felker helped fund it. A preview issue the next month sold out in eight days, selling 300,000 copies.

New York Times, Maria Bartiromo’s Downfall at an Increasingly Cautious Fox News, Jim Rutenberg, Erik Wemple and Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 5, 2026. The network this week took Maria Bartiromo, above, off the air, pulling one of the last hosts whose coverage of Dominion Voting Systems drew an expensive defamation lawsuit.

In July, as President Trump was preparing a prime-time speech on election security, word went out from executives at Fox News: The network would avoid covering his stock claims about a stolen election.

Fox had landed in serious legal trouble in 2021 after amplifying false assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies about vote-stealing election machines, culminating in an extraordinary $787 million defamation settlement.

In 2020, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo had made her show a central stop for proponents of the president’s election theories. And this summer, too, she was preparing to interview the presidential adviser Peter Navarro the morning after the speech.

But after she received a text message written by a Fox Business executive warning against post-speech coverage, she canceled Mr. Navarro’s appearance.

As she did so, she shared the executive’s text with Mr. Navarro, who promptly sent it “up the chain” to the White House, he said in an interview Friday. It was his duty, he said, to relay “yet another example of Fox personnel censoring the Trump administration.”

That sequence of events, described by Mr. Navarro and two other sources familiar with the discussions, would bring an abrupt end to Ms. Bartiromo’s on-air career at the network. The White House complained to Fox, which saw the disclosure of the communication as a breach of company policy. Fox News did not provide a comment.

A lawyer for Ms. Bartiromo, Bryan Freedman, called her “one of the hardest-working journalists throughout her award-winning career.”

Ms. Bartiromo’s cancellation was a dramatic split between the nation’s most-watched cable news channel and one of cable’s earlier, defining stars.

But it also revealed an important shift at the network in the years since the 2020 election — one that could have real consequences for Mr. Trump as he seeks to again assert the American election system is rife with fraud before a midterm election that, polling shows, could be rough for his party.

Where in 2020 he could count on hosts like Ms. Bartiromo to air his wildest election claims on Fox’s top-rated programs without much pushback, he cannot do so now.

The changes are a consequence of the legal straits the network found itself in after the election, when two voting technology companies at the heart of the stolen election theories, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, sued Fox for $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, for tarnishing their reputations.

The $787.5 million settlement stemmed from the Dominion case; its litigation with Smartmatic is ongoing, adding to the incentives to be careful about promoting conspiracies this election year.

Fox is in some ways a different network than it was in late 2020, in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

The chief Fox legal officer Viet Dinh, whose handling of the Dominion case came under question, is no longer there. Neither is a Dinh deputy and former Trump aide, Raj Shah, who helped keep the network hyper-focused on right-wing criticism when it or its hosts were viewed as being insufficiently deferential to Mr. Trump’s fraud claims after the election.

Early in 2021, Fox ended the program of the host Lou Dobbs, who had been among the more enthusiastic promoters of claims the presidential election was rigged. After the Dominion settlement, it parted ways with its host Tucker Carlson, who was mentioned in the case but also drew advertiser boycotts with his hard dive into right-wing conspiracies.

Another figure in the two voting cases, Jeanine Pirro, is now working as Mr. Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Fox’s most popular hosts remain overwhelmingly loyal to Mr. Trump, including its prime-time stars, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, and the network still tilts heavily in his favor.

But it has also shown a willingness to break from the administration on, for instance, its military campaign in Iran, which has been criticized by some on-air hosts, including Ms. Ingraham. The anchor Bret Baier delivered a rare, on-air defense of his colleague, Jonathan Hunt, when Mr. Trump blasted his coverage of Iran.

In the interview on Friday, Mr. Navarro, who formally serves as Mr. Trump’s senior counselor on trade, shared his displeasure with the shift. He said the network could not be trusted to “tell the truth about certain topics.”

He had no such issues with Ms. Bartiromo, whose approach — at times permitting guest commentators to free-associate on live television — had not appeared to change much in the years since the Dominion settlement. Puck, a news website, earlier reported on Ms. Bartiromo’s conversations with Mr. Navarro.

That was clear in July, when the network was sued for defamation after Kevin O’Leary, the investor of “Shark Tank” fame, used Ms. Bartiromo’s show to settle a score with his detractors. He baselessly claimed that two nonprofit founders in Utah who were opposing his plans for a 40,000-acre data center near the Great Salt Lake were Chinese agents.

According to the lawsuit, Ms. Bartiromo not only failed to challenge Mr. O’Leary, she “legitimized” his accusation.

The network’s response afterward was more reflective of the post-Dominion shift. Whereas the network stonewalled Dominion when it initially complained about its election-fraud coverage, it moved more quickly to apologize after Mr. O’Leary retracted his claims.

Ms. Bartiromo still has considerable time left on her contract, according to two people familiar with the matter, meaning that Fox News is still obligated to pay her millions a year despite ending her on-air role. The contract could also keep her from appearing on other networks.

Mr. Trump, who called Ms. Bartiromo a “total professional, and a true warrior” in a Truth Social post on Thursday, added that her “fans, of which there are many, will not be happy.”

 

Associated Press via Politico, Judge refuses to block Pentagon from firing Stars and Stripes staffers over CBS interview, Staff report, Sept. 5, 2026. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled the journalists are unlikely to successfully prove their First Amendment rights were violated.

A federal judge refused Friday to block the Pentagon from firing three Stars and Stripes staff members who claim they were illegally disciplined for speaking out about the military news outlet’s need to maintain its editorial independence.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Republican President Donald Trump. ruled that the journalists are unlikely to successfully prove that the Pentagon violated their First Amendment free speech rights. He said Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence “is not at stake here.”

“Plaintiffs argue that their termination will chill the protected expression of themselves and others at Stripes,” McFadden wrote. “Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a chill here.”

Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte sued last Thursday in Washington, D.C., to challenge their firings by the Pentagon, which partially funds the news outlet.

Slavin says he was dismissed for insubordination after giving an interview to CBS News in which he objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military. Korte participated in the same interview. Their lawsuit says they were punished in retaliation for publishing a report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

McFadden, however, concluded that Slavin and Korte gave the interviews as part of their official duties as public employees and not as private citizens.

“They are being fired for giving pre-approved interviews on their paper’s behalf in which they largely toed the company line. Whatever else such a scheme may violate, it does not clearly offend the First Amendment,” the judge wrote.

Lederer was dismissed shortly after announcing his impending retirement. He said the Pentagon had installed a new deputy publisher — an active-duty service member — under him at the newspaper without his knowledge.

The Defense Department and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the lawsuit’s named defendants.

The suit’s plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers for Good Government, Government Accountability Project and a Yale Law School clinic.

Democracy Defenders Fund attorney Taryn Wilgus Null said the judge’s decision emphasizes the “high burden” that plaintiffs have in seeking preliminary injunction, as the plaintiffs did in this case. She noted that the ruling wasn’t the final word in the litigation.

“While we are disappointed in the decision, we fully expect to prevail after we have an opportunity to take discovery and all the facts are revealed,” Null said in a statement.

McFadden also has presided over The Associated Press’ lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against the AP for its decision not to follow the president’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico. McFadden last year ordered the White House to restore the AP’s full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. The administration’s appeal is pending. 

Sept. 3

 

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

New York Times, Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92, Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 3, 2026. She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who, in galvanizing the modern women’s movement, helped millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Fox News Dumps Trump Cheerleader Maria Bartiromo, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Maria Bartiromo, above, has been non-stop waving the flag for Trump and professing endless support for a decade. Bartiromo was one of the personalities that Trump would turn to when he needed the softest of soft interviews.

Trump’s buddy Sean Hannity always seems to be his first Fox News choice, but Bartiromo, along with Fox and Friends, were his two other go-to spots for interviews that would be even more gentle than the standard Fox News interviews.

Bartiromo like the rest of Fox allowed Trump to pre-tape his interviews. The Trump interviews were often edited to paint the president in the best light, and there have been reports over the years that the White House even has editorial control over Trump’s interviews on Fox.

Fox News didn’t give Maria Bartiromo a big sendoff to thank her for her 12 and a half years on the network.

Instead, Fox News released a terse statement that:

Effective today Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media. Fox News media said, “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

That’s it. Boom. Gone.Bartiromo’s Exit Is A Sign That The End Of Trump Is Coming

Fox News is going to find a new host to take over Bartiromo’s Sunday show, Sunday Morning Futures, which has been the place for MAGA Republicans to push their messages, hawk their campaigns, and hit viewers up for donations.

Sunday Morning Futures is not a Sunday news show. It was more like a MAGA circus tent where those who either needed something or wanted to get the attention of Trump and his most loyal supporters gathered.

Bartiromo’s Sunday show was the place that Republicans turned to if they felt that Kristen Welker was too liberal.

We don’t have the details yet of why Bartiromo and Fox News parted ways. Maybe Bartiromo is taking a job in the Trump administration?

However, when Trump’s most loyal media supporters start losing their plum perches to speak to his base, it is also a sign that the MAGA era is drawing to a close.

In a few months, Democrats are likely to control all or part of Congress. Trump looks to be on the fast track toward lame duck status, and starting next year, voters of all political stripes will look toward the 2028 election and the selection of a new president.

The signs are growing that it really is over for Trump, and the era that many Americans thought would never come to an end is moving toward its close. 

Daily Beast, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, apparently, he’s the saddest, Laura Esposito, That’s according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who relayed the assessment from someone who worked closely with Musk. Gibney’s forthcoming film, Musk, was previewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

“Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else,” Gibney told the outlet.Elon Musk.Elon Musk has regrets about his chainsaw-waving stunt. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In Gibney’s film, which premieres this fall, he tackles the 55-year-old’s worst impulses—and how this unelected, unchecked figure shapes much of what we see in American politics today. Musk has made no secret of his thirst for power, notably during the 2024 presidential election, when he funneled more than $290 million into Donald Trump’s last presidential campaign and hosted town halls in swing states. He famously gave away a $1 million check to a rallygoer selected at random after they signed a petition to support a PAC he created.

Questions about his obscure data-collecting efforts and the role he plans to play in forthcoming elections also remain unanswered. In his documentary, Gibney hammers home that Musk’s brief stint at the helm of an army of twentysomething men known as the “DOGE” squad involved dismantling USAID programs around the world; the X owner gained access to the data on tens of millions of Americans.

What, exactly, he does with that information is unknown. Combined with the data he has already obtained through his control of X, that information makes him an undeniable force in American politics.

According to the person quoted by Gibney, Musk does it all to fill the bleakness he feels within himself. Other times, perhaps he fills that void by lashing out at others.

Just ask President Donald Trump, who has privately admitted he was hurt by Musk after their nuclear fallout, according to recent reports.

After the 80-year-old president returned to the White House in part due to Musk, it wasn’t long before the relationship went awry. It came to a head in a very public feud, which included Musk claiming in an X post that Trump “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” The allegation was unsupported, and Musk later deleted the post. 

Sept. 1

 

AlterNet America, Opinion: Trump Wants the FCC to Punish a Journalist for One Word, Ryan Rose, Aug. 31, 2026. Trump threatens NBC's Welker with FCC punishment, the FBI loosens hiring standards, West Point fires its climate scientist, and a judge blocks speech-based deportations. 

Trump is threatening to send the FCC after an NBC journalist who accurately described his endorsement record as “mixed.” The FBI has quietly dropped its ban on hiring applicants who have patronized sex workers, stolen from employers, or engaged in bestiality. West Point fired its only climate scientist after he refused to stop teaching that humans cause climate change. And a federal judge just ruled that the Trump administration cannot deport students for criticizing Israel.

Before we get to the news, a brief ask: AlterNet America was launched as a direct response to MAGA billionaires buying up networks like CBS and newspapers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. We’re going all-in on the bet that reader-supported journalism can compete directly with the billionaires by being the one thing they can’t buy.

We’re incredibly grateful to all the free subscribers who have signed up to receive our newsletters in recent weeks. But if you’ve been thinking about making the leap to become a paying subscriber, this is the time when it matters the most. Please upgrade today. Upgrade to paidTrump Threatens NBC’s Kristen Welker With FCC ‘Punishment’

Apparently the FCC now stands for Federal Compliment Commission.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday that Meet the Press host Kristen Welker would be reported to the Federal Communications Commission for “rebuke or punishment” because she noted that candidates he’s endorsed have had “mixed results.”

He called her assessment a “purposeful inaccuracy” and a “Threat to our Country,” despite the fact that six candidates he endorsed lost their primary elections in August alone. In a second post, he attacked what he called “FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA” and wrote “FCC TO THE RESCUE.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr previously issued a threat to broadcasters over their coverage of the Iran war in March after Trump complained on social media. In April, Carr initiated an unusual challenge to ABC’s local station licenses the day after Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel’s firing. He also has an open investigation into NBC’s parent company, Comcast, over what Trump has called “invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, responded that the FCC has no authority to punish journalists the administration does not like. The FCC’s complaint form does not currently include a box for “a journalist used a word I didn’t like,” but give it time.

New York Times, John Galliano Withdraws From Met Museum Show After Backlash, Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein, Aug. 31, 2026. Donors, politicians and Jewish leaders questioned the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, a fashion designer who was found guilty of a hate crime for his antisemitic outbursts.

Facing an intense backlash, the influential fashion designer John Galliano has taken the unprecedented step of withdrawing from a planned exhibition in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram page.

He also expressed “profound and enduring” gratitude to the museum’s leadership, and acknowledged the pain his past words had caused.

“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he wrote. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”

In recent days, a furor mounted over the museum’s choice to honor Galliano, who was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He would have been only the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing.

Given that the Met Gala has traditionally served as the opening night for the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, the plan risked placing the museum in the position of seeming to sanctify Galliano during an event that has become the Super Bowl of glamour. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 29, 2026 [Cherry-picked History], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 31, 2026. One of our founding myths is that of George Washington and the cherry tree. In his The Life of Washington, first published in 1800, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader.

The book was written not to reflect the facts of Washington’s life—biographies would not focus on facts for almost a century—but to show virtues the nation’s youth should imitate and to establish a set of attributes against which future voters could judge those vying to lead the nation.

Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. And, beginning with an 1806 edition of the book, he could not tell a lie. According to Weems, when George was about six years old “he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet, of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way. One day, in the garden…he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree…. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree…, came into the House; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author…. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. ‘George,’ said his father, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’

“This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’

“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”

Like many of the other anecdotes Weems delivered, this story was almost certainly invented. But it established the importance of truth-telling in a leader.

On Friday, Rick Maese of the Washington Post reported that despite orders from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes saying that she wanted advance notice before the government took down more than ten trees from the East Potomac Golf Links or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property, the Trump administration has taken down more than sixty trees in apparent preparation for Trump to redesign the golf course.

Opponents have sued to stop the redesign of the historic publicly owned course. Trump has said the makeover will begin on September 1, but Maese notes that the administration has released “no final design, construction schedule or estimated cost.” It has apparently not conducted either environmental or historical preservation reviews. It has not said how changes to the course will affect public access to the three courses and to the popular recreation path on the property.

Reyes said she would not stop administration officials from doing routine maintenance on the property, and the administration says the tree removal is routine maintenance. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said: “Arborists are doing routine maintenance at East Potomac Park with selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees, and declining and dying trees that cannot be brought back to good health through any degree of intervention.”

One of the trees they have cut down is a cherry tree.

It seems like the writers for the 250th season of American democracy are becoming increasingly desperate to get the country’s attention.

On Friday, Trump announced: “The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer. This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity. This Transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States! Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter.”

There are reasons to greet this announcement with skepticism.

A U.S. official told Megan Messerly, Ben Lefebvre, and Scott Waldman of Politico that this deal was a new venture between the U.S. government and an “experienced private operator in Venezuela.” Although the official did not identify which operator that is, it became clear over the weekend that the person in question is Alejandro Betancourt López.

Rebecca F. Elliott, Anatoly Kurmanaev, and Edward Wong of the New York Times explained that Betancourt’s family controls Venezuela’s second largest private oil producer, North American Blue Energy Partners. Betancourt has been accused of corruption for years; Switzerland has investigated him for money laundering and has issued a warrant for his arrest, although it has not charged him.

According to the New York Times reporters, it appears the plan is for the U.S. government to back North American Blue Energy Partners, which will, in turn, develop oil reserves in 17 of Venezuela’s oil fields. The U.S. official who talked to the Politico journalists said the new venture would be the second-biggest private oil company in the world, after Saudi Aramco. The U.S. would control 55% of the venture’s output. When production starts, the person told the journalists, “the resulting stable supply of at-cost oil in our Hemisphere will go toward filling the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve and fulfilling the supply needs of our Great U.S. Military.”

But an executive in the oil industry told the journalists that the deal was “built on a legal environment that does not exist. The Venezuelan constitution does not allow for anyone other than [Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company] to own rights to oil and gas in the country,” the executive pointed out.

“The end of story,” the person said, “is the president wants to say we have billions of barrels of oil in reserve. That would act as a price stabilization nuclear bomb. Oh, the Iranians have blocked Hormuz? The president could say[,] ‘I have 65 billion barrels in reserve.’”

The Politico journalists report that Trump has been frustrated that U.S. companies have been slow to invest in Venezuela and that the administration has pressured Rodríguez to give them better terms. Samantha Schmidt and Helena Carpio of the Washington Post today flat out said the deal “cements the United States’ long-term dominance over Venezuela, which has become a neo-colony since the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro in January, when Trump vowed to ‘run’ the country and exploit its oil wealth.”

Last September, the Trump administration began striking small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that Trump claimed—without evidence—were being operated by narcoterrorists from Venezuela. The U.S. massed military vessels off Venezuela’s shores, where they blockaded Venezuelan oil tankers after Trump called Venezuela’s government a foreign terrorist organization. On January 3, Trump authorized the military to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores in a nighttime raid and bring them to the U.S. for trial on weapons and drug charges.

Although opponents of Maduro, who had seized power after losing a presidential election, cheered the raid in the belief that Trump would help them put opposition candidate Edmundo González in power, in fact the administration supported Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. On January 5 it formally recognized her as Venezuela’s head of state. Venezuela’s high court disagreed. It called Maduro’s absence a “kidnapping” and determined that under the country’s constitution, elections had to be held to replace him.

Now the U.S. government says it has made a “deal” with Rodríguez, who told reporters: “The agreement is based on a very simple premise. Each party contributes what it does best. Venezuela contributes oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States contributes the capital and technology needed to recover and develop those assets.”

“So, let me get this straight,” national security reporter David Rothkopf wrote. “[T]he US illegally attacks a country, kidnaps its president, threatens its government with massive military force, gets them to hand over to US control a huge portion of their national assets, hails the billions it has already brought in and promises billions more[,] but we don’t know where the money’s going, how it is going to benefit the US, if it is going to benefit the US, who’s privately going to benefit, what side deals have been struck with the corrupt leaders of their country or ours, & we are supposed to celebrate this act of aggression and theft that violates international law and that could well turn out to be a massive mafia-style shakedown scheme to benefit the anti-democratic forces in Venezuela and the US, the president’s friends and supporters, possibly the president and his family?”

Rothkopf appears to have understood the point of the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

Brave New Films New Documentary: Murdering 60 Minutes: Did Bari Weiss Suppress Epstein Coverage? Staff report, Sept. 1, 2026. CBS fired the reporter working on a 60 Minutes investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Then the report was pulled entirely

.Around the same time, word got out that Bari Weiss's wife, Nellie Bowles, appears in the Epstein files — including a friendly exchange with Epstein and a 2018 visit to his Manhattan townhouse.With Weiss overseeing CBS News, the timing raises a question we think deserves an answer: did this story get killed because it hit too close to home?

August

Aug. 31 

The Wrap, Washington Post Columnist Slams ‘Traitor’ Pentagon Source Leaking Hegseth Meetings to Paper, A.J. Katz, Aug. 31, 2026. Marc Thiessen says the government official behind a classified Iran War report should be prosecuted.

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called the government source behind his own newspaper’s reporting on military opposition to prolonging the Iran war a “traitor” who should face prosecution.

“Whoever leaked this is a traitor and ought to be prosecuted,” the conservative columnist wrote Sunday on X, sharing the Post’s exclusive report that senior military commanders had warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against sustaining large-scale operations against Iran.Donald Trump/Washington Post (Credit: Getty Images)Read NextTrump Calls Washington Post Report of Hegseth Rift Completely False and ‘Treasonous’

The comments created an unusual tension at the Post, which had already defended its reporting after Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell accused the newspaper of committing a crime by publishing classified information.

“We’re confident in our reporting, our sourcing, and the constitutional protections that guarantee the rights of news organizations to publish information in the public interest that holds officials accountable,” the Post said in a statement. “The assertion that such publication is a crime is both incorrect and irresponsible.”

Post foreign-policy columnist Josh Rogin challenged Thiessen by pointing to the newspaper’s defense of its reporting.

“I said whoever LEAKED it, Josh,” Thiessen responded. “You do get that a government official leaking classified information to the press is committing a crime, right?”karen-attiahRead Next/Washington Post Ordered to Reinstate Karen Attiah After Firing Over Charlie Kirk Posts

Thiessen’s clarification drew a distinction between prosecuting the journalists who published the classified information and the government official who provided it. But his call would still target a confidential source behind reporting published by his own newspaper.

The underlying Post report said four senior military commanders formally objected to continuing to divert personnel and equipment to the Middle East into 2027. The warnings appeared in a classified Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, according to people familiar with the assessment.

The commanders warned that extended deployments were degrading their ability to carry out other missions, including homeland defense, according to the Post. Navy chief Adm. Daryl Caudle reportedly argued that the service could not sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict without a clear end date.

Parnell disputed portions of the report but acknowledged that Hegseth regularly receives such objections from military leaders, 

Aug. 30 

Associated Press, US Treasury blocks certain journalists from G20 meeting in North Carolina, Ben Finley, Aug. 30, 2026. The U.S. Treasury Department is preventing certain journalists from covering a finance meeting among the world’s most powerful countries, the latest example of how President Donald Trump’s administration has restricted media access.

Individual reporters from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News were not granted credentials to the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, the Times reported.

The Treasury has not explained the decision. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday that “it has nothing to do with point of view.”

The reporters who’ve been denied access include the Times’ Alan Rappeport, who has been covering such meetings and the Treasury Department since 2017. However, another reporter for the Times, Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley, is allowed to attend.

The Times said in a statement that denying American journalists access to an event in the U.S. is “not just another disturbing effort by the administration to undermine independent journalism, but a blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny.”

“With the war in Iran, sanctions, the bond markets, and inflation on the agenda for the G20 finance ministers, the stakes of this gathering are significant for the global economy and the American people,” the Times said. “Excluding specific reporters and entire news organizations is a disservice to the public and an assault on press freedoms that we strongly condemn.”Related StoriesUS plans to sanction another bank in effort to clamp down on Iran transactions, Bessent tells APUS plans to sanction another bank in effort to clamp down on Iran transactions, Bessent tells AP2 MIN READ33Bessent huddles with G20 to try to rally allies on Iran as tariffs strain tiesBessent huddles with G20 to try to rally allies on Iran as tariffs strain ties3 MIN READ45US targets Egyptian bank’s UAE branches under new push for Iran’s economic isolationUS targets Egyptian bank’s UAE branches under new push for Iran’s economic isolation3 MIN READ45

Bloomberg News, in a story published Sunday evening, said “numerous” journalists from the news agency, including some based in Europe and Asia, had their accreditation requests rejected. It said denying the agency access to the meeting “undermines media freedom and public accountability.”

The Wall Street Journal declined to comment.

Bessent is hosting the G20 meeting, which runs Saturday through Tuesday. It includes finance ministers, central bank governors and senior officials from the world’s top economies. This year’s G20 summit, which involves heads of state, is being held in December at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida.

Tensions have been escalating between the U.S. media and the second Trump administration, playing out both in the public arena and at times in the courts.

For example, the Defense Department declared earlier this year that its press office had become a classified space inaccessible to journalists. The ouster came after the Pentagon had demanded that reporters agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, prompting most news outlets to leave the building last fall.

The Associated Press has also sued Trump over access to the White House press pool. The news organization’s access was curtailed for sticking with the name “Gulf of Mexico” after the administration ordered it rechristened the “Gulf of America.”

Aug. 29

 

New York Times, Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Foreign Students Who Criticized Israel, Chris Cameron, Aug. 29, 2026 (print ed.).The ruling was a win for Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, and it followed another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year.A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.

“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.

“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.

Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.

The ruling follows another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year. A federal judge in Massachusetts appointed by President Ronald Reagan ruled in September that Trump officials had violated the First Amendment as part of a broader strategy to stamp out campus activism. Judge Wise relied heavily on the reasoning of that court, which found that the Trump administration singled out “pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech for a campaign of speech-chilling retribution.”

In California, lawyers from the free speech group brought their lawsuit on behalf of The Stanford Daily, a student newspaper at Stanford University. They argued that several of its staff members had been forced to self-censor or quit the paper out of fear that the government could retaliate for what it published.

In court filings, the newspaper, which is open to all students and has more than 150 members, said it had weathered resignations and withdrawn stories by noncitizens who were concerned that publishing content about Israel or the conditions in Gaza could leave them vulnerable to deportation.

The climate of fear at Stanford that the lawsuit described followed a series of arrests last year, when the Trump administration began targeting prominent student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, over their speaking out against the Israeli government and the mounting death toll in Gaza.

In those and other cases, immigration agents arrested the students after Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, invoked the challenged provision, deeming the students a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. In each case, Mr. Rubio personally signed off on the decision to revoke a student visa or render a lawful permanent resident deportable after determining that those interests were at stake.

New York Times, How Meta’s $17.1 Billion Social Media Settlement Came Together, Cecilia Kang and Eli Tan, Aug. 29, 2026. State attorneys general spent months in negotiations. Then, as its legal losses mounted, the social media giant’s new top lawyer brought a huge settlement to the table.

Six days before the start of a federal trial over online child safety, C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, traveled to Nashville on Aug. 6 to meet with lawyers for about a dozen states. He wanted to broker an enormous settlement, two people familiar with the conversation said.

Meta had already suffered losses in court this year over claims it created addictive products that harmed young users. Mark Zuckerberg had endured a full day of grilling on the witness stand during one of those trials. (“You’re mischaracterizing this,” he kept repeating.) He was likely to be questioned again at the federal trial in California, in which a coalition of states had sued Meta, arguing that the company had contributed to a national child mental health crisis.

Over bagels and coffee in an Art Deco office on Tennessee’s Capitol grounds, Mr. Mahoney presented his terms, which Mr. Zuckerberg had personally approved, according to four people familiar with the negotiations. Meta would pay the states up to $19 billion and make changes to its platforms to improve teen safety. Some of the payment would be withheld unless all states joined and other social media companies also settled.

For the states attorney general in the room, the offer was intriguing. They had been negotiating with the Silicon Valley giant for months with little progress, the people said. On Tuesday, 47 states — two had dropped out of the lawsuit — the District of Columbia and several territories agreed to a settlement worth roughly $17 billion.

“There’s a saying here in Tennessee,” Jonathan Skrmetti, the state’s attorney general, said in one of the meetings with nearly all the state attorneys general, encouraging them not to get greedy. “Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.”

The settlement, one of the largest agreements between a company and a group of states embroiled in litigation, was announced on Wednesday. This account of how it came together is based on a dozen interviews with state leaders, former and current Meta executives, court documents and trial testimony.

New York Times, Investigation: Political Campaigns Are Quietly Paying Influencers to Support Candidates, Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson, Aug. 29, 2026. Their videos have proliferated on social media, but the payments are frequently hidden from viewers., 

Josh Greene is a rising left-wing social media star with his own podcast, nearly 800,000 followers and access to politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.

He has used that platform to support dozens of progressive candidates in the midterm elections, ranging from low-profile, down-ballot contests to some of the nation’s marquee Democratic primaries. In camera-facing videos, Mr. Greene informs his followers of his preferences, calling some candidates “the most viable” and, in other cases, declaring that “this is the candidate for you.”

He does not always tell his viewers that he is being compensated for his support.

But records show that Mr. Greene, 26, has received money from at least seven politicians, or outside groups supporting them, in the current campaign cycle, including several congressional candidates in New York and a super PAC linked to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate nominee in Michigan. Tom Steyer, the former candidate for governor in California, paid him $21,500.

Mr. Greene, who lives in Southern California and is best known by his handle @joshtheprogressive, is among a growing number of influencers who, at a moment when campaigns are increasingly willing to pay for online attention, appear willing to put their mouth where the money is.In February, Mr. Greene said that Mr. Steyer “isn’t the progressive champion you might think” because of his investments in detention facilities.

Political CommentatorIn May, around the same time that he received $21,500 from Mr. Steyer’s campaign, Mr. Greene shifted his support to Mr. Steyer. He called Mr. Steyer “the most progressive viable candidate in the race,” adding that it was “my opinion.”

As more people spend time scrolling on their phones, campaigns view these shows of support from influencers as a vital way to reach voters. They are also significantly less expensive than traditional advertising.

But unlike campaign mailers, billboards and television spots, these messages fall into a legal gray area.

There are no federal regulations requiring disclosure of payments for political support on social media, and only a few states have such rules. That allows influencers, in most instances, to endorse candidates for a fee without ever disclosing those payments in their posts. Creators say some campaigns have even asked them to actively conceal the fact that they’re being compensated, making it impossible to know what’s genuine support — and what is pay-for-play.

In most cases, the only way a viewer would know an influencer is being paid would be to search a candidate’s campaign finance reports, as The New York Times did to discover the payments. Even then, such compensation is regularly obscured by funneling the payments through middlemen.“It’s completely out of control,” said Suzanne Lambert, a progressive influencer and comedian with more than 1.3 million followers between TikTok and Instagram. She said that while she happily promotes candidates she likes, she has “never taken a cent” in exchange for an endorsement and worries that the practice distorts the democratic process. “People don’t know what’s real anymore,” she said.

Mr. Greene defended the idea of influencers getting paid for their work and noted that he accepts money only from candidates and campaigns that he would support anyway. “I turn down offers every single day because I’m not going to take money from any place if I don’t agree with it,” he said. (In the case of the Steyer campaign, Mr. Greene said he was initially critical but came to see him as the most viable candidate.)

Still, he suggested there was a need for straightforward and consistent rules on disclosure. “If anything, we do need more clear transparency laws so that creators like myself aren’t confused,” he said.Coordinated networks

The phenomenon is bipartisan.

In June, Representative Barry Moore of Alabama filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that at least eight social media accounts were being paid to attack his military record during the Republican primary. In April, a newspaper in Kentucky revealed what appeared to be a coordinated network of influencers boosting Nate Morris — at the time running in a Republican Senate primary — even though none acknowledged being paid for their efforts. Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and the Republican nominee for Senate, benefited from a paid campaign on X when he was facing impeachment in the state several years ago.

But the question of paid influence has gained particular attention in recent months thanks to aggressive efforts by a handful of Democratic candidates to secure support from well-known influencers.

During California’s hard-fought primary this spring, Mr. Steyer’s campaign paid 17 influencers at least $5,000 apiece, including one, Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has over 14 million followers on TikTok and received a total of $400,000, campaign finance filings show.

Former Representative Katie Porter, who also ran unsuccessfully for California governor, paid 12 influencers a total of $139,500. One of them, a lifestyle creator named Avery Cyrus with 9.5 million followers on TikTok, received $25,000 for what appeared to be a single post claiming “Katie Porter’s thing works.”

Ms. Cyrus’s post was deleted after The Times inquired about it. She did not respond to a request for comment made through the social media agency that represents her, UnderCurrent Media, but the firm’s chief executive, Eric Bogard, said in an email that it “was not asked to oversee disclosure compliance, nor were we provided instructions concerning any required disclosures.”

Under California law, paid political posts on social media must be disclosed. A Times review found three posts supporting Ms. Porter on TikTok from influencers who were paid by her campaign that did not include any disclosures. In seven other instances, the disclosures could be found only after clicking through to a hidden section of TikTok for comments flagged “as potentially offensive or disturbing.”

Sander Jennings, an influencer based in Florida who was paid $22,000, said “the Porter campaign and I agreed to disclose the payment” in TikTok’s comments section in order to get around the site’s practice of removing paid political posts. He said he did not know why the disclosures ended up in the hidden section of the comments.

TikTok’s terms of service bar all paid political advertising, including “creators being compensated for making branded political content. In an email, Ms. Porter said that “nothing was paid for and posted without review and coordination and compliance with all law.”

Other political efforts have employed a different strategy, contracting private firms that pay little-known content creators smaller sums to put out a large volume of posts. Those companies, known as user generated content platforms, or U.G.C.s, operate on the principle that carpet bombing the internet with hundreds of nearly identical posts is more likely to generate viral content than paying one large influencer the same amount of money to make a single post.

This spring, a woman posted dozens of videos promoting Mr. Steyer in the California primary. Weeks later, she appeared in videos from a different account complaining about the cost of living “here in Michigan” and encouraging people to vote for Representative Haley Stevens, Dr. El-Sayed’s primary opponent in the Senate race. Then she pivoted to a third account talking about affordability in Wisconsin.

Corporate records show that the woman, Paige Dunmeyer, actually lives in Kansas City, Mo., and is registered to work with a U.G.C. company called SideShift. It’s not clear how much she was paid for her Michigan and Wisconsin videos, but she has earned more than $30,000 on SideShift for a variety of political and commercial campaigns, according to company records reviewed by the Times. Filings from Mr. Steyer’s campaign showed she received $1,320 for her efforts in that race. Ms. Dunmeyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Aug. 27

  

New York Times, Will Meta’s Changes Benefit Young Users’ Mental Health? Nina Agrawal and Roni Caryn Rabin, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Psychologists said the changes were a symbolic victory, but warned their effectiveness might be limited.

Psychologists and child advocates welcomed news of the landmark settlement Wednesday over claims that the social media giant Meta had harmed young users with its addictive platforms. But many expressed skepticism that the company’s planned changes would have a meaningful effect on adolescents’ mental health.

For users under 18, Meta announced it would introduce a default two-hour daily time limit, restrictions on use during nighttime and school hours and a ban on cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters, among other changes.

“There’s a desire to say with this kind of verdict and these kinds of changes, ‘This is going to solve the problem — this is going to protect teens’ mental health,’” said Jacqueline Nesi, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.

But research suggests that the relationship between social media use and mental health is much more complex, Dr. Nesi said. Technology can hijack young people’s time and attention, sometimes at the cost of beneficial activities like exercise, sleep or in-person interactions, and some studies have linked heavy social media use to anxiety. But the idea that social media is the primary or main driver of mental health problems in children and teenagers “is just not supported with the research,” Dr. Nesi said.

Experts agreed that the settlement and the changes Meta announced were a major symbolic victory. Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, said the measures would send “a powerful message” that platforms like Instagram are risky and should be used with care.

Candice Odgers, a professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said the settlement would force Meta to design its social media platforms in a way that would make them safer — something psychologists like her have long called for.

But unless the whole industry gets on board, young people can simply migrate to other platforms, Dr. Odgers said. (On Wednesday, Meta urged TikTok and YouTube to put similar measures in place, saying that it wanted to protect teens but adding that “we cannot do it alone.”) And even there, the science remains unsettled on any causal link between social media participation and adolescent mental health, she added.

Several large-scale reviews have shown weak associations in the adolescent population between social media use and mental health, Dr. Odgers said. These have been both positive and negative. For example, she said, algorithmic feeds can harm someone who has disordered eating, but social media can be a valuable resource for people who are looking for certain kinds of information or who are in crisis.

Some researchers pointed to sleep as a potentially important factor. “We know that for many teens, the way they are using technology in general, the way they’re using social media, is getting in the way of their sleep,” Dr. Nesi said. Poor sleep over time can lead to or exacerbate anxiety and depression and can affect physical health. Teens will now be restricted from using Facebook and Instagram between midnight and 6 a.m., but “it’s an open question whether these protections will actually lead to more sleep for teens,” Dr. Nesi said. (Instagram already had an option for users to select “sleep mode” and opt out of nighttime notifications.)+

In addition, six hours of sleep a night is not enough, said Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age.”

She said the agreement for Instagram and Facebook to silence notifications during school hours also does not go far enough, because young people need relief from notifications after school hours so they can do homework or focus on other activities.

New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Make Sure His Competitors Share His Pain, Mike Isaac, Aug. 27, 2026. Meta, the social media giant, agreed to change the way children interact with its apps. That could be trouble if its competitors don’t abide by the same rules.

The up to $17.1 billion that Meta agreed on Wednesday to pay to 47 states, the District of Columbia and some U.S. territories to settle a three-year-old lawsuit probably won’t sting that much for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The details of the settlement, however, could leave a mark. Meta also agreed to rein in children’s access to its marquee products like Instagram and Facebook, create daily time limits, increase parental controls and cut off access during school hours.

That could permanently alter how Meta interacts with its youngest users, the next generation to scroll and click on its various apps, and make it hard for the company to uphold its claim to be the world’s dominant social media company.

Mr. Zuckerberg has a contingency plan: Level the playing field, so that children can’t just switch to the app of a competitor. If he has to play by new rules, he wants companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same. Meta built a financial incentive into its deal with the state attorneys general, designed to rope in the other companies.

Here’s how it would work: The base line of Meta’s monetary settlement is $12 billion. The company has also agreed to a two-hour daily time limit for children. Meta will reduce that to one hour if YouTube and TikTok also agree to a one-hour limit. And if the other companies also pay $5 billion to the states, Meta will throw in the rest of the $5 billion or so it has promised.

It is not clear what sort of mechanism would be needed to make such cooperation from the other companies a reality. YouTube and TikTok have yet to publicly acknowledge Meta’s overtures. YouTube declined to comment, and representatives for TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

On Wednesday, some lawmakers hinted at their appetite to make the rules apply to the rest of the industry.

U.S. Midterm Election Political Dirty Tricks 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Senate GOP’s fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 27, 2026. On August 6, Popular Information exposed a network of fake news websites surreptitiously controlled by Senate Republicans. One of these sites is now being used to legitimize a specious attack against former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

The North Carolinian bills itself as “Independent Journalism for North Carolina.” But the website is not independent. It is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans.

The North Carolinian published an unbylined article on August 21: “Families Demand Accountability for Repeat Offenders as North Carolina Prison Releases Face New Scrutiny.” The article focuses on the “murder of 22-year-old North Carolina resident Logan Federico.” It emphasizes that the man who was accused of murdering Federico, Alexander Dickey, had previously been charged with “at least 48 crimes across 14 separate occasions, including 31 felony charges.”

The article then links Federico’s murder to “the decision by former governor Roy Cooper’s administration to release thousands of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Federico’s murder, however, has nothing to do with Cooper or North Carolina.

The crime was committed in 2025 in South Carolina by Dickey, a South Carolina man who was previously incarcerated in South Carolina. All of Dickey’s crimes occurred in South Carolina. Dickey was released from Lexington County Detention Center, a South Carolina jail, by a South Carolina judge.

The purported news article about Federico’s murder in the North Carolinian does not mention South Carolina. The fake news website is being used to legitimize the smear with an article no legitimate outlet would publish.

The SLF is promoting the fake news article to North Carolina residents through paid ads on Meta platforms.

The online campaign also reinforces a television ad by the SLF. The ad features an image of a report about the murder by WCNC, a North Carolina TV station, with a “Charlotte, N.C.” dateline. But, conveniently, it obscures the text of the piece stating the crime took place in South Carolina.Federico’s father has appeared with Cooper’s opponent, Republican Michael Whatley, on the campaign trail.

New York Times, A Republican Attack Ad Used a Family’s Tragedy. Now They’re Furious, Jessica Contrera, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Relatives of a family killed by a semi truck say they were not consulted about the ad, which connected the crash to illegal immigration.

In the months after Jesse Mallen’s sister died in a highway crash, looking at photos of her brought him comfort. Then he saw her face in a political attack ad.

The ad, which aired across Ohio this month, shows Mr. Mallen’s sister, Lynnea Soposki, along with her husband, Luke, and their 1-year-old son, Logan. In April, all three family members were killed when a semi truck crashed into their pickup truck on a highway north of Columbus, causing a nine-car pileup and setting their vehicle on fire.

The driver, who was charged with multiple felonies, has been accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and Ohio drivers licenses.

Titled “Dangerous for Ohio,” the ad was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and authorized by the campaign of Senator Jon Husted, who is running against former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat.

“Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals — the consequences were deadly,” a narrator says before the ad shows a photo of the semi driver, a photo of the family who died and a video of the crash. “Brown doesn’t care.”

Shortly after the crash, the Ohio Department of Public Safety issued a news release stating the driver entered the United States in the 1990s and “subsequently used multiple names and dates of birth to obtain state and federal identification.” The state said it was turning its investigation over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the driver, Modou Ngom, has not been charged with any immigration-related crimes. His lawyer, who declined to comment on Wednesday, has said in a court motion that the state’s statements violated Mr. Ngom’s right to a fair trial. In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Ngom was naturalized as a citizen in 2015, but did not answer a series of questions about the state’s fraud allegations.

Mr. Mallen, 40, said in an interview that he privately reached out to the Husted campaign through email and certified mail last week, imploring it to stop running the ad.

“What we all want is to be able to grieve in peace and privacy, and for our family to not be used in such a classless way by a politician, especially without being consulted,” Mr. Mallen said. “We certainly would not have said yes, but quite frankly, I think they knew that.”

Tributes To Dolly Parton

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 26, 2026 [We Will Always Love You: Special Remembrances], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.

The Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene” during the U.S. Open. Jack White played Jolene in London. Elsewhere in London, the Buckingham Palace band played “9 to 5.”

All this and more for a woman born on January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains without electricity or running water.

Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of twelve children born to illiterate sharecropper Robert Lee Parton Sr. and Avie Lee Caroline Owens. A musical prodigy encouraged by her mother, Dolly was singing on local radio and television shows in Nashville by the time she was 10 and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13. In 1964 she moved to Nashville, where other musicians quickly recognized her talent as a songwriter. Over her career, she would write songs made famous by Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and others.

In 1965, Parton made her first record, and the following year she married asphalt paver Carl Dean, who stayed out of the limelight during their 59-year marriage. Following the success of Parton’s first record, country music star Porter Wagoner invited her to become part of his show in 1967.

There she blossomed, joining Wagoner to record a dozen studio albums that produced a number of top 10 hit singles. Playing off Wagoner’s famous rhinestone-studded suits made by Ukrainian-American designer Nudie Cohn, the petite Parton adopted huge hairstyles and emphasized her figure, and soon began wearing rhinestones herself.

She once told a journalist that she modeled her public image after a woman others called the “town tramp” but whom she saw as a glamorous contrast to the women in Parton’s own life. “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’” But, in an industry dominated by men, Parton also noted her style was a way for a small woman to “fill my space.”

By the 1970s, Parton was coming into her own, taking on the music industry on her own terms.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,” Parton was famous for saying. “Don’t ever sacrifice who you are, your principles and your morals and your values to just try to get ahead in business. It ain’t worth it.”

Rather than running from her upbringing in rural poverty, Parton embraced the values that upbringing had inspired in her. In 1971 she hit #1 on the country charts with her song “Joshua,” inspired by the Appalachian men around whom she had grown up whose rough looks covered their quality. In the same year, her “Coat of Many Colors” reached #4, telling the story of how her mother had made her a coat of rags, rich with love. Those who valued possessions over love, she sang, were the ones truly impoverished. In 1972 she wrote “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” about the peace and humanity of rural life, “walking home from church on Sunday with the one you love, just laughing, talking, making future plans.”

She parted ways with Wagoner in 1974, and her farewell song to him, “I Will Always Love You,” became a global sensation that reached #1 on the country charts in 1974, 1982, and again in 1992, when it spent 14 weeks at #1 after Whitney Houston covered it. In 1974, Parton also delivered “Jolene,” the desperate plea of a woman to a beautiful rival not to “take my man.” “Jolene,” too, hit #1 on the country charts.

In 1975 and 1976 the Country Music Association named Parton Female Vocalist of the Year, and in 1978 it honored her as Entertainer of the Year, just three of the many awards she would win as her musical career took off not just at home but also internationally.

In 1976, Parton began working with manager Sandy Gallin, and in 1980 she launched her film career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a comedy with a subversive subtext about discrimination against women. In the film, for which Parton wrote the theme song, three working women replace their sexist, domineering boss and implement programs their colleagues like, including equal pay, flexible hours, and an on-site daycare center, all of which result in dramatically improved office productivity.

A massive success at the box office, 9 to 5 opened doors for Parton in the movie industry, leading to parts in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, and other films. She and Gallin created a production company, Sandollar, which produced her television specials and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

For almost sixty years, Parton was a member of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, a labor union that represents about 70,000 singers and players and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. She joined the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 1969.

AFM International president Tino Gagliardi told John Nichols of The Nation: “Before she was an icon, Dolly was a working musician. Dolly never forgot the musicians who helped bring her music to life. By standing firm for solidarity and treating every player with dignity, she elevated our entire profession.”

In 1989, Sandollar helped to bring awareness and empathy to the AIDS crisis with the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The film explored the lives of five of the individuals memorialized in panels on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and called attention to the Reagan administration’s lack of response to the epidemic.

In 1990, Common Threads won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and in the 1991 song “Family” that she wrote with Carl Perkins, Parton sang: “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, drunks, and strays, but not a one is turned away when it’s family. Some are lucky, others ain’t, some are fighters, others faint. Winners, losers, sinners, saints, it’s all family.”

In a conversation with host Larry King in 2016, Parton noted that she had taken heat for her support for the LGBTQ community, but that she did “not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are…. I just think that we should be more loving, more caring. We are who we are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight, and you should be allowed to be, you know, how you are, and who you are.”

In 1986, Parton bought an interest in a theme park owned by Jack and Pete Herschend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Renamed “Dollywood,” the park became the biggest ticketed attraction in the state, now visited by about 4 million people a year and employing about 4,000. “I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area,” she told a reporter.

Two years later, she established the Dollywood Foundation to support education in Sevier County. In 1990, her “buddy” program decreased the high school dropout rate in classes that participated from 35% to 6%. In 2016, the Dollywood Foundation created the My People Fund—as in, these are my people—providing immediate financial assistance to families who lost their homes in wildfires in Sevier County that November. It donated more than $12 million.

In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund the research that allowed researchers to prove that mRNA vaccine technology worked. That research led to grants that enabled development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 that saved millions of lives. She also helped encourage others to get vaccinated, taking her own shot on camera in a dress she had cut the shoulders out of so the doctor would have easier access.

Beginning in February 2022, under the Grow U program, Parton provided 100% free tuition, fees, and books to any of the 11,000 employees at any of the 25 amusement parks and attractions under Herschend Enterprises. The president of Dollywood told reporters that one of the key tenets of the Dollywood Foundation is to “learn more.” He said that Parton is “very supportive of the employees learning and continuing to grow themselves.”

That drive for growth and opportunity was behind Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which Parton founded in 1995 to put books into the hands of every young child in Sevier County. Her inspiration, she said, was her father, who was “the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all his dreams.” The program has grown until it now serves children across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

In February 2018, Parton donated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the Library of Congress. It was a copy of her book Coat of Many Colors, dedicated to her father.

By the time Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, August 25, at the age of 80, her Imagination Library had delivered more than 332 million books to more than 3 million children.

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true,” the Imagination Library website reads. “I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

When children age out of Dolly’s Imagination Library, they receive a final letter from her hoping they would “have a great time” in school and urging them to keep reading.

The letter ends: “You and all of your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me—dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you. You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.

“You are terrific, and remember…

“I Will Always Love You,

“Dolly.”

Aug. 23

 

The Quietside Journal (Maine), Publisher's Opinion: Covering Susan Collins Part 3: How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time, Lincoln Millstein, small town Maine digital news publisher and former prominent editor with the New York Times, Boston Globe and Hartford Courant, Aug. 23, 2026. How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time.

Sunday morning. Time to devour the Sunday paper along with your coffee and catch up on the week’s big stories.

“U.S., Canada Spiral Toward Trade War,” the Wall Street Journal blared on its home page this morning.

The WSJ does not publish a Sunday paper. But the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News still do.

I could only find only a generic wire-service article buried in the BDN website which failed to mention that Canada is Maine’s largest trade and investment partner.

According to the Maine International Trade Center, “Maine exported $1.3 billion of products – approximately 40% of the state’s total exports – to Canada last year.

“This figure only accounts for physical products. The value of the relationship grows substantially when adding in services like banking and tourism.

“Maine’s natural resource-based industries (potatoes, blueberries, lobster, forest products, etc.) are highly integrated with Canada, which is characterized by two-way trade flows of raw materials and finished products, as well as bilateral investments in each other’s markets.”

Seemed like fodder for a story or two, especially since an election is on tap Nov. 3 for the United States Senate in Maine.

The era of social media has exposed the hands-off coverage of Republican Susan Collins by the state’s largest newspapers which some believe is responsible for her 30-year-tenure.

On Aug. 2, I wrote about the masterful way she has manipulated coverage, including reports that how she got the Press Herald to change a headline for one which was friendlier to the senator.

This behavior will leave a permanent stain on the state’s news organizations the likes of which I did not detect in the aftermath of the 2000 Senate race, when Collins defeated Sara Gideon.

Since then, alternative voices have emerged on the right and the left, and they know how to use social media more deftly than they did six years ago.

Maine journalist Andy O’Brien is a perfect example.

He wrote in April on his Substack page, “Maine’s two dailies have been protecting Susan Collins for too long” under the headline, “The Susan Collins Media Industrial Complex.”

O’Brien didn’t start writing on Substack until 2025. Even though the platform was launched in 2017, it didn’t start gaining traction until the 2020 election year.

Its star, Heather Cox Richardson, did not begin writing on Substack until December 2019.

Bluesky, the explosive social network, began as a research project at Twitter in 2019. It launched as an invite-only beta app in February 2023 and finally opened its registration to the general public without invitations on February 6, 2024.

“Collins Watch” uses Bluesky.

It posted yesterday that, “Susan Collins making clear she won't do anything to stop a Republican policy that she concedes hurts her own state … notice how she's too much of a chicken to use the words ‘Trump’ or ‘president’ and instead resorts to ‘The Administration.’ “

The biggest alternative voice which has emerged may be that of the Mainenewsroom, which boasts of 30,000 followers on Facebook.

No one gets into the weeds as much as Andy O’Brien.

“The Bangor Daily News is notorious for its fealty to Collins though, especially at election time. When I’ve submitted op-eds that criticize Collins to the paper, the BDN’s editorial department has aggressively edited them to remove much of the criticism, even once going so far as to insist I give equal criticism to Senator Angus King during the 2020 campaign.

“After a lengthy back-in-forth with the editors, I reluctantly relented. It’s well known that the family who owns the BDN is close friends with Collins. In 2013, Susan Warren, the stepmother of BDN publisher and Collins donor Richard Warren, sold a house to Collins and Daffron.”

On July 14, I wrote BDN editor Dan MacLeod, “I thought of this story idea, but then I read that the Times already covered it. It was such an obvious story but no Maine paper touched it.Are you under pressure not to publish articles critical of Susan Collins during this campaign?”

He replied, “It’s always good to hear from you though I am surprised to see you ask this question. I have no idea what candidates Rick (publisher Richard Warren) prefers and he never tries to bend news coverage to fit his politics.

“We did cover the political ramifications of the ICE shooting. We don’t cover every story the same way as every other news org. We regularly ask Collins tough questions. We’re always open to story ideas if you’d like to share.”

The Press Herald and the BDN no longer commit previously de riguer tasks like “papers of record” - publishing Collins’s statements on important news for instance.

Influence is the coin of the realm for the press. Can traditional media in Maine still wield that power, as alternative voices gain traction?

POSTSCRIPT:

I worked on the State Desk of the Hartford Courant in my twenties and received a hands-on education of how the “front office” influences the news pages.

One example was the the hand-written “business office must” memos from the publisher (we called them BOMs). Most of the edicts were small, almost inconsequential ones -- announcements of open houses and the like for car dealerships. We were ordered to tuck them at the bottom of local news pages. They were not labeled “advertisement.”

The Courant was clearly the voice of the establishment, as its political writer saw to it.

When I got to the Boston Globe in the Eighties, I witnessed a newsroom which leaned into divisive politics with a heavier hand. Senior editors and the publisher regularly lamented in private how far the editor Tom Winship had pushed his agenda on the news pages.

He told me at lunch once at Locke-Ober, after I asked him what was the first thing he did after becoming editor:

“I married Cambridge,” meaning he became an acolyte of the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” and wanted badly to align himself with the views of the university from across the river which starts with an “H.”

I spent five years at the New York Times and witnessed first-hand the influence exerted on the paper by powerful forces on Broadway on its Arts section and the olive oil industry and the like on its food writers. That’s a story for another day. 

Aug. 21 

Last Page First, Jane Doe 4 and the Epstein Files: The Leaked FBI Notes Nobody Could Verify, Jana, left, Aug. 21, 2026. The FBI records are real. The leaked handwritten notes were never verified, then they were pulled. What happened, what the evidence shows, and how bad sourcing can damage a survivor’s story.

Before this piece was published, the journalist who posted the leaked notes pulled them from her own platforms. She wrote that she was “working hard to verify” them, that they “may be part of a disinfo campaign,” and that she was “putting the brakes on everything” until more was known.

That came after a federal judge had already warned the Justice Department in open court that he had held government lawyers in contempt before and was willing to do it again. Six days later, an independent journalist published 22 pages of handwritten notes she said were leaked copies of records DOJ is still withholding.

So the basic question is: what in this leak was ever actually verified?

What We Actually Know

Jane Doe 4 told the FBI in four interviews in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein abused her on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, beginning around 1983, and that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was between 13 and 15.

Those interviews are part of the FBI record. DOJ released them in stages this year, with the final batch coming out on March 5. What it did not release were the handwritten notes taken by the interviewing agents, along with roughly 37 pages tied to her file.

Those are the records now being fought over in federal court.A November 19, 2009 federal court order concerning Jane Doe 4’s deposition in the Epstein civil litigation. The court noted that her deposition had already taken place. EFTA02748206.

At an August 13 status hearing in Phang v. Blanche, a DOJ lawyer could not give the court a date for producing the notes. Judge Emmet Sullivan brought up the Ted Stevens case and reminded the lawyers that he had held government attorneys in contempt before for withholding information. He said he had no desire to go down that road again, but made clear he was willing to enforce the court’s orders.

Sullivan then gave Phang’s legal team ten days to propose how the case should move forward. Separately, her lawyers have asked the court to hold Blanche in contempt and impose a $1,000-a-day fine until he complies. That fine has been requested, not granted.

Phang’s attorney, Brendan Ballou, was blunt after the hearing. He said Blanche had “failed to follow the law,” pointing to DOJ’s failure to produce the required redaction log, begin producing foreign-language documents and turn over the notes concerning Trump.

DOJ has defended its handling of some of the material, saying it remains focused on protecting victim privacy.

The underlying story was already serious. There are FBI interviews, records DOJ still has not produced and a federal court fight over getting them released.

None of that needed an anonymous Reddit leak to make it worth reporting.

The Leak Nobody Could Actually Verify

On August 19, a journalist published 22 pages of handwritten notes she said had leaked to her. By her own account, the first batch came through an anonymous tip pointing to a Reddit thread. A second batch arrived through a private message.

The authentication came down to one phone call.

The source she contacted had seen the real missing notes once, briefly, in a supervised setting, and had not been allowed to photograph them. The source told her the leaked pages felt legitimate, but also said the handwriting did not match what they remembered and that a name they specifically recalled seeing in the real notes was missing.

That should have been enough to keep digging before publishing.

Katie Phang did exactly that. She did not post the leaked pages. On Bluesky, she said there were “concerns and questions about their authenticity” and that she was trying to get them vetted by sources who could actually verify them.

Phang’s own lawsuit is the reason these missing records are being fought over in court. She had every reason to want answers about them. She still did not call the leaked pages authentic before she could establish that they were.

Within days, the journalist who published the notes pulled them from her platforms. She wrote that she was “working hard to verify” them, that they “may be part of a disinfo campaign,” and that she was “putting the brakes on everything” until more was known. The Reddit thread the pages were said to have come from is also gone.

No government agency authenticated them. No court authenticated them. And no independent news outlet had shown they were the missing FBI notes before they were published to a large audience.

A researcher has said that related material appeared on Scribd under a pseudonym before it reached Reddit. That may help explain how the files traveled online. It does not tell us who created them or whether they are genuine.

If you are publishing purportedly leaked FBI records involving a survivor, allegations of sexual abuse and the sitting president, “it looks right” is not verification. A source remembering something similar is not verification either.

The person who published them ultimately decided there were enough questions to pull them herself.A Wrong Name Is Not a Small Error

You can already see the danger of getting ahead of the evidence with one name: “Jim Atkins.”

Jane Doe 4’s FBI material refers to a man by that name and describes ties to Ohio, a university or college, and the survivor’s mother.

The Post and Courier later dug through public records and matched roughly sixteen details from her interviews. Its reporting pointed to Jimmy L. Atkins, a Hilton Head real estate figure who also had ties to a for-profit college in Ohio.

That identification is backed by substantially more reporting and records. It is still not the same thing as the FBI or DOJ officially confirming that Jimmy L. Atkins was the man Jane Doe 4 was talking about.

Before that reporting appeared, a different candidate had also been proposed.

You can see how the match happened. Some of the details appeared to fit.

But that is not enough.

So we are left with two public attempts to identify “Jim Atkins.” One is backed by much stronger reporting. The other remains unconfirmed. Neither has been officially confirmed by the government.

And this is where bad verification starts hurting real people.

Once you attach a real person’s name to allegations involving sexual abuse and blackmail, that name travels. Screenshots travel. Search results travel. Other people repeat it.

A correction does not magically pull all of that back.

You cannot treat verification like cleanup after the fact. With allegations this serious, getting the person wrong can drag an uninvolved person into an abuse story while doing absolutely nothing to help the survivor whose story you were supposed to be reporting.The Incentive to Be First

None of this happens in a vacuum. The Jane Doe 4 story has been covered again and again by a group of independent journalists and podcasters who regularly appear on each other’s shows and cite each other’s work.

That is not automatically a problem. But it does mean something unverified can move very fast.

An anonymous tip becomes a Reddit post. Then a private message. Then a published story in front of a large audience, sometimes in the span of a night. Once one person puts it out, everyone else is reacting to it, quoting it, trying to identify names and scrambling to figure out what they have before anyone has really established what the document even is.

That is where the rush to be first starts screwing up the reporting.

Who leaked these pages, where they actually came from and whether they were deliberately planted are still open questions. Nobody can responsibly answer those yet.

Guessing does not help Jane Doe 4. It does not make her allegations stronger. It just adds more noise to a story that was already supposed to be about getting the actual records released.

What Matters Now

The real story is not the leak. It is that DOJ has had these notes since 2019 and still has not produced them, amid repeated promises of transparency and a federal judge warning government lawyers about contempt.

If DOJ eventually turns over the missing 37 pages, they can be compared directly with the copies that circulated online. That is what will settle this. Not one phone call. Not a source saying something felt right. Not silence from a lawyer. Not a document going viral before anyone knew where it came from.

Until then, the leaked pages are still unverified pages that were published, spread widely and then pulled by the person who published them.

And this is where the rush to publish starts causing problems.

Jane Doe 4’s allegations already exist in FBI records. There is already a legitimate court fight over material DOJ has not produced. Throwing questionable documents into the middle of that does not help her. It gives people something easier to attack, something easier to dismiss, and another excuse to cast doubt on everything else.

In a story involving a survivor, that kind of mistake can do real damage.

Survivors do not need people racing to be first. They need people willing to verify what they are putting in front of the public.

DOJ still has the records that can actually answer the question.

Those are the records worth waiting for.

More On Media, Celebrities, Propaganda, Culture 

 

The United Kingdom's Prince Harry, shown in a 2021 interview before he renounced his royal title.

New York Times, Prince Harry and Others Told to Pay Daily Mail Publisher $13 Million, Stephen Castle, Aug. 21, 2026. Harry and six other high-profile figures lost a privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers. They may eventually have to pay more than twice the initial sum, a judge said.

Prince Harry and six other high-profile figures in Britain were ordered on Friday to make an initial payment of £9.54 million, about $13 million, to the publisher of The Daily Mail, after they lost a privacy case against the company.

In July the group of claimants, which included the singer Elton John and the actress Liz Hurley, failed in its efforts to sue the publisher, Associated Newspapers, over allegations of phone hacking and intruding into its members’ private lives between 1993 and 2011.

On Friday a judge in the High Court in London ordered them to make an initial payment “on account” by Aug. 28 for the legal costs incurred by the newspaper company in the case.

In a written statement that summarized the ruling, the judge, Sir Matthew Nicklin, said that “the reasonable sum on account is £9,544,355.”

The judge, whose formal title in the High Court is Mr. Justice Nicklin, declined to impose a cap on the total payment that might be ordered from the claimants, meaning that they might eventually have to pay up to £34.5 million, the costs that Associated Newspapers said it had incurred up to July this year.

However, he said in his full ruling that Associated’s costs “appear exceptionally high” and “largely unexplained,” so a court assessment would take place to determine the appropriate final sum.

The judge’s ruling comes just days after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, made public their plans to return to Britain, with their children Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5. The court case against Associated Newspapers was Harry’s last in a series he has undertaken against Britain’s tabloid newspapers, with whom he has had a fractious relationship.

The seven claimants ordered to pay the initial multimillion-pound fee are Harry; Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; Simon Hughes, a former lawmaker; the actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley; and Doreen Lawrence, a member of the House of Lords and social justice campaigner whose son was the victim in a notorious 1993 racist murder case.

The seven claimants had accused private investigators of listening in on phone calls, intercepting voice mail messages and tricking people into handing over information to obtain phone numbers, medical records and bills.

During the trial, those who gave evidence in court included Harry, who flew in from the United States to attend the hearing in person. Current and former employees of Associated also appeared, denying any wrongdoing.

In a ruling in July, the judge ruled that Harry and the other high-profile claimants had failed to prove “that the information complained of had been obtained unlawfully.”

In his statement on Friday, the judge rejected a request from the group of claimants to set a cap on costs at between £18 million and £20 million, arguing that doing so would “risk being no more than a judicial estimate of what appears, at this stage, to be a reasonable maximum.”

He added: “That would be vulnerable to the charge that it was arbitrary. It would also risk unfairness to Associated, because it would deprive Associated of the opportunity to demonstrate, on evidence and in the proper forum, that costs above the cap were reasonably incurred.”

However, he made clear his skepticism about the scale of the costs that the newspaper group had claimed. “I regard a claim for costs in excess of £34 million as, on its face, excessive and as giving rise to real concerns as to whether all of the costs now claimed by Associated were reasonably incurred and are reasonable in amount,” he wrote.

According to The Law Society Gazette, a British legal publication, the group of celebrities that brought the claim have legal insurance covering them for £16.2 million in the event of them losing the case.  

New York Times, Return of Harry and Meghan to U.K. Renews Questions About Their Security Fears, Adam Goldman, Aug. 21, 2026. The couple lost their publicly funded security after deciding to leave Britain in 2020, deepening their split with the royal family. 

Before they left Britain in 2020, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, weathered a storm of threats and digital abuse. A former top police official once described their safety risks as “disgusting and very real.”

Such threats made security a paramount issue for the couple once they announced this week that they are returning to live in Britain. Their safety had been at the heart of the fallout from their original decision to leave the country, when the government withdrew their publicly funded, armed security after they stepped down from their royal roles.

The pair have said the decision put them in danger, and it became a bitter flashpoint in their rupture with the royal family. Harry at one point even claimed the move was a plot to keep him in Britain.

The couple have not said what kind of arrangements they have made for their protection upon their return, expected this month. But the kind of security they had access to while living in California for the past few years is not possible in Britain without government resources.

While armed private security is legal and ubiquitous in the United States, guns are tightly restricted in Britain. Even top American law enforcement officials such as F.B.I. agents must get permission from the government to carry firearms in Britain.

Still, an unarmed detail is relatively common among Britons who use private security, said Chris Phillips, a former senior British counterterrorism official.

“There are lot of people over here that have security, and they are not armed,” he said.

As for Harry, he added, “There are going to be threats to him. There is no doubt about it.”

Harry’s and Meghan’s return to Britain comes at a time when they are unpopular with the British public, and news coverage of their security has emphasized comments from Britons saying they do not want the government to pay for it.

The armed details that the government provides are stretched thin, officials have warned, in part because of a high number of protectees. Britain has a record nine living former prime ministers who get round-the-clock security.

Prime ⁠Minister Andy Burnham refused to wade into the royal saga on Thursday when questioned by reporters, declining to say who would foot the bill for protecting Harry, Meghan and their two children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5.

“This is a private matter,” Mr. Burnham said. “It’s a ⁠matter for Harry and ⁠for Meghan, and ⁠we wish ⁠them well in the moves that they are ⁠making.”

As Harry and Meghan split with the royal family in 2020, questions over their safety arose as part of a larger debate over their expectations about a post-royal life.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016. Maybe Grok is willfully dumb because of Elon’s role in the whole thing.

All that’s before you consider how quickly Steve Witkoff and Jared resumed the outreach from Kirill Dmitriev, or how quickly Trump moved to get Alexander Smirnov sprung from prison.

Grok showed amazing agility for a robot, always moving the ball from “accepting” Russian help to “sitting in a room and asking for it.”

The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. Except that among the documents Solomon released, he revealed that Konstantin Kilimnik had renewed his efforts to get Trump elected in 2020.

And that Michael Caputo had participated in an anti-Biden propaganda effort in 2020, before he joined Trump’s government.

NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. But it did note the gravy train Benny Johnson was floating on.

Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Iranians were charged with hacking Mr. Trump’s campaign and shopping stolen material to various news outlets in an effort to harm his bid to return to the White House. The Justice Department and other agencies accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of again trying to bolster Mr. Trump (and degrade U.S. support for Ukraine) by targeting the United States with disinformation — including by secretly funneling $10 million to a conservative media start-up.

But those revelations were piecemeal, and do not offer a full portrait of what foreign meddling took place.

Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.

In a letter in July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee urged Bill Pulte, then the acting director of national intelligence, to declassify and publicly release a redacted version of the 2024 election report. The law at issue requires the assessment’s public release within 60 days of the conclusion of the federal election cycle “to the greatest extent possible” while protecting sources and methods.

The Trump administration also has yet to deliver to Congress a report required by law, identifying foreign intelligence threats to the coming 2026 midterm election. The deadline was in early May, a Democratic aide to the House Intelligence Committee said.

“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” as well as the administration’s efforts to combat those threats, the letter said.

Though to be honest, I think Trump may have as much to hide regarding the Iran hack-and-leak that successfully compromised Trump’s rat-fucker Roger Stone, his defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, and his campaign manager (though Trump delayed confirmation that Iran did get at least some files from Susie Wiles), as he does on the Russian front. I say that for reasons beyond the fact that even as he was being hack Trump was promising to be nice to Iran.

I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

There was a blackmail component with the Bolton hack, and I would be unsurprised if Iran at least tried that with Trump. Just as importantly, even from the few documents I saw from the hack (the vetting documents for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum), I have real questions whether Trump vetted JD anew or just relied on one that Peter Thiel had done in 2022.

Whatever the reasons, Donald Trump is defying the law that requires him to tell us all the ways Russian intervened to help him get elected in 2024 before they try again in 2026.

MSNOW, Opinion: Michael Cohen once called Trump a con man and a cheat. Now he’s back to calling his ex-boss ‘sir,’ Anthony L. Fisher, Aug. 21, 2026. The president’s former fixer-turned-witness for the prosecution, shown above, was eager to patch things up in a groveling interview.

This was Michael Cohen’s big moment. President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer/fixer turned nemesis/witness for the prosecution has apparently turned the page on his stint as a #Resistance figure and made amends with the man who is the only reason most people know Michael Cohen’s name in the first place.

Cohen, who testified against Trump in the latter’s 2024 New York “hush money” trial, hyped the previously recorded sit-down with a post on his Substack titled “The Impossible Reunion” and even previewed the discussion with a livestream Thursday afternoon as a must-hear interview between the two convicted felons.

“Loyalty doesn’t mean pretending someone never hurt you. Forgiveness doesn’t mean surrendering your principles. Reconciliation doesn’t mean rewriting history. It means deciding that your history doesn’t have to end with your worst chapter. And frankly, it takes far more courage to extend a hand across a divide than it does to throw stones from behind a keyboard,” Cohen wrote. Trump to be interviewed by friend-turned-enemy Michael CohenAugust 20, 2026 / 09:16

But in the end, it was a whole lot of nothing. The conversation reportedly lasted 40 minutes, but Cohen has released only 15 minutes so far — first on New York’s WABC-AM radio, and later on Cohen’s podcast and Substack. The rest is set to be rolled out in a similar fashion Sunday.

The big show began with a lengthy rant against the news media and unnamed partisan bogeymen on both the left and right who Cohen alleged were only interested in stirring up “rage bait.” Then came a jarring pivot to a curiously infomercial-like interview with a tech company boss. Then, finally, Cohen rewarded listeners with the much-hyped interview.

In his 2020 memoir, Cohen called Trump “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” On Thursday, however, he was back to calling Trump “sir.”

Since 2018, Cohen has been a fixture on TV, radio and podcasts, willing to spill the beans on Trump’s unsavory dealings that he personally enabled. But the interview portion that aired Thursday was so vapid and backslapping that it seemed to undermine its apparent purpose — to rehabilitate Cohen among the MAGA faithful.

Whatever else you may think about Trump, he’s an accomplished showman. So he’d probably recognize that Cohen’s show was an absolute dud. This obsequious slobberfest won’t buy Cohen a return to Trump’s inner circle, but it did very likely end his relevance to anyone else.

Of all the indignities Cohen has suffered on behalf of Trump, that he couldn’t even get Trump to give him a good soundbite for this reunion show must rank high among them.

Cohen segued into a logic-challenged rant against the media for reporting Trump’s historically atrocious approval ratings. Cohen argued that because Trump isn’t running for a third term, his poll numbers are irrelevant.

“CNN, MS NOW and the other left-leaning outlets…constantly talking about you being underwater with favorability numbers, Mr. President. What do you say to these people who keep bringing up polls when you’re not even running for office again? What’s the point?”

Presidential job approval numbers are not the same as campaign polling numbers. But Cohen most likely knew that already, so let’s move on.

Trump rambled in his typical incessant fashion, praising himself for a great economy and his war with Iran that’s going just super. Cohen asked why the president doesn’t tell the American people how lucky they are “to go to sleep at night with knowledge that there will be no intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile being fired towards the United States.”More from MS NOW Daily

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This was Trump’s reply:

“So I do tell that. The press doesn’t get it out, and I say it often. I said it the other day at a big rally I had with the police out on Long Island, and we have these unbelievable rallies. The rallies are potentially bigger than ever. I mean, if we did rallies, as an example, if we did rallies now, nobody ever had rallies like this. Their potential, I think, they’re bigger than ever. There’s a great spirit for what’s going on, especially in light of what’s happening with all these crazy theories and policies and lunatics that are running. You have lunatics. They would destroy the country, and they’re being put in the Democrat Party. I think they’ll be wiped out in the election, because the people are too smart to allow that to happen. It’s never worked in a thousand years. That stuff has never worked and is not going to work now. But they’re not even smart people. You know, you watch some of them; half of them can’t even speak properly. So I think we’re doing very well.”

Of all the indignities Cohen has suffered on behalf of Trump, that he couldn’t even get Trump to give him a good soundbite for this reunion show must rank high among them.

Trump bragged about scrapping the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the multinational nuclear agreement with Iran that the Obama administration negotiated in 2015 — which led Cohen to ask how Iran ended up with 1,000 pounds of “soon to be made nuclear-grade enriched uranium”?

The answer, of course, is that Iran ended up with that much near-weapons-grade uranium precisely because Trump scrapped the agreement that would have prevented it. Now he’s losing a war he foolishly started against that same regime.

The rest of the quarter-hour largely consisted of base insults at various Democrats and outright false claims about how Trump’s tariff war is great for Americans and U.S. business interests.

Ultimately, this was 15 minutes of dull, right-wing radio pablum, made notable only by the fact that a sitting president and his former bag man were conducting it as a kiss-and-make-up reunion. If this preview is any indication, tuning into the rest of the chat on Sunday is a sucker’s bet, as is Cohen’s apparent attempt to win back Trump’s audience.

The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, Opinion: Why I Feel Sorry For Michael Cohen, Joe Walsh, right, Aug. 21, 2026. I’ve known Michael Cohen for a number of years. I think I had him on my radio show in 2019 when he testified before the House Oversight Committee, accusing Donald Trump of criminal conduct and campaign finance violations. We stayed in touch and we communicated fairly regularly when he was released from prison. And he and I had a weekly show on Substack for the past year or so, which ended earlier this year.

Michael said something to me after he got out of prison that he repeated to me a number of times during our brief friendship/working relationship. You see, both he and I left Trump world around the same time, but he always reminded me that I voluntarily left Trump and Trump world, and he left because he had no choice. He was kicked out.

When people would often say to us both how courageous he and I were to leave Trump, he’d quietly admit to me, “No, Joe. You were courageous. You CHOSE to do the right thing. You chose to do the right thing knowing it would cost you and you would lose everything. I had no choice. I was FORCED to do the right thing. You chose to turn on Trump. I turned on Trump to save my hide. I was kicked out of his orbit. I had no choice.”

I’ve thought about those words a lot these past few weeks, and certainly the past day or two, watching Michael Cohen get down on his knees and kiss Trump’s ass again, as he’s worming his way back into Trump world. He even had Trump on his radio show yesterday (to be aired in full this weekend, I believe), and it was absolutely nauseating. There was Cohen making nice with, kissing the ass of, and praising to the high heavens this guy who just a few months ago he was calling a racist, a pathological liar, and a legitimate threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Just a few months earlier, Cohen was in the thralls of positioning himself as a leader of the resistance movement. And now here he was, like a Trump fanboy again, trying to get back into Trump’s good graces and maybe even become Trump’s fixer again.

And the general reaction, rightly, from pretty much everyone has been, “What a fucking sellout Cohen is. I knew it. I knew he didn’t genuinely ever change. What a liar Cohen always was, and what a fraud.” And while I can’t necessarily disagree with any of that, my reaction has been quite different. I feel sorry for Michael Cohen. I have genuine pity for him. Because I think he’s just not capable of doing the right thing, the honest thing, and I think he knows it.

Look, I’m not surprised Cohen flipped back to Trump. In my final conversations with him before we ended our relationship, it became clear to me that he knew much more about Trump and Epstein than he was letting on, and he knew much more about Trump and young women than he was letting on. He just wasn’t being honest about what he knew. And it also became crystal clear to me in our conversations that Cohen wanted a pardon. A pardon that only Trump could give. That was what was driving Cohen’s turn. He needed that favor from Trump, so fuck doing the right thing — he needed to go be a Trump lackey again.

But in all my conversations with him this past year, it was also clear to me that Michael wasn’t comfortable as a “resistance” figure. He wasn’t comfortable being in opposition to Trump. He didn’t fit in and he knew it. I could tell he genuinely missed being in Trump world and feeling important, being relevant. He wanted that back.

Michael Cohen is a fundamentally dishonest person. He’s a liar. No matter what political side he’s on. I like Michael, but I always knew I couldn’t believe much of what he said. He’s always on the make; he’s always hustling. He’d lie about anything if he could benefit financially from it. And I think he knows that about himself. What a horrible thing to know about yourself.

Which brings me back to those words he would often say to me — "Joe, you're courageous. You chose to leave knowing it would cost you everything. I'm not courageous. I didn't have any choice but to leave." Looking back this week, I now realize those were the only truly honest words Michael Cohen ever said to me. Honest because, in saying that to me, I knew he was telling me that he knew there was no fucking way he would ever have voluntarily left Trump world. He was telling me that he knew he wanted to stay Trump's fixer. It was him telling me that, unlike me, he knew he was not capable of doing the right thing. Because whenever he said those words to me, there was a sadness in his voice. He knew the difference between him and me.

Which is why, with this latest turn of his back into Trump’s arms, I feel sorry for him. He’s like that addict who just knows he can and will never quit.

Look, fuck Michael Cohen for doing what he did. But yes, I pity him as well. 

Aug. 15 

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Andrew Ferguson and Joe Simonson Squeal about Their $277 Fraud Charges, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 15, 2026. This is the summary of allegedly fraudulent expenditures charged against Esmerelda Soriano, an Orange County food cart owner indicted on two counts of SNAP fraud. 

Devlin Barrett highlighted her case in a story about how Trump is focusing on low-level fraud while pardoning far bigger fraudsters. Barrett describes how JD Vance — whom taxpayers pay $235,100 a year so he can get his son flown by helicopter to his golf lesson — focused on this kind of case in a speech in April.

New York Times, Little Thefts, Big Charges: Trump’s Justice Dept. Targets Lesser Fraud, Devlin Barrett, Aug. 14, 2026. As the Trump administration drops charges against corporations and the wealthy, it is also taking aim at small-scale fraud cases, including against the operator of a weathered food truck in California.

As the White House expands its “war on fraud,” the Justice Department announced criminal charges in recent days against a new symbol of that battle — a food truck in Santa Ana, Calif.

Soriano Produce, a weathered white food truck advertising ice cream treats as well as fruits and vegetables, drew the attention of undercover agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement for what investigators said was a startlingly high number of food stamp transactions for such a small business.

The case against the food truck owner, Esmeralda Soriano, is an example of the Trump administration’s push to show that “no fraud is small enough or big enough to look away from,” as Vice President JD Vance said in a speech in April.

The new emphasis on small-dollar fraud comes as the administration has issued pardons and commutations to white-collar convicts, pulled back from pursuing criminal cases against multinational corporations and dropped high-profile charges against wealthy executives. 

Barrett doesn’t mention that Todd Blanche has also bragged about focusing DOJ resources on $1,001 fraud cases.

In response to the story, the FTC’s propagandist and sometime Free Beacon hack, Joe Simonson (whom Ballotpedia describes being paid $197,200 as a part time detailee to the White House), wrote a 7-tweet screed, calling NYT a “mid-cap tech company,” pretending Barrett’s story opposed prosecuting fraud, and wailing because (he said) the NYT hates Trump for pointing out what a waste of resources this is.

The New York Times, a mid-cap tech company known for its crossword puzzles and recipes, is out today attacking the DOJ and @VP for working to arrest fraudsters. If you just read the headline and you’ll assume we’re bullying small business owners for not having the right permits.

[snip]

Interview a normal person to see if they think it’s a good idea that this administration is holding fraudsters accountable? Nope, let’s talk to this partisan weirdo instead.

The New York Times hates President Trump and Vice President Vance. That’s not a new. But how could that hatred drive them to attack bipartisan, antifraud work? Maybe they don’t just hate the President and Vice President. Maybe they hate you for caring about getting ripped off.

Nowhere in his 7-tweet screed did Joe the Free Beacon hack manage to link Barrett’s story. Nowhere in his 7-tweet screed did he manage to mention that the two charged crimes amount to $277, $724 less than even what Blanche said he was going to go after (though DOJ suspects that Soriano committed fraud on a far grander scale, to the tune of hundreds of million). Nowhere did he mention that DOJ asked to cage Soriano while she awaits trial, which would itself cost more than the alleged crime.

Nowhere did Joe the Free Beacon hack mention that HSI investigated this crime, which not only means investigators adhere to a far lower standard for investigating crimes than the FBI would, but they diverted their attention away from investigating things like child sex trafficking to hunt down $277 in charged SNAP crimes.

Nowhere did Joe the Free Beacon hack mention that this focus on low-level fraud arises, in part, from a stupid directive Aakash Singh (whose exact salary is not public, but is somewhere north of $160,000, a huge boost from the $64,362 Chuck Grassley used to pay him) imposed, which has correlated with a significant drop in white collar crime prosecutions.

To try to drive up the number of cases, department officials have internally declared that each assistant U.S. attorney should have at least 25 open cases at all times. For a low-level prosecutor handling common drug or violent offenses — or food stamp fraud — that is not particularly high. For a senior prosecutor handling complex public corruption or corporate fraud investigations, two dozen open cases can be a crushing workload.

In phone calls to prosecutors around the country, a senior Justice Department official, Aakash Singh, has pushed back against criticism of the rule. That threshold of 25 cases is the bare minimum to show that a prosecutor “has a pulse,” he has told officials, according to people familiar with his remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the details of internal discussions.

[snip]

From the start of Mr. Trump’s second term to this May, the administration brought 4,747 white-collar cases, or about 5 percent of the total criminal cases, according to federal statistics analyzed by Justice Connection, a group of former department employees that has been critical of the Trump administration’s sweeping changes.

Those figures are a significant drop from previous administrations (5,554 cases from the same period under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; 6,626 cases in Mr. Trump’s first term; and 8,781 cases in President Barack Obama’s second term).

Nowhere did Joe the Free Beacon hack mention that Orange County’s DA — who would, traditionally, prosecute this kind of low level crime — is also working on this case. So is USDA’s Inspector General, who might otherwise investigate why Brooke Rollins (who is paid $253,100) was engaged in pay-to-play with a SNAP contractor.

Concurrently with Army 250, a fundraising mechanism was being test driven at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), using the congressionally-chartered nonprofit partner of the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation (NFF), as the enabling fundraising nonprofit.

The test drive centered on the Great American Farmers Market (GAFM), which was staged in 2025 and billed as “a weeklong celebration of food, family, and farming.”28 Planning meeting agendas for the staff of USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins—which were obtained by Committee Democrats—showed that she or her staff intended to solicit donations for the event from companies with business before the federal government, since USDA was a sponsor of the event.29

[snip]

Four companies—Chobani LLC, Visa, Inc., John Deere, and Tractor Supply Company—each contributed between $100,000 and $499,999,33 routing the money to the “Secretary’s Priorities” fund, which gives the USDA Secretary wide latitude to spend on “initiatives that are directly aligned with the mission and priorities of the USDA Forest Service.”34

At least three of the four contributors held clear business interests before the government. Chobani holds over $12 million in contracts with USDA that are described as “commodities for [U.S. government] food donations” and are derived from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Child Nutrition Programs, Food and Nutrition Service accounts.35 Visa was fighting an antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.36 John Deere was fighting an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission.37 The company had also been singled out in 2024 by then-candidate Trump with a threatened 200 percent tariff if John Deere moved its manufacturing to Mexico.38 Put plainly, companies with matters pending before the federal government paid into a fund controlled by a Cabinet secretary, routed through a conservation charity that had to manufacture a forestry rationale to accept the checks.

After Joe the Free Beacon hack posted his 7-tweet screed, his boss, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson (who makes around $197,200), RTed the 7-tweet screed with a flame and a thread emoji, falsely claiming that any of this demonstrated Ferguson and JD Vance’s little Fraud Task Force’s commitment to prosecuting all fraud.

🔥🧵from @SaysSimonson. As usual, Joe is exactly correct about this. When we said we’re going to stop fraud against government programs, we meant ALL fraud. Every dollar this woman allegedly stole from American citizens was an injustice. She’s getting what she deserves: JUSTICE.

This is all intended to serve as theater claiming to hunt waste fraud and abuse.

This theater is costing taxpayers far, far more than the charged crime in this case. Just a single helicopter flight to a golf lesson for 9-year old Ewan Vance costs more than this charged crime.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment:Donald Trump Is Using The Government To Hide His Kids From The BBC's Subpoenas, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Aug. 15, 2026. The BBC tried to serve subpoenas to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner as part of the discovery process in Trump's defamation lawsuit, but was blocked by the Secret Service.Sarah Jones & Jason EasleyAug 15∙PaidREAD IN APP

The BBC has put Donald Trump completely on the defensive. Trump, the plaintiff who brought the lawsuit, as he is attempting to sue the broadcaster for $5-$10 billion for what he claims was a defamatory use of video of himself delivering his speech before the 1/6 attack in a documentary.

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Trump claims the documentary caused his businesses to suffer extreme financial damage. The BBC responded by using the discovery process to request Trump’s financial documents. To avoid disclosing his business interests, Trump narrowed his lawsuit and changed his claim after he was ordered to turn over the documents.

Trump can no longer sue the BBC for large sums of money, but the discovery process in the case remains ongoing.

Lawyers for the BBC are asking the Florida court where the case is being heard to force the president’s children to accept subpoenas, because Donald Trump has been using the federal government to shield his kids and block the delivery of the subpoenas.

Never in the history of the presidency has a president used the power of the office to block civil lawsuit subpoenas, but that is exactly what Trump is doing.

Attorneys for the BBC laid out how they tried to serve Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner.

The BBC’s lawyers wrote:

Given the Third Parties’ knowledge on these topics, the BBC has attempted to serve document subpoenas on them pursuant to Rule 45, but the BBC is unable to do so. Specifically, law enforcement officers prevented the BBC’s process server from effecting service on Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump at their home in Florida and directed the BBC to coordinate service through the U.S. Secret Service. See Decl. of Maxwell S. Mishkin (“Mishkin Decl.”) ¶ 2 & Ex. A.

The BBC attempted to do so and was informed by the U.S. Secret Service’s Office of the Chief Counsel that the “United States Secret Service, as an agency of the United States Government, is not authorized to accept service of these subpoenas for these individuals, nor can we opine on how you all may best facilitate or effectuate service of these subpoenas.” See id. ¶ 3 & Ex. B.

Security for the Trump Organization similarly prevented the BBC’s process server from effecting service on Mr. Trump Jr. at his office in Trump Tower in New York, see id. ¶ 4 & Ex. C, and the Secret Service would likewise prevent service on Mr. Trump Jr. at his home.

The reason why the BBC wants to talk to Trump’s family is that his two oldest children and son-in-law were with the president and can testify about his mindset and intentions on 1/6.

The basis of Trump’s lawsuit is the claim that he never intended to inspire violence on 1/6, but if this is true, the president’s kids should be able to back him up. Trump should want his kids to testify if he has nothing to hide.

Trump doesn’t want his kids to testify under oath and is abusing his power as president to keep them from testifying.

When Democrats win back control of some or all of Congress, they should look at this case and Trump’s behavior, because there could be impeachable offenses that deserve investigation. 

Aug. 5

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Stop Letting Trump Write Your Headlines, Susan J. Demas, right, Aug. 5, 2026.  The corporate media's ubiquitous "Trump says" framing is coverage fit for the king he imagines himself to be.

Almost every day, Donald Trump unleashes a blitzkrieg of lies. And almost every day, members of the beltway press give him the benefit of the doubt simply because he occupies the Oval Office. We’ve been watching his routine for a decade, and yet somehow, the corporate media still has no idea how to cover him — or any of the other pathological liars in power.

Now it’s true that some stories knock down Trump’s absurd claims in the body of the story. But the headline (often the only thing readers actually absorb) usually does Trump a tremendous favor by writing the story on his terms, with his words.

It’s the “Trump says” framing — and it’s everywhere.

Trump says he’s canceling the Iran strikes because a deal is pending. Trump says vandals are responsible for the Reflecting Pool turning green. Trump says he can keep imposing tariffs regardless of what the Supreme Court ruled. Even when Iran says there’s no deal. Even when the courts have already shut him down. The headlines still give his baseless assertions instant legitimacy.

Take the Reflecting Pool that Trump had painted “American flag blue” this summer (courtesy of $15 million in no-bid contracts, including to a prominent donor). For weeks, he insisted “Criminal, Radical Left Vandals“ cut the waterproof lining and caused the algae bloom because they “truly hate our Country.”

Interior officials had already told reporters, before Trump ever made the vandalism claim, that the outbreak was caused by residual algae sitting in the supply lines during construction. Then last week, his own U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, quietly dropped the charges in three more of the vandalism cases, including one against former Olympian David Hearn.

Trump’s response wasn’t to acknowledge he’d been wrong — it was to bash Pirro because she “folded like an umbrella,” adding, “I guess she choked.” (No one will be surprised if Judge Jeanine is out of a job soon, following in the footsteps of other high-profile women in his orbit).

The real story is that the administration manufactured criminal prosecutions to cover up for their own incompetence and corruption. Not that Trump “says” there are vandals. (Confused old men say a lot of things).

The tariff coverage follows the same pattern. The Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump doesn’t have the authority to impose tariffs under the emergency powers law he invoked. He kept slapping them on anyway, prompting twenty-five states to sue the administration over what they call a pretext for reinstating the very tariffs the Court struck down.

Meanwhile, Trump is out there posting, “Thank you, Mr. Tariff!” and taking credit for a narrowing trade deficit, while research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that nearly 90 percent of tariff costs land on American businesses and consumers, not on foreign exporters. A headline that leads with, “Trump says tariffs are working” without that context isn’t news. It’s a glorified press release for the regime.

Trump’s claims about the Iran war are far worse because of the stakes. We’ve had 18 troops die in the conflict and hundreds of others injured. At the dignified transfer for four slain servicemembers last month, Trump had the audacity to speak for the dead and declared that their dying wish was that “we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” There’s zero evidence that these words were said, but the credulous headlines, of course, tell a different story.

We’re now months into “peace is right around the corner” coverage. Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz open for business over and over again (even though the facts said otherwise). He’s teased an imminent deal with Iran dozens of times since the war began.

This past weekend, he announced on social media that Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked the U.S. to “hold off any attack” because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.” Iran’s own semi-official news agency called that claim “simply a new lie.” Days later, Iran’s foreign ministry was still denying that any direct negotiations were happening at all.

Every time Trump pulls this trick, some reporter dutifully writes the story as if it’s totally gonna happen this time because the president insists it will. Even when those stories include basic facts and experts are quoted disputing his assertions, the piece is still framed around whatever Trump says — it’s his narrative.

It’s coverage fit for the king Trump imagines himself to be.

Trump also surrounds himself with people who are genuinely gifted liars. Pete Hegseth was a Fox & Friends host before he was Defense Secretary (so selling nonsense on camera is one of his few discernible talents). But even he has largely stopped holding press conferences on the Iran war as it’s dragged on, because he no longer wants to answer for the administration’s myriad mistakes (even to a revamped Pentagon press corps featuring such heavyweights as the Gateway Pundit and Epoch Times).

RFK Jr. built his career on anti-vax conspiracies, so he fits in perfectly with Trump’s crew. When Dana Bash pressed him on CNN about measles cases hitting a 35-year high after years of him stoking vaccine skepticism, the HHS Secretary didn’t own any of it. Instead, he angrily attacked the media over COVID and invoked Anthony Fauci as the real villain.

JD Vance has already told us how all this works. Confronted by Bash in 2024 about the vile claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating pets, Vance admitted he’d made it up to bolster his campaign’s deportation agenda. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention ... then that’s what I’m going to do,” he declared.

When people tell you who they are, believe them. And the media should cover them accordingly.

I’ve been sounding the alarm about how the media covers Trump’s lying since 2015. It’s been a profound challenge for journalists, most of whom simply aren’t trained on how to effectively report on a politician who lies with such abandon, about everything from his golf game to fallen soldiers.ArticlesWhy Trump’s War on the Press Is Different This TimeSusan J. Demas·Jul 26Why Trump’s War on the Press Is Different This Time

Donald Trump spent Friday night at a party in his own honor, in a ballroom he built, thrown by the very press corps he’s spent over a decade trying to destroy.

But the corporate media has had 11 years to get it together. And they still haven’t figured it out. Look at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in July, an event that’s supposed to celebrate the First Amendment and honor excellence in journalism. Giving Trump such a powerful platform turned out to be the incredible self-own we all knew it would be, as he devoted an hour attacking reporters and political rivals (replete with fat and trans “jokes”) before putting on a “Trump 2028” hat and threatening to violate the Constitution by running again.

When WHCA leadership talks about needing to “normalize the relationship” with the White House, that’s waving a white flag. You’re letting the world’s most powerful liar set the terms of engagement.

Journalists are trained to chase facts, not to win debates. That’s a different skill set, and it’s one reason why interviews with practiced liars often go so badly for the press. When NBC’s Kristen Welker pushed Trump on evidence for his 2020 election fraud lies, he simply got up and left, telling her “you’re a one-sided crooked network” (and adding a bit of his signature sexism: “I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Welker looked pathetic in the aftermath, begging him not to end the interview. “Mr. President ... please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin,” she implored.Subscribed

That’s the bind: when your job demands access to the White House, pressing the liar-in-chief can carry a steep cost. And these days, a lot of corporate newsrooms aren’t willing to pay it.

But here’s the thing. We know the M.O. of Trump and his allies — and that’s precisely why there’s no excuse for headlines that uncritically repeat what they say. We’ve witnessed Trump’s act for over a decade now. We know he’ll lie about everything big and small, without hesitation. We know Hegseth, Vance, and Kennedy will do the same. That should change how reporters prep for interviews and how editors write headlines. It shouldn’t inspire journalists to try and “normalize” relations or beg them for sitdowns where they can lie with impunity.

Journalism exists to tell the truth and speak truth to power. We’re supposed to inform the public, not function as stenographers for the powerful. Every time a headline launders an unverified or disproven claim into “Trump says” framing, the line between reporting and propaganda gets a little blurrier.

And that’s exactly what Trump is counting on. 

Status with Oliver Darcy, The Ellison Credibility Crisis; More Brain Drain at '60'; Pirro's Pool Plunge, Oliver Darcy, right, Aug. 4-5, 2026. The Paramount boss tried to convince the public he can be trusted with CNN. But staffers inside the network torched his Times essay in brutal comments to Status, pointing to his disastrous record at CBS News.

Early Tuesday morning, The New York Times published a guest essay from David Ellison, in which the Paramount boss and Oracle scion made his case—yet again—for his proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. In the piece, Ellison recycled his usual pro-merger talking points, but he also curiously identified what he believes to be the real reason a dozen states have sued to block the deal.

"I believe this fight is not really about market share," Ellison wrote, but is about "the news," specifically whether he can "be trusted as a steward of Warner's CNN."

As he worked to persuade the public that he would be a good owner of the Ted Turner-founded news behemoth, in addition to CBS News, Ellison insisted he does not wish “to bend their newsrooms” to his views. However, in the very next paragraph, Ellison stated that he would like to see these organizations "reflect the whole world, not one side of it.” On one hand, he insisted he has no intention of meddling in the news. On the other, he signaled that he does have some views about the news, apparently that one side of the political equation deserves fairer treatment. The wink and nod is rather clear.

In any event, Ellison's essay was not well received inside CNN. In fact, if the Paramount chief had hoped to win over some of the network’s deeply skeptical journalists he would like to lead, he appears to have failed spectacularly. On Tuesday, I spoke with 10 CNNers, ranging in seniority across the company.

Status Scoop | The ‘60’ Brain Drain: The exodus of behind-the-scenes talent continues to eat at “60 Minutes” ahead of the newsmagazine’s fall debut. The most recent departure? Status has learned that Madeleine Carlisle—a well-regarded associate producer at “60 Minutes,” who also happens to be the daughter of Stephen Colbert—resigned from the program…

 

Letters from Leo: the American Pope & US Politics, With Leo XIV’s Approval, Roche Shuts the Door on the Ultratraditionalists, Christopher Hale, above, Aug. 5, 2026. A Spanish daily now reports the cardinal’s January liturgy document was commissioned and approved by the pope himself, with “not a single comma” changed. Rome’s direction is unmistakable.

Cardinal Arthur Roche seemingly settled a year of speculation about Pope Leo XIV and the traditional Latin Mass in a single sentence.

“No, Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he’s not going back to Summorum Pontificum,” the Vatican’s liturgy chief told The Tablet in an interview published July 29.

Traditionis Custodes is Pope Francis’s 2021 decree restricting the traditional Latin Mass. Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI’s 2007 ruling, had given priests wide latitude to celebrate it.

Roche, who has led the Dicastery for Divine Worship since May 2021, grounded the claim in the altar itself. The traditional Latin Mass is “a very complex area,” he said, and an important one, “because the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity: it’s the place where we should all be able to be together to celebrate Mass.”

Four days later, the Spanish daily La Razón went further. Citing anonymous Vatican sources, the paper reported on August 2 that Roche’s consistory document (the one traditionalist media spent the winter dismissing as one man’s crusade) was written at Leo XIV’s request. The pope read it himself, the sources said, and approved it; not one comma changed.

The traditionalist press erupted. Diane Montagna, the movement’s most dogged chronicler, pronounced the report woefully inaccurate; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco (Leo named him to the Church’s highest court on July 25) went on EWTN to question how well Roche knows the pope’s mind. If the restrictions stand, the archbishop warned, some of the faithful “will then go to these other groups that are not in full communion with the See of Rome.”

He did not need to name the group.

Six decades of war over the Mass

The old Mass has been a battlefield since Paul VI promulgated the reformed liturgy in 1969. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the Second Vatican Council’s reforms, built the Society of St. Pius X around the 1962 Missal.

When he consecrated four bishops without papal permission in 1988, Rome declared him excommunicated. Benedict XVI spent years trying to close the breach. He lifted those excommunications in 2009 — two years, as it happened, after his decree Summorum Pontificum gave priests broad freedom to celebrate the old rite without asking their bishops.

Francis judged that experiment a failure. His July 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes found that Benedict’s concession had been raised as a banner against the Council itself, and it handed bishops (and Rome) control over where, and by whom, the 1962 Missal could be used. Roche arrived at the worship office less than two months before the decree landed; he enforced the new rules, then tightened them with rescripts of his own.

Leo inherited the battlefield and said, for more than a year, almost nothing in public. His one extended comment came in September 2025, in an interview with Crux: the liturgy, he lamented, had become “a political tool” in a Church so polarized that “people aren’t willing to listen to one another.”

His actions told the rest. I reported in January that his first consistory deferred every Latin Mass hope while the pope launched a catechesis series calling Vatican II the Church’s “guiding star.”

When the cardinals gathered again in June, he kept the liturgy off the agenda a second time. La Razón’s sources describe that June meeting bluntly: the old rite is a matter “that a vocal minority wants to stir up.”

None of this has made Leo XIV cruel. In March, he sent a message to the French bishops, through Cardinal Pietro Parolin, asking for “concrete solutions” and the “generous inclusion” of Catholics sincerely attached to the Latin Mass.

“It is troubling that a painful wound continues to open within the Church concerning the celebration of the Mass, the very sacrament of unity,” he wrote.

Cardinal Raymond Burke got permission to celebrate the 1962 Missal in St. Peter’s Basilica in October 2025. The superiors of the Fraternity of St. Peter and the Institute of Christ the King (two traditional communities in full communion with Rome) found a warm welcome when they came to see the pope.The tent at Écône

The Society of St. Pius X tested Leo XIV’s goodwill when they announced plans to consecrate four new bishops without papal approval.Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández warned on May 13 that the ordinations would constitute “a schismatic act.” Leo followed with a June 29 personal letter to the society’s superior general pleading with its members to “please turn back.”

They refused.

On July 1, in a tent outside the society’s seminary in Écône, Switzerland — 38 years to the day after Rome declared Lefebvre excommunicated — Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta consecrated the four men anyway before a crowd of some 15,000 faithful.

The next day the Vatican declared the society’s bishops and priests in schism and excommunicated, and it extended the penalty to any layperson who formally adheres to the group.

No pope had ever gone that far against the society; John Paul II’s 1988 declaration touched only the bishops involved.

If you put the sequence together, the shape of Leo’s pontificate comes into better focus. A canon lawyer by training, Leo begged the ultratraditionalists to come home, then signed the harshest decree in the society’s history when they marched into schism instead.

He told the French bishops to treat the faithful who love the old rite with generosity. The faction that wields that rite against the Council received a different answer.

Unity, in Leo’s mind, has never meant surrender to extremists.

According to Pope Leo XIV, the Second Vatican Council remains the Church’s “guiding star,” whatever the SSPX dissidents decide.

Leo travels to France next month, where the traditionalist pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres drew roughly 20,000 mostly young walkers this spring. He will meet them as a father rather than a combatant. The restorationists mistook his patience for weakness, and the excommunication decree makes that painfully clear.

The Church is moving forward, and the pope is holding the door open for everyone willing to walk through it. 

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every Catholic who believes the Eucharist belongs to the whole people of God rather than to whichever faction shouts loudest. The schism at Écône was a bid for a smaller and purer Church, one facing permanently backward. Leo answered it with a father’s grief and a shepherd’s firmness.

This community exists to tell that story honestly, free of the rage merchants and the nostalgia trade, rooted instead in the Gospel’s stubborn insistence on communion.

People across this country are hungry for a Catholicism that is neither a museum nor a weapon. That hunger has made this the fastest-growing Catholic community in America. In a Church wounded by six decades of liturgy wars, we choose the wholeness Leo is building.

Aug. 4

 

Some of the world's richest and most politically powerful oligarchs-- including Mark Zuckerberg of META, towards the left, Amazon's Jeff Bezos at center and Space X leader Elon Musk towards the right -- celebrated Donald Trump's 2025 Presidential inauguration in the company of Trump's prospective enablers who would help enable the oligarchs government contracts, political power and related money-making with minimal regulation or other obstacles, including future Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 4, 2026. And Democrats should make the most of it.

Inauguration Day 2025 looked and felt like a coronation, as Donald Trump was installed in a position of immense, unprecedented power. Since he had returned to office despite the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was obvious that time-honored checks and balances on presidential authority wouldn’t apply to him. And the megabillionaires who had spent vast sums to assure Trump’s victory had no qualms about appearing as the new MAGA oligarchy. Through their political and monetary fealty to Trump, they had positioned themselves to dictate policy, free from petty democratic constraints and concern for public welfare. They evidently expected that they would spend years effectively ruling the nation in their interests, along with the president they had bought.

Now, a year and a half later, the oligarchs’ victory celebrations look premature. Newly elected presidents usually experience a few months of positive net approval, but Trump’s “honeymoon” barely lasted a month. He is now plumbing new depths of public disapproval:

Furthermore, Trump’s plunge is like a vortex pulling the entire Republican Party down with him. G. Elliott Morris’s model gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of taking the House despite extreme GOP gerrymandering. He also gives the Democrats a 55 percent chance of taking the Senate, despite its overrepresentation of small, rural states that strongly tilts its composition towards the Republicans.

And you know what has an even worse approval rating than Donald Trump? AI data centers:

There are substantive reasons to oppose these centers, but beyond concerns over rising electricity bills, pollution, water depletion and noise, the controversy over data centers has become a proxy for public backlash against the power of the broligarchs and their disregard for the welfare of ordinary Americans.

According to historical experience, this kind of massive shift in public sentiment should have induced hedging on the part of the big money. That is, based on past patterns we would have expected billionaires to give more money to Democrats during the midterm elections compared to the 2024 election as a way to maintain influence if the balance of power in Washington shifts.

But that’s not what is happening this time: instead, oligarchs are doubling down on MAGA. An analysis by the Washington Post finds that megadonors have already spent more than $1.6 billion on the November midterms. Here’s how that spending breaks down:

What’s the rationale here? Why are the billionaires doubling down in support of a hugely unpopular president and his hugely unpopular agenda?

This partly reflects a change in the nature of billionaires’ relationship with the extreme right. Twenty years ago American conservatism was dominated by a “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” strategy in which corporations and the wealthy used racism and bigotry to advance their goals — tax cuts and deregulation — without necessarily being racists and bigots themselves. Today Elon Musk isn’t putting on a show of being a neo-Nazi, because that’s who he really is.

Beyond that, Trump’s second presidency is so pervasively corrupt, abusive and destructive that it will be virtually impossible for anyone who supported him to move on and rehabilitate themselves. Outside of MAGA, who will ever be willing to trust Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos again? Frankly, what political hopeful would be stupid or venal enough to associate with them?

Indeed, I believe and hope that if Democrats regain power, they won’t repeat past mistakes by trying to “move on” from the corruption and scandals of the previous regime. It’s now clear that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, enabled Trump’s return to power by slow-walking the investigation of January 6th. Earlier, Barack Obama let Republicans off the hook by not pursuing the lies that led to the Iraq war. Let’s hope that this time the Democrats, once in control of one or both houses of Congress, will quickly initiate investigations, hearings and, where warranted, prosecutions. And it’s unlikely that Trump’s billionaire money men will escape unscathed.

So rather than trying to mollify the Democrats and defuse the coming political reckoning, the billionaire class is opening the money taps, going all out to prevent Democrats from being elected. And why not? For Musk, the Koch Brothers, Ken Griffin, Alex Karp and others hundreds of millions is pocket change, while billion-dollar business interests and, in some cases, possible criminal charges are at stake.

Rather than being daunted by the flood of billionaire money, Democrats should treat this as a campaign theme. Robert Reich had a good post yesterday titled “The Stink of Musk,” arguing that “Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.” If Musk supports a candidate, that in itself can be used as an argument that said candidate is not on the side of ordinary Americans.

Reich is not only right, but the strategy of highlighting oligarch support as a reason not to vote for politicians can and should extend beyond Musk money. A case in point: when Forbes magazine finds it noteworthy that the likes of Ken Griffin, Stephen Schwarzman and Paul Singer are pouring large sums into Susan Collins’s campaign in Maine, there is an obvious case to be made that Collins is working for the billionaire class and not the working class, the middle class, or even the bottom 99 percent.

Just as the billionaires have come to the obvious realization that there is no turning back on MAGAdom, Democrats must also realize that there is no turning back on opposition to the billionaire agenda. Any failure to address corporate tax giveaways, shrinking paychecks, loss of healthcare, epidemics, loss of SNAP benefits and, yes, predatory data centers, will be perceived by ordinary Americans for the betrayal that it is. We, as a country, are at an unavoidable fork in the road. Perhaps we should extend some thanks to the billionaire class for clarifying that

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Bombshell Epstein Report Reveals Trump/CBS Cover-Up of Money Trail, Military Runs out of Munitions, DOJ Drops More Cases, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 4, 2026.

I told you there would be major Epstein news today, and we have it: a new report from Senator Ron Wyden details how big banks failed to report Epstein’s suspicious transactions for decades, and how the Trump Administration and CBS are working to cover it up. Follow the money. That’s what we do today. Meanwhile, Todd Blanche is set to move forward in the confirmation process today, Epstein survivors are speaking out, Trump is seeking reparations for himself, and the U.S. military is quickly running out of munitions.

I told you I would never stop talking about the Epstein files, and I meant it. More interviews are coming. I cannot stop until survivors get the justice they deserve. Here’s the news:

Epstein: Follow the Money:

A new bombshell report from Senator Ron Wyden reveals that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America systematically failed to report Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious transactions for nearly two decades despite knowing he was a convicted sex offender with ties to human trafficking and now, the Trump Administration is covering it up. JPMorgan filed just seven SARs totaling $4.3 million between 2002 and 2016, then retroactively flagged over 5,000 wire transfers worth $1.3 billion only after Epstein’s 2019 arrest, six years after the bank had already terminated him as a client in 2013 over money laundering concerns. Deutsche Bank, which took over as Epstein’s primary bank from 2013 until his death, similarly waited until after his arrest to flag $250 million in suspicious transfers, despite compliance staff catching his attorney Darren Indyke repeatedly asking how to withdraw cash without triggering government alerts. Bank of America waved through $170 million in wire transfers from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein for supposed “tax advice,” only flagging them as having “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose” nearly eight months after Epstein’s arrest.

Leon Black was overwhelmingly Epstein’s largest funding source, providing 90% of the roughly $184 million in revenue Epstein’s shell company Southern Trust reported between 2013 and 2017, and USVI’s settlement with Black explicitly states Epstein used that money to partly fund his sex trafficking operations there. Top JPMorgan executives, including Mary Erdoes (now the bank’s Asset and Wealth Management CEO) and Jes Staley (former investment bank CEO), maintained close personal contact with Epstein for years, with unsealed emails showing Staley telling Epstein “say hello to Snow White” and wanting to give him a “long heartfelt hug,” while a 2012 exchange between two executives joked about the “nymphettes” at Epstein’s house. Even after JPMorgan formally cut ties with Epstein in 2013, Erdoes personally approved continuing to work with him informally so he could keep serving as an intermediary to Leon Black, and banker John Duffy coached Epstein on withdrawing cash through his aviation account instead of personal accounts to avoid scrutiny.

Despite these findings, virtually none of the bankers involved have faced consequences, Erdoes remains employed with total compensation exceeding $50 million this year, and most others named in the report still hold senior positions at JPMorgan or Bank of America. The report also reveals that Senator Wyden taped an interview about this investigation with then-60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March 2026, but CBS News leadership under Bari Weiss fired Alfonsi shortly afterward and the segment has not aired. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused three separate requests to turn over the Treasury’s Epstein files to the Senate Finance Committee, even though the same records were reportedly given to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, and Senate Republicans, including Finance Chair Mike Crapo, blocked Wyden’s bill (PETRA) that would have forced their release.

Wyden’s report calls for DOJ and Treasury investigations into all three banks and named executives, criminal probes into Epstein aides Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn and Harry Beller (who control his $100 million estate and remain unquestioned by DOJ), and new legislation requiring annual compliance attestations from banks serving ultra-wealthy clients, harsher penalties for bankers who fail to report suspicious activity, and mandatory disclosure when banks quietly offboard high-risk clients. Total settlements paid out by the banks and Epstein’s estate related to his crimes now exceed $900 million, but Wyden notes this figure is likely understated given evidence of dozens or possibly hundreds of additional secret NDA settlements between victims and wealthy Epstein associates that have never been made public.

Trump Rules For U.S Oligarchs, Supporters 

New York Times, White House Whipsaws Silicon Valley (and Itself) Over A.I. Rules, David McCabe, Mike Isaac, Ana Swanson and Kate Conger, Aug. 4, 2026. The Trump administration has struggled over how to approach to “open source” models, which are freely available to download and favored by Chinese companies.

Trump administration officials have struggled over the past few weeks with what to do about artificial intelligence.

In particular, a group that includes White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have debated whether or not to take a far more interventionist approach to “open source” A.I. models, which are freely available to download and modify, said more than a half-dozen current and former tech and government officials and other people familiar with the matter.

Senior officials have considered a range of actions, including using sanctions, a trade blacklist against Chinese companies that make these open-source A.I. models, or even banning U.S. cloud companies from doing business with them, said five of the people, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. But after an outcry from Silicon Valley, they appear to have changed their minds and instead are focused on promoting American A.I. models to be more competitive, the people said.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration’s A.I. plans may become clearer. The White House has invited U.S. tech companies to discuss a framework that would allow the government to review new A.I. models for cybersecurity issues before they are released publicly, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.

“This is all happening so fast,” said Senator Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio, last week after he met with the chief executives of Nvidia and OpenAI. “I don’t know that I have any definite conclusions about any of it.”

The whiplash is a sign of the Trump administration’s conflicting impulses when it comes to A.I. and the difficulties of handling such a quickly developing and powerful technology. The White House has aggressively intervened in swathes of the economy over the last 18 months, from media to computer chip manufacturing to mining. But A.I. is changing rapidly and the government has scrambled to determine how to put its thumb on the scale.

President Trump began his second term as an unabashed A.I. booster, peeling back regulations and forging close relationships with A.I. companies and start-ups. But that changed in June when Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would give the government oversight over new A.I. models. Since then, the technology has continued to evolve quickly.

The most recent debates were prompted by a surge in powerful new Chinese A.I. models, which are known as “open source,” where the public can see the underlying computer code, or “open weight,” where companies reveal the calculations used to generate answers to questions.

In Silicon Valley, the response to these Chinese A.I. models varied wildly. OpenAI and Anthropic, which generally do not share the underlying technology of their models, pushed the government to rein in their Chinese rivals, citing national security. 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo). His son is shown  below.

New York Times, Guest Essay: David Ellison: Let’s Set the Record Straight on the Paramount-Warner Deal, David Ellison (above, chief executive of Paramount Skydance), Aug. 4, 2026. Many people have weighed in on Paramount’s agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — media analysts, power brokers, political commentators, competitors and, of course, lawyers. For a transaction of this size, that is expected and appropriate. The one person you haven’t heard from is me.

There is a reason for that. I believe that anyone who oversees a news organization — I am chief executive of Paramount, which owns CBS — shouldn’t put a finger on the scale, especially on matters involving his own company. So, when California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet. I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.

The states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators, while the W.G.A. argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists — an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.

Add up every hour Americans spend watching television, and a combined Paramount-Warner would account for less than 20 percent of all watch time — competing every day against Netflix, Amazon, Apple, which are all companies whose resources dwarf ours. Include YouTube’s user-generated content in that math and our share would drop to around 13 percent. A combined company would account for just 18 percent of the domestic box office over the past 12 months and only 22 percent on average over the past two years. Those are not the numbers of a company that can dictate what audiences watch or what writers get paid.

I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed or approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union and China. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.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.

Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.

Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle. That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause. These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of “60 Minutes.”

There is much ground to recover. By Gallup’s latest measure, just 28 percent of Americans trust the news — the lowest ever recorded. The temptation is to say the problem lies elsewhere. Our obligation is to look inward and say: We can do better. We are in a moment when Americans trust few institutions, but journalists haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques.

Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day. In an age when so much of what fills our screens is machine-generated or engineered to enrage, journalism from real reporters matters more than ever. That is the work I intend to pay for, patiently, for a long time.

Which brings me to what we aim to build. The Paramount-Warner deal began with the movies. I have loved film since I was old enough to sit still for one, and scenes from the movies have shaped who I am: a boy riding a bicycle silhouetted against the full moon, twin suns setting over the desert, jets dogfighting off the California coast. Behind each of those moments stands real money, real risk and hundreds of brilliant artists who tell stories and who count on movies to keep them employed.

That machinery is in trouble. Hollywood is losing ground to technology platforms whose algorithms reward the loudest voices. The work is leaving, especially from California — where I grew up and where I’m raising my family — draining the deepest pool of creative talent ever assembled.

I understand that promises from an executive in the middle of a merger invite skepticism. So judge us by the year we just had.

Since I took over Paramount, we have nearly doubled our theatrical slate from eight films last year to 15 and greenlit 40 new or returning series for Paramount+, our streaming service. You can expect 90 series from our television studios in 2026. We raised our content investment by $1.5 billion. We did that before the deal was signed and any lawsuit was filed, because making more is the whole point of the company we are building.

The commitments we have made for the proposed Paramount-Warner extend that trajectory: 30 theatrical films a year; 170 television series annually, for our own platforms and for our competitors’; more than $30 billion in annual content investment. I have learned better than to promise hits. In my own career, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” met financial expectations, “Top Gun: Maverick” exceeded them and “Terminator: Dark Fate” fell short. I am proud of all these films, but nobody can dictate what audiences will love. What I can promise is the work, and more of it.

A deal this size is lived out in public, and I have felt every bit of that. I don’t ask to be taken at my word; the commitments are in writing, and the work will be on screens where anyone can judge it.

Hollywood’s story can have a happy ending only when we connect with our audience. It’s the audience — the American people — who have the final say in whether a movie succeeds or fails, whether a news organization thrives or withers and therefore whether our industry succeeds or fails. I want to build a company with the strength and resources to deliver for those audiences who turn to us, for the storytellers who rely on us and for the country that dreamed this all up. 

Status with Oliver Darcy, The Ellison Credibility Crisis; More Brain Drain at '60'; Pirro's Pool Plunge, Oliver Darcy, Aug. 4-5, 2026. The Paramount boss tried to convince the public he can be trusted with CNN. But staffers inside the network torched his Times essay in brutal comments to Status, pointing to his disastrous record at CBS News.

Early Tuesday morning, The New York Times published a guest essay from David Ellison, in which the Paramount boss and Oracle scion made his case—yet again—for his proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. In the piece, Ellison recycled his usual pro-merger talking points, but he also curiously identified what he believes to be the real reason a dozen states have sued to block the deal.

"I believe this fight is not really about market share," Ellison wrote, but is about "the news," specifically whether he can "be trusted as a steward of Warner's CNN."

As he worked to persuade the public that he would be a good owner of the Ted Turner-founded news behemoth, in addition to CBS News, Ellison insisted he does not wish “to bend their newsrooms” to his views. However, in the very next paragraph, Ellison stated that he would like to see these organizations "reflect the whole world, not one side of it.” On one hand, he insisted he has no intention of meddling in the news. On the other, he signaled that he does have some views about the news, apparently that one side of the political equation deserves fairer treatment. The wink and nod is rather clear.

In any event, Ellison's essay was not well received inside CNN. In fact, if the Paramount chief had hoped to win over some of the network’s deeply skeptical journalists he would like to lead, he appears to have failed spectacularly. On Tuesday, I spoke with 10 CNNers, ranging in seniority across the company.

Status Scoop | The ‘60’ Brain Drain: The exodus of behind-the-scenes talent continues to eat at “60 Minutes” ahead of the newsmagazine’s fall debut. The most recent departure? Status has learned that Madeleine Carlisle—a well-regarded associate producer at “60 Minutes,” who also happens to be the daughter of Stephen Colbert—resigned from the program…

 

Pro Publica, FCC commissioners face ethics complaints for taking luxury gifts from Paramount,  Corey G. Johnson, Aug. 4, 2026. Commissioners accepted the gifts while the FCC reviewed the company's megamergers.

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.

ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.

Carr, right, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats.

The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.

The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.

The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.

Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.

“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.

“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.

CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.

“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”

The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.

California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.

Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.  

Aug. 1 

New York Times, Justice Dept. Subpoenas Times Freelancer in Effort to Identify Sources, Devlin Barrett, Aug. 1, 2026. A previously undisclosed subpoena, involving reporting on a failed SEAL Team 6 mission in North Korea, reflects the government’s expanding campaign to investigate leaks of secrets.

A freelance reporter has been fighting a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking to force him to reveal his sources for a New York Times article about a failed top secret mission in North Korea, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoena, which has not been previously disclosed, reflects the administration’s intensifying campaign to investigate leaks of government secrets by pressuring reporters to divulge their sources. Until President Trump began his second term, federal subpoenas to reporters were exceedingly rare.

In February, F.B.I. agents showed up at the New York home of the reporter, Matthew Cole, to deliver the grand jury subpoena, which was issued by prosecutors in Newport News, Va., according to the people familiar with the matter, who described the private conversations on the condition of anonymity.

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

The Justice Department has not subpoenaed Mr. Philipps, according to people familiar with the matter. He declined to comment.

Mr. Cole disclosed more details of his reporting on his Substack newsletter, stating that despite learning about the mission in 2023, he waited for months before making calls to find out more given the sensitive nature of the reporting.

Mr. Cole is also the author of “Princes and Thieves,” a coming book about the finances and global entanglements of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six,” a 2022 book about the elite Navy unit.

Mr. Cole’s lawyer, David A. O’Neil, who has also represented The Times in a separate fight with the administration over subpoenas about its coverage of Air Force One, said in a statement that Mr. Cole (with the covers of two books shown left and right here) “has dedicated his professional life to bringing official misconduct to light and informing the public about the workings of its government.” His client, he added, “will not be intimidated from continuing that important work. He will defend press freedom and the First Amendment from this administration’s brazen attacks on journalists, and he will honor his commitment to his sources.”

The Times is providing a legal defense to Mr. Cole.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the specific investigation, but said in a statement that it would use all available legal tools to “uncover those who unlawfully disclose national defense information.” 

July

July 25 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

New York Times, Paramount Agrees to Delay Warner Bros. Merger for Months, Benjamin Mullin, David McCabe and Lauren Hirsch, July 25, 2026 (print ed.). The company agreed to a proposed freeze until June 2027, unless a judge issues a ruling before then on a lawsuit blocking the deal.

Paramount said on Friday that it had agreed to halt its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until next June at the latest while a judge considers a lawsuit from state attorneys general who sued to block the deal. The delay is the latest curveball in a deal that would remake Hollywood.

In a legal filing, Paramount and the state attorneys general said that they had reached an agreement to freeze the $111 billion merger while the case works its way through court, extending a shorter pause imposed this week by a federal judge in California. The merger agreement expires on June 4, 2027, if the deal has not closed by that date.

The delay could be costly for Paramount. The company, run by the tech scion David Ellison, has agreed to pay Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a fee of $650 million for every quarter that the deal does not close, beginning in October.

But Paramount framed the agreement as a “significant win” that would help it close the deal. The company said the move would speed up the legal process by pushing the case to a trial sooner. It will also help avoid prolonged back-and-forth over some legal issues, like the merits of a court-ordered delay.

The proposed delay does not take effect until it is approved by Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who is overseeing the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“This is the fastest and clearest way to prove that this transaction is good for competition, good for consumers, and good for creators,” a Paramount spokeswoman said in a statement.

The coalition of 12 states led by California includes New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Arizona. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the states, said in a statement that the delay was “great news for audiences.” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, called the freeze “a crucial victory” in a statement.

The deal would unite under one roof two major movie studios, the streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+ and networks including CBS and CNN. Mr. Ellison has aggressively pushed to acquire Warner Bros., ultimately outbidding Netflix after proposing a handful of escalating offers.

 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

The deal was already a big bet for David Ellison, his partners at RedBird Capital and his father, Larry Ellison, who personally guaranteed the acquisition. The combined company is expected to carry about $80 billion in debt, a daunting burden for the younger Mr. Ellison. Now, with the delay potentially triggering hundreds of millions of dollars in additional fees, the deal could become even less attractive.

The lawsuit from the state attorneys general argues that combining with Warner Bros. would give Paramount too much leverage over the release of feature films and, in particular, the tent-pole blockbusters that are the backbone of studio revenues. It also claims Paramount would be too dominant in the market for basic cable channels.

The Writers Guild of America has filed its own lawsuit against the deal, arguing it would financially harm screenwriters. The Friday filing proposing a delay to the deal’s closing also covers the union’s case.

Paramount has argued that the deal will give the combined company enough heft to serve as a counterweight to streaming powerhouses like YouTube and Netflix. It has also argued that the states are too narrowly defining the market for basic cable and films, particularly by excluding players like streamers.

The merger raised similar alarms in Hollywood among creative professionals who feared that bringing two major studios into the same conglomerate would lead to fewer productions and less investment in show business.

Norm Eisen, a lawyer who led opposition against the deal in Hollywood through his organization Democracy Defenders Fund, applauded the delay in a statement, saying that the merger was “anti-competitive, anti-consumer and anti-creator.”

The delay comes after a week of wrangling over how the lawsuits challenging the deal would proceed. Judge Martínez-Olguín was preparing to hear arguments on an injunction that would freeze the deal for an indefinite period of time while the lawsuits moved forward. Friday’s proposal is likely to render that kind of injunction unnecessary.

The Contrarians, Opinion: Hang On. Accountability Is Coming for Trump & Cronies Like the Ellisons, Norman Eisen, right, July 25, 2026. A tsunami of trouble is coming for Donald Trump — and his enablers in and outside of government.

That struck me when I appeared this week before Democratic members of Congress and their staff, who are getting ready to drop the boom should one or both houses of Congress flip. And it hit me again on Friday when Trump cronies the Ellisons were forced to postpone the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger that would have handed them CNN — considered a done deal until we and partners in the #BlockTheMerger coalition swung into action.

Let’s start with the shock news about the Paramount-Warner delay. The merger is anti-consumer, anti-creator, and anti-competitive as I told The New York Times. I also explained in a snap statement when the news broke, “the Ellisons believed their relationship with Trump would help them rush through a disastrous deal that threatens democracy, creative freedom, and independent journalism. We in the #BlocktheMerger campaign helped prove them wrong.”

Paramount’s capitulation keeps two major media enterprises competing pending the trial, instead of handing one company even more power over what Americans watch, what they pay, and where entertainment workers can earn a living. The merger would have eliminated one of Hollywood’s largest buyers of scripts and productions while placing Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS News, CNN, and dozens of local stations under the management of one company. If you like what the Ellisons have done to CBS, you will love what they would do to CNN and the rest of the assets they seek to acquire.

This victory in putting the merger on hold belongs to the people who refused to treat the merger as inevitable. Artists, journalists, filmmakers, and consumer advocates spoke out despite the risk of retaliation, more than 5,500 people signed our open letter, and ultimately Attorneys General Rob Bonta and Letitia James, along with 10 other attorneys general, acted. This collective resistance turned the tide for now. We will see what happens next, starting with when a trial is scheduled, as I explained in a special Contrarian Substack live with my colleagues Tim Dickinson and Meredith Blake.

The tide also may be soon to turn in Congress. When I appeared there this week, the topic was Trump’s monumental corruption — both in terms of the national monuments that he is destroying and the vast scale of his wrongdoing. With likely the House and possibly the Senate about to flip, I was impressed with the intensity of the members who questioned me and with their staff, whom I chatted with on the margins. Led by ranking member Robert Garcia (D-CA) of the House Oversight Committee and ranking member Dick Blumenthal (D-CN) of the Senate

As I testified, we are experiencing unprecedented corruption in plain sight — and we are fighting back in court and winning. I focused on three examples, beginning with the White House East Wing demolition and debris. The president tore down part of the people’s house to build himself a $600 million ballroom, and then he dumped the toxic wreckage on a public park. Now, more than 35,000 cubic yards of demolition debris has been hauled onto East Potomac Park, land Congress set aside in 1897 to be held “forever” for the recreation and pleasure of the people. Forever.

For over a century, that park has been home to the East Potomac Golf Links, D.C.’s busiest golf course. Trump dumped this waste with no environmental review. No historic preservation review. Months later, the National Park Service’s own testing found elevated lead, arsenic, and mercury in the park. And just this past week, the government admitted to a federal judge that it never finished testing that soil before declaring it safe. My colleagues and I at Democracy Defenders Fund are proud to join Democracy Forward and Lowell & Associates in representing the D.C. Preservation League and local residents in court.

And then there is the Kennedy Center, above. Congress created it. Congress named it: for President John F. Kennedy, who personally led the fundraising to build it. This president tried to attach his own name to the facade that Kennedy built and that carries his name. Democracy Defenders Fund is proud, with Washington Litigation Group, to represent Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) in her lawsuit to stop that unlawful renaming. On May 29, a court permanently halted it and ordered the signage taken down. The administration threw a temper tantrum and draped a tarp over the building’s facade. But the courts saw through that, and an appeals court this month upheld the order for Trump to remove his name. Now we are litigating to get that tarp removed. The Kennedy Center belongs to the American people; it’s not a self-promotional opportunity for Trump.

The third staggering case of vandalism that I have fought and that I testified about is the $1.776 billion so-called “Anti-Weaponization” Fund. It is a blemish on the Department of Justice and the Constitution itself. This is a Trump scheme to take money from American taxpayers and give it to his political allies — including individuals charged in connection with the January 6 insurrection.

And it is deeply illegal. The president sued agencies he controls. Contrary to the constitutional requirement of a case or controversy, Trump was the plaintiff, the defendant, and the beneficiary — and his Justice Department never appeared in court to defend the United States. The department even entered a release purporting to block the IRS from pursuing pending tax claims against the president, his family members, his trusts, and his businesses — dramatically expanding the deal beyond the parties who had actually sued.

We at DDA served as co-counsel with Platkin LLP and Susman Godfrey for 35 former judges who urged the court to reject this charade. Judge Kathleen Williams did exactly that. She threw out the settlement in its entirety, found collusion rather than a genuine controversy, barred the president from relying on the agreement, and referred the president’s attorneys for disciplinary review. Her decision was itself a landmark, one that I predict the president will not find easy to destroy.

Why focus on those examples out of the hundreds of other possibilities? As I explained to the members, when the House and perhaps the Senate are back in pro-democracy hands in just a few months’ time, it will be important to pick the most outrageous scandals and concentrate on going deep to squeeze out the truth, including unearthing whether any crimes were committed:

I think Congress should focus on a relatively short list of the worst corruption scandals, perhaps including those I testified about and those captured on the inventories we have published and updated at the Contrarian (see for example here, here and here). Our lists evolve over time, and Congress will similarly need to be fluid.

For example, this week we found out shocking revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital. This firm, which managed $200 million around when Trump took office, now oversees $3 billion in assets. Is that solely owing to Don Jr.’s business acumen? I tend to doubt it. As the New York Times reported, many of its investments are in companies affected by the administration’s policies or that have benefited from administration action. I explained on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNOW show — she has been having me on regularly to track the growing public outrage about these issues:

Congress will have plenty to work with if and when it gets back into pro-democracy hands. And the AGs already do in contesting the Paramount-Warner merger. Knowing those who will be leading the work, I think they are up to the job — and they will make good use of all of my and my colleagues’ work that your paid subscriptions have helped make possible. If you aren't yet a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to be a part of all that.Subscribed

 to get and how. And the “Read to Me” feature you may already know from the app? It’s available on the website now, too.

Katie Phang, Opinion: Nixon's Tapes Were Never His To Hide, Katie Phang, right, July 25, 2026. In 1971, then-President Richard Nixon secretly installed a voice-activated recording system throughout the White House. Hidden microphones captured Oval Office meetings, Cabinet discussions, telephone calls, even conversations at the Aspen Lodge at Camp David. By the time the system was dismantled in 1973, it had preserved nearly 3,700 hours of presidential history. Nixon believed he was creating a legacy. Instead, he created the Prosecution’s Exhibit A. Then, he tried to bury it.

During the Senate Watergate Committee’s investigation into the break-in of the DNC headquarters, former White House counsel, John Dean, testified that he suspected Nixon had a secret recording system. The Committee then asked Deputy Assistant to the President, Alexander Butterfield, in a closed-door meeting if he knew if such a system existed. His answer: “I’m sorry you asked…But, yes, there was a taping system that taped all presidential conversations.” Three days later, Butterfield testified on live TV and confirmed the existence of Nixon’s secret recording system.

On July 23rd, in 1973, Nixon refused to produce these tapes to Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox. What’s incredible is that he didn’t deny their existence or their authenticity. He didn’t argue that they had been manipulated or altered in any way. Nixon simply insisted that because he was the President of the United States, he, alone, could decide whether prosecutors and the courts were entitled to listen to the tapes.

That wasn’t unitary executive theory on steroids. That was just obstruction of justice.

Now, at first blush, Nixon’s legal defense sounded like it could pass for plausible: he argued that presidents require the ability to conduct confidential conversations. He expressed the concern that advisers could not speak candidly if every Oval Office discussion risked becoming tomorrow’s headline. Executive privilege was not merely convenient; it was essential to the presidency, itself.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. A president should, and I submit, must, receive candid advice. In some ways, confidentiality is often indispensable to governing. But, the Constitution doesn’t recognize a president’s unilateral authority to decide whether EVIDENCE relevant to a criminal investigation remains forever beyond the reach of the courts.

Sidenote: I’m often asked where I go to do research for my reporting. One of the main research tools I use is called Ground News. 

The Framers had already fought one king. They had no interest in creating another, just with a different title. So they designed a government in which ambition would check ambition, where courts could review executive power, and where no public official, regardless of rank, possessed the authority to place himself beyond the law’s reach.

Those principles had a head-on collision when the US Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Warren Burger (a Nixon appointee, no less) recognized that executive privilege exists. But, he also recognized that there’s something even more fundamental and decent at play: the fair administration of criminal justice outweighs a generalized claim of presidential secrecy. When evidence is needed in a criminal prosecution, the President doesn’t get the last word, the judiciary does.

US v. Nixon remains one of the clearest affirmations of the rule of law in our constitutional history. Eight Supreme Court justices, appointed by Republican presidents and one appointed by a Democratic president, reached precisely the same conclusion. They didn’t ask whether producing the tapes would embarrass President Richard Nixon, cripple his presidency, or reshape the balance of power.

They asked one question: Is the President above the law? And their answer was unanimous: No.

It’s worth noting that the irony here borders on being Shakespearean: Nixon wasn’t trying to suppress conversations secretly intercepted by political enemies. He was trying to suppress his own recordings created by his own White House, using a system he personally ordered installed. The tapes were intended to preserve history on his terms. What Nixon couldn’t deal with was once those recordings became evidence in a criminal investigation, history no longer belonged to him. It belonged to the American people and to justice.

Without the tapes, Watergate might have remained an endless political shouting match, with accusations answered by denials and denials answered by accusations. The recordings changed that because evidence has this remarkable way of ruining carefully crafted and often-false narratives.

Evidence doesn’t vote. It has no party registration, no campaign consultants, and no social media strategy. Evidence simply exists, stubbornly and beautifully indifferent to the ambitions of the powerful. That is precisely why obstruction of justice is so dangerous.

Obstruction is not merely an effort to delay an investigation. It’s an attempt to control reality itself by deciding which facts the justice system is permitted to discover. Once the subject of an investigation acquires the power to determine what evidence judges may examine, the rule of law ceases to be a principle. It becomes a privilege granted by the very people it’s supposed to restrain.

Half a century later, SCOTUS, in Trump v. United States, took a different track in recognizing substantial presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. That decision does not overrule United States v. Nixon, nor does it hold that a president may ignore a lawful subpoena or conceal evidence. The two cases answer technically different legal questions: Nixon concerns access to evidence, while Trump concerns criminal liability and immunity for same.

But, together they illuminate an unmistakable shift in constitutional thinking. The Nixon Court viewed the presidency through the lens of accountability, insisting that the demands of criminal justice could outweigh claims of executive secrecy. The Court in Trump viewed the presidency through the lens of institutional protection, concluding that broad immunity is necessary to preserve executive independence.

One Court asked how to ensure that presidents remain answerable to the law. The other asked how to ensure that the law does not unduly burden the presidency. That kind of constitutional evolution is striking and alarming.

Richard Nixon ultimately surrendered the tapes only because a unanimous Supreme Court ordered him to do so. Days later, the evidence spoke more eloquently than any lawyer ever could. His political support collapsed and his presidency soon followed.

The enduring lesson of Watergate was never about tape recorders; it was about accountability. Because in the end, the most powerful words are not “executive privilege.” They’re “the evidence speaks for itself.”

July 18

 

Boosie BadAzz onstage in a white and green football jersey with a green hoodie underneath and large jewelry on his hands, wrists and around his neck.Boosie BadAzz performing in Charlotte, N.C., last year (Photo by Jeff Hahne via Getty Images). 

New York Times, Boosie Lobbied for a Trump Pardon. It Never Came. He Wants a Refund, Rick Rojas, July 18, 2026. The Southern rapper paid $600,000 to two right-wing operatives. Now, they’re in a dispute over a contract the rapper believes entitles him to at least half his money back.

Boosie BadAzz, a prolific and popular Southern rapper whose career started in the 1990s, built a reputation that lent credence to his chosen name. He has had many run-ins with the law, and has served time in the notorious Louisiana prison known as Angola. He has also kicked up plenty of controversy, including a well-documented history of bizarre, homophobic and transphobic rants.

Last year, he found himself staring down the possibility of another stretch in prison, having pleaded guilty to a federal felony gun possession charge. It would mean years away from his children, and years away from making music and money. The tough facade he projected through his music was slipping. Boosie, 43, was worried, he said.

Then came an offer he could not resist.

Two lobbyists reached out to the rapper’s lawyers, saying they could use their proximity to President Trump and others in his orbit to help Boosie secure a pardon. He paid them $600,000 for their services. But the pardon never came.

“I was in a bad position, and they preyed on me, bro,” Boosie, whose legal name is Torence Hatch Jr., said in an interview. “They were chasing the money.”

Now, he wants the money back — half of it, at least. He has a signed contract that entitles him to such, he said.

The lobbyists disagree. Two right-wing operatives with tarnished histories of their own, they say they did exactly what they had promised for Boosie and owe him nothing.

After Boosie’s claims were widely circulated this week in news reports and on social media, one of the lobbyists challenged him to a public debate with journalists in attendance. “He has smeared us unfairly,” the lobbyist, Jack Burkman, wrote in an email to The New York Times. (The dispute was reported by the political news website NOTUS.)

In a separate statement, Mr. Burkman said that he and his partner, Jacob Wohl, had undertaken a “massive, highly tailored advocacy campaign across Congress, the executive branch and leading political influencers and media figures” in an attempt to secure a pardon.

“In 25 years,” he added, “we cannot think of a single client for whom our firm has done more work than Boosie.”

He was an unusual client in other ways, too.

Boosie found fame and commercial success as an early practitioner of a Southern strain of hip-hop that took over rap music roughly two decades ago.

First as Lil’ Boosie and then as Boosie BadAzz, he has pumped out hundreds of songs. His music draws upon the lessons and the pain of a hardscrabble youth in Baton Rouge, his Louisiana hometown, where he has remained a beloved figure.

Many rap listeners can recognize him instantly because of his distinctive voice, raspy and high-pitched (like “a frog on helium getting bear-hugged by a bodybuilder,” as a Pitchfork critic put it). And there’s the high-and-tight haircut he’s so closely associated with that barbers know it as a “Boosie fade.”

But his career has been marred by controversy and legal setbacks.

He was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, in 2009 after pleading guilty to a third-offense marijuana possession charge. His stay was extended after he was caught trying to smuggle in codeine.

July 17

Politico, Trump’s threats to revoke TV licenses get serious, John Hendel, July 17, 2026. Brendan Carr is already scrutinizing TV broadcasters, but he may have to be careful echoing the president’s political grievances, legal experts say.

President Donald Trump’s threats against broadcast television licenses are suddenly less of a laugh line to the media world and more of a real danger.

Trump’s broadsides Thursday night against NBC and ABC were just the latest occasion during the past nine years when he’s called for revoking the licenses of TV outlets that anger him, this time after the two networks declined to air his White House speech on election security.

“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said Thursday.

But unlike Trump’s first term, when Republican leaders at the Federal Communications Commission disavowed any such reprisals, current Chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly opened probes and inquiries into the same TV networks that have drawn the president’s ire. And that has some policy veterans worried that the FCC may act this time, teeing up a constitutional fight.

“We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,” said Robert Corn-Revere, a former top FCC who’s now chief counsel for the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. “If you expressly link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically diminished if you link them.”

Carr spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment Friday, and the FCC chair has yet to weigh in on X, where he is fairly prolific.

But he has already begun scrutinizing the diversity practices at NBC parent company Comcast and the network’s relationship with other TV station owners. He has also called in the licenses for ABC’s eight network-owned TV stations for an early renewal, a move that could lead to their being revoked.

Trump’s conservative allies have urged the FCC to go ahead with denying the licenses. Some renewed that call Thursday after ABC and NBC said they wouldn’t carry Trump’s speech live.

“Pull it,” Steve Bannon, the senior White House chief strategist during part of Trump’s first term, said on his podcast Thursday. “Let’s see what tough guys they are when you do that.”

Trump’s latest threats came during a primetime address in which he aired long-running claims that U.S. elections are vulnerable to fraud and foreign tampering.

July 12

Status with Natalie Korach, The Times’ Subpoena Showdown, Natalie Korach, July 12, 2026. Mentioned in this edition: David Ellison, Kash Patel, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Jake Tapper, Felice Belman, Graham Platner, and more. But first, The Sunday Spotlight.

Behind the scenes, Status has learned, top New York Times executives have been in close contact with five reporters targeted by federal prosecutors, preparing the newsroom for a high-stakes fight over press freedom.

Over the last few days, as The New York Times braces for a potential precedent-setting legal showdown with the Trump administration over press freedom, the newspaper’s top leadership has been in close contact with the five reporters targeted by federal prosecutors, seeking to reassure them that the institution will mount an aggressive defense against the extraordinary effort to compel their testimony before a grand jury.

Behind the scenes, Status has learned, Times executives have held several conversations with the journalists, with Executive Editor Joe Kahn personally involved in the discussions as the newspaper prepares for what could become one of the most consequential press-freedom battles of Trump's second term. On Sunday, chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien brought that message to the broader newsroom and company. In an internal memo obtained by Status, Kopit Levien recirculated a Saturday note from Kahn that denounced the subpoenas. She added that leadership regards the action as “a brazen attempt to stifle independent reporting.” “As Joe says, the five colleagues who have been targeted—and our whole newsroom, which works hard every day to serve our mission and the public’s right to know—should know that they have the full weight of The Times, and each of us, behind them,” she wrote.

Together, the Times leadership’s actions underscore how seriously it views the administration’s move as a direct attack on the newspaper’s reporting and as a broader threat to press freedom.

The subpoenas, issued by the Southern District of New York, seek testimony from Times reporters Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt, and Adam Goldman over their reporting on security concerns surrounding the Qatari-donated Boeing 747 that Trump has sought to use as the new Air Force One.

The journalists have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday, setting up what is likely to become an expedited legal battle over whether reporters can be compelled to testify about confidential sourcing and newsgathering.

Renowned First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, who successfully represented CNN during Trump’s first term when the White House sought to exile Jim Acosta, told Status he expects The Times to move quickly to quash the subpoenas and that a judge will likely allow the newspaper to challenge them before any testimony is compelled.

“My expectation is that the district court will give the journalists and The Times an opportunity to be fully heard on these issues,” he said. “The idea that they’re going to have to go and testify on Wednesday seems highly doubtful.” But Boutrous added that the compressed timetable and the DOJ’s decision to serve the subpoenas directly at the reporters’ homes appeared designed to send a message. “To go to their houses and serve the subpoenas when they know where David McCraw is, they know where The Times is, they know the drill on this,” Boutrous said, referring to the newspaper’s longtime deputy general counsel.

“Instead, it’s really a bush league maneuver in so many ways. So unprofessional to serve these grand jury subpoenas without notice to anybody.” “

There are all these flashing red lights that say intimidation, harassment, retaliation for speech and journalism, and I think it's deeply troubling for the First Amendment and our democracy,” Boutrous added.

Kahn, for his part, projected confidence in the paper’s ability to prevail. “We have the best legal team in the business,” he wrote in his memo. “The Trump administration, with its impulsive subpoenas, used vague pretenses of a threat to national security to try to compel our reporters to appear before a grand jury. The law protects news gatherers from this sort of retaliatory abuse of prosecutorial power.”

The aggressive posture also reflects the extent to which The Times has emerged as one of the leading major news organizations confronting the Trump administration in court over issues of press freedom. In recent months, the paper has sued the Defense Department over restrictions on Pentagon access, countersued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and now appears poised to mount another high-profile legal battle over its reporters' ability to protect confidential sources.

The stakes extend far beyond the Times journalists. If prosecutors succeed in forcing reporters to testify in a leak investigation, it could have a chilling effect, weakening long-standing protections surrounding confidential newsgathering and making sources significantly more reluctant to come forward.

Meanwhile, for the Trump administration, the subpoenas are the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive moves toward journalists and news organizations in Trump’s second term.

In January, FBI agents searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of a leak investigation, seizing her electronic devices. Later that month, former CNN anchor turned independent journalist Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents after covering a protest that disrupted a church service in Minnesota.

Elsewhere, Trump has used regulatory power to his advantage, putting pressure on news organizations to settle lawsuits, including ABC News and CBS News. Separately, Trump also sued The Times last year, accusing it of publishing stories to “sabotage” his 2024 presidential campaign and business interests.

This all comes as Trump prepares to attend the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an event that specifically celebrates the role of the free press in American democracy.

In a statement, WHCA president Weijia Jiang condemned the subpoenas and expressed support for the Times reporters, writing that they were “targeted for doing their jobs to uphold the public’s right to know how its government operates.”

“The WHCA condemns any act of intimidation against journalists, including attempts to pressure them into revealing sources,” she added. The juxtaposition is striking. Next Friday, July 24, Trump is expected to sit among journalists at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. At the same time, his Justice Department is pursuing one of the most aggressive efforts in recent memory to force reporters to testify about their reporting and confidential sources.

 

New York Times, Michael Cohen Helped Convict Trump. Now, He’s Making Nice Again Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess, July 12, 2026. A previously unreported encounter last summer set the stage for a rapprochement between the president and his former fixer, who has so far avoided the diatribes and prosecutions that President Trump has directed at other critics.

Last summer, as many one-time adversaries of President Trump sought to bury the hatchet with him, he met with someone who seemed like a intractable enemy: his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had a brief yet significant conversation at the president’s private, members-only golf club in Bedminster, N.J., breaking a yearslong estrangement marked by legal disputes and public acrimony, according to people with knowledge of the encounter, who discussed the private session on the condition of anonymity.

Their conversation, which has not been previously reported, provided Mr. Cohen a toehold into Mr. Trump’s orbit and set in motion a broader effort to make peace with the president. His private outreach also included a second, longer meeting with Mr. Trump this year and calls to some of the president’s closest allies.

Mr. Cohen’s public stance has shifted as well. Two years after serving as the star witness against Mr. Trump at the president’s criminal trial in New York — delivering testimony that helped secure his conviction for falsifying business records — Mr. Cohen has publicly assailed the prosecutors leading the case.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Cohen said his relationship with the president had improved in recent months after Mr. Trump had noticed a liberal backlash to his criticism of prosecutors.

“If Donald Trump and Michael Cohen can rekindle and reconcile their past relationship, then anyone should be able to,” he said.

Mr. Cohen stands to gain from the rapprochement. With the White House’s apparent blessing, he is debuting a radio show on Sunday on a Trump-friendly station in New York, WABC. He is filling former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s slot during the summer, but he has said that he hopes to get a syndicated show eventually.

Unlike several prominent Trump critics who have legally sparred with the president, Mr. Cohen has not faced prosecution from Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, which has sought to bring charges against figures such as former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. Mr. Trump has not publicly attacked Mr. Cohen since retaking office.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The truce represents a surprising third act in the tumultuous Trump-Cohen relationship

The two men, both known for their tough-guy personas and tendency to lash out at enemies, have worked together, betrayed each other and now might soon be chatting again in public: While promoting his new show, Mr. Cohen recently said that he expected Mr. Trump to call in as a guest in the coming weeks.

On his show, Mr. Cohen could continue to undermine his role as a witness at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial, if his most recent public remarks are any indication.

During the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Mr. Trump over a hush-money deal with a porn actress, Mr. Cohen said he was helping prosecutors because Mr. Trump “needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.” Mr. Cohen, who went to prison for his role in the hush-money deal, now contends that he “felt compelled and coerced to deliver what they were seeking.”

Mr. Trump — who has recently told aides and confidants that he felt sorry for his former fixer, lamenting his time in prison — could try to leverage Mr. Cohen’s recent criticism of prosecutors as he challenges the legal cases against him. His lawyers have already cited Mr. Cohen’s comments in court papers, part of a broader effort by the president to recast the past decade, including his refusal to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 election.

There is also potential peril in Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump’s reconciliation. Mr. Cohen may not stick to Trump’s talking points, having already noted publicly that he does not agree with the president on everything.

The two-decadlong relationship between them was born from conflicts, one involving New York real estate, rather than presidential politics. After buying apartments in two of Mr. Trump’s New York buildings, Mr. Cohen caught Mr. Trump’s eye during a dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower in New York in the mid-2000s.

Mr. Cohen, who had idolized Mr. Trump since his youth on Long Island, saw a potential mentor and patron. Mr. Trump saw a potential bulldog enforcer.

Mr. Cohen often delivered. He threatened Mr. Trump’s foes — Mr. Cohen once wrote that he served as Mr. Trump’s “designated thug” — and occasionally worked on real estate projects.

Mr. Cohen was not given a formal role in the 2016 campaign. But he found ways to be useful to the president politically.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen played a pivotal role in covering up a potential scandal that could have damaged Mr. Trump’s candidacy. When the porn actress Stormy Daniels threatened to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen bought her silence with a $130,000 payoff.

In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to several federal crimes, including for his role in the payoff, though he said Mr. Trump had directed him to make the secret payment.

Mr. Cohen was the only person to serve prison time for that deal. Released during the pandemic, the Trump administration threw him back behind bars when he would not sign papers ruling out writing a book. A judge ordered him released, saying the move was “retaliatory.”

Mr. Cohen emerged from prison angry, saying he was determined to set the record straight. He released books titled “Disloyal” and “Revenge,” as well as a podcast called “Mea Culpa.” He also met with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which ultimately indicted Mr. Trump for his role in the hush-money deal.

Mr. Cohen took the witness stand in that case. He also testified in a civil case that Ms. James brought against Mr. Trump, who was found liable for fraud.

Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen a “rat” and a “liar.” He even sued Mr. Cohen, ultimately dropping the case days before Mr. Trump was set to be deposed.

For years, Mr. Cohen did not back down. In social media and on cable news, he boasted of his role in holding Mr. Trump accountable, noting that he had voluntarily testified before Congress and met with prosecutors some 20 times. He likened Mr. Trump to a mobster.

“If the country won’t forgive me, how can I ever forgive myself?” he wrote on Twitter in 2021. “It’s why I have and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement; to ensure Trump and company are held responsible.”

Mr. Cohen nevertheless has said he had some misgivings about testifying at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial. And some of Mr. Cohen’s friends have contended that he never wanted to break up with Mr. Trump and would have preferred remaining in his orbit, rather than enduring years of testimony and receiving accolades as a hero of the left.

After Mr. Trump returned to office last year, Mr. Cohen began to seek out his former boss.

His effort gained traction last summer, when he met with Mr. Trump at Bedminster. Mr. Trump’s top personal legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, was present for the conversation but did not arrange it, the people briefed on the matter said.

It is unclear who did; Mr. Cohen has declined to say, and a White House spokesman did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The president and his aides have yet to comment on Mr. Cohen’s change in tone publicly.

Still, according to the people briefed on the initial Bedminster conversation, it broke the ice, without cementing a new relationship. By late summer, Mr. Cohen began softening his tone about Mr. Trump in television appearances.

In January, Mr. Cohen made a vocal public turn: In a Substack essay, he argued that he was an involuntary participant in the cases against Mr. Trump, compelled to testify by subpoena. He also accused prosecutors of posing “inappropriate leading questions to elicit answers that supported their narrative.”

Mr. Cohen has said he received a swift and furious reaction from liberal readers. That’s when a Trump associate brought the backlash to the president’s attention, Mr. Cohen recently said when he appeared as a guest on a WABC radio show. The associate, Mr. Cohen added, relayed to him that the president had expressed sympathy for him.

So, Mr. Cohen said, he texted the president to thank him and express “my sincere hope that this long, exhausting feud could finally end.” Mr. Trump responded, Mr. Cohen said. According to people with knowledge of the matter, they met in Florida some time after the Substack essay. It all unfolded “about six, seven months ago,” Mr. Cohen said in the appearance.

“We rekindled our relationship because of a shared experience of betrayal,” he said.

Mr. Cohen also contacted a number of Trump allies, including one of his lawyers and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who then had him on her podcast. There, he defended Mr. Trump from questions about past ties to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Eventually, he landed on WABC, a home to Trump acolytes including Roger Stone.

John Catsimatidis, the station’s owner and a longtime Trump supporter, told The New York Post that he had checked with the White House before giving Mr. Cohen the show. In a brief call with The New York Times, he declined to elaborate.

July 10

New York Times, F.C.C. Approves Test of Space Mirror to Light Night Sky Despite Outcry, Hiroko Tabuchi, July 10, 2026. A start-up company has permission to try its plan to bounce solar rays onto the dark side of Earth, turning night to day for a three-mile-wide patch.

The federal government has approved plans by a start-up company to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the company says would power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers and illuminate city streets.

In a license issued on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., to launch its Eärendil-1 satellite into low Earth orbit. The company plans to deploy its test satellite this year but has said it eventually wants to send as many as 50,000 big mirrors into space.

The approval came despite a flood of opposition from astronomers, wildlife experts and others who say the light from the mirrors could distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms, the light-and-dark cycles that help people, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.

“It’s terrifying to me that one country can change the night sky for everybody in the world,” said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. “I need access to dark skies in order to do my research. If you’ve got giant mirrors shining down, then we’ve lost that.”

In a letter to the F.C.C. sent last month, the American Astronomical Society, said the endeavor “cannot be considered to serve the public interest” and in fact would waste taxpayer dollars by wrecking the work of federally funded astronomical facilities, even as it brought untold risks to people and wildlife.

“It is clear that the activities that Reflect Orbital is proposing will have an impact on the Earth environment, including on human health, agriculture and wildlife, in addition to astronomy,” Roohi Dalal, the society’s director of public policy, wrote.

Roughly the size of a dorm fridge, Reflect Orbital’s first prototype, once in space about 400 miles up, would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. The mirror would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth’s surface.

Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites by the end of 2028, and 5,000 others by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons.

The F.C.C. stressed, however, that it was approving only “a single demonstration satellite” that would test a technology that could advance American leadership in outer space. “Reflect Orbital’s demonstration satellite is an example of a potentially groundbreaking technology,” the commission said in its order granting the license.ission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites, the F.C.C. said. In reviewing satellite applications, it generally checks to ensure that a spacecraft’s radio communications do not create interference problems for others, and that the vessel will be safely disposed of at the end of its operational lifetime.

The federal government’s overall stance is that activities in space are not subject to environmental regulations and review, which apply only to Earth. “Even if the commission had authority to review and condition these operations (which it does not), these harms are unlikely to occur,” the F.C.C. said.

June

June 20

 

Future President Trump, right, enjoying life with his onetime best friend Jeffrey Epstein along with Trump's now-notorious birthday greeting to Epstein.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Important Epstein Deep Dive: Investigations Ramp Up as Accountability is Coming, Aaron Parnas, right, June 20, 2026. As promised, I wanted to take a deep dive into the Epstein files and the question of accountability. With so much attention on the document releases, it has become easy to lose sight of what has actually happened as a result. After speaking with survivors, members of Congress, and others involved in this issue, I have compiled a detailed list of individuals who have faced real consequences.

TikTok has completely censored my content today and nothing will post, so I figured we start the day with some Epstein news.

I also want to walk through the investigations that are currently underway, the depositions that are scheduled, and what may come next. It is important that we keep the Epstein files at the forefront of the public conversation, because this story is far from over.

This work is only possible because of your support. Many platforms are reluctant to amplify this information, but people deserve to know where things stand, where the investigations are headed, and who has actually been held accountable.

Investigations

Position: Former Foreign Minister of Norway; President and CEO of the World Economic Forum. Brende resigned as president and CEO of the World Economic Forum in February 2026. His departure followed disclosures that he remained in contact with Epstein long after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor. The revelations raised questions about his judgment and associations while leading one of the world’s most influential international organizations.Peter Mandelson

Position: British Ambassador to the United States; Labour Party politician; member of the House of Lords. Mandelson was arrested by British police, released on bail, and remained under investigation. He had already lost his position as ambassador after scrutiny of his relationship with Epstein intensified. He was also forced to resign from the Labour Party and the House of Lords. His case involved both legal scrutiny and the loss of multiple high-profile political positions.Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (Prince Andrew)

Position: British royal family member; former British trade envoy. Prince Andrew was arrested and later released while an investigation continued. Prior disclosures had already resulted in the loss of his royal titles and removal from his royal residence. Authorities were investigating allegations that he shared confidential information with Epstein while serving as a trade envoy. The consequences included legal scrutiny as well as the loss of royal status and privileges.Thorbjørn Jagland

Position: Former Prime Minister of Norway; former Secretary General of the Council of Europe. Jagland was criminally charged with “gross corruption” by Norwegian authorities. Investigators examined whether gifts, travel, and loans connected to Epstein were linked to his public positions. Released communications showed extensive contact between the two men. He faced one of the most severe forms of accountability: formal criminal charges.Mona Juul

Position: Norwegian Ambassador to Jordan and Iraq. Juul was suspended from her diplomatic post before resigning. Norwegian police subsequently announced a corruption investigation involving her and her husband over financial dealings connected to Epstein. The fallout cost her a senior diplomatic role and exposed her to possible legal consequences. The investigation remained ongoing at the time of publication.Terje Rød-Larsen

Position: President and CEO of the International Peace Institute; diplomat involved in the Oslo peace process. Rød-Larsen became the subject of a Norwegian police investigation after reports concerning financial benefits connected to Epstein. Years earlier, he had resigned from the International Peace Institute after revelations involving donations and a personal loan from Epstein. The renewed investigation brought additional scrutiny to conduct that had already ended one major leadership career.Jack Lang

Position: Former French Minister of Culture; President of the Arab World Institute. Lang resigned as head of the Arab World Institute after French authorities began investigating reports of financial ties between his family and Epstein. The resignation followed growing public scrutiny surrounding the allegations. Although no charges had been announced, the investigation led to the loss of a prestigious leadership position.Morgan McSweeney

Position: Chief of Staff to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. McSweeney resigned under political pressure because of his role in appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. McSweeney has no known ties to Epstein. Nevertheless, he became caught up in the broader fallout resulting from the controversy.Joanna Rubinstein

Position: Chair of Sweden for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. Rubinstein resigned after documents revealed that she and her family had visited Epstein’s private island. The disclosures generated public scrutiny and questions about her judgment. She subsequently left a prominent international humanitarian position. Her accountability came in the form of resignation rather than legal action.Miroslav Lajčák

Position: National Security Adviser to Slovakia’s Prime Minister; former Slovak Foreign Minister. Lajčák stepped down after emails surfaced showing exchanges with Epstein that appeared to joke about young women. The communications triggered political controversy and damaged confidence in his role. He resigned from one of the most sensitive positions in the Slovak government. The consequence was the loss of public office.AcademiaLeon Botstein

Position: President of Bard College. Botstein announced his retirement after files showed years of messages and visits involving Epstein. Bard College commissioned an independent review that criticized aspects of his leadership but found no illegal conduct. Nevertheless, the controversy contributed to his decision to step down.Joichi Ito

Position: Former Director of the MIT Media Lab; technology entrepreneur. Ito resigned from a Japanese government technology initiative after renewed attention to his ties with Epstein. Earlier disclosures had already led to his resignation from MIT’s Media Lab, several corporate boards, and academic positions. The consequences accumulated over multiple years and institutions. His case represents one of the most extensive examples of professional fallout in academia.Larry Summers

Position: Former President of Harvard University; former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Summers announced he would stop teaching at Harvard and resigned from university leadership roles. Earlier fallout had already included resignations from think tanks, the board of OpenAI, and the loss of a New York Times contributor position. Newly disclosed emails showed ongoing contact with Epstein after serious allegations had emerged.Richard Axel

Position: Nobel Prize-winning scientist; Columbia University professor. Axel resigned as co-director of a Columbia neuroscience institute and stepped down from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Documents portrayed him as a frequent guest at Epstein’s residence and an intermediary with university officials. The disclosures generated intense scrutiny within the academic community.Dr. Letty Moss-Salentijn

Position: Vice Dean, Columbia University College of Dental Medicine. Columbia University stripped Moss-Salentijn of her vice dean title after documents suggested she helped develop a customized academic plan for Epstein’s girlfriend. She retained her tenured faculty position but lost her administrative authority. The university’s action reflected concerns about her conduct in an admissions-related matter.Dr. Thomas Magnani

Position: Columbia University Dental School affiliate; dentist. Columbia University severed all remaining ties with Magnani after disclosures connected him to efforts to secure admission for Epstein’s girlfriend. The university removed him from admissions and volunteer leadership roles. Although he had not taught there for several years, the institution formally ended its association with him.David A. Ross

Position: Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts; museum executive. Ross resigned as department chair after emails revealed a friendship with Epstein spanning decades. The disclosures generated public criticism and pressure within the arts community. He subsequently stepped down from his academic leadership role.Elisa New

Position: Former Harvard professor; host of PBS’s Poetry in America. Arizona State University ended its relationship with New, and PBS canceled her television program. The actions followed revelations that Epstein had helped develop and fund the project. She lost both a university affiliation and a nationally distributed media platform.BusinessCasey Wasserman

Position: Founder of Wasserman talent agency; sports and entertainment executive. Wasserman’s company removed his name from the agency and began seeking a buyer after numerous clients left. The departures followed the release of emails involving Ghislaine Maxwell.Dr. Bernard Kruger

Position: Concierge medicine physician. Kruger stepped away from positions at two concierge medical practices after details of his relationship with Epstein became public. The disclosures led to questions about his professional judgment and associations. He subsequently relinquished leadership and professional roles.Bob Kerrey

Position: Former U.S. Senator from Nebraska; Chairman of a clean-energy company. Kerrey resigned as chairman of a clean-energy company after documents showed continued contact with Epstein following Epstein’s plea deal. The disclosures generated criticism regarding his decision to maintain the relationship. He subsequently stepped down from his corporate leadership role.Dr. Peter Attia

Position: Physician, author, and CBS News contributor. Attia resigned as a CBS News contributor and had previously stepped down from a corporate science position. Documents described close contact with Epstein, including visits and correspondence over several years. Public backlash followed publication of those details. The result was the loss of multiple professional affiliations.Thomas J. Pritzker

Position: Executive Chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of Hyatt after files revealed continuing contact with Epstein after Epstein’s plea deal. The disclosures prompted scrutiny of his judgment and associations. He relinquished one of the most important leadership roles in the hospitality industry.Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem

Position: Chairman and CEO of DP World. Bin Sulayem resigned from leadership of the global ports company DP World. Documents suggested efforts to arrange business opportunities with Epstein and contained exchanges concerning women. After his identity became public, pressure mounted rapidly. The consequence was the loss of leadership of a major international corporation.James E. Staley

Position: Chief Executive Officer of Barclays. Staley resigned as CEO of Barclays in 2021 amid scrutiny of his ties to Epstein. Evidence showed that he maintained contact with Epstein after Epstein’s plea agreement and visited him during his sentence. Regulatory and public pressure intensified over time.Leon Black

Position: Co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management; Chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. Black stepped down from all leadership positions at Apollo Global Management and later from the Museum of Modern Art. Investigations highlighted extensive business and social ties to Epstein, including large payments for advisory services. The disclosures generated sustained public and investor scrutiny.U.S. PoliticsGeorge J. Mitchell

Position: Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader; diplomat and peace negotiator. Mitchell resigned from the Mitchell Institute and saw institutions remove his name from programs, awards, and honors. Queen’s University Belfast removed a bust of him and renamed a research institute that bore his name. Other organizations also distanced themselves from his legacy.Alexander Acosta

Position: U.S. Secretary of Labor; former federal prosecutor. Acosta resigned as labor secretary in 2019 after criticism of his handling of Epstein’s 2008 plea deal while serving as a federal prosecutor. Critics argued that the agreement was overly lenient given the allegations. The controversy became politically untenable and ultimately ended his Cabinet tenure.LawKathryn Ruemmler

Position: General Counsel of Goldman Sachs; former White House Counsel. Ruemmler announced she would leave Goldman Sachs after emails revealed a long-running friendship with Epstein. The correspondence showed personal and professional interactions spanning many years. Public scrutiny intensified after the communications became public.Brad Karp

Position: Chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Karp resigned as chairman of one of the nation’s most influential law firms after emails suggested a deeper relationship with Epstein than previously understood. The disclosures included legal advice he offered regarding Epstein’s earlier plea agreement. Although he remained at the firm, he relinquished its top leadership role. His accountability was the loss of the chairmanship.Here are the pending investigations:

New Mexico Criminal: The state of New Mexico has launched an active criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s activities at Zorro Ranch, his sprawling property outside Santa Fe, while a separate legislative “Truth Commission” is conducting a survivor-centered inquiry into what occurred there and whether institutions failed to act. In recent months, investigators from the New Mexico Department of Justice executed a search of Zorro Ranch and issued preservation orders to major companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Google, and PayPal, directing them to retain any records related to Epstein.

New Mexico Truth Commission: One of the most significant developments in the Epstein case is New Mexico's newly established Truth Commission, a legislative investigative body tasked with examining Jeffrey Epstein's activities in the state, particularly at his Zorro Ranch property outside Santa Fe. The commission has already begun issuing subpoenas to state agencies, law enforcement offices, government officials, and private organizations in an effort to uncover records related to Epstein's operations, financial dealings, and relationships in New Mexico. Among the records being sought are communications involving former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, documents related to Zorro Ranch, law enforcement files, and information about donations made by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Commissioners have described the effort as a survivor-centered investigation focused on establishing a full public record of what occurred in New Mexico, identifying institutional failures, and ensuring accountability for anyone who may have enabled or concealed Epstein's activities.

Overseas Investigations: The release of millions of pages of Epstein-related documents has triggered a wave of investigations outside the United States, with authorities in at least eight countries and the European Union opening probes into individuals, financial networks, and possible misconduct connected to Epstein's global network. In the United Kingdom, investigators arrested both Prince Andrew and former British Ambassador Peter Mandelson, while British authorities continue examining allegations uncovered through the files. Norway has launched some of the most aggressive actions, including criminal charges against former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland and investigations involving other current and former officials. Authorities in France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Turkey, and Slovakia are also reviewing ties revealed in the documents, while the European Union's anti-fraud office has opened its own investigation into Mandelson. These inquiries range from allegations of corruption and abuse of office to questions surrounding financial relationships, trafficking networks, and whether powerful individuals received benefits or provided assistance through their connections to Epstein.

Upcoming Key Dates: House Oversight Committee Testimony

• June 26, 2026 — Leon Black, co-founder and former CEO of Apollo Global Management, is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee.
• July 9, 2026 — Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein’s former attorney. Requested
• July 15, 2026 — Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House Counsel and former General Counsel of Goldman Sachs, is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee.
• July 23, 2026 — Jes Staley, former CEO of Barclays, is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee.

These hearings are expected to provide lawmakers with additional information about relationships, communications, and decision-making involving Jeffrey Epstein and his network, and could shape the direction of future investigations.

Epstein Survivor Stories:

Finally, I wanted to share the voices of those most directly affected by Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Over the course of this investigation, me and other journalists have sat down with multiple survivors and advocates who have spent years fighting for accountability and transparency. Their stories provide a powerful reminder that this is not simply a story about documents, investigations, or powerful people. It is a story about real victims whose lives were forever changed.

Below, you’ll hear from:

• Jess Michaels:
• Marina Lacerda and Andrea Sterling:
• Sky and Amanda Roberts:
• Danielle Bensky:

All of these survivors offer a unique perspective on the lasting impact of Epstein’s abuse, the pursuit of justice, and why the fight for accountability continues today.

More On Trump Administration New York Times, Book Preview: A President Using Super Glue and Irked About Epstein: Takeaways From a New Trump Book, Tim Balk, June 18, 2026. The book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, “Regime Change,” reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.

A hunger for vengeance. A lack of restraints. A fixation on interior decorating and a drive to leave lasting marks on his office.

That is the portrait of President Trump in his second term that emerges from “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” a new book by two New York Times reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

The 464-page book, set to be released on Tuesday, describes Mr. Trump’s relentless, norm-shattering efforts to bend the federal government, cultural institutions and news cycles to his will. It draws on extensive interviews conducted on the condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions and sensitive issues. Throughout the reporting process, the authors write, they made extensive efforts to contact the people named in the book and to give them ample opportunity to offer their perspective.

A group of formerly enslaved people at a wharf during the American Civil War.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“Regime Change” describes the “most powerful president of our lifetimes” — a leader operating on “grievances and instincts” who could be found, on at least one occasion, decorating the White House with a tube of super glue.ImageA book cover with the title, subtitle and authors' names on a gold, textured backgroundCredit...Simon & Schuster

Here are 11 takeaways from the book. lTrump relished watching Zuckerberg and Bezos try to ingratiate themselves with him.

After Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, the book says, he reveled in the ways that tech leaders who had once scorned him were now “kissing my ass.”

He especially enjoyed the outreach from Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, who had barred Mr. Trump from Facebook and Instagram after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.ImageFrom left, Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai standing together before President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.The book details how tech executives including Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Jeff Bezos, center alongside Lauren Sánchez, now his wife, sought to ingratiate themselves with Mr. Trump.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

At Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump would tell visitors about texts he had received from the titans of tech companies, the book says. In one instance, he showed guests a photo of a letter from one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s children, who had written that they eagerly awaited “the golden age of America” arriving with Mr. Trump’s return, according to the book. In another, he showed a text from Jeff Bezos with a smiling selfie of the Amazon founder and Lauren Sánchez, now his wife.

At a dinner after the 2024 election, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bezos commiserated, according to the book, over a source of shared frustration: The Washington Post, Mr. Bezos’s newspaper, whose coverage had long irritated Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bezos, who bought The Post in 2013, complained that the newspaper had been his worst investment, the book says.

“The people there are terrible,” Mr. Bezos said of the news organization’s business side, according to the book. “They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.”

At another point, Mr. Trump seemed to marvel at his new reception in the tech world.

“They hated me,” he told Elon Musk, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Bezos, the book recounts. He added, “And look at them now.”

June 16

 

President Donald Trump and others pose inside the octagon after UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House. Paramount didn't mind broadcasting Trump's grift-fest but said a conflict of interest precluded it from airing an ad criticizing its dealings with Trump (Pool photo by Evan Vucci via Associated Press).

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), Paramount+ blocks FPF ad about Trump-Ellison censorship threat, Staff report, June 16, 2026. Freedom of the Press Foundation revealed today that Paramount+ rejected an ad calling attention to President Donald Trump’s crooked meddling in media transactions to extract favorable coverage. The ad would have run on the platform during the same time as the UFC Freedom 250 event, broadcast live June 14 from the White House on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

The ad warns Americans about the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would place CNN under the editorial control of David Ellison, a Trump-aligned investor who has already made documented concessions to the administration as a condition of regulatory approval. As the ad shows, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, has publicly declared that “the sooner the Ellisons take over that network, the better.”

The advertisement features recently fired “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley’s accusation that CBS — which Ellison’s company owns — demanded his stories include “falsehoods and bias” to appease the president. Paramount+ declined to air it.

“Ellison has already shown his cards on editorial independence, but in case there was any doubt, his company has now declined to air a straightforward message about what his proposed takeover of CNN, HBO, and other outlets would mean for press freedom,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at FPF. “Ellison won’t air criticism of himself, his company, or his buddy Trump. That’s bad for press freedom, bad for the public, and bad for Paramount — just look at CBS’ recent struggles under Ellison’s watch. Billionaires who don’t respect the First Amendment should stay out of the news business.”

Stern added that Paramount, despite citing a conflict of interest in rejecting the ad, “apparently sees no conflict of interest in promising the Trump administration editorial concessions in exchange for merger approvals, in throwing fancy dinner parties honoring Trump while he attacks CBS and CNN journalists, or in airing a UFC event which functioned as an hourslong commercial for Donald Trump and Truth Social.”

The rejected ad opens with Trump calling reporters “the enemy of the people” and closes with a direct call to block the merger — a message Paramount+, the streamer owned by the very company seeking approval for that merger, chose to suppress.

You can watch the ad Paramount+ refused to air below. Please contact us if you would like further comment.

 

 Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: When ‘60 Minutes’ Caved, That Told Trump Everything He Needed to Know, Susan J. Demas, right (Lincoln Square’s Executive Editor and a 25-year journalism veteran), June 16, 2026. Scott Pelley was fired for telling the truth. And journalists with the power to do something decided their jobs were worth more.

Here’s the thing about institutions that fold to authoritarianism: those who stay insist they’re doing so to preserve something of grave societal significance. And then you watch these institutions die anyway.

Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes for saying, out loud, what everyone already knew: Bari Weiss is killing CBS’s journalistic integrity. He confirmed that she’s injecting right-wing politics into the broadcast and censoring solid investigative reporting. He accused Weiss of “murdering” the show during a contentious staff meeting and was fired the next day. That’s it. That was his offense. He told the truth about what was happening to his own show, and Paramount and CBS fired him for it.

I’ve been in journalism for a quarter-century. I’ve watched plenty of ethical failures in corporate, partisan, and nonprofit newsrooms. But there’s a specific kind of failure that happens when someone gets fired for telling the truth, and it’s not really about that person at all. It’s an indictment of the institution. Every time. No exceptions.

Believe me, I know.

What happened next is the part that should actually worry you.

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim didn’t walk. They stayed. Pelley’s firing left the show’s remaining correspondents “completely adrift,” according to a source close to the situation. They said they wanted to save the show. But as media critic Jennifer Schulze aptly put it: the show is already dead. It died the moment they decided that staying was worth more than standing up for a colleague who got fired for telling the truth.

I want to be clear about who we’re talking about here, because it matters. These aren’t editorial assistants or interns — twentysomethings at the start of their careers who’d be risking everything and couldn’t make rent if they got the ax.

Stahl, Whitaker, and Wertheim have spent decades as some of the most respected journalists in America. They’re millionaires. They have more power and more security than almost anyone in that building. If there was ever a moment for someone to use that power — to walk out, to make Paramount choose between 60 Minutes and Bari Weiss in full public view — this was it.

They didn’t. And the fact that they didn’t tells you everything about why David Ellison’s Skydance Media felt so confident doing a MAGA takeover of CBS News in the first place. They’d already sized up the resistance. They knew it was weak.

They were right.

This is the bet. This is the bet Donald Trump and MAGA make over and over again, and it keeps paying off. Institutions are weaker than you think. People’s backbones — their morality — are weaker than you think. And so things that used to be unthinkable become merely things that happened.

That was the bet behind January 6th. Trump thought he could help stage an insurrection and get away with it, and he did — eventually. The Supreme Court shielded him from prosecution and he went on to win the 2024 election.

That’s the bet behind Trump sitting in the Oval Office right now, openly profiting off the presidency — crypto deals, bogus lawsuits against the federal government he runs, a ballroom getting built on the taxpayers’ dime. Elon Musk makes that bet. Jeff Bezos makes that bet. Trump’s own family — Jared Kushner, Don Jr., Eric — they’re all making that bet, every single day. So far nobody’s proven them wrong.

And every time an institution caves, the bet gets a little safer.

I want to give 60 Minutes its due, because it deserves it. The show has done groundbreaking reporting for decades. It’s put Trump’s feet to the fire — as well as plenty of others in his orbit — when it mattered.

But when Trump sued CBS in 2024 over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris — which legal experts called frivolous — Paramount’s previous ownership settled it anyway, ahead of a merger that needed the administration’s blessing. Pelley called that settlement a “bribe” (which Paramount, of course, denies).

Here’s what came out after Pelley was fired, and it’s the detail that should stop you cold: in his first interview after being terminated, he said Weiss had been “putting a thumb on the scale” for the president’s version of events during a 60 Minutes story on the Minneapolis ICE protests. That included a request to describe Renee Good driving toward the officer who killed her, which has been widely disproven. Pelley refused to make the change.

He said Weiss had a second note, which he paraphrased to the New York Times as: “Can we make the protesters look more violent?” Now he pushed back on this, too, but don’t mistake this for bravery. His explanation was a perfect example of obeying in advance:

“I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because … it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this.”

In other words, Pelley felt that the segment already sufficiently got Weiss’ viewpoint across and was offended she would take issue with how journalists did so.

Not exactly a profile in courage.

Here’s the thing about mainstream media today that I think people outside journalism don’t fully grasp: it’s not just that they won’t fight for press freedom in the abstract. They won’t even fight for each other.

Trump told Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy” when she asked him about the Epstein files. He’s called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “stupid and nasty,” described the New York Times’ Katie Rogers as “ugly, both inside and out,” and told MSNOW’s Akayla Gardner she was “a dumb person” for accurately reporting on his ballroom’s ballooning cost. And when Kristen Welker pressed him last week for evidence of election fraud on Meet the Press, he called her network “crooked,” told her “thank you, darling, have a good time.” Then he stormed out of the interview (despite her embarrassingly begging him to come back).

And the White House press corps mostly says nothing. A handful of journalists, including Collins herself, have publicly defended colleagues after some of these incidents — which tells you it’s possible. It also tells you how rare it is.

Why? Because the access is the asset. Corporate media has decided that staying in the room with this administration is worth more than defending their own colleagues, more than defending democracy, more than basic professional ethics, more than standing up for what’s left of this country’s institutions.

They’re not just failing the public. They’re failing each other, in real time, on camera — and calling it journalism. 

New York Times, A new No 1! Re-ranking the 48 World Cup teams after day five of the tournament, Tim Spiers, Eduardo Tansley, Elias Burke and Nick Miller, June 16, 2026. When you’ve just drawn 0-0 against a country ranked 64th in the world and which has a population of around 500,000, you can no longer be considered favourites to win the World Cup.

Spain will surely improve but they deservedly drop down Tuesday’s rankings. But where do Cape Verde land after shocking the world? And what about Belgium and Egypt after their opening draw?

What does “report the hell out of this story” mean in practice?

ROTHFELD: Drill into both the official narrative and the underpinnings of the pervasive conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death. Question all of it. See what answers we could find. That’s what we did. Let’s face it, if we found that Epstein had been murdered, that would have been a world-shaking story. We didn’t.

EDER: I wanted to be on this story because it was a chance to take

June 7

 

The late U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican, and the late FBI Las Vegas Field Office Supervisor Joe Yablonsky, a would-be whistleblower on the senator's corruption

Mobology, How a 1985 rivalry between ABC News and "60 Minutes" allowed a mobbed-up U.S. Senator to evade exposure, Dan E. Moldea, right, June 7, 2026. An earlier example of a major public figure using libel litigation to chill the press.

On April 26, 2026, I published the column: “With defamation lawsuits now cynically used as political weapons, we need to reform the laws that govern libel.”

Today, I reprint the following award-winning article, “Networks Knuckle Under to Laxalt: The Story That Never Aired”—which I co-authored with investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman—in the Village Voice on March 5, 1985.

This piece chronicled, among other things, how that story—completed and scheduled for broadcast by both ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS’s 60 Minutes—was killed.

The parallels between this 41-year-old article and the circumstances behind the current crisis in journalism at both ABC and CBS, stemming from Donald Trump’s flagrant abuse of litigation, are striking.

Friedman is an important character in this story, but he still wanted to share the byline after inviting me aboard. Consequently, unless otherwise noted, I conducted the interviews with 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt, and 60 Minutes senior correspondent Mike Wallace, as well as Peter Lance, Bill Lichtenstein, and Charlie Stuart at ABC News, along with others quoted in this story, including Joe Yablonsky of the FBI and Robbie.

This is the first time that I have published this edited story on Mobology.

Tragically, Robbie Friedman died at 51 on July 2, 2002, from a rare disease that he contracted while on assignment in India. . . . He was a good man and a brave reporter.

From the Village Voice, March 5, 1985: Overview

 

There was an air of excitement at 60 Minutes late last summer as journalists at that top-rated CBS news program completed an expose about Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt’s alleged ties to organized crime. Earlier stories in the press—most notably in the Miami Herald in 1981 and the Wall Street Journal in 1983—included long lists of Laxalt’s friends and campaign contributors who have mob connections.

By mid-September 1984, Lowell Bergman, a respected 60 Minutes producer for senior correspondent Mike Wallace, was putting the finishing touches on his own story—the end product of a three-month-long investigation—that had uncovered startling revelations about Laxalt’s notorious friendships.

On September 14, Wallace said on the Phil Donahue Show that the forthcoming Laxalt segment on 60 Minutes could possibly change the course of the November presidential election.

But the story, pegged for the season opener in late September, never aired.

On September 20, CBS News executives received a hand-delivered letter from Laxalt’s New York attorney, which threatened a libel suit if they broadcast a report linking Laxalt to organized crime. The letter called into question the credibility of the network’s key on-camera source, Joseph Yablonsky, the former head of the FBI in Las Vegas, whose allegations about Laxalt’s mob connections were the centerpiece of the story.

ABC’s World News Tonight, which had also obtained an interview with Yablonsky and was racing to scoop its arch-rival with its own Laxalt expose, received a similar letter that same day.

Shortly after getting the correspondence, 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt called Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News and Sports. The news executives agreed to shelve their Laxalt stories.

Neither was broadcast.

Hewitt’s decision was based on the simple fact that his star correspondent, Mike Wallace, wanted to kill the segment after learning that Yablonsky had talked to ABC, giving that network the chance to scoop him. Yablonsky, who promised Wallace an exclusive interview, had spoken with ABC after receiving what he believed were assurances that ABC would not broadcast its program until after the 60 Minutes segment aired.

In the end, while the networks’ stories self-destructed, Laxalt, one of President Ronald Reagan’s closest friends and the chairman of both the Republican National Committee and Reagan’s reelection campaign, sidestepped the serious allegations in the reports. And the American viewing public was deprived of a significant insight into one of this country’s most powerful public officials.

What follows is an anatomy of the two networks’ aborted Laxalt stories in the era of the multimillion-dollar libel suit, as well as an inside view of what happens to journalists and their sources when rival networks are locked in bitter competition over the same story. CBS opens an investigation of Paul Laxalt

On November 30, Yablonsky sent a letter to Roone Arledge, chronicling his travails with ABC and CBS. Yablonsky concluded:

“Simply put, ABC’s lies to me turned me into a liar to Wallace. . . .

“Paradoxically, I became the scapegoat of an incident caused by ABC’s lack of integrity. I naively thought I could trust a network organization. . . .

“In retrospect, I really don’t think you had the guts to do the story in the first place. Your actions caused an important story to go untold to the American public.”

Besides the American public, however, the big loser in this story is clearly Joe Yablonsky, who, after a brilliant 32-year career with the FBI, jeopardized his reputation because of the naive manner in which he conducted himself with the networks.

Says Yablonsky, “I tried to please everyone: ABC, CBS, Friedman, and myself. In the end, I didn’t please anyone.”

Except, of course, Senator Paul Laxalt. . . .

 June 4

 Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, above, was fired a day after a tense meeting where he accused the CBS editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes” (CBS photo by Michele Crowe via Getty Images).

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: We Are All Scott Pelley, Thom Hartmann, right, June 4, 2026. We must all become truth-tellers, whether our platform is radio, TV, Substack, social media, a local newspaper, or a protest sign raised in the town square…

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU SDS.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hourlong news block in prime time on TV.

We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes.

Storied journalist and 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, Ellison, Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Putin and Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to rightwing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Thus, this is now the Putin/Orbán/Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.— Declare an “emergency.”— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.— Bypass Congress.— Bully or ignore the courts.— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.— Send people to foreign concentration camps.— Build concentration camps within the United States.— Prosecute lawyers and judges.— Assert control over universities.— Merge corporate and state interests.— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.— Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump’s and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship. 

June 2

 

 

The Triad via The Bulwark, Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need, Jonathan V. Last, June, 2, 2026. We’re talking about 60 Minutes again because there was an earthquake in journalism yesterday. I’m leaving this edition unlocked because I want everyone to know what Scott Pelley did. It’s inspiring. It’s important.

And it’s very much what we try to do at The Bulwark every day. We don’t have a lot of power—we don’t control a secret police force, or the federal government, or the Supreme Court. We are a dissident movement. Which means that the power we do have is all about truth.

Saying true things is powerful. Refusing to go along with polite fictions is powerful. That’s what today’s Triad is about. And I think you’re going to feel energized when you read it.

Help to be a beacon for truth: Please share this Triad far and wide. If you are on social media, find it on our social account and like or share it to help boost our signal.

Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need

Four days after Bari Weiss decapitated the leadership of 60 Minutes, she sent her new executive producer, Nick Bilton, to meet with the remaining staff. What happened will reverberate in journalism for years.

In full view of the newsroom Scott Pelley took Bilton and Weiss (in absentia) to the woodshed.

The best account is from Oliver Darcy at Status, who had a recording, and the short version is that Pelley:

Asked Bilton to explain the firings of correspondents and reporters.

Bilton absurdly tried to pretend that he didn’t know anything about these firings.

Observed that Bilton had only the most slender qualifications for the job of EP and that Weiss had no qualifications for running CBS News.

The most important part of the showdown, however, was this:

• “Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves 60 Minutes.”
• “She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”

Truth to power.

People sometimes ask me why I’m so hung up on Bari Weiss and the answer is that it’s because her project is essentially the same as Donald Trump’s project. She is a corrupter.

Weiss has attempted to do to journalism what Trump has done to American government: Transform an ancient, messy, imperfect—but basically functional—web of institutions into a corrupt gangland organization. To do so, both Weiss and Trump have depended on the opposition refusing to notice what they are doing and—when they do notice it—to accept ludicrous rationalizations.

Ergo: Trump turns Elon Musk and DOGE loose on USAID and says it’s about saving money. Trump directs his attorney general to indict his enemies and says it’s about stopping the weaponization of government. Trump has ICE agents assault people and says it’s about deporting hardened criminals.

Or: Weiss dismantles 60 Minutes and pretends it’s about getting more views on digital.

Every time someone goes along with this make-believe by treating it as a valid point of you—just like, your opinion, man—they contribute to the corruption.

Here is why Scott Pelley’s stand was so important: He didn’t just refuse to be party to Bari Weiss’s lie—he stood up and exposed it. Even though she has the power and he does not.

Remember Christopher Wray? He was the director of the FBI. Trump wanted to fire him. And Wray, instead of forcing the issue, meekly resigned his office and pretended that he was preserving the integrity of his institution.

Remember John Kelly? He stood next to Donald Trump, saw exactly what kind of man he was serving, and when he finally walked away was only able to muster a couple of print interviews sharing what he knew about the man plotting to destroy American democracy.

Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, Mick Mulvaney, H.R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Bill Barr, Elaine Chao.

All of these people saw what was happening. All of them objected to it. None of them dared say so out loud.

After all, doing so would have been poor form. Better to walk away and not get involved in any ugliness.

Authoritarianism exploits politesse.

The corrupter counts on the existing establishment normalizing her actions, hoping that they can work with her. She depends on people not noticing the plain reality and, if they do notice, politely looking the other way. Or quietly resigning. Not being unpleasant.

Throughout the 60 Minutes meeting yesterday, one of Bari Weiss’s lieutenants begged Pelley to stop asking questions because, he insisted, Pelley was being “rude.” As if civility and obeisance were the same thing.

Pelley would have none of it. He kept going. He said the things that were obviously true. He called things by right names.

2. Enjoy the Bagels

Here are things that are true about 60 Minutes, CBS News, and Bari Weiss:

• 60 is the most successful property—in terms of both product and revenue—in broadcast journalism.
• Donald Trump has a particular grudge against 60, as evidenced by his lawsuit against the show.
• Larry and David Ellison needed Trump’s approval for the purchase of Paramount and CBS News.
• The Ellisons put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News for the sole purpose of placating Trump.
• Trump has been publicly effusive about Bari Weiss as head of CBS News.
• Weiss decapitated the show’s staff in order to bring it fully under her control in order to please Trump.
• The Ellisons now need Trump to approve their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

That’s the story. That’s what is happening. Anyone who pretends that this is about Weiss and the Ellisons “rebuilding public trust” or “reaching a broader audience” is participating in the corruption.

Just like anyone who pretends that DOGE was about reducing government spending. Or that Christopher Wray’s resignation would preserve the integrity of the FBI. Or that Elon Musk bought Twitter because he was concerned about free speech.

You see the thread, right? In every case, the corrupter counts on liberalism being too fastidious to believe the reality, or too polite to say it out loud.

We need more Scott Pelleys. More people who will say the true things, out loud. More people who, when confronted with authoritarian power, will say, “Make me.”

Our entire rationale for The Bulwark is to be Scott Pelley every day. To say the true things. No matter the consequences. Hell, that’s how I got here in the first place, after losing my job because my colleagues and I wouldn’t shut up about what Donald Trump was doing.

Come ride with us. Because it’s right. And because we’re going to win.

May

May 31

U.S. Religion, Culture, Science, Media, Space

New York Times, In U.F.O. Files, Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons, Ruth Graham, May 31, 2026. The prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raises unsettling theological implications.

The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February weren’t sure exactly what they were in for. An organizer asked them to turn their phones on airplane mode. Snacks were served. Then, for at least two hours, two mysterious men presented a slide show laying out the evidence, as they saw it, for some kind of extraterrestrial life and the spiritual confusion that coming revelations could sow among Christians.

“It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever been a part of,” said Alan DiDio, a pastor in North Carolina who attended. “You’ve never seen that many Pentecostals in a room that quiet.”

For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there’s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.

As the pastors left the meeting and turned on their phones, they began receiving news alerts that confirmed for many of them that something significant was happening. That very day, President Trump had directed his administration to begin releasing files related to extraterrestrial life.

The disclosure began this month, with the Pentagon’s release of murky “new, never-before-seen” images whose significance is so far unclear.

But for some conservative Christians, who are among Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, the prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has some unsettling theological implications. Some worry that it undercuts the Bible’s account of the Earth and humanity as the centerpiece of God’s plan for the universe, for example.ImagePresident Trump gestures with his hands while sitting in a brown chair.For the Trump administration, the release of government files was an attempt to demonstrate transparency on a topic of widespread public speculation. Credit...Carolyn Van Houten for The New York Times

Christians in the United States are significantly less likely than the general public to say intelligent life exists on other planets, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center. Among atheists and agnostics, 85 percent say their best guess is that intelligent life exists outside Earth. Among white evangelicals, only 40 percent say the same.

“The U.F.O. topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from U.F.O. “experiencers.”

In Dr. Kripal’s view, the origin stories of many earth-based religions can be read as descriptions of encounters with unexplained entities of unknown provenance.

“The gods have always come from the sky, and we call that religion,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of words in the Western canon for these entities of the middle realm, so my own feeling is that when religious people look out and they see entities that don’t fit into their religious world, they call them demons.”

The possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be better understood as demonic entities is not a new theory among some conservative Christians. But it has lately burst from the fringes of speculative religious cosmology into more prominent view, including from elected officials at the highest levels of government.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said on a conservative podcast this spring.

The Catholic church has no formal teaching on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, though it has intrigued some Catholic theologians. A Vatican scientist made headlines in 2010 when he suggested aliens might have souls, and said he would baptize an alien “if they asked.”Editors’ Picks9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This WeekBy September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in Dying7 Songs We’re Talking About This Week

“Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain,” Mr. Vance added.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado made a similar point recently on another podcast, this one hosted by the conservative Christian musician and activist Sean Feucht.

May 30

 

 

White House Chronicle, Opinion: The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose, Llewellyn King, above, May 30, 2026. Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions.

But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk, above. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble. 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

May 9

 

 

The hosts of ABC’s “The View,” from left, Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Joy Behar, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin (ABC photo by Lou Rocco via Getty Images). 

New York Times, How ‘The View’ Landed at the Center of a Free Speech Battle, John Koblin and Jim Rutenberg, May 9, 2026. The Trump administration’s focus on the show is testament to the enduring influence of an old-fashioned broadcast TV program started 29 years ago.

President Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to punish his perceived media critics has come for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register and The New York Times; broadcast outlets like the BBC, NBC News and CBS News; and the late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

But now it is bearing down on a new opponent, one that remains politically potent and has a storied place in Mr. Trump’s oeuvre of media grudge matches — the long-running ABC daytime talk show, “The View.”

The Federal Communications Commission has been quietly investigating the program for months, looking into whether “The View” violated old federal rules requiring equal airtime to rival political candidates. The inquiry could also feed into the agency’s wider review of whether ABC should be allowed to continue to own some of the country’s most important local television stations.

The clash between ABC and the Trump administration could lead to a protracted, high-stakes legal battle over free expression. The network asserts that the F.C.C. action could have “a chilling effect on First Amendment-protected free speech on the eve of the 2026 elections” and affect which political guests — if any — talk shows will book.

The central role of “The View” is testament to the enduring influence of an old-fashioned broadcast television program that the ABC anchor Barbara Walters started 29 years ago, describing it “as a kaffeeklatsch with more caffeine.” People in both parties say the show continues to hold significant political power — even as streaming, podcasts and social media take up more attention.

“The View” draws 2.7 million viewers a day, more or less the audience it has had for a decade, according to Nielsen.

“It would be easy for our side to say, ‘Who watches that junk?’” said Tim Graham, a senior leader of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that has long been critical of the show. “But the answer is: Many people.”

Representatives for “The View” declined to comment, or to set up interviews with the hosts or anyone involved in the production.

 

Salon, Axios accused of “market manipulation” with Iran reporting, Sophia Tesfaye, May 9, 2026. Journalist Barak Ravid draws range of criticism from Wall Street to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Over the past several weeks, Axios has repeatedly reported that a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran was either “close,” “imminent” or nearing completion. On Wednesday, a little over an hour before Axios reporter Barak Ravid published a scoop claiming the White House believed it was close to reaching a one-page memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war, nearly 10,000 crude oil contracts — worth approximately $920 million in notional value — were sold on the futures market by traders betting the price of oil was about to fall. According to data highlighted by trading surveillance accounts like The Kobeissi Letter, whoever placed those bets stood to make an estimated $125 million as oil prices collapsed more than 12%.

Then the reality of the war hit. Iran called the whole thing “the Americans’ wish list,” Donald Trump told the New York Post it was “too soon” to prepare for peace, Israel said it hadn’t even been informed of the proposal and oil bounced back 8% as traders realized the “imminent deal” might not exist at all. Even Fox News host Mark Levin, the war’s biggest media booster, wrote that he had concluded the Axios report was “largely fake.” A senior Iranian parliament member said Axios was being used by the White House for market manipulation.

The money, though, had already changed hands.

RelatedTrump wants to jail reporters over leaks from own administration

This was not the first suspiciously-timed trade surrounding Axios’ reporting on Iran. Analysts tracking commodity activity and prediction markets have identified a series of similar trades surrounding major Iran-related announcements. According to trading data cited by market observers and later referenced by lawmakers demanding investigations, billions of dollars in oil bets appeared on several occasions shortly before sensitive geopolitical developments became public. After Ravid’s April 5 report suggesting progress in negotiations, another massive oil short reportedly appeared shortly before prices fell. Similar activity allegedly preceded subsequent Axios scoops on April 17 and May 1.

Some analysts, including CNBC host Jim Cramer, and social media users suggested Axios’ reporting may have been strategically released ahead of market trading, potentially influencing oil prices and broader financial sentiment.

Former head of global research at JPMorgan, Marko Kolanovic, reacted to oil price moves following Wednesday’s Axios report, saying, “Who knows what happens next in blatantly manipulated markets” and called the outlet’s credibility into question. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger criticized the surrounding information environment in a tweet deleted after Axios communications director Jake Wilkins replied that the allegations are “obviously not true” and “it’s irresponsible of you to be promoting it.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who left Congress after a public split with Trump, asked on X: “When is everyone going to start realizing that the manic on again off again war/peace rhetoric is really just insider trading?”

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ben Rhodes, who served as former Deputy National Security Adviser to Joe Biden, wrote on X: “No matter how long it takes, it will be essential to someday figure out and hold accountable the people profiting off these constant and absurd leaks of imminent peace often to the same outlet.” Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a University of Tehran professor with long-standing ties to the country’s regime, wrote Wednesday in a post on X: “Axios is a tool for White House market manipulation. The Islamic Republic is fully prepared for a potential major attack before Trump’s trip to China.”

For his part, Ravid has categorically denied any coordination with traders, calling the allegations “complete and utter bulls**t.” A spokesperson for Axios said the outlet strongly supports Ravid, calling him “the best reporter on the world’s biggest story, delivering exclusive after exclusive.”

The 2024 White House Correspondents’ Association winner for overall excellence in White House coverage, Ravid is viewed as one of the premier national security reporters in Washington. When criticism gave way to conspiratorial and ugly attacks this week — unsupported claims that Ravid operates as an active intelligence asset embedded in U.S. journalism — journalists like CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper quickly came to his defense.

Modern national security journalism increasingly operates as an elite signaling system in which anonymous officials shape narratives through carefully-timed leaks that pressure foreign governments, manipulate public perception — and sometimes even markets.

But dismissing all criticism as fringe paranoia avoids confronting the underlying reality that access journalism creates profound conflicts of interest, whether or not individual reporters act improperly. Modern national security journalism increasingly operates as an elite signaling system in which anonymous officials shape narratives through carefully-timed leaks that pressure foreign governments, manipulate public perception — and sometimes even markets. So Axios has continued functioning precisely as access journalism outlets typically do: publishing what powerful officials tell them in exchange for continued insider access. After all, journalists are not responsible for what insiders do with information after publication.

That dynamic becomes especially dangerous during war.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-NY., has sent multiple letters to regulators demanding investigations into the trading activity surrounding Iran-related announcements. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse similarly urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to investigate what they described as recurring suspicious trades tied to sensitive government information.

Torres captured the broader institutional despair bluntly when he admitted he lacked confidence in regulators but felt there was “no choice but to agitate for accountability.”

White House Chronicle, In the Turmoil, Challenges for Graduates in the Class of ’26, Llewellyn King, May 9, 2026. Dear Graduates of 2026:

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American. 

May 5

 

New York Times, Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, Alexandra Alter, May 5, 2026. The class-action lawsuit accuses the tech giant and its founder and chief executive of infringing on authors’ copyrights.

Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.

The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”

“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesman, Dave Arnold, told The Times. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don’t have to buy them.

“These A.I.-generated books are already flooding the world’s largest book marketplace, Amazon, in volumes that materially displace human-authored works,” the complaint states. The filing cites several authors whose works the plaintiffs claim were used to train Llama, including V.E. Schwab, N.K. Jemisin, Lemony Snicket and Turow.

Some of the evidence cited in the complaint purportedly comes directly from Llama. When asked to produce a travel guide in the style of the writer Becky Lomax, Llama rapidly produced “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s local insider voice,” the complaint says. Then, when asked how it was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so accurately, Llama allegedly replied, “While I don’t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I’ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.”

Llama is also able to summarize books in detail. When asked to give a synopsis of Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” Llama confirmed that it had “been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,” according to the complaint.

In an email to The Times, Turow said Meta’s use of pirated works amounted to “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior.”

“I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,” Turow wrote.

By producing “knockoffs and imitations” of authors’ works, Meta’s A.I. program could “dilute the overall market for literary works,” the plaintiffs argue.

“These outputs are similar enough to copyrighted works — in subject matter, plot details, sequencing of events, character names and traits, or other creative choices — that they replace the original work for many readers or consumers,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit is the latest effort by authors and publishers to rein in tech companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their large language models.

Writers have brought lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the companies’ unauthorized use of their work. Last fall, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to writers whose books had been used to train its A.I. program.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as Perplexity, accusing the companies of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have rebutted the claims.)

Authors have challenged Meta in court before. In June 2025, a judge ruled in Meta’s favor, finding that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence that Meta’s A.I. product would create “market dilution” by producing a flood of A.I.-generated books.

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday against Meta brought together trade and education publishers, academic publishers of scientific and medical journals and a best-selling author of legal thrillers. The plaintiffs are seeking an order requiring Meta to destroy all illegally acquired copies of works copyrighted by the plaintiffs that Meta used in A.I. training and to “cease all unlawful activities,” as well as requesting any “further relief as the Court deems proper.”

“We’re focused on a much more sustainable A.I. landscape — something that’s transparent and fair and participatory and has guardrails against harm for authors and publishers,” said Maria A. Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that acts as a law and policy advocate for the book publishing industry. “The harm is already evident.”

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Education Dept. Investigates Smith College Over Transgender Students, Michael C. Bender, May 5, 2026. The college has been admitting transgender students since 2015.

What We’re Covering Today

• Transgender Rights: The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Smith College, the women’s school in Massachusetts, over its enrollment of transgender students. The Trump administration, which has mounted a campaign to limit transgender rights in schools, has said that admitting students identified as male at birth and granting them access to “women-only” spaces could violate civil rights protections. Read more ›
• National Mall Shooting: The Secret Service shot and wounded an armed man on Monday afternoon just south of the White House in a burst of gunfire that also grazed a young bystander, officials said. There was no indication that the man was targeting anyone in the executive complex, a Secret Service official wrote in an email to Congress. Read more ›
• Voting Rights Act: The Supreme Court on Monday evening agreed to immediately transmit to the lower courts its opinion striking down Louisiana’s congressional map, rather than wait 32 days, as would have been routine. Read more ›

The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into whether Smith College, the women’s school in Northampton, Mass., violated anti-discrimination laws by allowing transgender students to enroll.

The inquiry broadens the Trump administration’s bid to limit rights for the nation’s transgender students by targeting school admissions for the first time. Until now, the administration had mostly targeted policies that allowed for transgender women to participate in women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms.

By investigating Smith, the administration is raising the question of whether allowing transgender women to enroll at a women’s college — and providing access to “women-only” spaces such as bathrooms, dormitories and locker rooms — violates civil rights protections for women.

Kimberly Richey, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said in a statement that “an all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males.”

“Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness and compliance under federal law,” Ms. Richey said. “The Trump administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense.”

The college issued a statement acknowledging the investigation and stating that it remained “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws.”

About 4.7 percent of college students identify as transgender, according to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a group of doctors and scientists that has called for more government regulation of pediatric gender medicine.

The federal investigation was in response to a civil-rights complaint filed by Defending Education, a nonprofit group founded in 2021 that has become one of the leading voices in the growing parents’ rights movement. Several of the group’s complaints have sparked federal civil rights investigations during the past year, and its research is often cited during congressional hearings by conservative lawmakers.

Formerly known as Parents Defending Education, the Arlington, Va.-based group posted on its website a letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday announcing the investigation into Smith.

Smith, one of the nation’s largest women’s schools with about 2,500 students, has been admitting transgender students since 2015, along with several other top women’s colleges. The issue became a lightning rod at women’s colleges after a transgender applicant was denied acceptance to Smith in 2013 because her gender identity did not match her financial aid forms.

Since then, most women’s colleges updated their admissions policies to welcome transgender applicants. One notable exception has been Sweet Briar College in central Virginia, which does not admit transgender students and helps students in transition transfer to another college.

The Trump administration resolved 30 percent fewer civil rights complaints in the nation’s schools in 2025 compared with the Biden administration in 2024, the sharpest year-over-year decline in at least three decades. But the new administration has opened more than 40 civil rights investigations into schools and other educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students.

The Education Department has taken the unusual step of backing out of civil rights agreements that previous administrations negotiated to protect transgender students. The government has also sued state education departments and high school athletic associations in California and Minnesota over policies that permit transgender athletes to participate in school sports. 

April 

April 27

More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Elections

 

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Geralyn Gilbert-Soto at an April 2026 gala this month in Santa Monica, California (Photo by Dave Starbuck dpa via Associated Press)

New York Times, Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side, Theodore Schleifer and Kate Conger, April 27, 2026. After once backing liberal causes, the Google co-founder has praised President Trump, donated to Republicans and spent $57 million to try to block a California billionaire tax.

It was a holiday party at a crypto titan’s estate in Marin County, and Sergey Brin had a bone to pick with Gavin Newsom.

Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk.

Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax. They were soon joined by Mr. Brin’s girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a Trump-loving gut-health influencer. Even as she tried to defuse the tension — joking that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would wreck California’s economy.

Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.

The December confrontation, which took place at a party thrown by the billionaire Chris Larsen and was recounted by three people briefed on it, reflected Mr. Brin’s new war footing. He is growing more politically agitated, more willing to spend his estimated $273 billion fortune on elections and evidently more receptive to Republican points of view.

Mr. Brin, 52, long showed little interest in politics. When he did, he embraced liberal causes: He donated to a campaign to defend same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and backed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He called President Trump’s election in 2016 “deeply offensive” in leaked comments to Google employees and then joined a protest against Mr. Trump’s ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries. In 2021, he quietly started a nonprofit group that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy.

But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right.

With his outspokenly conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr. Trump in his second term. Last May, he attended a fund-raiser featuring Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

Mr. Brin is particularly rattled by the proposal for a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, and has emerged as Silicon Valley’s leading combatant of the measure. To escape the tax, he moved before a Dec. 31 deadline to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he has spent $57 million to try to undercut the measure, including $9 million more disclosed on Friday.

Asked for comment on this article, Mr. Brin said in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

The New York Times spoke with more than a dozen people close to Mr. Brin for this article, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations.ImageSupporters of California’s proposed billionaire tax holding up signs at the state’s Democratic convention in February.

Mr. Brin’s spending, along with smaller donations in the California governor’s race, have made him the state’s second-largest individual donor this election cycle — behind only the billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for governor himself.

Mr. Brin’s political engagement has roughly coincided with his relationship with Ms. Gilbert-Soto, which began in 2023. Mr. Brin began dating her after divorcing from Nicole Shanahan, who served in 2024 as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.

Ms. Gilbert-Soto, 32, who goes by GG, describes herself on Instagram as a “holistic health coach” and a “clean meat enthusiast.” She, like Mr. Brin, regularly attends the Burning Man festival, and she appeared on a season of the reality television series “Vanderpump Rules.

But she also styles herself as a firebrand in Trumpworld, and even some of the president’s own aides are struck by her loyalty. She has called Mr. Trump her “bestie,” owns a clutch bedazzled with “MAGA,” and has shown off a photo of Mr. Brin in a red MAGA hat, two people who saw it said. After the comedian Seth Rogen made anti-Trump jokes at an event last year, Ms. Gilbert-Soto was incensed and complained to other guests, one attendee said. 

April 26

Top Headlines

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel. Shown below:  Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo). Additional details in the news excerpts below. 

• New York Times, Live Updates: Investigators Search for Motive in Shooting at Washington Dinner, Luke Broadwater, Michael M. Grynbaum, Shawn McCreesh, Tyler Pager and Shawn Hubler, April 26, 2026. President Trump was unharmed after being rushed from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner.
• New York Times, Investigation: U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold and Sells It as ‘American,’ Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios, Visuals by Federico Rios, April 26, 2026. As prices for the precious metal soar, the industry’s guardrails have broken down.
• New York Times, U.S. Sanctions Zigzag in New World of Economic Warfare, Alan Rappeport and Ephrat Livni, April 26, 2026. With oil prices in mind, the Trump administration has deployed a haphazard approach to sanctions on Russia and Iran.

More On Gunman's Attack In DC

• New York Times, World leaders condemn violence after gunfire at the White House correspondents’ dinner, Amelia Nierenberg, April 26, 2026. World leaders condemned political violence after the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, the third in three years to unfold close to President Trump.
• New York Times, ‘I’m Not a Basket Case’: Trump Describes His Mind-Set After an Evening of Chaos, Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager, April 26, 2026. Very little was clear about what had happened at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. But the president wanted to talk about it.
• New York Times, Confusion and Fright Inside the Washington Hilton Ballroom, Michael M. Grynbaum, April 26, 2026. A sense of danger spread like a wave among high-profile politicians and journalists as an emergency unfolded at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. 

More Opinions On Shooting, U.S. Media, Politics

• Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: A quick analysis of last night's shooting, Garrett M. Graff, right, April 26, 2026. A quick analysis of last night's shooting. So far, it appears the system worked as intended. 
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 25, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, April 26, 2026. Tonight the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) held its annual black-tie dinner, which is designed both to raise money for the institution and to provide a glitzy night out for journalists. In recent years the event has drawn criticism for the chumminess it reveals between White House journalists and the lawmakers they cover. This year, that concern was heightened dramatically when the WHCA invited President Donald J. Trump to attend the dinner and to give a speech.

Since he entered the political arena, Trump has denigrated the press and even urged supporters to attack journalists, but in his second term his administration has gone further, trying to silence the press with lawsuits or threats of them against media outlets and individuals, blocking access to the White House and the Pentagon for journalists Trump dislikes, personally attacking female journalists, arresting independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and raiding the home of Washington Post political correspondent Hannah Natanson. Inviting him to address the press at a fancy dinner seemed to normalize his attacks on the First Amendment.

More On Trump Team, Corruption, Media Coverage  

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

• People Magazine, Karoline Leavitt Attends White House Correspondents' Dinner 9 Months Pregnant, Just 1 Day After Announcing Maternity Leave, Lindsay Kimble, April 25, 2026. Leavitt sat onstage at the head table during the dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C.  
• Democratic Underground, Commentary: Fox Reporter Was Warned, Noah Prince, April 26, 2026. Fox News might have cooked their entire narrative. One of their reporters [Aishah Hasnie, right] was cut off mid-sentence while saying someone (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's husband Nicholas Riccio) warned her before the shooting.
• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Donald Trump works for the highest bidder, Heather Delaney Reese, April 26, 2026. At 2:31 in the afternoon, Donald J. Trump exited Air Force One onto the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Florida, and slowly made his way toward the press pool waiting nearby to ask him questions. As the president began to speak, the camera caught the growing exhaustion and confusion we have been seeing more frequently in recent months.
• Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Sunday Message from MeidasTouch Co-Founder, Ben Meiselas, right, April 26, 2026. The news today is focused on the incident last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The facts are still developing, but what we saw almost immediately afterward tells you a lot. Within minutes, Trump and his team rushed out to politicize it, pushing narratives, talking about the need for his “golden ballroom,” and trying to turn the situation into a talking point about the unlawful war in Iran.
• Lincoln Square Media, Corporate Media Chaos: Trump, the WHCD Shooting, and the Future of the Free Press, Kristoffer Ealy, right, April 26, 2026. “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology.”

Top Stories

 

President Trump leads a press briefing at the White House accompanied by FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials following a report of a shooter outside the hotel hosting the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026.

New York Times, Live Updates: Investigators Search for Motive in Shooting at Washington Dinner, Luke Broadwater, Michael M. Grynbaum, Shawn McCreesh, Tyler Pager and Shawn Hubler, April 26, 2026. President Trump was unharmed after being rushed from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

A gunman exchanged fire with authorities but did not reach the ballroom, and a suspect was in custody.Investigators were working on Sunday to determine a motive in the shooting that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner, an attack that raised questions about how a gunman was able to get close to one of Washington’s most heavily guarded events.

The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after running through a security checkpoint and exchanging gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.

Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.

The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun and had been staying at the Washington Hilton, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. He said that the authorities were still investigating whether the suspect had targeted the president, but that they believed he had acted alone.

At a separate news conference after the attack, Mr. Trump compared his line of work to being a racecar driver or a bull rider, and said that presidents were more likely to be shot at or killed.

“It’s a dangerous profession,” he said.

The president said a Secret Service officer had been shot but was saved by his bulletproof vest.

The attack revived questions about political violence in the United States and about security around Mr. Trump, one of the most targeted presidents in history. In 2024, he was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, and rushed to safety months later when a federal agent fired on an armed man at his Florida golf club.

There were no metal detectors set up at the hotel’s entrances on Saturday, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom. Mr. Trump said the incident underscored why he wanted to build a $400 million ballroom on White House grounds that he said would be equipped with the latest security features. That project is currently subject to litigation.

Investigators have been able to gather some information from the suspect’s electronic devices and have interviewed some people who know him, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. The gunman “set out to target folks that work in the administration, likely including the president,” Mr. Blanche said, though he said the understanding of his motivation could change as evidence is reviewed.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Charges: The suspect faces federal firearm and assault charges and is expected to be arraigned in federal court on Monday, with more charges possible, said Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. She did not name the suspect.
• The suspect: A spokeswoman for the California Institute of Technology said a person named Cole Allen had graduated in 2017, but that the school had no other information to disclose immediately. On Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that appear to be connected to him, Mr. Allen described himself as an independent game developer.
• Ballroom scene: There were no announcements or cries of “get down” in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Saturday. Security officials with weapons drawn emerged on the dais as the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, were quickly escorted out.
• Video: Mr. Trump posted a brief surveillance video of a man running past the security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was being held. In the video, agents drew their guns and appeared to start firing.
• Hotel’s history: The Washington Hilton is the same hotel outside of which John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

 

President Trump shared a photo of the alleged shooter, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, age 31 of Torrance, California, after he was subdued at the hotel. Shown below:  Security personnel rush U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, at left, out of the Hilton Hotel ballroom following a report of a shooting outside the ballroom hosting a reported 2,600 guests at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (Reuters photo). Additional details in the news excerpts below. 

More On Gunman's Attack In DC

New York Times, World leaders condemn violence after gunfire at the White House correspondents’ dinner, Amelia Nierenberg, April 26, 2026. World leaders condemned political violence after the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, the third in three years to unfold close to President Trump.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said he was “relieved” to know that Mr. Trump and other attendees were safe.

“My thoughts and prayers are with him, and I wish him continued safety and well-being,” Mr. Sharif wrote on X.

Mr. Sharif has been trying to broker talks between the United States and Iran, which appear to be on pause again after Mr. Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a trip to Pakistan by two of his top negotiators.

Many European leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, strongly condemned the violence.

Mr. Macron called the attack “unacceptable” and said Mr. Trump had his “full support.”

“Violence has no place in a democracy,” he wrote on X.

The leaders of Canada and Mexico, who have often clashed politically with Mr. Trump, posted messages of support.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said she had sent Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “our respect.”

“Violence should never be the way,” Ms. Sheinbaum said on X.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada, who is embroiled in a trade battle with Mr. Trump, said he was “relieved that the President, the First Lady, and all guests are safe.”

New York Times, ‘I’m Not a Basket Case’: Trump Describes His Mind-Set After an Evening of Chaos, Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager, April 26, 2026. Very little was clear about what had happened at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. But the president wanted to talk about it.

It was 10:31 p.m. on Saturday when President Trump walked into the White House briefing room, still dressed in his tuxedo and bow tie, to talk about what may have been yet another attempt on his life.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said. “That was very unexpected!”

Moments before he walked out, the president posted surveillance footage of a suspect making a mad dash through the cavernous halls of the Washington Hilton. That’s where Mr. Trump was attending the White House correspondents’ dinner when gunfire broke out at the hotel. Very little was clear about whatever had happened there, a mile and a half up the hill.

But the president wanted to talk about it.

“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he said, standing with the first lady, the vice president, the defense secretary, the secretary of state, the acting attorney general, the F.B.I. director and the press secretary — all still in their evening wear from the dinner.

But, really, he argued, the whole thing was just the latest example of why he needs to build his maximum-security, legally challenged ballroom at the White House.

“I didn’t want to say this,” he said, “but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got — it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

And then he gave the first question of the night to Weijia Jiang, the CBS News correspondent and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who had been seated next to him at the dinner before pandemonium broke out.

“Madam chairman,” he said, “I just want to say you did a fantastic job. What a beautiful evening.” (Mr. Trump does not usually speak this way to the reporters who cover him.)

She asked him what was going through his mind when he realized his life may have been in danger again. He told the tale: He was sitting with the first lady on his other side when he heard a noise he thought sounded familiar and nonthreatening. “I thought it was a tray going down,” he said. “I’ve heard that many times, and it was a pretty loud noise, and it was from quite far away.”

His wife was not so sure, he said.

“Melania was very cognizant, I think, of what happened,” he explained. “I think she knew immediately what happened. She was saying, ‘That’s a bad noise.’” She looked quite stoic behind him in the briefing room. The only word she spoke during the news conference was “No,” after being asked if she would like to say anything at all. The president said that it was “a rather traumatic experience for her.”

New York Times, Confusion and Fright Inside the Washington Hilton Ballroom, Michael M. Grynbaum, April 26, 2026. A sense of danger spread like a wave among high-profile politicians and journalists as an emergency unfolded at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The spring pea and burrata appetizer course had been distributed and the schmoozing hour of Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner had begun when a small commotion occurred toward the back of the Washington Hilton ballroom shortly past 8:30 p.m.

It might have been an upturned catering cart, or perhaps a scuffle with protesters. Then security officers began sprinting down the aisles toward the elevated dais, where President Trump, along with Vice President JD Vance and the first lady, Melania Trump, had taken their seats just a few minutes earlier.

There were no announcements or cries of “get down.” Instead, a sense of danger spread across the room like a wave. Hundreds of the country’s top media executives, editors in chief and prominent television anchors, clad in tuxedos and evening gowns, instinctively dropped to the floor, crouching besides chairs and ducking under tables. 

More Opinions On Shooting, U.S. Media, Politics

Doomsday Scenario, Commentary: A quick analysis of last night's shooting, Garrett M. Graff, abovet, April 26, 2026. A quick analysis of last night's shooting. So far, it appears the system worked as intended.

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and — unfortunately — the fight for democracy in the Trump era.

I had intended to write today about what a travesty the White House Correspondents Association dinner was — and how embarrassed every single journalist who attended should be — but for obvious reasons, after the events of last night, I wanted to share instead some quick thoughts on presidential security that might be useful to understanding what happened.

First, a couple of points on my particularly relevant background to this subject: During a different era, when the event was merely laughable, I attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner itself multiple times and covered the event and the parties around it for more than a decade. Plus, during my Washington career, I’ve been to probably just shy of a hundred dinners and galas inside that same ballroom at the Washington Hilton, which is known universally in Washington as the “Hinckley Hilton,” in reference to the 1981 shooting of President Reagan there. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on presidential security over the years, including writing a book on “continuity of government” and presidential evacuation protocols.

Two very-much-related factoids: Anne Schroeder, then at the Washington Post, and I, then the blogger at FishbowlDC, were largely responsible for the nicknaming the correspondents’ dinner “prom” in 2005, which later evolved into “nerd prom.” Anne coined it in her gossip column that year, and I picked it up to use in my blog coverage of that year’s event. Later, when I was editor at Washingtonian, I as a history buff repeatedly badgered the Hilton team into finally putting up a historic plaque marking the entrance where Reagan was shot.

Which brings us to last night’s startling events at an event that already felt particularly high-stakes as the famously anti-press president attended for the first time the main dinner meant to honor the working relationship of the president and White House press corps.

What we know so far is that gunfire could be heard inside the dinner around 8:30 p.m., and that Secret Service and protective details swarmed the stage and room about 15-20 seconds later. Vice President JD Vance and President Trump were rushed from the stage and in the audience Cabinet members and congressional leadership similarly evacuated. Outside the ballroom, a 31-year-old named Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California, had tried to rush the ballroom armed with both guns — perhaps a shotgun and handguns — as well as knives. Trump finally headed back to the White House around 9:30 and, alongside other officials, addressed the events from the White House briefing room. Across Washington, the after-parties mostly continued as planned, albeit depleted by the reporters and anchors who rushed to cover the unfolding events.

We normally don’t get to see the massive hidden security footprint that surrounds the president like we did last night, when members of the Secret Service Counter-Assault Team (CAT) actually stormed the stage and we saw countless security details rush their protectees from the room:

In the hours since, I’ve seen a lot of arm-chair-quarterbacking about how the whole hotel should have been behind the security cordon or how shocked shocked shocked guests were that security seemed so lax at the entrances, etc., etc., but most of those critiques misunderstand two major things:

(1) You always have to have an outer security perimeter; and

(2) The goal of the Secret Service isn’t to prevent any incident at a high-profile event — it’s to prevent an incident that could harm the president.

Yes, you can always push the security checkpoints out further, but there will always have to be a first moment where the unvetted and unsecured public approaches a security check. You’ll hear similar complaints/quarterbacking when there are shootings at airports: “How did someone get inside the airport with a gun?” Because anyone can walk through the first door. Security in a free society is always a trade-off. Push the security checkpoints back to the curb, and the attack will just happen at the curb instead.

As far as I can tell — I didn’t attend last night’s dinner and maintain every single journalist or editor who made the decision to do so made a bad professional and life choice — security at the Hilton was basically the same as it has been in past years.

Federal agents react after last night’s incident at White House Correspondents Association Dinner. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Some background: The Washington Hilton has some 1,100 guest rooms spread across ten floors and several main public levels — including the main lobby level and then, an escalator flight down, the level of the ballroom, which is accessible too from a lower street entrance on the side of the building, which is where the red carpet for the correspondents dinner is located. Its giant “pillar-less” ballroom is the main venue for large events in Washington — including not just the correspondents dinner but other large conventions and gatherings like the National Prayer Breakfast — because it can seat around 2,600 people at banquet tables.

The size and scale of the hotel — or any major hotel in Washington, really, where presidential events occur — is such that there are hundreds of people in the hotel who have no connection to the dinner and are going about entirely unrelated activities.

Moreover, the “Hinckley Hilton” is, tragically, now uniquely situated for handling a presidential visit — following the shooting of President Reagan, the hotel installed a secure entrance facility for VIPs and there’s a special secure green room and secure path to and from the stage for a president. Securing a presidential speech at the Washington Hilton is like table-stakes for the Secret Service — about as easy as a presidential movement can be.

The evening events at the Hilton involve both the dinner itself but also a whole host of cocktail receptions and parties, big and small, at the hotel by various news organizations, and there are many hundreds of people who attend only those parties and then go elsewhere for the dinner itself and then rejoin the glitzy after-parties, and thus never come anywhere close to being in the presence of the president. (That’s actually what I usually preferred to do when I lived in DC.)

The security detail for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., rushes him from the ballroom last night. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

There’s usually — as there apparently was last night — a very rough outer security check at the edge of the property to try to determine whether someone has business in the Hilton that night. You have to be a registered guest in the hotel, or have an invitation to the party inside, or some such, but the goal with that security check is less about weapons and more about crowd control — trying to minimize the number of people who crowd into the hotel’s public spaces to gawk. It’s not the goal of this checkpoint to definitively ID and cross-check every person attending — it’s to manage the crowd flow inside.

The Secret Service at some fundamental level doesn’t really care who is merely inside the hotel. Instead, the Secret Service only cares about securing the area where the president will be and where people will be able to see the president. Similarly, it’s not the job of the Secret Service to protect all the partygoers or even all the non-presidential VIPs at the event.

It would be an impossible, disruptive, costly, and unnecessary project to secure the entire hotel and property — particularly for an event where the president is only on-site for 2-3 hours maximum. (I’ve seen, for instance, some “criticism” of how when Barack Obama was staying at the Hay-Adams as president-elect, everyone entering the hotel was subject to security screening, but securing a place where a president is staying is a very different protocol than just where a president is visiting, and the Hay-Adams is a much smaller hotel than the Hilton.)

Thus, the Secret Service sets up magnetometers — usually staffed by some combination of uniformed Secret Service officers and TSA officers — that screen guests before they file into the ballroom itself. At that point, there’s (usually) a much tighter circle of security — double-checking names and invite lists as well as screening for weapons.

According to video and photos that Trump posted on Truth Social afterward, this is evidently the security checkpoint that the suspect charged and where he was stopped — and, because of the geography of the hotel, he was stopped before he even made it to the floor where the ballroom was:

(One question I do have: The TV audio of the incident appears to show far more gunshots than have been explained so far — we know one Secret Service agent or officer was hit in his bulletproof vest, but it’s unclear who fired what shots at whom.)

The shooting at Butler was clearly a major security failure and exposed all sorts of problems with the Secret Service’s protocols and planning — and emphasized how overlooked and exhausted the long-underfunded and under-staffed agency has become, particularly in the complex years of providing security to the ever-growing list of the sprawling Trump family and ever-more administration officials.

It’s not clear — so far — that this event should be viewed the same. (Another question I have: I was surprised that apparently Trump remained in his motorcade on-site for the better part of an hour before organizers and the Secret Service finally decided to cancel the remainder of the evening and he departed for the White House. I would have imagined that the goal of the Secret Service would have been to get him out of the site as fast as possible once the shooting occurred, particularly since it wasn’t or wouldn’t have been initially clear whether the attacker was acting alone.)

Overall, knowing only the scattered reports we still know about 12 hours later, this mostly appears like presidential security working as it is intended. It’s not — and shouldn’t be — the job of the Secret Service to secure the whole building. There was a threat to the president and it was stopped well before it could pose a threat to the president. Screening everyone who enters the outer perimeter of even a high-profile event like the correspondents dinner for weapons and then re-screening everyone who attends the actual dinner would be a massive operation and require more than a multiple of the security resources already committed to an event like this.

We’ll surely learn more in the coming days and months — and I would bet the dinner security will change in future years and that security at the Hilton will change, as it did after 1981 and as it is now the first place in the US to have the dubious distinction of being the site of not one but two presidential assassination attempts — but so far as we know right now, this seems like the system basically working as designed amid the always necessary trade-offs of security in a free society.

I’m glad everyone is okay. Political violence is never the answer.

White House Correspondents Association President Weijia Jjiang presides at the group's annual dinner before the arrest of a shooting suspect outside on April 25, 2026 (Reuters photo).

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: April 25, 2026 [Background on the attack and event], Heather Cox Richardson, right, April 26, 2026. Tonight the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) held its annual black-tie dinner, which is designed both to raise money for the institution and to provide a glitzy night out for journalists. In recent years the event has drawn criticism for the chumminess it reveals between White House journalists and the lawmakers they cover. This year, that concern was heightened dramatically when the WHCA invited President Donald J. Trump to attend the dinner and to give a speech.

Since he entered the political arena, Trump has denigrated the press and even urged supporters to attack journalists, but in his second term his administration has gone further, trying to silence the press with lawsuits or threats of them against media outlets and individuals, blocking access to the White House and the Pentagon for journalists Trump dislikes, personally attacking female journalists, arresting independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and raiding the home of Washington Post political correspondent Hannah Natanson. Inviting him to address the press at a fancy dinner seemed to normalize his attacks on the First Amendment.

While it is customary for a president to attend at least one WHCA dinner, where traditionally a comedian roasts him, Trump has always refused to attend. This year, though, he agreed (although a mentalist was engaged to perform instead of the usual comedian). With his job approval numbers plummeting and the administration mired in a war in Iran that Trump appears to have started on a whim, along with the economy stumbling, there was plenty of speculation about what he would say at the event and how journalists should react if he used the opportunity to insult them.

We will probably never know. Something happened at the event that made Secret Service agents evacuate Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. Exactly what happened is not yet clear: it appears law enforcement stopped an armed man outside the event, and a subsequent noise alarmed dinner attendees and Secret Service agents, who rushed the president, the first lady, and other government officials to a secure location.

During the confusion, as Trump was being held near the ballroom, he posted: “Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again.”

Then, at 8:36, he posted that law enforcement “has requested that we leave the premises, consistent with protocol, which we will do, immediately. I will be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House Press Briefing Room. The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition. We will be speaking to you in a half an hour. I have spoken with the representatives in charge of the event, and we will be rescheduling within 30 days.”

Trump took to the podium a little after 10:30. Referring to the threat of a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner—which has never happened before—he said: “I will say, you know, it’s not a particularly secure building, and, uh, I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure. It’s got— It’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it. They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today’s, uh, a little bit different, because today, we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”

Trump said that there was a record crowd at tonight’s event and that he felt everyone coming together, but he urged people to do so even more fully in light of what he said was another attempt on his life. In response to a question about why Trump thought attempts on his life happened so frequently—a reminder: there is as yet no information about what the man’s plan or motives were—he responded that assassins come for “impactful people” and boasted of how much he has done for the country.

The Framers of our government enshrined the right to freedom of the press in our Constitution along with the right to gather together, to practice any religion we want (including none at all), the right to say what we want, and the right to ask our government to do (or not to do) things. After writing a new constitution that created a far stronger national government than existed under the Articles of Confederation, which had underpinned the government since 1777 (although the Articles were not ratified until 1781), the Framers designed the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights to hold back government power.

The power to control what citizens can publish about the government would give leaders the power to destroy democracy. A free press is imperative to keep people informed about what leaders are doing. Lose it, and those in power can do whatever they wish without accountability.

From the beginning of the American republic, though, the press was openly partisan. This meant the president worked quite closely with newspaper reporters from his own party while ignoring, or sometimes even trying to silence, his opponents. By the 1880s the country had begun to turn against the partisan press and to “independent” newspapers, and the number of papers took off.

No longer advocates for a party position and eager to attract readers, reporters began to look for new, exciting stories. And not much was more exciting in 1886 than a marriage in the White House. On June 2 of that year, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, who had been his unofficial ward, in the Blue Room.

Reporters had dogged their courtship (many thought he was interested in her more age-appropriate mother), and they flocked after the newlyweds, finally prompting the irritated president to ask his personal secretary to keep them away. But while the president was angry at the scrutiny, editors recognized a good story, and by the end of Cleveland’s first term, a reporter had figured out he could just stay at the White House and write columns based on interviews with people coming from meetings with the president. Other papers immediately stationed their own people at the White House.

In Cleveland’s second term, which started in 1893, his private secretary worked directly with the press. Through the next few presidencies, the role of press secretary began to take shape. Theodore Roosevelt relished attention from reporters. When his shy successor William Howard Taft shunned them, they complained he was hiding things.

So, shortly after he took office in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson held the nation’s first press conference, only to complain both that reporters were quoting statements he considered off the record and that the conferences were a free-for-all in which anyone could shout out questions, often ones Wilson found irritating (like his opinion about Groundhog Day).

In 1914, rumors circulated that Congress might begin to choose which reporters would be allowed at Wilson’s press conferences. In alarm, eleven White House reporters organized the White House Correspondents’ Association. In 1921, as part of their annual election of officers, fifty members of the growing WHCA held a dinner. With former newspaperman Warren G. Harding in the White House, they were in a celebratory mood despite Prohibition (which they ignored). Taking their cue from the famous Gridiron Club, which held dinners where they roasted politicians, WHCA members poked fun at the administration and Congress.

While at first the reporters simply wanted access to the president, as the WHCA became an established force it came to work for transparency more generally, recognizing that journalists are the main eyes and voice of the people. It protected press passes for journalists who regularly covered the White House, and assigned seats in the briefing room.

But all that changed in February 2025, after Trump took office for the second time. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the administration would no longer recognize the role of the WHCA in managing the White House press pool. Instead, she said the “White House press team” would control access to the White House. At the time, then–WHCA president Eugene Daniels said the change “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States” and “suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president.”

“In a free country,” Daniels said, “leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

Trump repeated tonight that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be rescheduled.

More On Trump Team, Corruption, Media Coverage

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio at White House Correspondents' Dinner April 25, 2026 (Kristina Bumphrey photo for Variety via Getty Images).

People Magazine, Karoline Leavitt Attends White House Correspondents' Dinner 9 Months Pregnant, Just 1 Day After Announcing Maternity Leave, Lindsay Kimble, April 25, 2026. Leavitt sat onstage at the head table during the dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C.  

One day after announcing her maternity leave, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was onstage at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday, April 25.

Leavitt, 28, posed for photos with her husband Nicholas Riccio, 60, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., ahead of the dinner and speeches (as shown above). Then, once inside the ballroom, Leavitt was seated onstage at the head table with President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance, among others.

The baby, a girl, will be Leavitt's second with Riccio, who she married in 2025. She first announced her pregnancy last December. They welcomed their first child — a son, Nicholas "Niko" Robert Riccio — in July 2024.

Leavitt is the youngest press secretary in U.S. history and also the first pregnant press secretary.

Just yesterday, Leavitt told reporters that she'd be stepping away from the podium while awaiting the birth of her child.

"This will likely be my last gaggle for some time. As you can see," Leavitt said on April 24 as she looked down at her 9-month-pregnant belly, per USA Today, AFP and UPI. "I'm about ready to have a baby any minute, so I will see you guys very soon."

“I know you'll be in very good hands with my team here at the White House. And I know all of you have the president's phone number personally, so I have no doubt that you will have a shortage of statements and news from this building while I'm gone,” Leavitt then joked, referencing a March Atlantic article about Trump's personal phone number being leaked.

Democratic Underground, Commentary: Fox Reporter Was Warned, Noah Prince, April 26, 2026. Fox News might have cooked their entire narrative.

One of their reporters [Aishah Hasnie, right] was cut off mid-sentence while saying someone (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's husband Nicholas Riccio) warned her before the shooting. 

 

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

 

New York Times, Hollywood Heavyweights Sign Letter Opposing Paramount’s Deal for Warner Bros., Benjamin Mullin, April 13, 2026. The letter warns that the deal will result in fewer jobs for creatives, along with higher costs and less choice for audiences.

More than 1,000 writers, actors and directors released a letter on Monday opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the deal would harm Hollywood’s already distressed entertainment industry.

The letter, which was signed by well-known performers and directors including Bryan Cranston, Joaquin Phoenix, Tiffany Haddish, Lily Gladstone and Yorgos Lanthimos, warns that merging two of Hollywood’s major studios will result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”

“We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed,” the letter said. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made — and on what terms — leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.”

The letter comes months after Paramount and its chief executive, David Ellison, prevailed against Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion. Mr. Ellison has said that the deal will be good for the creative community, pledging to release at least 30 movies in theaters annually and invest in both studios. He has also argued that a deal with Netflix would have created a subscription streaming behemoth twice the size of its nearest competitor.

 "Poetic justice, put it in a song, alright."

— Kendrick Lamar wrote that as a love song in 2012. He had no idea he was also writing the caption for a night in Washington when a press secretary predicted shots would be fired and the universe decided to take her literally.

Lincoln Square Media, Corporate Media Chaos: Trump, the WHCD Shooting, and the Future of the Free Press, Kristoffer Ealy, right, April 26, 2026. “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology.”

I was mid-sentence.

Sitting here building what was supposed to be a straightforward analytical follow-up to my March piece about the most dangerous media consolidation in a generation — the $111 billion Paramount purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery — when Ben Meiselas broke the news on MeidasTouch and my iPad started doing exactly what the evening was about to do — interrupt everything with something nobody saw coming.

Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump evacuated. A Secret Service agent down. The suspect in custody at the Washington Hilton — the same hotel where John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Hinckley Hilton. Because Washington, D.C. has a sense of humor that nobody asked for.

My first thought wasn’t shock.

It was recognition.

Because I had spent the better part of this Saturday documenting exactly how we arrived at a place where something like this could feel — in the most sick and twisted way imaginable — not just possible but almost inevitable. So I didn’t put the merger story down. I folded the two together. Because they belong together. Because on Saturday, April 25th, American democracy didn’t just hand me a metaphor. It handed me the whole damn thesis gift-wrapped in chaos and burrata salad.

Karoline Leavitt (shown at right in a file photo) — nine months pregnant, apparently planning to have a lovely evening watching her boss roast his political enemies like it was open mic night at the authoritarian comedy club — told reporters before the dinner began that Trump’s speech would be “classic Donald J. Trump” and that there would be “some shots fired tonight.” She was talking about jokes. Tasteless, mean-spirited, grievance-soaked jokes about whoever had the misfortune of being on Trump’s enemy list this particular Saturday. She had no idea how literal she was about to be. Famous last words, Karoline. Famous. Last. Words.

This is what poetic justice looks like in 2026. Not clean. Not satisfying. Just this — a press secretary waddling into the Hinckley Hilton expecting a comedy show and ending up in a security evacuation while 2,600 journalists abandoned their burrata and dove under tables at a dinner ostensibly celebrating the First Amendment. The same First Amendment that the guy they were celebrating has spent his entire second non-consecutive term treating like a suggestion.

Kendrick asked us to make it make sense. I’m going to try.

 

Let me start with David Ellison (shown above), because nothing that happened on Saturday night makes sense without him.

Six weeks before the dinner, Ellison — son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, new owner of Paramount, aspiring architect of American state media, and apparently a man who has never once asked himself whether something is too on the nose — threw a private gathering at the United States Institute of Peace. Except it isn’t called that anymore. It’s the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace now, which is the kind of sentence that should make your eye twitch regardless of your political affiliation. The invitation described the evening as “an intimate gathering in celebration of the First Amendment honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.”

Norm Eisen responded that this resembles the First Amendment “in the same way that a book burning is a celebration of the written word.” Which is correct. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was in that room. The same Todd Blanche — who stepped in after Trump fired Pam Bondi — whose Justice Department has to approve Ellison’s $111 billion merger. Trump spoke for an hour. Weijia Jiang — CBS News anchor, White House Correspondents’ Association president, employee of the man throwing the dinner — was also there, presumably calculating exactly how grateful she was supposed to look.

Two nights later she stood on the WHCD stage and told Trump “it is meaningful that you are here.”

No. What’s meaningful is what was in that room on Thursday. What’s meaningful is that the woman running the organization that exists to protect press freedom from government interference was breaking bread with the government official whose signature her boss needs on a $111 billion check. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s a conflict of interest wearing a tuxedo, sipping champagne, and calling itself a First Amendment celebration. That’s a conflict of interest so naked it needs a bathrobe.

But nobody in that ballroom was going to say that into a microphone. They had already made their calculation. They replaced the comedian with a mentalist — Oz Pearlman, a man whose entire profession is making you believe something that isn’t real, which, now that I think about it, is an oddly honest metaphor for the evening — specifically to avoid generating the kind of jokes that might upset the White House.

Don Lemon, right, the man Ellison’s network pushed out the door with a cardboard box and a severance check, had the good sense to stay home. The people who showed up practiced their resting faces and prepared to laugh at whatever the president decided to say. That was the plan. That was the evening.

Then a 31-year-old man from Torrance, California — my backyard — allegedly walked into the Washington Hilton with guns and knives and blew the whole performance up. Literally.

Now. About that merger.

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: Corporate Media Is about to Get So Much Worse, Kristoffer Ealy, March 15, 2026. 

I wrote about this in March and I will not insult your intelligence by repeating myself at length. What I will do is note that everything I predicted has happened faster and more brazenly than even I anticipated, which is saying something because I anticipated a lot. The debt load made a merger inevitable — I said that. The only question was who would hold the leash and who would get walked. Paramount and Skydance won that race. Shareholders approved the deal. They also, in the same vote, rejected David Zaslav’s $887 million golden parachute — because even the people cashing out apparently have a threshold for what’s too naked to defend in public, and “pay me $887 million for destroying the company I was hired to run” apparently clears that bar.

Zaslav spent years “maximizing value for shareholders” by crushing Warner Bros. Discovery under so much debt it had to sell itself. For this service he requested $887 million on his way out the door. The shareholders said yes to the merger and no to the parachute in the same breath — 82% of them voted it down. That’s not accountability, by the way, because the vote is non-binding. The WBD board can pay him every penny anyway. So the shareholders staged a symbolic rebellion and Zaslav will likely still collect. That’s not accountability. That’s aesthetic objection with a side of impotent fury. But I’ll take it.

The opposition to this merger has been loud, credentialed, and almost completely ignored by the people with the actual power to stop it — which, coincidentally, is also the story of American democracy in 2026. Mark Ruffalo testified before the Senate — sat in the chair, looked senators in the eye, and said, “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology.” He called Zaslav’s exit package “obscene” for a man who spent years crushing the company he was now being paid hundreds of millions to abandon. Worth noting: David Ellison was invited to that same hearing and skipped it, claiming a family funeral — then showed up in DC two days later to throw Trump a dinner party. The audacity on this man is genuinely impressive in the way that a house fire is impressive.

And in the most literary moment of a congressional hearing in recent memory, Ruffalo invoked both Citizen Kane and 1984 in the same sentence, because when you’re describing a billionaire buying the news infrastructure of a democracy to stay friendly with the president who controls his merger approval, sometimes the classics are the only frame that fits. Some things are just that on the nose.

Damon Lindelof — who knows David Ellison personally and signed the petition anyway, because that’s what integrity looks like when it actually costs something — put it in the language that doesn’t require a political science degree: “It’s thousands and thousands of Grips and Gaffers. Drivers and Decorators. Builders and Boom operators. Camera teams and Caterers. And they’re all about to get fucked.” Lindelof isn’t describing an abstract antitrust concern. He’s describing human beings whose livelihoods are about to be restructured into nonexistence so that two legacy corporations can tell Wall Street they’re “maximizing synergies” — which is corporate-speak for “we are about to fire a lot of people and we hired a consultant to make it sound inevitable.”

And then there’s Jane Fonda. Who was married to Ted Turner — the man who built CNN — from 1991 to 2001. She watched him create the network from inside the marriage. They share an adopted daughter. She knows what CNN was built to be better than virtually anyone alive who isn’t Ted Turner himself. Jane Fonda produced a satirical sketch imagining what CNN looks like under Paramount’s ownership and called it “Pete Hegseth’s dream.” That is not a celebrity with an opinion. That is a woman with a front row seat to exactly what is being dismantled, and she is not being subtle about what she sees. When the woman who shared a bed with the man who built CNN tells you it’s about to become Pete Hegseth’s dream, you should probably listen.

The petition hit 4,000 signatures. More than 75 Oscar winners and nominees. Robert De Niro signed and said nothing further — which, if you know De Niro, is its own statement. This is a man who called Trump a wannabe dictator from a podium in Cannes, who showed up outside the hush money trial just to talk to reporters, who has never in his life been accused of keeping his opinions to himself. He signed the letter and went quiet. When Bobby De Niro decides silence is the move, pay attention to what he’s not saying.

And the Star Trek universe — the franchise that Gene Roddenberry built explicitly around anti-authoritarianism, collective ownership, and the dangers of concentrated power — is owned by the company throwing Trump merger-approval dinners. Let that land for a second. The people who play characters dedicated to resisting exactly this kind of consolidated authoritarian control are petitioning against the company that cuts their checks. Wilson Cruz, Wil Wheaton, Jeri Ryan, Jonathan Frakes all signed. J.J. Abrams — who made the last three Star Trek films for Paramount with Skydance as partners — signed against his own business partners. Gene Roddenberry didn’t accidentally build a show where the Federation has no billionaires and everyone shares resources. The franchise’s DNA is a direct rebuke of everything this merger represents, and the people who embody that franchise know it. The universe is not being subtle.

Here is something worth saying plainly that most coverage of this story glosses over completely: legacy media has already gone to shit. We are not riding to the rescue of something healthy. We are watching the dignified disposal of something that was already on life support, hooked up to a machine that mostly just played Nielsen ratings and called it journalism.

CNN has spent years hosting what amounts to a nightly panel discussion moderated by human resources — one person with sources and facts, one person with vibes and a Twitter following, both treated as equally valid inputs into democratic discourse, as if democracy is a debate club where points go to whoever sounds most confident. Scott Jennings has somehow turned the ability to say factually incorrect things with enormous confidence into a lucrative television career. That’s not a critique. That’s a business model, and CNN paid for it. Jake Tapper wrote a book about Biden’s cognitive decline while employed as a CNN anchor, promoted it on Megyn Kelly’s show — Megyn “Santa Is Definitively White” Kelly — and announced on that same appearance that he had personally apologized to Lara Trump. Jake Tapper apologized to Lara Trump. Read that sentence again. Take as long as you need. I’ll wait.

CBS News didn’t wake up one morning and decide to drift toward conservative appeasement. Institutional decline rarely works that way — it almost never announces itself because the people doing it have convinced themselves they’re being reasonable. It happens gradually, through executive hires framed as balance, through editorial recalibrations justified as audience outreach, through legal departments quietly reminding producers which fights might complicate the next merger approval. Nobody sends a memo. Nobody has to. The memo is the silence. And now Bari Weiss — the patron saint of corporate media’s desperate attempt to appear intellectually rebellious while remaining structurally safe, a woman who has built an entire career around convincing powerful institutions that the best way to handle criticism from the right is to hire someone who agrees with it — is running editorial operations at a network whose owner was just in D.C. throwing the president a party with the AG in the room. This is not a coincidence. This is a org chart.

The institutional anxiety has already reshaped the newsroom. Producers are recalibrating which pitches are worth making. Reporters are calculating how far to push on stories that might generate the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people. That is not editorial independence. That is institutional fear wearing a press badge and calling itself journalism.

Meanwhile, at the same hotel where all of this was unfolding, 2,600 people gathered to celebrate press freedom by replacing their comedian with a mentalist and praying the president didn’t get offended. That’s the state of the First Amendment in 2026. We swapped the jokes for a magic show and hoped for the best.

Think about what the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has become. Joy Reid, Katie Phang, Jim Acosta (shown at right in a Gage Skidmore photo), and Waj Ali — people who were pushed out of or escaped from the corporate media structure that runs that dinner — spent Saturday night doing their own roundtable roast without asking a single corporate boss for permission. They called themselves the Resistance Brady Bunch, which is both funny and accurate, and they used the phrase “truthful not neutral” because they have the luxury of meaning it. They did not have to calculate whether their takes would upset an advertiser, complicate a merger, or generate a phone call from a congressman who controls a broadcast license. That freedom is not a consolation prize. That is the whole point.

That is what journalism looks like when it isn’t performing deference to power. That is also why Ellison buying everything he can get his hands on ultimately won’t work — because the audience isn’t sitting in that ballroom eating burrata and practicing their resting faces. The audience already left. Don Lemon didn’t disappear when CNN showed him the door; he rebuilt and his audience followed him there. Jim Acosta moved to Substack, where he isn’t required to share a panel with anyone whose job description is “say the opposite of the truth with confidence.” Roland Martin built Black Star Network years before most legacy executives were willing to acknowledge that Black audiences deserved serious coverage, let alone serve it. Joy Reid. Katie Phang. The migration is real, it is accelerating, and no amount of merger paperwork changes it.

Viewers recognize institutional fear faster than executives realize. And when they recognize it, credibility goes with it — and it doesn’t come back just because you hired a new anchor.

Let’s talk about the strongman problem, because it goes directly to why this merger is happening and why it cannot be allowed to become the template.

Donald Trump has spent his entire political career performing toughness while being catastrophically, legendarily, almost impressively thin-skinned about the most basic forms of accountability. The 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner — where Barack Obama roasted him mercilessly while he sat in that same ballroom, stone-faced, unable to laugh, unable to leave, and apparently unable to let it go for the next fifteen years — is arguably the origin story of his political radicalization. A man who can dish out cruelty without limit but cannot absorb a joke from a comedian is not strong. He is performing strength for an audience that has agreed, collectively, to confuse aggression with courage and grievance with conviction. Obama did what comedians do — told the truth without asking permission — and Trump spent the next decade and a half making the entire country pay for the humiliation he felt in that room.

This is not unique to Trump, by the way. Putin has people jailed for memes. Orbán criminalizes satire. Every authoritarian who has ever styled himself as the toughest man in any room has turned out to be, without exception, the most fragile person in it the moment someone makes a joke at his expense. Because comedy tells the truth without asking permission, and that is the one thing a manufactured strongman cannot survive. You can suppress a journalist. You can regulate a network. You can threaten advertisers and harass reporters and call everything you don’t like fake news. But you cannot make a punchline illegal without everyone instantly understanding exactly what you’re afraid of. The joke always wins. It just sometimes takes a while.

So what does a man like that do when he can’t make the jokes stop? He buys the room where the jokes are told. He puts his people in the anchor chairs. He installs Bari Weiss at CBS and calls it editorial independence. He throws a “First Amendment” dinner with the AG whose signature he needs and calls it a celebration. And then he shows up to the actual Correspondents’ Dinner — the first time in his presidency, because he was too fragile to attend during his first term — expecting to spike the football in a room he believes he has already won.

Instead, Cole Tomas Allen walked in with guns and knives, and Trump’s press conference from the White House briefing room was the third time in less than two years that someone has tried to shoot at or near this man. Butler, Pennsylvania. West Palm Beach. Now the Hinckley Hilton. His response each time has been a variation of the same performance: toughness, a shrug, a victory lap, a Truth Social post about how brave law enforcement is. Because showing genuine concern would be weakness, and weakness is the one thing the MAGA definition of masculinity cannot accommodate — even when the alternative is pretending that three assassination attempts in two years is just the cost of doing business.

For the next week, every legacy media outlet that has been slowly surrendering its editorial independence to avoid political pressure will spend wall-to-wall airtime being grateful Trump is okay. He should be okay. I want to be clear about this: I don’t want to see any president get shot, including this one. But that coverage will completely crowd out the question that actually matters — how did we get to a place where a gunman walks into the most symbolically important press freedom dinner in American democracy, and the story we’re all supposed to tell is about the president’s bravery? The press corps that just spent the evening auditioning for Ellison’s good graces will spend next week performing concern for the man they were performing deference to twelve hours earlier. It is performances all the way down.

Here is where I land, and I want to be precise about it.

This merger is not permanent. Nothing Ellison builds is permanent. The AT&T breakup didn’t happen because AT&T grew a conscience — it happened because an administration decided to enforce antitrust law against a consolidation that had been allowed to calcify for decades. The government can revisit mergers. It can order divestiture. It is harder the longer you wait, and the window to cleanly block this one is closing fast. But the 2028 election matters enormously. Agency leadership shifts with elections. What Brendan Carr builds, a different FCC chair can dismantle. What Ellison assembles under this administration, a different DOJ can be ordered to take apart. The architecture of American regulatory governance exists precisely because the founders understood that concentrations of power — in industry, in government, in media — eventually produce enough dysfunction to trigger correction. We are in the dysfunction phase. The correction phase is an election away.

The goal is not just to stop this merger. The goal is to make the next one not worth trying.

If the pattern becomes — you spend $111 billion, you throw a dinner with the AG in the room, you get regulatory approval, you spend years integrating two massive companies, and then a new administration orders divestiture and you spend five more years and billions more dollars unwinding the whole thing — the math stops working. Billionaires are not ideologues. They are accountants with better PR. Make the expected return on regulatory capture include a realistic probability of forced divestiture, and the calculus changes. The next David Ellison looks at the spreadsheet, looks at what happened to the last guy, and decides a $111 billion bet on a single administration’s goodwill isn’t the genius play it looked like on paper.

Kristoffer Ealy, right,is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization.  

 

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary, Donald Trump works for the highest bidder, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, April 26, 2026. At 2:31 in the afternoon, Donald J. Trump exited Air Force One onto the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Florida, and slowly made his way toward the press pool waiting nearby to ask him questions. As the president began to speak, the camera caught the growing exhaustion and confusion we have been seeing more frequently in recent months.

As he hurried through questions after attending a crypto event at Mar-a-Lago for those who invested in his $TRUMP meme coin, which he has personally made millions of dollars from, he continued to struggle to justify not sending negotiators to Iran talks because it’s “too expensive,” adding that he’s “a very cost-conscious person.”

The man who is too cost-conscious to send negotiators to Iran to end the war that he started, that has destabilized the entire region, and impacted the world’s fuel supply, just walked out of a party his family has made over $336 million from in a single year. Money he made from a meme coin, a personal cryptocurrency he launched three days before taking office, one that has since collapsed 96% from its peak, while he collected a transaction fee on every single trade, all the way down. The people who paid to be in that room today lost most of what they put in. And he just keeps making money from them and all the fees.

That is where we are. The president of the United States, standing on a tarmac, too cost-conscious for diplomacy, on his way back from selling access to himself by the token.

I was in Washington in the morning, walking before an event I was attending later in the day. It was one of those mornings where the city feels like two places at once. On the surface, everything looks like it always has. The buildings are still standing. The streets are still full. People are moving through their days with purpose. But underneath it, you can feel the weight of what is happening inside those buildings, and what is being done to them from the top down.

I stopped to talk with a security guard outside one of the federal buildings. He was not a federal employee. He worked for an outside company. And he started talking, the way people do when they have been holding something in and finally find someone to say it to. He told me about the federal workers he sees every day. People who have given decades to this government. Who were there long before Trump arrived and who intend to be there long after he is gone. He said they keep showing up by telling themselves, and each other, that he is a temporary “bad manager.” That the work still matters and that the mission does not belong to him. He told me that the banners they have hung everywhere draw a reaction from at least half the people who walk past them. Not salutes or approval, but a different kind of gesture entirely, involving one finger raised in the middle of their hands.

I found more comfort in that conversation than I have found in a lot of headlines lately. Because what he was describing is not a coup, nor is it dramatic. It is just people, without power like those at the top, without titles, and without aspirations of wealth accumulation from proximity to the current administration, showing up every day and refusing to let the institution be hollowed out on their watch. These are the real Americans. The true patriots. Doing the work under harsh conditions and not losing hope for better days and better leaders.

And then I came back to my hotel room and opened my laptop. While those federal workers were walking into their offices this week, doing the unglamorous, unnoticed work of keeping this government functional, the people at the very top of it were doing something else entirely. The New York Times published an investigation that we should all be talking about. At the center of it is a Syrian billionaire named Mohamad Al-Khayyat, whose family business is tied to more than $12 billion in Syrian reconstruction contracts. Contracts that were worthless as long as American sanctions blocked the international financing needed to build anything. Meaning the only thing standing between him and that money was the United States government.

The barrier was sanctions. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, in place since 2020, was specifically designed to block international financing from flowing into Syria’s reconstruction until there was accountability for war crimes committed by the Assad regime. For the Al-Khayyat family, those sanctions stood between them and billions of dollars. So they went to work on getting them lifted. And they did not do it through normal channels.

They proposed a Trump-branded golf course on the Syrian coast, part of a larger development vision that also included a cruise port, a polo club, and a Bugatti showroom. According to the Times investigation, they cut Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar resort project in Albania, a deal that began as a contractor arrangement and grew into a full joint venture. Ivanka flew to Albania to meet with the family and review design plans with architects and local officials. They cultivated at least a dozen members of Congress. And then there was the stone. Someone physically delivered a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican congressman, with instructions to carry it to the White House to get the president’s attention.

And then in December of 2025, Trump signed the repeal of the Caesar Act into law, buried deep inside the National Defense Authorization Act. The sanctions were gone, and the contracts started moving. The Damascus Airport redevelopment. Power plants. Natural gas projects. Historic properties in the capital being converted into luxury hotels. The resort deals with Kushner’s firm kept expanding. And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.

The same family that needed the policy changed to access their billions of dollars was building resorts with the president’s son-in-law and daughter. The policy was changed. And the reporting suggests all it took was that, plus a stone, with a congressman willing to carry it.

And then there is the meme coin gala that happened earlier today. One that tells much of the same story told in a different way. Old money uses engraved stones and Albanian resort deals and defense bills with buried provisions. New money uses a leaderboard and a smartphone and a champagne toast.

Here is what today’s event at Mar-a-Lago actually was. Not a crypto industry conference or a policy summit. A contest. The 297 people who held the most $TRUMP tokens during a qualification window won invitations. The top 29 got a VIP champagne reception with the president of the United States. Winners received Trump-branded watches, trading cards, sneakers, and fragrances. The coin is trading around $2.98 today, down 96% from its $75 all-time high in January 2025. The minimum holding needed to qualify dropped 85% from last year, because fewer people were willing to play. The people in that room lost most of what they put in. But the Trump family has pulled in more than $1 billion from crypto ventures overall, at least $336 million tied to meme coin sales alone in the first half of 2025, all while Trump is simultaneously shaping U.S. crypto policy. He earns a transaction fee on every single buy and every single sell. He profits when people buy in. He profits when people panic and sell. He profited from the entire collapse. The White House says there is no conflict of interest. Ethics experts say the opposite, and the numbers say everything.

And those losing money weren’t just the people in that room. It was all of us. We are the ones paying with our tax dollars, the money we pay into the government pool for roads and schools and veterans’ care and the basic infrastructure that holds a country together. Instead, untold millions are flowing toward Trump’s constant travel to events like this one in Florida. The nonstop fundraising. The donor parties. The meme coin galas. Local security alone costs $240,000 a day every time he lands in Palm Beach. Individual trips run three to four million dollars when you add Air Force One and the Secret Service. He has visited his own properties 129 times since taking office. And every dollar spent protecting him at a club he owns and profits from is a dollar he is effectively collecting twice. We are the losers here, too.

And then there is Justin Sun. A Chinese-born crypto billionaire. The single biggest $TRUMP holder. This year’s top contest winner for the second year in a row. He was in that room today raising a glass with the president. He also filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump family’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which Eric Trump co-founded, accusing it of freezing his token holdings worth hundreds of millions of dollars and using the Trump brand as a vehicle to profit through fraud. He is suing them and celebrating with them on the same weekend. That one detail captures the whole arrangement. Even the people who got burned keep showing up, because the access is that lucrative.

We talk a lot about Trump’s authoritarian takeover. But the thing about Trump is that he has taken the worst parts of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and fascism and combined them with something that gets less attention but may be doing just as much damage. Kleptocracy. Government by theft. Because what he is doing is what kleptocracy looks like. Not a dramatic seizure of power. But often, a transaction fee collected on a collapsing coin. An Albanian resort deal. A defense bill with a sanctions repeal buried on page 400. Small corruptions, stacked and compounded until the entire structure of government bends toward one family’s financial interests. In Putin’s Russia, the oligarchs did not bribe the government from the outside. They became the government. The line between the state and the family vanished. In Erdogan’s Turkey, the president’s son-in-law ran the energy ministry while the family’s firms won government contracts worth billions. Trump’s version is distinctly American, louder, brasher, sold with merchandise and a leaderboard and a branded fragrance. But it follows the same blueprint. When the people at the top are extracting wealth from the power, the people at the bottom are paying for it twice. Once in taxes. Once in the cost of a government that no longer works for them.

And it’s not just what he is doing through his personal businesses. It’s also what he is doing to the federal government itself, trying to use the machinery of our own institutions to funnel money directly to himself and his family.

Take the IRS lawsuit. In January, Trump, along with his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization, filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. The claim: that the government failed to protect his tax returns when a contractor leaked them to the press. The lawsuit followed a New York Times report that found Trump had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. The contractor, a man named Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.

But on Friday, a federal judge named Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee sitting in Miami, looked at the case and asked a question that cut through what this lawsuit really was about: money. She pointed out that Trump is the sitting president who directly oversees both the IRS and the Treasury Department. His named adversaries in this lawsuit are agencies whose decisions are subject to his direction. She questioned whether the parties are even “sufficiently adverse to each other” for the lawsuit to be constitutional under Article III, which requires an actual controversy between genuinely opposing parties. She ordered both sides to explain by late May why the case should not be thrown out entirely.

Here is why that matters beyond the legal technicality. Trump and his lawyers are currently in settlement talks with the Department of Justice over this lawsuit. The same DOJ that he controls. If those talks result in a payout, it would be Trump’s own administration writing Trump and his family a check from the United States Treasury. That would be taxpayer money being spent. A group of former government officials filed a brief calling the situation “extraordinary” because “the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics.” And Trump himself, on Air Force One back in January, acknowledged the strangeness of it. He told reporters it is “very interesting” to be on both sides of a lawsuit, adding, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

And if he does donate the winnings to charity, as he suggested on Air Force One, do not hold your breath waiting to find out which one. This is a family with a history of creating entities that look like charities on paper. The Trump Foundation was shut down under court supervision after the New York Attorney General found that Trump had repeatedly used its funds for his own personal, business, and political interests. He was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. He made 19 admissions of illegal activity. His three adult children were required to undergo mandatory charity law training as part of the settlement. So when he says the money could go to charity, it might not mean what we imagine that to mean.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible for everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever.Upgrade to paid

There is a lot of corruption in Washington, D.C., especially in the Trump regime, but that is a small part of American society. We are seeing more and more people stepping up outside of the machine of profit and self-dealing in our government. And we just saw another example of this with Bette Midler and friends who created a new rendition of Woody Guthrie’s, “All You Fascists” that he originally wrote in 1940. As he was watching the rise of fascism in Europe and recognizing the strains of it at home, in the poll tax, in Jim Crow, in the systems designed to keep people powerless and afraid, he used the tool he had at hand, his words, to not just draw attention to what was happening but as a form of resistance. He did not have a Senate seat. He did not have a law firm, a news network, or a lobbying budget. He believed that the people without official power were the ones who would ultimately decide how the story ended. He wrote a song for them and handed it forward.

Eighty-six years later, Bette Midler, now 80 years old, sat down and rewrote it for this moment. She talked to her friend Jane Fonda, who told her the resistance needed an anthem. So she went back to Guthrie’s words and updated them for 2026. She brought in her Beaches co-star Barbara Hershey, actor David Hyde Pierce, singer and actress Jenifer Lewis, Broadway star Shoshana Bean, and she released her powerful version just yesterday with a music video, and she said at the start of it: “I hope you’ll sing it when you’re marching.”

Nobody in that video has the power to lift sanctions. Nobody can issue a pardon or dismiss a lawsuit, or override a president. They are singers. An actress. A woman who has been making people laugh and cry for fifty years and who looked at this moment and decided that was exactly the right set of tools to bring to it.

Verse by verse, she moves through everything we have lived through this year. She warns the fascists directly that when they come for the rest of us, we will fight them at the gate. She names the ICE raids. She names Minneapolis. She calls out the cowards hiding behind their masks and says plainly that we are coming for them at the ballot box. She names the Epstein files and the violence of the raids in the same breath. And then she lands on the close, the clearest statement of purpose in the whole song: “America, get ready, midterms are at hand. We got to stick together folks and vote to save this land.” It is not subtle. It is not meant to be. Woody Guthrie was not subtle either. That was never the point. The point was to give people something to sing when the moment called for it. Bette Midler looked at this moment and decided it called for it.

Guthrie wrote that song for working people, and Midler updated it for the same people. The federal workers who walk past those banners every morning and keep going. The judge who opened a copy of the Constitution and applied it to a $10 billion self-dealing lawsuit. The security guard I talked to in Washington this morning, who is not a federal employee and has no official power, but who told me what was happening inside those buildings with the quiet certainty of someone who has watched it long enough to know. Who told me that the people who built their careers around this government, who were there before Trump and will be there after, are getting through it the same way people always get through a bad manager. By holding onto each other, by showing up and doing the work that keeps this country running, while the man at the top charges people by the token for the privilege of standing near him.

The celebrities, the writers, the judges, the federal workers, the security guards, the people marching, the people reading this right now. None of us has official power. Yet all of us are the resistance. And all of us, together, are the reason this does not end the way he wants it to. The presidency is for sale, but the resistance has no price tag. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Sunday Message from MeidasTouch Co-Founder, Ben Meiselas, right, April 26, 2026. I really look forward to this time with you, just slowing things down a bit, talking directly, and cutting through all the noise together.

The news today is focused on the incident last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The facts are still developing, but what we saw almost immediately afterward tells you a lot. Within minutes, Trump and his team rushed out to politicize it, pushing narratives, talking about the need for his “golden ballroom,” and trying to turn the situation into a talking point about the unlawful war in Iran.

Let’s just call that what it is. It certainly seems like Trump and MAGA are going to try to use this incident to boost their poll numbers and repeat this narrative over and over again. But the American people aren’t buying it. They already aren’t buying it. People see this for what it is. And more broadly, people see what’s happening right now.

They see weakness. They see desperation. They see a war spiraling with no clear end. They see the Strait of Hormuz still controlled by Iran. They see gas prices up, oil at record highs, groceries unaffordable, housing and rent out of reach, and healthcare being ripped away. Americans are sick and tired of a regime of lies, chaos, and constant manipulation.

All of that connects. I’ve been reporting on YouTube, breaking this down, comparing it to Butler, talking about the lack of transparency, the missing medical records, and how these patterns keep repeating. Everything becomes spin. Everything becomes propaganda. And we’re not going to let that slide.

While all of this was happening, I wasn’t at the Correspondents’ Dinner. I wasn’t even in D.C. I stayed right here in California. I took my baby girl to see Disney on Ice yesterday, came home, grabbed a cup of coffee, and got right back to reporting for all of you.

April 24

 

Billionaire High-Tech 'Bros' from left: Jeff Bezo of Amazon.com, the Washington Post and Blue Origin, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Tesla and other companies, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of META and Facebook.

Robert Reich, Opinion: The Worst Neo Robber Baron of Them All, Robert Reich, April 24, 2026. Hint: He's even worse than Musk.

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk that title. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk.

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon.

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans.

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

The New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products.

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now.

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws.

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks.

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America.

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that on April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.

But what puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump's second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era.

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all.

April 23

New York Times, Meta to Cut 10% of Work Force in A.I. Push, Mike Isaac and Eli Tan, April 23, 2026. The layoffs affect about 8,000 employees, with Meta also planning to close 6,000 open roles, as the company focuses on artificial intelligence.

Meta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by A.I.-powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

New York Times, Microsoft Targets About 7% of Its U.S. Workers With Buyout Offer, Karen Weise, April 23, 2026. The tech giant is offering long-serving employees early retirements as it continues to invest aggressively in artificial intelligence.

Microsoft offered early retirement to thousands of long-serving employees on Thursday as it looks to thin its ranks amid major investments in artificial intelligence, according to an internal email from Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer.

Eligible employees amounted to roughly 7 percent of the company’s U.S. work force, a person familiar with the program said. Microsoft employed about 125,000 workers in the United States at the end of its fiscal year in June.

“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” Ms. Coleman wrote in the email to staff.

The early retirement is being offered to U.S. workers who meet certain criteria: Their age plus their number of years at the company must total 70 or more. They also have to be at the senior director level or below and cannot be paid by sales incentive programs.

Microsoft and its big tech peers have been closely managing or culling the size of their work forces amid a spending spree to build the infrastructure for A.I. The companies are plowing cash into building data centers and filling them with the chips and other technologies needed to power advanced systems. As more data centers are built and used, the technology inside them begins to depreciate, putting pressure on profit margins. Cutting employees is one way companies can offset those costs.

April 22

New York Times, F.B.I. Said to Have Investigated Times Reporter After Article on Patel’s Girlfriend, Michael S. Schmidt, April 22, 2026. The bureau said it is not pursuing a case, but the scrutiny is an example of the Trump administration weighing whether to criminalize routine news gathering.

The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws, the person said.

Those actions prompted concerns among some Justice Department officials who saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, did not like, and who determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation, according to the person briefed on the matter.

In response to questions from The Times this week, the F.B.I. said that “while investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking,” the F.B.I. is not pursuing a case.

The scrutiny of Ms. Williamson is an example of the Trump administration examining whether to criminalize routine news gathering practices that are widely considered protected by the First Amendment.

Journalists are more often caught up in criminal investigations as potential witnesses when the authorities are trying to determine who leaked them classified information.

In preparing the article about Mr. Patel and Ms. Wilkins, Ms. Williamson followed normal procedures for a journalist working on a story, which typically involve reaching out to the subject and seeking a variety of perspectives. In this case, Ms. Williamson contacted numerous people who had worked with or knew Ms. Wilkins.

Ms. Williamson had one phone call at the beginning of her reporting process with Ms. Wilkins — Ms. Wilkins insisted that it be off the record — and exchanged emails with her before publication of the article. At that early stage in her reporting, Ms. Williamson asked Ms. Wilkins to provide a list of people she might speak to for the article, but Ms. Wilkins did not respond.

Ms. Williamson was never in Ms. Wilkins’s presence.

Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, criticized the bureau for investigating a reporter for doing her job.

“The F.B.I.’s attempt to criminalize routine reporting is a blatant violation of Elizabeth’s First Amendment rights and another attempt by this administration to prevent journalists from scrutinizing its actions,” Mr. Kahn said. “It’s alarming. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.”

The Times article, published Feb. 28, described how Ms. Wilkins has a full-time protective detail of Special Weapons and Tactics team members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country to accompany her to engagements including singing appearances and a hair appointment.

The disclosure intensified questions over Mr. Patel’s use of taxpayer-funded resources for personal use, not long after he drew headlines for celebrating in Milan with the U.S. men’s hockey team after its gold medal victory in the Olympics.

In a statement provided for the Feb. 28 article, a spokesman for the F.B.I. said that active death threats against Ms. Wilkins warranted the level of protection she was receiving, but he did not question the accuracy of Ms. Williamson’s reporting.

The inquiry into Ms. Williamson played out in the days and weeks following the publication of the article.

On the day of the article’s publication, Ms. Wilkins received a threatening email from an anonymous sender. Ms. Wilkins forwarded the email the same day to the F.B.I., according to an affidavit later filed in a criminal prosecution of the alleged sender of the email, who was in Boston. According to the affidavit, the sender acknowledged emailing the threat after reading the article by Ms. Williamson.

Several days later, the F.B.I. interviewed Ms. Wilkins, who told them how the reporting Ms. Williamson had done for the article had left her unnerved and feeling harassed, according to the person familiar with the matter. Ms. Wilkins had raised similar concerns with the F.B.I. as early as January, when Ms. Williamson first contacted her, the person said.

April 18 

MS Now, Opinion: New Hungarian PM says government was funding CPAC but won’t anymore, Ja'han Jones, April 14, 2026. In the wake of authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s political defeat over the weekend, Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, is looking to sever his government’s financial ties to the influential pro-Trump activist group the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in Hungary, campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. When U.S. Vice President JD Vance made a last-second visit to Hungary to deliver his and Trump’s ultimately futile endorsements of the prime minister, I noted in a blog that an Orbán loss could disrupt the work of activist groups like CPAC operating in Hungary, which they portray as a model of the illiberal rule they’d like to bring to the U.S. (You can read some of my coverage on CPAC Hungary here and here.)

At a press conference on Monday, Magyar said Orbán’s government had given government funds to CPAC and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian residential college that Orbán critics have described as “an institution designed to breed right-wing intellectuals,” according to The New York Times. In condemning the alleged payments, Magyar called for investigations and said that while CPAC is welcome in Hungary, the government would no longer pay the group.

According to CNN:

Magyar told CNN that neither MCC nor CPAC would receive state funds under his government. ‘I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place. It was a crime. Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense,’ Magyar said. He added that institutes like MCC ‘should be investigated’ by anti-corruption institutions he plans to set up. ‘CPAC can come to Budapest. They’re very welcome. But not from Hungarian taxpayers’ money. From Fidesz’s money, or Orbán’s buddies’ money — before we take it back,’ he said.

Scandal-plagued CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp posted in response to Magyar’s comments but didn’t address the payment claims, saying only that he was “gratified” that Magyar “has invited us back to have CPAC.”

Neither Magyar nor the Hungarian government provided further details about the reported payments to CPAC. Following the comments, U.S. critics of the conservative group — including MS NOW contributor Joyce Vance, below — have an eye out for what information may emerge from the Hungarians’ anti-corruption investigation:

In the other direction, there’s been reporting on efforts by Trump officials, like State Department undersecretary Sarah Rogers, to name one, to fund far-right groups in Hungary and elsewhere. Rogers met last November with members of an Orbán-backed Hungarian propaganda group that was connected to CPAC Hungary.

It’s easy to see how Orbán’s loss could prove injurious to the MAGA movement in a variety of ways. With the downfall of Trump’s favorite authoritarian, the U.S. conservative movement appears to be losing its free rein (and apparently some financing) to use Hungary as an ideological testing ground.

New York Times, Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading, Ruth Graham, April 18, 2026 (print ed.). He will read a passage from the Old Testament that his Christian supporters cite as a call to national repentance and divine blessing

President Trump has a complicated relationship with the Bible. He has often called it his favorite book, has posed with it for photographers outside a church and has sold his own edition for $60. But he has also struggled to name a favorite passage or even pick a favorite Testament between the two.

Now, fresh from a week in which he skirmished with the pope and Christians accused him of blasphemy, Mr. Trump will participate in a marathon reading of the entire Bible in Washington, the event’s organizers announced Friday. The event’s leader, a conservative activist who once ran for Congress in Texas, has described it as “a national reading of God’s law.”

The White House issued a statement on Friday praising the event, America Reads the Bible, as an occasion to “honor Holy Scripture, renew our faith, usher in a historic resurgence of religion on American shores, and rededicate the United States as one Nation under God.”

Mr. Trump recorded his segment of the reading from the Oval Office, organizers said. He read a passage from the Old Testament book of II Chronicles that has become a touchstone for many of his Christian supporters, who interpret it as a call to national repentance and subsequent blessing.

The central verse in II Chronicles 7 reads: “If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

“It’s been a hallmark of the religious right to cite this particular passage,” said Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University.

Biblical scholars emphasize that the passage concerns the writer’s understanding of a particular covenant between God and the ancient Israelites. The books of Chronicles cover centuries of Jewish history, including the reigns of Kings David and Solomon.

In recent decades, the verse has become the subject of songs, prayers and sermons that interpret it as a promise with direct political implications for the contemporary United States. For example, at the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, the founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump prayed the passage through a bullhorn over the crowd, which chanted “Fight for Trump!” in response.

Mr. Trump’s reading comes after a tumultuous run of self-inflicted challenges to his relationship with his most loyal Christian supporters. Last weekend, the president posted an A.I.-generated image that appeared to depict him as Jesus Christ performing a miraculous healing. The backlash from Christians was swift, with many describing the image as blasphemous. Mr. Trump deleted the post the next day, and said he believed the image showed him as a doctor.Mr. Trump also unleashed a long diatribe against Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of the American war in Iran. The tirade, which the president opened by calling the pope “weak on crime,” was greeted with confusion and disgust by many American Catholics.

Mr. Trump recorded his Bible reading from II Chronicles on Tuesday, the event’s organizer, Bunni Pounds, said in an interview.

The event has been in the works for more than a year, envisioned in part as an invitation for leaders to “humble themselves in front of the American people” in anticipation of the country’s 250th anniversary, Ms. Pounds said. Under the Trump administration, official celebrations appear poised to emphasize the Christian roots of the nation’s founding.

America Reads the Bible will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for a week, starting with Genesis 1 on Sunday and ending with the last chapter of Revelation on Saturday evening. Most participants will read their passages live at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, but some high-profile participants prerecorded their segments.

Mr. Trump’s recitation will be broadcast on Tuesday between 6 and 7 p.m. Eastern time, a block that also includes Ben Carson, the former housing secretary, and the home-school advocate Heidi St. John.

April 13

 

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: : Trump HUMILIATED as judge tosses $10 billion Epstein letter lawsuit for failing basic legal test, Staff Report, April 13, 2026. Donald Trump has always routinely used lawsuits as a method of intimidating — and ultimately controlling — his critics and other perceived adversaries. Until recently, it’s been proven to be quite an effective strategy, forcing his opponents to choose between long and costly litigation and humiliating submission to the Orange Narcissist’s will.

Now, however, Trump’s tried and true tactic has hit a major speedbump.

Last year, Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a story about a lewd birthday card he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein. A federal judge just threw Dementia Donnie’s suit out of court — and the Journal's lawyers made one argument that deserves to be read twice: the story couldn't be defamatory because the conduct described was "consistent with Trump's reputation."

BOOM! That’s the sound of Trump’s head exploding after realizing that he won’t be able to use frivolous lawsuits to bully his antagonists into compliance with his wishes much longer.

Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed Trump's lawsuit Monday, ruling that Trump had failed to "plausibly allege" that the Journal published the story with actual malice — meaning the paper had no reason to believe it was false and in fact did its due diligence before publishing.

The Journal reached out to Trump for comment before publication. They noted his denial in the article. They investigated the claims. They published anyway, because the evidence supported the story.

The article, published last July, described a letter in a 2003 birthday album compiled for Epstein — apparently from Trump — featuring a drawing of a naked woman with Trump's signature filling in for pubic hair and the message: "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."

Trump said he "never wrote a picture in my life" and called it "a fake thing." He filed the lawsuit the day after the article was published, seeking $10 billion — the same amount he's seeking from the IRS in a separate lawsuit he is filing against essentially himself as the head of government.

A copy of the birthday book, including the letter, was subsequently released to the House Oversight Committee by lawyers for Epstein's estate. Which is to say: the physical evidence of the letter's existence is now in congressional hands.

The case has been dismissed without prejudice, meaning Trump can refile. His legal team immediately announced they would bring back what they called "this powerhouse lawsuit," which is quite a creative description of a complaint a federal judge just ruled didn't plausibly allege the basic elements of defamation.

Here is the full picture of Donald Trump's relationship with the legal system right now.

He is suing the Wall Street Journal for reporting on his Epstein birthday letter. He is suing the IRS for $10 billion in a case he is negotiating against himself. He is seeking $230 million from the Justice Department over the January 6th and Mar-a-Lago cases. His pardoned allies are filing hundreds of additional claims seeking taxpayer money. His own pardon attorney is claiming executive privilege to escape ethics charges.

And Pam Bondi is still not sitting for her Epstein files deposition.

"May every day be another wonderful secret." Unfortunately for Donald Trump, some secrets have a way of getting out.

 

New York Times, Hollywood Heavyweights Sign Letter Opposing Paramount’s Deal for Warner Bros., Benjamin Mullin, April 13, 2026. The letter warns that the deal will result in fewer jobs for creatives, along with higher costs and less choice for audiences.

More than 1,000 writers, actors and directors released a letter on Monday opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the deal would harm Hollywood’s already distressed entertainment industry.

The letter, which was signed by well-known performers and directors including Bryan Cranston, Joaquin Phoenix, Tiffany Haddish, Lily Gladstone and Yorgos Lanthimos, warns that merging two of Hollywood’s major studios will result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”

“We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed,” the letter said. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made — and on what terms — leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.”

The letter comes months after Paramount and its chief executive, David Ellison, prevailed against Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion. Mr. Ellison has said that the deal will be good for the creative community, pledging to release at least 30 movies in theaters annually and invest in both studios. He has also argued that a deal with Netflix would have created a subscription streaming behemoth twice the size of its nearest competitor.

The letter was organized by a coalition of advocacy groups including the Committee for the First Amendment, the free speech group led by the actor Jane Fonda; Democracy Defenders Fund, an organization co-founded by Norm Eisen, an ambassador in the Obama administration; and the Future Film Coalition, a group of independent film professionals.

Paramount’s deal with Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to close later this year pending approval from shareholders and government regulators. The company has said that it does not expect any significant impediments to closing in the United States and that some countries like Germany and Slovenia have already given their approval to proceed.

But concerns about the deal loom over Hollywood. Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Cinema United, a trade organization that represents 30,000 movie screens in the United States, said in an interview that he was opposed to the acquisition, warning that any decrease in film production could result in more theater closings.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said that the acquisition was “not a done deal” but he expressed skepticism that the federal government would conduct a rigorous review.

In the letter, the signatories urged Mr. Bonta to continue scrutinizing the deal, saying they were prepared to support efforts to “ensure a vibrant future for our industry.”“Competition is essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy,” the letter said. “So is thoughtful regulation and enforcement. Media consolidation has already weakened one of America’s most vital global industries — one that has long shaped culture and connected people around the world.”

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Coachella performers are funding the MAGA movement, Judd Legum, right, April 13, 2026. Following the money from Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G to the politicians advancing Trump’s agenda.

Sabrina Carpenter, the headlining act of Coachella 2026, is an outspoken critic of the Trump administration and MAGA politics. The proceeds from her performance, however, will help get more MAGA Republicans elected.

Last December, when the Trump administration used her hit song “Juno” in an online video of ICE arrests, Carpenter issued a harsh rebuke. “This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter posted on X. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

Carpenter’s progressive advocacy goes well beyond objecting to the appropriation of her tracks. In June 2025, as ICE raids intensified across the country, Carpenter encouraged her 50 million Instagram followers to donate to the National Immigration Law Center, which is fighting the Trump administration’s deportation agenda in court.

Since 2024, Carpenter has set aside $1 for every ticket sold to support a variety of causes, including LGBTQ rights. After Trump won a second term, Carpenter added the Transgender Law Center to the list of beneficiaries. In June 2024, Carpenter partnered with Van Leeuwen Ice Cream to create an Espresso flavor, donating a portion of the sales to an organization supporting LGBTQ youth.

In June 2025, Carpenter signed an open letter protesting the Trump administration’s decision to end federal funding for suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth. During her September 2025 performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, performers held signs reading “Protect Trans Rights,” “In Trans We Trust,” and “Support Local Drag.”

Carpenter’s performance came as Republican governors across the country signed anti-trans legislation and Trump issued multiple anti-trans executive orders.

Whether or not Carpenter is aware, the proceeds from her 20-song headlining set at Coachella — along with the other musical acts at Coachella — will help elect more MAGA Republicans and advance their “inhumane agenda.”

Here is how it works: Coachella is run by Anschutz Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of The Anschutz Corporation, which is owned by right-wing billionaire Philip Anschutz. Money from The Anschutz Corporation’s treasury, which includes the profits from Coachella, is funneled directly to right-wing organizations that support key politicians funding ICE, undermining LGBTQ rights, and restricting abortion.

Republican governors, for example, have been signing legislation and taking other action to require local law enforcement to assist in ICE deportation raids. This has been a key lever to accelerate ICE’s crackdown.

The Anschutz Corporation donated $125,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) on April 3, 2025.

The company also donated $125,000 to the RGA in 2024, $100,000 in 2023, and $100,000 in 2022. (The RGA, which is organized as a 527 organization, has not yet had to disclose any 2026 donations.) This money is used to ensure as many Republicans as possible are elected governor. Over the same time period, the Anschutz Corporation has not donated any money to the Democratic Governors Association.

Republican attorneys general have also acted aggressively to assist ICE. In December 2025, for example, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R), a Trump loyalist, wrote a letter to the New Orleans Police Department demanding the department “fully cooperate” with a Trump administration ICE raid. Murrill suggested the failure to do so would be illegal.

The Anschutz Corporation donated $100,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) on April 1, 2025. This is the company’s first donation to RAGA since 2022, when it donated $125,000. Democratic attorneys general are fighting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in court, but The Anschutz Corporation has not donated any funds to the Democratic Attorneys General Association.

The Republican-controlled Congress has provided tens of billions of dollars in additional funding for ICE. The Anschutz Corporation donated $250,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a Super PAC devoted to maintaining Republican control of the Senate, on April 3, 2025. The company donated $500,000 to the SLF in 2024 and $500,000 in 2023. In 2023 and 2024, The Anschutz Corporation donated a combined $375,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), the Super PAC supporting Republicans in the House. If Republicans lose control of either the House or the Senate, it will be much more difficult for the Trump administration to fund its immigration crackdown. The Anschutz Corporation has not donated any money to Super PACs supporting the election of Democrats.

Candidates and officials who are supported by RGA, RAGA, SLF, and CLF have also worked to undermine other issues important to Carpenter, including LGBTQ rights. Republican governors signed dozens of anti-LGBTQ laws last year, Republican attorneys general are filing lawsuits to restrict LGBTQ rights, and Republicans in Congress are pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation.

Carpenter is not the only prominent musician taking the stage at Coachella this year to speak out against the MAGA agenda. Justin Bieber, another 2026 headliner, wore an “ICE Out” pin to the Grammy Awards in February 2026. Jack White called Trump an “obvious fascist” in 2024 and sued the Trump campaign to prevent the use of “Seven Nation Army” in a campaign video. White specifically called out Trump’s “gestapo ICE tactics.” During the ICE raids of 2025, Karol G wrote, “I am Latina, and what is happening to my community is deeply painful. Being Latino shouldn’t generate rejection or fear.” Addison Rae also condemned the ICE raids, writing, “I’m so disappointed and disturbed by what is happening across our nation. This country could not exist without immigrants.”

Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, an indie band, closed its 2026 Coachella set by declaring, “Fuck ICE’ and free Palestine.” David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads, projected images of anti-ICE protests as he performed the song, “Life During Wartime.”

All of these artists, and others who have made similar statements, are now generating profits for Anschutz, which he is using to support MAGA politicians.

In 2022, Popular Information reported on The Anschutz Corporation’s support of RAGA in light of the group’s efforts to restrict abortion rights. Representatives of The Anschutz Corporation told Popular Information the donations should not be considered an endorsement of the organization’s views on any issue. “Mr. Anschutz makes contributions to numerous organizations, usually for specific reasons,” a spokesperson said. “He does not review or support each of the positions taken by such organizations.”

In 2017, Anschutz faced scrutiny after his foundation donated to anti-LGBTQ groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. He denied he was financing anti-LGBTQ causes, calling the claims “fake news.” Anschutz declared that he “unequivocally” supports “the rights of all people without regard to sexual orientation.”

Anschutz claimed in 2017 to have “immediately ceased all contributions” to groups that oppose LGBTQ rights. Anschutz, however, continues to support groups like the RGA and RAGA, which support politicians who are restricting LGBTQ rights.

April 11

First Lady Melania Trump delivers remarks at the Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit, Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at the U.S. State Department in Washington D.C. ( Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks via Flickr).

Lincoln Square, Opinion: The Melania Files, Kristoffer Ealy. April 11, 2026. The First Lady wants us to buy that she didn't know Jeffrey Epstein. Let's take a deep dive into her history and her character.

On April 9, 2026, Melania Trump walked into the Grand Foyer of the White House, stood at a podium, and asked the American public to believe her. She never knew Jeffrey Epstein. She never visited his island. She never boarded his plane. The email she sent to his convicted child sex-trafficker girlfriend — the one that opened with “Dear G!” and closed with “Love, Melania” and included warm thoughts about a magazine profile of the man she claims was practically a stranger — was just casual correspondence. A trivial note.

She spoke for five minutes, read from a prepared statement, plugged her book, told Congress what investigations to conduct, and walked away without taking a single question. A press conference where you don’t take questions isn’t a press conference. That’s a hostage video with better lighting.

I want to be very clear about something before we go any further: I do not believe this woman. I have not believed this woman for a long time. And it is not because of anything Jeffrey Epstein-related. It is because I have been watching Melania Trump operate for the better part of fifteen years, and what I have observed is a person who lies the way most people breathe — reflexively, efficiently, and without apparent discomfort. The difference between Melania Trump lying and Melania Trump telling the truth is not something you merely hear. It is something you feel. It settles into the room like humidity. And what settled into the White House Grand Foyer on April 9, 2026 was very, very familiar.

The media will spend the next several days debating whether her denial was credible. I am not interested in that debate. I am interested in the record. Because the record is long, it is documented, and it has more receipts than a Whole Foods on a Saturday afternoon. Let’s go through it.1996: She arrives in the United States on a tourist visa and immediately starts working.

Melania Knauss entered the country in August 1996 on a B-1/B-2 visitor visa — the kind of visa that permits networking and business meetings but explicitly prohibits paid employment. According to reporting by the Associated Press, she accepted at least ten modeling jobs in the United States after that entry, before her work authorization was officially approved.

Her lawyer claims she obtained H-1B status in October 1996, conveniently plugging the gap. Now, you would think that a woman married to a man who has built his entire second act on screaming about illegal immigration would have airtight documentation proving she followed every rule to the letter. You would think she would have held that promised press conference, released those documents, and put the whole thing to rest. You would be wrong. The press conference never happened. The documents were never released. The public was simply expected to take her word for it.

The irony of an undocumented worker becoming the First Lady of the most aggressive anti-immigration administration in modern history is the kind of thing that would be funny if it weren’t so catastrophically on the nose.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization.  

The Guardian, Tucker Carlson to launch publishing imprint with books by Russell Brand and Milo Yiannopoulos, Staff Report, April 13, 2026. Former Fox News host says publishing house Skyhorse ‘looking for books that nobody else will publish’

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, right, is set to launch his own imprint and publish books by the likes of Russell Brand and “alt-right” commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

The imprint, Tucker Carlson Books, will be part of the US-based publisher Skyhorse. “I think most people don’t read books anymore because they’re too absorbed in all the other available media,” said Carlson, according to the Wall Street Journal. He added that those who do “tend to be disproportionately influential in policy conversations and conversations about ideas”.

Among the titles set to be published by Carlson’s imprint is Brand’s How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, described by Skyhorse as a “testimony and guide to a timeless, yet zeitgeist-capturing, grounded, yet psychedelic encounter with Christ”.

The former BBC radio host turned influencer is currently facing charges of three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault in the UK, to all of which he has pleaded not guilty.

Carlson’s imprint will give “a platform to things that would, in many cases, be shut down, be censored, and be covered over by propaganda”, said Skyhorse publisher Tony Lyons. Carlson said Lyons is “just looking for books that nobody else will publish”.

Carlson, a former Trump supporter and promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, was reportedly fired from Fox News in 2023. He soon launched his own media company, Tucker Carlson Network. The imprint is being launched in partnership with the network.

Carlson’s imprint will also publish Yiannopoulos’s book, Ex Gay. Yiannopoulos has previously been shunned by publishers, with one insider calling his 2017 memoir, Dangerous, a “toxic book”. Its publication was subsequently cancelled by Simon & Schuster after footage surfaced in which he made comments that appeared to condone sex between adult men and underage boys. Yiannopoulos denied endorsing child abuse and said the video had been “selectively edited”.

Previous publications by Skyhorse have included Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing, and US secretary of health and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr’s The Real Anthony Fauci. The publisher, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster, launched in 2006. On its website, it claims to be one of the fastest-growing independent book publishers in the US.

Existing imprints include Good Books – which it says focuses on cookbooks, country living titles, craft books, Amish and other Christian titles, justice and peace-building – and War Room Books, which published Trump’s Time to Get Tough in 2024.

April 9

 

 

Cardinal Christophe Pierre and Undersecretary Elbridge Colby (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense).

The Pillar, Analysis: Nuncio’s Pentagon meeting was ‘frank exchange of ideas,’ officials say  Staff Report, April 9, 2026. U.S. and Vatican officials described the meeting as ‘tense’ and ‘honest’ but dismiss reports of threats.

Pentagon officials have insisted that a January meeting with the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio was a “cordial” and frank conversation, while some Vatican sources have told The Pillar that while no threats were implied or made by U.S. officials, the discussion between defense leaders and Cardinal Christophe Pierre was at times “tense.”

The comments came in response to an April 6 report from the Free Press, suggesting that Pierre had been summoned to the Pentagon for a dressing down, reportedly in response to a speech on world peace by Pope Leo XIV.

“Under Secretary Colby’s meeting with Cardinal Pierre was a productive, cordial meeting, and a chance for real dialogue on serious issues. They had an honest and respectful conversation. Reporting about threats or disrespect is false and scurrilous,” a senior defense department official speaking on background told The Pillar on Thursday.

Meanwhile, a Vatican official described the meeting as “tense” at times, characterizing some exchanges as “aggressive,” but confirmed that there was “no question of anyone threatening anyone,” despite suggestion in recent media reports.

The Free Press published April 6 a report stating that the Defense Department’s policy undersecretary Elbridge Colby had “summoned” the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.

According to the Free Press, defense officials were “enraged” by a speech made by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican diplomatic corps earlier that month which was interpreted as a “hostile message directed at Trump’s policies.”

Citing Pentagon and Vatican sources briefed about the meeting, the article claimed “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

Pentagon officials were, according to the Free Press, upset over a speech delivered by the pope to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, in which he criticized “a diplomacy based on force” – interpreted by the Pentagon officials as a direct criticism of U.S. policy.

Since becoming the first pope from the United States last year, Pope Leo has spoken out repeatedly against the use of violence in foreign policy, in remarks that have sometimes been seen as a direct commentary on U.S. military action, including recently in Venezuela and Iran.

“The reports of the meeting with Cardinal Pierre and his staff were wildly distorted and grossly exaggerated,” a senior Pentagon official speaking on background told The Pillar.

“The purpose of the meeting was a good faith effort to engage with the Vatican on a variety of foreign policy matters. It was an attempt to engage seriously and respectfully with the Holy See’s position on matters relevant to the Department of War.”

“The meeting discussed issues on Latin America, NATO, Europe issues, and Africa,” the official said. “In the context of the pope and senior Church officials talking about these issues, we decided to reach out to the nuncio to understand the Church’s perspective directly. The Pentagon deals with ambassadors all the time, so while it might be a relative first with the Vatican’s ambassador, it isn’t unusual from the department’s perspective.”

Pentagon sources also told The Pillar that in addition to specific issues, U.S. officials also wished to discuss the concept of just war and the nature and scope of legitimate military action.

That conversation, a senior Pentagon official told The Pillar, was “a frank exchange of ideas,” and “was very respectful.”

“There were somewhat different perspectives, but definitely no hostility or even hint of an attempt at coercion. That’s frankly just absurd and a calumny,” the official said.

Senior officials at the Holy See’s Secretariat of State in the Vatican also confirmed to The Pillar that the meeting took place, and that the discussion focused on public speeches and statements by Pope Leo about war and peace in the light of U.S. military action and priorities, but offered a different assessment of the meeting’s tone.

One senior official in Rome described the conversation as being “tense” at times and suggested that U.S. officials had been “aggressive” and “bullying” at points, but insisted that the conversation had been mutually forthright, with Cardinal Pierre “making himself heard, too.”

“There was no question of anybody threatening anyone,” the Vatican official said. No one at the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted by The Pillar could recall or confirm any reference to the Avignon papacy during the conversation.

In a response to the Free Press article published on twitter.com on April 9, the U.S. Department of Defense said that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”

The department confirmed that the meeting had taken place between Pierre and Colby and their respective staffs on Jan. 22, 2026, but said that the meeting was “substantive, respectful, and professional.”

“During the cordial meeting, they discussed a range of topics, including issues of morality in foreign policy, the logic of the U.S. National Security Strategy, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and other topics. Cardinal Pierre expressed his appreciation for the outreach and both sides looked forward to continued open and respectful dialogue,” the department said.

The United States ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, also released a statement Thursday, saying on social media that he had spoken with Cardinal Pierre, who now lives in Rome.

According to Burch, Pierre “​​confirmed that recent media characterizations of his meeting with Colby are ‘fabrications’ that were ‘just invented.’”

“I was likewise not surprised when His Eminence acknowledged there were no threats of any kind in the meeting. ‘It was a frank and cordial meeting that took place two months ago.’ Threat of Avignon? ‘None,’” said Burch.

Pope Leo accepted Cardinal Pierre’s resignation in March, after the cardinal turned 80, appointing in his place Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia, who had been serving as the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations.

April 1

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Alex Jones Didn’t Just Spread Lies: He Helped the Right Wing Weaponize Them to Undermine American Democracy, Thom Hartmann, right, April 1, 2026. How Republicans turned misinformation into a system for seizing power and reshaping reality, and the damage those lies are doing to our democracy…

I still remember the day, back in 2009 when we were on speaking terms, when Alex Jones showed up naked for a live simulcast of our two shows. It’s one of those pictures that my staff and I have worked for years to get out of our heads.

It was for a stunt, of course; if nothing else, Alex has always known how to be a showman. It was April 15, Tax Day, and he wanted to emphasize how the IRS had “taken the shirt off my back.” Point made. And a largely harmless one (other than that $38 trillion national debt that’s 100% derived from tax cuts for billionaires and corporations we were lied into by Reagan, Bush, and Trump).

But when he filmed a phony, staged “ISIS beheading” that he claimed happened on the southern US border, it was far from harmless, according to a new book by one of his former employees, Josh Owens, titled The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Machine.

The video of one of Jones’ reporters dressed up as an ISIS soldier carrying a phony severed-head prop went viral, gaining millions of views, and helped fuel anti-Muslim hatred that the rightwing was then working hard to exploit in post-9/11 America. Owens told an NPR reporter that the turning point for him was sitting on a plane next to a Muslim woman with her young daughter:

“I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn’t do anything. There’s no reason for suspicion; it’s just racism. It’s not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently.”

The real crisis this kind of media causes isn’t just the misinformation; it’s the collapse of a shared reality among Americans, without which democracy can’t function. And we’re seeing that play out in real time in the daily dysfunction both in Congress and in state capitols across the the nation.

When political power is built not on debate, compromise, and persuasion but on intentional lies, governance simply becomes a shallow performance and an opportunity for corruption rather than a way to serve the needs of the people of a country. It becomes, in essence, a grift.

This is why partisan lies used to seize and hold power are so corrosive: they destroy a nation’s sense of shared reality.

While it’s nearly impossible to identify any meaningful lies Democrats depend on to win elections, increase media profits, or pass special-interest legislation, there’s a long list of rightwing lies that serve those exact purposes:

— Tax cuts for billionaires help average people,— Unions are bad for workers,— Climate change is a hoax,— Welfare fraud is widespread and mostly committed by Black “welfare queens,”— Social Security is going broke and lifting the cap on what billionaires pay won’t solve the problem,— The 2020 election was stolen from Trump,— Immigrants bring more crime than native-born citizens,— Deregulation doesn’t produce harms but by increasing profits helps society,— National single-payer health insurance can’t work in America (even though it mysteriously works just fine, better than what we have, in dozens of other democracies),— America was founded as a Christian nation,— Men are superior to women,— White people are superior to people of color,— Vaccines are dangerous and Covid isn’t,— Voter fraud and voting by non-citizens is widespread,— Guns will keep your home and children safe,— Rich Jews are funding a program to “replace” white workers with dark-skinned people,— Increasing the minimum wage destroys economies and causes severe inflation.

Each one of these lies is repeated regularly by Republicans on TV and hosts of rightwing talk shows as if they’re true to the point where MAGA voters can recite them in their sleep (and when they’re carrying tiki torches).

As America learned when Fox “News” was forced to admit in court that their top talent was lying directly to the camera for months about the 2020 election, these lies are typically planned, organized, intentional, and can produce millions in revenue for the media and its stars.

Not to mention supporting billions in profits for aligned industries like fossil fuels and tobacco that depend on people believing lies to keep consuming their products.

Republican lies can also swing elections, like when a PAC aligned with George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign promoted their Willie Horton ad arguing that a prison furlough program that led to a white woman being raped and murdered by a Black man was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’ fault when, in fact, it’d been started by a previous Republican governor.

Rightwing lies have taken America into or prolonged wars, as we learned when Nixon lied about his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, Reagan “rescued” medical students by invading Grenada, George HW Bush had a member of the Kuwaiti royal family lie on national TV about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, Bush and Cheney lied us into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Trump lied us into attacking Iran and killing hundreds of innocent children.

Republican lies can even create self-fulfilling prophecies, like how when both Obama and Biden each came into office Republicans and rightwing media immediately started loudly claiming the US southern border was “now wide open” and that lie, repeated over and over again by conservative politicians and media, made its way down to South and Central America and caused people there to believe it and then to migrate north.

It’s particularly problematic when Republican lies become loyalty tests for public office. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse have been asking every Republican-promoted federal judge nominee to come before the Judiciary Committee the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Not even one single candidate has yet answered with the simple truth that Joe Biden won, fair and square, a result that was even litigated 60 times and proven before the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The problem Republicans, rightwing billionaires, and conservative media have is that if they simply told the truth about any of the things in the list above — that they really do support more pollution and raw bigotry while exclusively working to enrich the already morbidly rich — they’d quickly lose their audiences and their voters.

The fix, therefore, isn’t particularly complicated, even if does require discipline.

Every anchor, every host, every journalist, and particularly every guest on radio or TV who lets one of these lies slide past without correction needs to be called out for it.

Not “some people disagree,” or “Democrats say otherwise.” Lies like these require a flat-out, factual, on-air correction: “That’s not true, and here’s the proof.” There really are differences between the two major parties, and only the GOP consistently uses demonstrable lies to get their way.

When hosts or Republican guests refuse to respond to that in good faith, when they treat a documented lie as just another “perspective” worthy of equal consideration, they have to be outed.

The Founders understood — as much as they loved free speech — that democracy can’t survive without a press willing to tell the truth. What we have today in far too much of our media landscape is the opposite: a press that’s either owned by billionaires invested in the lies or so terrified of being called “liberal” that it’s stopped holding liars accountable.

So, when you see this happen, pick up your phone and tell the network, station, host, or politician exactly what you just witnessed. And amplify it on social media.

The deep truth here is that decades of Republican lies have only worked because so many in the media — and so many of us who consume media — have let them pass unchallenged.

The facts are on our side. Americans, when presented with the actual substance of these issues without partisan labels attached, consistently support the positions Democrats hold and Republicans lie about.

And remember, every one of the lies on the list above exists for one reason only: because without them, the people telling them couldn’t win an election, hold an audience, get tax cuts and deregulation, or make more money.

So, correct the lies at the dinner table. Share articles like this one that document them with receipts. Support the journalists and outlets brave enough to call partisan and corporate liars out by name. Show up for protests. And, most important, vote this fall like your democracy depends on it, because (as the old cliché goes) it does.

March

March 27

 

Tiger Woods stands by his overturned vehicle in Jupiter Island, Fla., on Friday, March 27, 2026.

New York Times, Tiger Woods arrested, charged with DUI after rollover crash in Florida, Gabby Herzig and Hugh Kellenberger, March 27, 2026. Tiger Woods was arrested and jailed on a charge of driving under the influence after being involved in a two-vehicle crash on Friday afternoon that resulted in his Land Rover rolling onto its side.

When officers reached the scene of the crash on Jupiter Island, Fla., where Woods has a home, the golfer showed “signs of impairment,” Martin County Sheriff John M. Budensiek said at a news conference.

A breathalyzer test did not detect any alcohol in his system, but Woods refused a urinalysis. That led to his arrest and his being taken to Martin County Jail, where he must remain for at least eight hours. Woods will remain in jail until at least 11 p.m. to satisfy that requirement.

He was charged with DUI with property damage and refusal to submit to a lawful test. Both charges are misdemeanors.

March 26

Etilaatroz Foundation, William McCarren Named Chair of Etilaatroz Foundation Board, Staff Report, March 26, 2026.  Etilaatroz Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting independent journalism on Afghanistan, has appointed media executive William McCarren as Chair of its Board of Directors.

McCarren, right, joins a board that includes founder and President Zaki Daryabi and board member Dr. Habiba Sarabi, former Governor of Bamyan Province and the first woman to hold a gubernatorial position in Afghanistan.

McCarren is the founder of the Press Freedom Center at the National Press Club. He previously served as Executive Director of the National Press Club as well as the founder and President of U.S. Newswire LLC. He has a BA from Vanderbilt University and an MA from Brown.

“Bill McCarren was one of the first people I met when I came to the U.S.,” said Zaki Daryabi. “We were new to the country and trying our best just to get settled and try to get back to news operations. Bill had great advice. He helped us network and think about how to structure our business into a foundation. He introduced us to lawyers and accountants who helped us with the process. Bill even helped my brother get a great job. I am glad we have Bill with us as we navigate our new direction forward,” Daryabi said.

Following the collapse of the Afghan Republic in 2021, members of the Etilaatroz team were forced to leave Afghanistan after facing threats, harassment, and violence. In the early days after the Taliban takeover, several journalists were beaten, and the organization was forced to suspend its Kabul newsroom. Today, a core editorial team operates from a newsroom in Silver Spring, Maryland, editing the reports and photos submitted by reporters and photographers who continue their work inside Afghanistan under very difficult circumstances. Etilaatroz remains banned by the Taliban, and working for the organization can lead to severe punishment.

Founded in Kabul, Etilaatroz built a reputation for investigative reporting focused on corruption, governance, and human rights. During its ten-year run in Afghanistan prior to the fall of Kabul, the outlet became one of the country’s leading independent media organizations. That work continues today through its Dari, Pashto, and Uzbek platforms, as well as its English-language publication, KabulNow. The organization has recently converted from a business entity to a nonprofit foundation in the United States and has 501(c)(3) status. Individuals and foundations can support its work. 

March 16

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Carr Wreck, Andrew Egger, March 16, 2026. The Federal Communications Commission is a relatively obscure federal agency, so its chairman, Brendan Carr, tends to get into the news only when he starts threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over speech he dislikes. Unfortunately, he’s back in the news.

On Saturday, after President Trump posted a message to Truth Social grumbling about coverage of his war in Iran (“Media actually want us to lose the war. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts!”), Carr chimed in: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Naturally, for Carr the public interest is Trump’s interest. If this wasn’t obvious enough from the fact that he attached a screenshot of Trump’s kvetching post to his threat, Carr went on: “When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of [sic] hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.”

Apparently, Carr believes that reporting that tanker planes were “struck” in an Iranian missile strike—the headline that set Trump grumbling in the first place¹—is to invite the government to label you “fake news” and retaliate against you as such. But lest you think he’s just being an incredible stickler for accuracy, in the very same post Carr proclaims that Trump “won a landslide victory” in 2024—an interesting way to describe a 1.5-point win with a plurality of the popular vote.

Because he’s not insane, Carr, right, wants to frame his threat as mere concern for fair coverage. But the president he’s channeling, who is insane, isn’t really bothering. In one post last night, Trump accused the “Fake News Media” of working “in close coordination” with Iran to spread AI-generated disinformation about the war: “Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not.” He added that “the Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”

Which outlets were these? Who knows! Trump didn’t name them, and since no actual outlets have actually been spreading such AI-generated disinformation, it’s hard to know from context clues. (I asked the White House this morning which outlet in particular the president was accusing of treasonous AI-generated coverage. They did not respond.)

Trump’s post suggests that different adversaries are blurring together in the president’s mind: He starts by taking issue with a Wall Street Journal report, then pivots to denouncing AI clips he seemingly bumped into on social media before smash-cutting to Carr-like threats against broadcasters’ FCC licenses and, for good measure, a parting shot at “the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings.”

It’s possible that Carr, channeling Trump, was making an empty threat intended to keep Trump’s media opponents off-balance. Carr’s last foray into the headlines is perhaps instructive here: Last year, after threatening to revoke ABC affiliates’ broadcast licenses over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue he didn’t like, Carr ended up backtracking pretty quickly.

Or maybe this time Carr is more serious. The White House has had media suppression on the mind lately—think of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remark Friday that “the sooner David Ellison takes over [CNN], the better.”

And wartime has always made for better opportunities than peacetime for opportunistic governments to start chiseling away at the structures restraining their power. The stakes are too high, a would-be wartime autocracy argues, for subversive internal elements to be allowed to go on poisoning the body politic.

Whatever Carr intends, it’s plain he isn’t freelancing here. CNN’s Brian Stelter notes that Carr’s threat came during a trip to Mar-a-Lago, where he was seen Saturday meeting with Trump. That same day, Trump posted a chest-thumping graphic to Truth Social detailing the ways he is “reshaping the media,” which Stelter theorized may have been provided to him by Carr:

Apparently, Carr and Trump intend to reshape it still further—perhaps by threats alone, perhaps by force.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Voter Fraud Fraud… There just isn’t evidence of significant election cheating—but that won’t stop the GOP from pushing its dangerous SAVE America Act, argues SEN. ANGUS KING.
• How Does The Iran War End? On this week’s Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the Iran war: its battlefield gains, strategic failures, mounting munitions costs, and the possibility of a shift in U.S. focus to Cuba.
• Trump’s War With the Fed Could Backfire… On How to Fix It, Harvard economist and former IMF chief economist KENNETH ROGOFF joins JOHN AVLON to discuss the growing risks facing the U.S. dollar.

Quick Hits

THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST: It’s been a tough week for the DOGEbros. Elon Musk’s kid arsonists, who spent the early part of last year slashing and burning their way across the federal government, have been sitting for depositions in a court case brought by groups seeking to reverse their cuts. The groups have argued that the cuts were illegal and arbitrary, and the DOGEbros aren’t exactly beating the allegations. As the New York Times reported earlier this month, much of DOGE’s “work” involved downloading grant summaries and feeding them into ChatGPT with a simple prompt: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”

Recently, clips from the DOGEbros’ depositions have gone viral on social media, especially one in which staffer Justin Fox repeatedly struggles to define what D.E.I. actually is. In another, staffer Nathan Cavanaugh is asked whether he regrets that people might have lost income to DOGE’s fast-and-loose work. “No,” he replies, “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” (The federal deficit last year ended up being about $1.7 trillion.)

Clowning on the DOGEbros is fun and cathartic, but perhaps not conducive to achieving a sober outcome in the lawsuit. On Friday, a judge ordered that the deposition videos be removed from the internet. Late last night, Musk said that he had offered his former staffers “legal support as needed.” Big of him.

WITH COURTS LIKE THESE: The Fake News Media weren’t the only institutions that felt Donald Trump’s social media wrath this weekend. He also had some revealingly insane things to get off his chest about the Supreme Court. In the wake of their tariff decision, which found—to the shock of no one—that Trump did not actually have unlimited power to place tariffs on any product from any country at any level for any duration for any reason at any time, the president fumed that the justices he appointed weren’t giving him the respect they owed him: “They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are.”

And Trump wasn’t finished: “They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020. . . . This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be.”

New York Times, The Oscars 2026 Winners: The Complete List, Shivani Gonzalez, March 16, 2026 (print ed.). The winning actors, directors, pictures and more at the 98th annual Academy Awards.

The movie awards season finally came to a close Sunday night, with the 98th edition of the Academy Awards, which took place at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood.

“One Battle After Another,” which was nominated for 13 awards, received the highest honor of the night: best picture. Paul Thomas Anderson won for best director and Sean Penn, though he wasn’t in attendance, received the best supporting actor award. The film also won in the newly added category, best casting (Cassandra Kulukundis).

With a record-breaking 16 nominations, “Sinners” took home four awards. Its writer-director Ryan Coogler won best original screenplay, and its star, Michael B. Jordan received best actor.

Conan O’Brien hosted the show with a slew of gags about the future of A.I., while a heartfelt in memoriam segment honored Rob and Michelle Reiner, Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Catherine O’Hara and others.

See below for a full list of winners.unregulated segment of Wall Street lending may soon collapse, and the new New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill is centering part of her agenda on attacking personalized pricing. That and much more, after the paywall. Read on!

The Honest Editor via Substack, Commentary: The myths of London Book Fair, Phoebe Morgan, March 14, 2026. An honest look at the reality behind the noise!

If you’re at all interested in the publishing industry, you won’t have missed the fact that last week was the London Book Fair. This happens every year, and is basically a three-day trade fair, at which international editors, agents, and scouts gather in the event space Olympia to talk about books. The basic aim is buying and selling rights, but there are also interesting panel talks and speeches from industry professionals, often debating the key issues of the day such as AI, English language rights, audio growth and more.

It’s not really a place for writers. There are ‘authors of the fair’ (this year one of ours, the brilliant AF Steadman, was present on the Tuesday) and those authors are invited to meet their translation publishers or to give talks, but it’s not a place for unpublished writers or even for most published writers. It’s more for those working in the industry on the publishing side. If you are an aspiring writer there is no need to go. It’s not where you would find an agent or a publisher and it’s expensive! I’m only saying this as I think sometimes authors feel confused and worry they should attend so I’m telling you honestly, you don’t need to!

The other reason I wanted to write this post is to help dispel the sense of anxiety, failure and fear of missing out that can descend (on both writers and editors) around LBF. It is so, so easy to read the Bookseller or go on social media and see endless six-figure whirlwind announcements and feel bad about yourself because you’re not one of them (either as an author or as a publisher/agent). HOWEVER, and I cannot stress this enough, when these announcements go out they are only one small piece of the picture, and a pretty small piece at that…

Here are some myths dispelled!

March 14

 

PoliticusUSA, News and Commentary:Trump's FCC Chair Threatens To Take Away Broadcasting Licenses If Networks Don't Push Iran War Propaganda, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, March 14 2026. Trump's FCC Chair Brandon Carr threatened to take away licenses from broadcasters if they don't stop telling the truth about the Iran war.Sarah Jones.

The signal was sent during Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s latest briefing, which was a loss in the media and a loss in the war in Iran. Hegseth attacked the media for reporting details about the planning mistakes that appear to have been made by the Trump administration, and that the war is not going as well as the rosy picture that the White House likes to paint would suggest.

Hegseth took time out of his briefing to lecture the press about how he thought they should cover the war. To the surprise of no one, the Trump administration official wants the war to be covered as sunshine and rainbows as the United States marches to an easy victory.

The reality is that Donald Trump spent Saturday posting that the allies of the United States, whom he trashed, should be helping to open the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s administration doesn’t want to acknowledge that its war in Iran is the least popular war at such an early stage in the history of public opinion polling.

The administration is blaming the media for the unpopularity of the war, so their answer is to use their power to threaten broadcasters.

Trump’s FCC Chair Brandon Carr posted on X on Saturday:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news. When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

The “landslide victory” Carr was referring to was Donald Trump's in 2024. Even though Trump did not win by a landslide, and the corporate media spent much of the campaign working on Trump’s behalf by refusing to mention his felony convictions, the 1/6 case against him, or Trump’s theft of classified materials.

Carr’s comments are making it clear that the FCC is a partisan instrument to do Donald Trump’s bidding, and no longer acting in good faith for the American people.

It is not Carr’s job to promote “trust in the media,” whatever that is. Carr’s job is to implement the law.

Carr does not have any power over cable networks or the internet, but his comments are trying to create a chilling effect across all media.

The administration wants the media to be afraid to tell the truth about the Iran war.

The media isn’t the reason why the war is unpopular, and even if all the broadcast networks spread propaganda, the popular opposition is likely to keep growing.

The Parnas Perspective, News and Commentary: Trump Attacks Media Coverage of Iran War After Privately Acknowledging He Thought Tehran Would Capitulate Instead of Closing the Strait of Hormuz, Aaron Parnas, right, March 14, 2026. President Trump has privately acknowledged to his staff that he did not expect Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.

He believed Iran’s government would quickly capitulate. That did not happen. The strait has become a central pressure point in the conflict, global energy markets are reacting, and the war is proving far more complicated than the administration anticipated. At the same time, Trump is increasingly lashing out at the media over coverage he believes is biased.

Meanwhile, investors behind the TikTok deal are paying the U.S. government 10 billion dollars tied to the administration’s role in executing the agreement. Laura Loomer is also facing backlash internationally after being called out in India for posts widely criticized as racist and Islamophobic.

 

Donald Trump attacked Maggie Haberman (author of the book Confidence Man and a longtime reporter forthe New York Times) in a post, calling her a “sleazebag writer” and saying he may add her and other reporters to his Florida lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing them of publishing false stories about him.

Rajdeep Sardesai criticized Laura Loomer for remarks about Kamala Harris, Indians, and immigrants, calling them “brazenly racist and Islamophobic” and condemning the comments as offensive toward immigrant and Indian communities.

According to the New York Times, investors backing a U.S.-controlled version of TikTok — including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX — are set to pay a $10 billion fee to the U.S. Treasury for the government’s role in arranging the deal championed by Donald Trump and led by JDVance, an unusually large government charge tied to resolving national-security concerns over TikTok’s former Chinese parent ByteDance.

 

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Kennedy Center’s President Leaving After Tumultuous Year, Adam Nagourney and Julia Jacobs, March 14, 2026 (print ed.). What We’re Covering.

• Kennedy Center: Richard Grenell, a close ally of President Trump who was installed to run the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (shown above), is leaving his position after a tumultuous year that included an exodus of artists and audiences from the Washington cultural center. Mr. Trump said Mr. Grenell was being replaced by Matt Floca, the center’s vice president of facilities operations. Read more ›
• Powell Inquiry: A federal judge blocked an attempt by the Justice Department to issue subpoenas to the Federal Reserve as part of its investigation targeting the central bank’s chair, Jerome H. Powell. The judge wrote that there was “abundant evidence” the government’s action was designed to “harass and pressure” Mr. Powell into yielding to Mr. Trump’s wishes to lower interest rates or resign. Read more ›

Mr. Trump announced Mr. Grenell’s departure from the center, which will soon close for two years of renovations, in a post on social media on Friday afternoon.

“Ric Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done,” Mr. Trump wrote.

The president said Mr. Grenell, right, would be replaced by Matt Floca, the center’s vice president of facilities operations. Mr. Trump said Mr. Floca “has helped us achieve tremendous progress in bringing the Center to the highest level of Excellence!”

Mr. Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany, is stepping aside as the center prepares to close on July 4. Mr. Trump announced the shutdown after months of headlines about boycotts by patrons and high-profile artists, including the composer Philip Glass, the Grammy-winning banjo player Béla Fleck, the San Francisco Ballet and the traveling production of “Hamilton.”

He leaves behind an institution that is drastically changed from a year ago, when Mr. Trump installed himself as chairman of the center and filled the board with loyalists as he moved to put his imprint on the center, including what appeared on its stages. The president went on to insert his name into that of the center, which opened in 1971 in tribute to John F. Kennedy.

The upheaval at a traditionally nonpartisan institution, where Republicans and Democrats have over the decades sat side by side for opera, theater and orchestra performances as well as black-tie gala events like the Kennedy Center Honors, set off a storm in the cultural world.

The Washington National Opera, a cultural pillar of the center, announced that it was moving out because of a decline in attendance and an edict from Mr. Grenell that all productions had to show how they would break even before the curtain raised. (Operas rarely make a profit from ticket sales alone, relying instead on contributions.)

The National Symphony Orchestra continued to perform at the Kennedy Center, often to many empty seats, but last week its executive director, Jean Davidson, announced she was leaving. She previously had been a public advocate of the orchestra’s staying put but said then that she did not “see how I could be effective as a leader in the current climate.”

Mr. Floca is stepping in as the center moves from offering arts programs to construction and rebuilding, an extension of the kind of work he was doing in his previous positions.

On Friday, Mr. Trump posted two renderings of the future Kennedy Center online and said that it would be “the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the World!” It is not clear, however, whether performers and audiences will return as enthusiastically, much less what it will look like after the project is completed.

New York Times, Judge Rules Lawmaker Must Be Allowed to Join Kennedy Center Board Meeting, Zach Montague, March 14, 2026. A judge ordered that Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat, be given access to planning documents and have the chance to oppose changes to the center at a board meeting next week.

A federal judge in Washington on Saturday ordered that Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, be granted more information and be allowed to participate in a planning meeting about the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, temporarily resolving a minor standoff with President Trump.

The ruling gave Ms. Beatty a window into the president’s goals for remaking the center in his own image, after dozens of performers canceled shows in protest and patrons worried about a proposed multiyear closure of the performance space.

Ms. Beatty was designated an ex officio member of the board of the Kennedy Center and has used that role to fight against changes to the institution as Mr. Trump asserts more control over its governance.

The center’s board is scheduled to meet on Monday, though Ms. Beatty argued that the purpose of the meeting had not been explained, and that she had been kept out of the loop.

On Saturday, Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the Federal District Court in Washington agreed that Ms. Beatty needed to receive a more thorough accounting of plans and be allowed “a meaningful opportunity to lodge her dissent” at the meeting, “and not be categorically barred from speaking.”

She has said that she plans to attend and voice her opposition to Mr. Trump’s proposals to overhaul the performing arts center.

Judge Cooper wrote that the secrecy surrounding the project and the agenda on Monday appeared hard to square with the scale of the president’s stated ambitions.

“These are exceptional circumstances, both in the potential immensity of the announced work on the Kennedy Center and the manner in which most of its trustees have been sidelined from one of the more consequential decisions in the institution’s life span,” he wrote.

Ms. Beatty has also asked the court to issue an order barring Mr. Trump from redeveloping the site, arguing that her job on the board was to be a steward of the center. Judge Cooper has not yet considered that request.

Mr. Trump has told performers and staff that he intends to transform the space into a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex.”

In a 37-page opinion, Judge Cooper laid out a list of documents — including budgets and planning reports — that had to be sent to Ms. Beatty within 24 hours, “to the extent they exist.” He added that the government’s claims in the lawsuit that no plans had been finalized, just four days before the board could meet to approve them, “borders on preposterous.” 

New York Times, Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online, Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, March 14, 2026 (print ed.). A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.

The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online.

The New York Times identified over 110 unique A.I.-generated images and videos from the past two weeks about the war in the Middle East. The fakes covered every aspect of the fighting: They falsely depicted screaming Israelis cowering as explosions ripped through Tel Aviv, Iranians mourning their dead and American military vessels bombarded with missiles and torpedoes.

Collectively, they were seen millions of times online through networks like X, TikTok and Facebook, and countless more times within private messaging apps popular in the region and around the world.

The Times identified the A.I. content by checking for both obvious signs — such as depictions of buildings that do not exist, garbled text and behaviors or movements that defy expectations — and for invisible watermarks embedded within the files. The posts were also checked with multiple A.I. detector tools and compared with reports from news organizations.

A sophisticated new wave of A.I. tools makes the fakes possible, enabling nearly anyone to create lifelike simulations of war that can deceive the naked eye for little to no cost. Similar content has spread in other conflicts, including the war between Ukraine and Russia. But this war has multiple fronts, and that has led to a proliferation of fake content since the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, according to experts.

“Even compared to when the Ukraine war broke out, things now are very different,” said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar. “We’re probably seeing far more A.I.-related content now than we ever have before.”

 March 13

Stars and Stripes, U.S.Pentagon plan expands oversight of Stars and Stripes, limits content, Rose L. Thayer, March 13, 2026. A March 9 memo affirmed the independence of the publication while announcing new restrictions. 

The Pentagon has released a modernization plan for Stars and Stripes that affirms the publication’s independence while expanding Defense Department oversight, introducing new restrictions on content and transitioning away from a print publication.

An eight-page memo, dated March 9 and effective immediately, limits the use of wire services, bars comics and other syndicated features and states that content must be consistent with “good order and discipline,” a phrase borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The memo is the first formal explanation since Pentagon Press Secretary Sean Parnell said in a Jan. 15 social media post that the Defense Department intended to “refocus” the news organization “from woke distractions that syphon morale.”

On Friday, Parnell in a statement provided the first direct comment to the organization since Jan. 15. He said the department is “returning S&S to its original mission: an independent news source for service members stationed overseas that is by the warfighter and for the warfighter.”

Parnell said the effort includes “a transition from print to digital, transition to uniformed staff at locations outside the continental U.S., and other efficiency measures that will eliminate redundancies and ensure smart use of DOW resources.”

Stars and Stripes staff currently includes service members on one- to three-year assignments who are mentored by civilian journalists. The service members are typically trained by the services in public relations.

Parnell did not answer questions about how his office is coordinating with the news organization to implement these changes or if the decisions are based on any formal review or evaluation of Stars and Stripes operations.

No coordination

Stars and Stripes Publisher Max Lederer told U.S.-based staff of the memo Thursday and said he would begin meeting with the organization’s leadership to discuss implementation of the memo.

Lederer said he has not been contacted directly by anyone from the Pentagon about the changes, despite reaching out to them. The memo, which was sent to Pentagon leaders and combatant commanders, was written without Stars and Stripes’ input.

Stars and Stripes was not notified about publication of the memo, which was found during a search on a DOD website.

“It is unlikely that the Pentagon was aware of the extensive modernization that Stars and Stripes had already begun,” Erik Slavin, Stars and Stripes editor in chief, said in a statement Thursday. “Over the past year, the changes to our digitally produced news and information have resulted in significant increases in pageviews, engagement and subscribers.”

Reader feedback and real-world usage drove the efforts, said Slavin, who became the organization’s top editor late last year after more than 20 years stationed with the company in Japan, Iraq, South Korea and Germany.

Business operations and funding remain largely unchanged by the memo.

‘A threat to the First Amendment’

Press freedom advocates said the memo shifts authority over content decisions in a way that risks undermining the newsroom’s independence.

“This clearly shows that the Pentagon is trying to increase its influence over content decisions at Stars and Stripes,” said Timothy Richardson, program director of journalism and disinformation for PEN America, a nonprofit that protects free expression.

“That’s a threat to the First Amendment, certainly, and the independence that the Congress has long guaranteed for the newsroom,” he said Thursday after reviewing the memo.

PEN America and five other press-freedom organizations sent a letter to Congress last month in support of Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence.

Stars and Stripes, which is owned by the Defense Department, was first published by Union troops during the Civil War and has been published continuously since World War II. The newspaper publishes print editions overseas and a U.S. weekly edition. It distributes to combat zones as needed.

Its website and other digital offerings have gained readership among troops stationed across the U.S. and among veterans.

The news organization has been threatened with closure over the years but has repeatedly garnered support from veterans and bipartisan members of Congress.

The Pentagon in January withdrew a federal regulation that underpinned the mandate set by Congress for Stars and Stripes to provide independent journalism to the military community under the principles of the First Amendment.

The new memo confirmed that Stars and Stripes’ editorial operations are “independent of the military chain of command, military public affairs activities or other external influences,” but makes no mention of First Amendment freedoms.

It moves the defense secretary’s public affairs office into an oversight role. Previous guidance gave it an administrative role to help with funding, military manning and other regulatory steps. It also calls for an advisory board of Defense Department personnel.

Content overhaul

The memo bars purchased content on the assumption that all service members overseas have online access to all commercially available news on their own. Exceptions for purchased content can be approved by Parnell, according to the memo.

Stars and Stripes uses wire services to provide more complete world coverage of interest to the military community.

Jacqueline Smith, Stars and Stripes’ ombudsman, said wire services add value because they fill gaps and make a news outlet a “one-stop shop.”

“A complete newspaper should include national sports and entertainment ...,” she said. “Stripes does not have the resources to do its own reporting in those areas. Yet sports and entertainment contribute to the morale of troops.”

Losing this “will reduce the quality and breadth of information available to readers,” Slavin said.

The memo calls on Stars and Stripes to be a “‘hometown-style’ publication for the increasingly niche U.S. military community” and says it “should” republish content created by the Defense Department public affairs offices with a label describing its origin, though it grants the publisher latitude to determine whether such content serves readers’ needs.

The memo does not specify which publications should include public affairs content.

“We have no plans to commingle military public relations offerings with our independent reporting,” Slavin said. “Stars and Stripes remains committed to balanced and accurate reporting on behalf of the military community we serve.”

Other changes require the ombudsman to send information bound for Congress through the Defense Department Legislative Affairs Office.

“The House Armed Services Committee created the independent position in 1990-91 with the requirement the ombudsman report to the committee on matters of importance to maintaining Stripes editorial independence,” Smith said. “If that report must go through the Pentagon’s legislative affairs staff, then there is no assurance it would be complete and unchanged and there would be no opportunity to ask the ombudsman questions.”

The memo also bars reporters from requesting public records through the Freedom of Information Act in an official capacity and prohibits the organization from publishing “controlled unclassified information.” This label has often been used to limit the release of information under broadly defined terms.

Last year, the Pentagon asked all reporters working within the building to sign a pledge that included a similar demand. Dozens of journalists turned in their access badges, while a new group of reporters signed the agreement and replaced them.

“The obstacles that the Pentagon continues to throw in the way of credible reporting are growing, and [the memo] is another clear example of that,” Richardson said. 

March 12 

New York Times, Pentagon Bars Photographers From Briefings on Iran War, Erik Wemple, March 12, 2026 (print ed.). The decision is the latest move by the Pentagon to restrict access inside the department for journalists.

In its first briefing after the United States attacked Iran, the Pentagon welcomed photographers from news outlets including Bloomberg, The Associated Press, Getty Images, Reuters and more.

But the Pentagon has since enacted strict limits that bar access to photographers from news organizations, the latest move by the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth to restrict press access.

The Pentagon said in a statement that it made the change for photographers to use the space in the Pentagon’s briefing room “effectively.”

“Photographs from the briefings are immediately released online for the public and press to use,” the department said.

Mr. Hegseth has taken an adversarial stance toward the news media since his first days of running the Pentagon. He proposed denying access to a reporter from NBC News from the Pentagon, then removed several news organizations from their on-site workstations. Months later, he curtailed the unescorted roaming privileges of journalists within the complex.

And last fall, Mr. Hegseth presided over the adoption of new media restrictions that allow the Pentagon to determine whether reporters pose “security risks” that justify revoking their press credentials. Rather than sign the document, dozens of reporters surrendered their credentials, and a new set of largely pro-Trump commentators and influencers took their places.

The Times in December sued the Defense Department over the policy, calling it a violation of the First Amendment. In a hearing on that suit last Friday, David Schulz, a lawyer representing the Pentagon Press Association, said that before a briefing early last week, Pentagon officials invited the new press corps to attend. “And then they realized none of those people could really get the information out to TV networks and others since they didn’t have a camera,” Mr. Schulz said.

The Pentagon then requested placement of a pool camera for the major TV networks, Mr. Schulz said. The network pool camera has been at all three Pentagon briefings on the Iran war.

The Times is among the outlets whose photographers have been excluded from the latest briefings.

“As The Times has long said: there is a clear importance and public service to allowing journalists to report fully on the U.S. military,” The Times said in a statement. “This includes photojournalists, who deserve access and credentialing to attend Pentagon briefings.” 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Sing, Goddess, of the Fury of Trump!, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, March 12, 2026. The wartime president is focused on footwear.

Way back in June 2024, Andrew wrote that “one awkward thing about Trump discourse today is that all the vile things about him suck up so much oxygen that it can be hard to make space to talk about the ways in which he’s merely very stupid.”

We thought about that this morning—and about how it’s now become a government-wide phenomenon—when we encountered this Deadline headline: “Kash Patel Confirms UFC Fighters Will Train FBI Agents This Week, Calling It a ‘Historic Opportunity.’” What a time to be alive. Happy Thursday.

March 3

 

Larry Ellison, hard-right owner of major media properties with his son, David (New York Times photo).

The Contrarian, Opinion: The Paramount/Warner Bros. Merger Is Not What a Free Press Looks Like, Neera Tanden, right, Center for American Progress president and CEO, March 3, 2026. The takeover is a threat to our economy and our democracy. State Attorneys General can stop it.

Americans should be alarmed by the nearly $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery that allies of the Trump administration are currently rushing to the finish line. If the merger goes through, Americans will pay more for less, thousands of workers will likely lose their jobs, and two of the country’s most important newsrooms will fall under the control of a billionaire who has already begun censoring journalists on behalf of the Trump White House. State attorneys general have the power to stop it—and they should.

Consider just the economic case against the deal. Three months after the Ellisons officially took over Paramount, the company announced it would hike subscription prices by as much as 50% on Paramount+, its flagship streaming service. If Paramount is allowed to acquire Warner Bros., too—the owner of HBO Max, CNN, and a massive content library—the resulting mega-corporation will likely have the market power to increase prices even further, lay off workers at these services, and force streamers everywhere to accept fewer options and worse programming.

And it’s not just streaming. This deal would cut the number of major film studios from five to four and bring two of America’s major news properties, CNN and Paramount subsidiary CBS News, under the same roof. Under 2023 federal guidelines, mergers that significantly increase concentration in already concentrated markets are presumed illegal. This one would do just that—twice over.

The antitrust concerns with the Paramount/Warner Bros. deal also have grave implications for our democracy. Paramount’s CEO, David Ellison, and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, are close to the Trump White House and to President Trump personally. David Ellison attended the State of the Union as a guest of Trump stalwart Lindsey Graham. Trump has indicated that he backed Paramount’s acquisition bid (without mentioning the company by name) and that he wants CNN sold and its leadership changed. And the Ellisons have already demonstrated exactly what they are willing to do with the media properties they control.

After acquiring CBS News, David Ellison installed conservative pundit Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief, where she promptly began gutting stories critical of the administration. Weiss forced 60 Minutes, one of the most trusted investigative programs in the country, to delay a segment investigating the administration’s deportation regime. As the Ellisons prepared to take operational control over Paramount, the Trump administration approved the sale after the company paid $16 million to settle a legally dubious lawsuit brought by Trump himself. And, during the same period, the company canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—one of Trump’s most prominent critics—just two days after Ellison met with FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who has openly weaponized his agency’s power to target Colbert specifically.

 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

The Trump administration, and President Trump individually, are bent on exercising more control over CNN. The Wall Street Journal reported last December that David Ellison promised administration officials he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if his takeover bid succeeded—and Larry Ellison even talked to the White House about firing CNN hosts Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, “whom Donald Trump is said to loathe”. Trump met privately with Ellison twice in February; days after one of those meetings, the Department of Justice began an investigation into Netflix, Paramount’s chief rival for the Warner Bros. acquisition, for alleged anticompetitive practices. And, in December, Bloomberg reported that Ellison’s bid is being financed with billions from investment funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi—all countries that would happily use their leverage over an American news organization to gain favor with the Trump administration.

If the deal goes through, two pillars of American journalism will be controlled by a hard-right billionaire who already has a track record of suppressing credible reporting, silencing dissent, and slanting the news at media properties he owns. That’s not a free press; that’s a media working in service of the state. Nor can we count on federal regulators to scrutinize the deal for either its effects on competition or on freedom of speech. Under this administration, independent agencies and antitrust enforcers work to protect Trump, not consumers.

When, in another country, the leader’s closest political allies buy up media properties that then became less critical of the leader, we recognize that for what it is: crony capitalism and corruption.

Thankfully, the Paramount/Warner Bros. deal isn’t just a federal question. The states, via state attorneys general, have the authority to challenge anti-competitive mergers like this one. This state-level approach has real precedent: In 2024, Washington State sued to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger, winning an injunction from a state court. If state AGs can stand up to two of the country’s largest grocery chains to protect consumers, they can certainly do the same for two of the country’s largest media and entertainment corporations.

This is a precarious moment for American democracy and the free press it relies on. The Trump administration and its allies are willing to use the heavy hand of government to further their political, economic, and cultural goals, and the usual checks-and-balances of our federal system have proven unable to stop them. That’s why state attorneys general need to step up, use every legal tool they have, and scrutinize this deal. Both a free market—one without monopolies—and our democracy depend on it.

Neera Tanden is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and the CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. She was previously the Domestic Policy Advisor to President Joe Biden and director of the Domestic Policy Council, overseeing some of the administration’s signature achievements, including efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs and expand health insurance coverage.

March 2 

 

False Flag via The Bulwark: Commentary: MAGA Already Hates Trump’s Iran War, Will Sommer, March 2, 2026. Less than seventy-two hours into Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, the pundits and podcast hosts who make up his base of support are revolting. That’s a problem for Trump, since these disaffected pro-Trump personalities can sway his most dedicated fans, many of whom are already wary of another military quagmire in the Middle East.

DESPITE HIS PRESIDENTIAL campaign promises to put America first, Donald Trump didn’t seem to upset his media allies too much when he bombed Iran last June, or when he sent Delta Force to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.

But those engagements were limited, free of American fatalities, and didn’t appear to produce much in the way of immediate consequences for Trump or the country. Even white nationalist Nick Fuentes became an old-school Monroe Doctrine imperialist.

Trump’s latest attacks on Iran this weekend, however, have given rise to a much more negative reaction in right-wing media.

After a quick flurry of support for the initial strikes (with even some self-professed America-firsters reversing themselves and supporting the attacks), the mood became much more dour.

Megyn Kelly, on her Monday show, said she had “serious doubts” about what the White House was doing in Iran. Appearing on Kelly’s show, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested Trump has gone insane—adding that Trump’s oft-repeated statement about not knowing if he’ll get into heaven raises questions about his state of mind and competency.

“We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country, and who in the hell are these decisions being made for, and who is making these decisions,” Greene said.

Recent White House visitor Tucker Carlson, arguably the most outspoken war opponent still in Trump circles, announced on his show Monday that Trump had been duped into the war by Israel.

“This happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” Carlson said in a video Monday slamming the attacks. “This is Israel’s war.”

Curiously, Carlson barely mentioned Trump by name in his video, perhaps hoping to preserve his relationship with the administration. After Trump alluded to reported Iranian attempts to kill him, Carlson wondered whether Israel had faked that intelligence to draw Trump into an attack.

“Maybe it doesn’t show that, because this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence—and other foreign countries’ intelligence, but certainly by Israeli intelligence,” Carlson said.

Carlson wasn’t alone on the right in speculating about—or outright leveling accusations about—whether Trump went to war for Israel. And amid the recriminations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided to confirm exactly that, saying on Monday afternoon that the United States attacked because an impending Israeli strike on Iran would have precipitated Iranian attacks on American bases. This was met with groans by right-wing pundits.

“So we are at war for Israel,” wrote the Hodge Twins, a pair of twin brothers who are popular MAGA influencers. “Thanks for confirming.”

Support our coverage of the right, the far-right, and the far-out right—sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today:Subscribed

FOR SOME RIGHT-WING CRITICS of the operation in Iran, such as Carlson, their skepticism is in keeping with longstanding opposition to military adventurism abroad. But it also could have been informed by news events. By Sunday, it had become clear that the administration was expecting the Iran bombing to continue for weeks, and that at least three U.S. service members had already died (today, that count rose to six). After a New York Times poll found just 21 percent of Americans supported the attack, Steve Bannon declared the results “brutal.”

That left even reliable Trump boosters to try and find innovative ways to continue to support the president while signaling concerns about his Iran policy. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles limply declared that Trump would be like George W. Bush, but somehow better.

“Initially it was, ‘Bush had the wrong idea,’” Knowles said on his show. “Now the argument would be, ‘Well, Bush might have had the right idea, but he did it poorly.’”

This idea that the Trump administration, not generally known for its competence, will succeed in a domain where past American administrations have failed has caught on. Pundit Will Chamberlain said conservatives worried about a forever war in Iran should just realize Trump won’t fall into that trap, somehow:

At this point, the best-case scenario for Trump is that his supporters aren’t really concerned about Iran and want Trump to go back to focusing on economic issues. Breitbart’s Matt Boyle, perhaps the most diehard Trump sycophant in the entirety of MAGA media, posted on X that callers to his radio show didn’t care about Iran. Boyle even noted that he was trying really hard to highlight the Iranian strikes for his audience. And yet, nothing.

“Just no energy on the Iran issue at all,” Boyle wrote.

That’s not to say the war doesn’t have its backers. Conservative pundits who have closely aligned themselves with American support for Israel, like Laura Loomer and Fox News host Mark Levin, have been supportive.Subscribed

But other Trump allies find their energy for the war already starting to flag. One challenge is that the administration isn’t giving them much to work with.

Boosters of the 2003 Iraq invasion had months of talking points to draw on. By comparison, this administration hasn’t explained—at least coherently—exactly why the war is necessary or what its goals are. Charlie Kirk lieutenant Andrew Kolvet, for example, said he had heard Iran was working on dirty bombs—but, he wondered, why hadn’t the Trump administration bothered to say that?

Federalist cofounder Sean Davis, typically a doctrinaire Trump supporter, similarly griped on X that the White House hadn’t done anything to explain the war.

“The lack of any coherent message seems to suggest the lack of any coherent objective,” Davis wrote.

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh has been one of the right’s most outspoken critics of the war, saying Trump’s allies who are still backing the attacks are blindly placing their faith in the man.

“They [the administration] could have reasons for doing what they’re doing that I don’t know about or understand. But that is also the exact argument we heard during COVID,” Walsh wrote on X, putting it in terms that must sting for the Trump team. 

The Contrarian, Opinion: An Illegal, Unjustified War Underscores Danger of Media Consolidation, Jennifer Rubin, right, March 2, 2026. We need diverse, critical news coverage more than ever.

Donald Trump launched another illegal war over the weekend, throwing out patently false justifications for a war of choice. Fortunately, CNN was among those with swift, accurate, and aggressive coverage.

But what if CNN were reduced to a captive of Trump’s billionaire buddy, David Ellison? That’s what lies ahead, unless Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. is stopped. And it can be.

Media industry coverage at the end of last week by and large treated the announced Paramount/CBS takeover of Warner Bros. as a done deal. Reports too often seemed to skip past the significant legal barriers to the merger, preferring to go straight to the panic. Certainly, if the merger goes through, the new mega-conglomerate will further consolidate an industry already overly consolidated. Even more ominous for democracy, the merger would put another news outlet known for exacting coverage of breaking foreign events, CNN, in the hands of a Trump-friendly billionaire.

However, the deal is not done. Defenders of democracy and advocates of competitive markets are already digging in, and they deserve public support from Americans rightly concerned about the growing power of unaccountable oligarchs who control an increasing slice of our economy and dominate our politics.

No doubt, the fix is likely already in with Trump’s corrupt Justice Department to rubber stamp the merger, but DOJ is not the only hurdle. Most importantly, our federal system provides another avenue to contest the deal. (UK and EU regulators will also get to weigh in.)

Fortunately, within hours of Ellison’s announcement, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, in a statement released on a platform ingested by another Trump billionaire pal (Elon Musk), wrote: “Paramount/Warner Bros. is not a done deal.” He added, “These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny — the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review.”

State antitrust litigation has become a robust, viable alternative to the feds. George Mason Law Review in 2022 explained: “State antitrust regulators have brought dozens of large cases over the last twenty years in areas from telecom mergers to complex pharmaceutical cases.” The article continued that while individual cases used to be the norm, “many cases are now brought as multistate actions incorporating large groups of attorneys general joined into one litigation that is filed in federal court under the Sherman or Clayton Act.”

Bonta, as he has in a host of other cases brought against the Trump regime, may well find partners among other active Democratic attorneys general.

Bonta was hardly alone in expressing concern. Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya added, “One family is about to control CBS, CNN, HBO, and TikTok. They’ll buy WBD with $24 billion in money from the Saudis, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. To win over Trump, they canceled Colbert, blocked a CECOT investigation, and blocked [James] Talarico. Much more will follow. Block this rotten deal.” Consider how an outlet with heavy investment from Middle East countries might be less than independent in its coverage of nuanced wars involving those very countries.

Democrats on Capitol Hill also have a role to play. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was exactly right to lay down a marker and elevate the merger to a critical election issue. “Paramount should enjoy its growing news monopoly while they have it because when Democrats win back power we are going to break up these anti-democratic information conglomerates,” Murphy said. “All of them.”

Antitrust is not usually a sexy subject, but given public animosity against big business and big tech specifically, this issue’s time may have come. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Adam Schiff (D-Cal.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) all blasted the proposed deal.

Warren, a longtime antitrust warrior, questioned whether the bidding for Warner Bros. was rigged:

A Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. merger is an antitrust disaster threatening higher prices and fewer choices for American families. What did Trump officials tell the Netflix CEO today at the White House? A handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want. With the cloud of corruption looming over Trump’s Department of Justice, it’ll be up to the American people to speak up and state attorneys general to enforce the law.

If Democrats win control of one or both house, they will be able to subpoena records, conduct hearings, and propose legislation to slow down or block merger mania.Subscribed

The head-snapping consolidation of entertainment and news, coupled with billionaire Trump-suck ups’ acquisition of news properties, has transformed the media landscape. This did not begin with Trump, but the added ingredient of oligarch capture now poses an existential threat to entertainment diversity and news independence — while introducing the potential for foreign interference and manipulation of our news and entertainment.

As disturbing as entertainment monopolies may be (fewer outlets will pay lower wages, charge higher prices, and neglect markets deemed “too niche”), the gravest danger to democracy is allowing corporations and oligarchs beholden to the president (i.e., friendly or compromised by fear of regulation or retaliation) to have a stranglehold on news coverage. (Strongmen in Italy and Hungary took precisely this path.)

CNN soon may be cheerleading every regime-change war, putting MAGA toady Scott Jennings in the anchor chair, and canning legitimate news people (e.g., Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash). You don’t even have to use your imagination. CBS head Bari Weiss’s blocking 60 Minutes’ CECOT report and her cringeworthy tweet sneering at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his critique of the illegal war tells you how far CBS has fallen — and likely where CNN is headed.

How long before tenacious Kaitlan Collins gets yanked from the White House beat or every guest and panelist is an inveterate MAGA liar? If CNN recently has been too accommodating to Trump (e.g., the ridiculed town hall, a presidential debate without factchecking), that coverage many soon seem like aggressive journalism by comparison to oligarch news.

Of course, Ellison could decide to shutter either CNN or CBS entirely. But even if CNN survives in some form, Ellison/Weiss control would quickly destroy its credibility, leaving viewers outside the MAGA cult with few choices. Creating a national news desert may be autocrats’ goal.

Status, Media News: CNN’s Cosplaying Correspondent, Oliver Darcy, March 2, 2026. Scott Jennings pushed a dubious White House talking point on Iran to millions, only for CNN’s actual reporters to knock it down—an episode that drew blowback inside the network, Status has learned.

On Sunday evening, CNN published a report pouring cold water on a claim anonymously peddled by the Trump administration that had ricocheted across MAGA Media.

The story revealed that, in closed-door briefings with congressional staff, Pentagon officials acknowledged that Iran was not planning to launch an unprovoked strike on U.S. forces in the Middle East. The reporting must have made for uncomfortable reading for CNN’s resident MAGA pundit, Scott Jennings (shown at right in a Gage Skidmore photo).

Earlier in the weekend, Jennings blasted the claim out to his nearly one million followers on X, asserting that senior Trump administration officials had told him “that credible intelligence indicated Iran planned preemptive missile strikes against US military targets in the region, and against civilian targets as well.” In Jennings’ own telling, “Failure to act would’ve resulted in mass US casualties.” His post was shared more than 13,000 times and racked up over five million views, according to the platform’s analytics.

Behind the scenes, Status has learned that the episode did not sit well with many of CNN’s actual journalists. Jennings, who often cosplays as a reporter while wrapping himself in the CNN banner, is a paid talking head, not a reporter. According to multiple people familiar with the matter…

Celebrating the Censor: The White House Correspondents’ Association is facing criticism after Donald Trump said he would attend this year's annual dinner where the organization offered to welcome him as an "honoree."

In a Truth Social post, Trump stunned many when he announced, "In honor of our Nation’s 250th Birthday, and the fact that these 'Correspondents' now admit that I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country, the G.O.A.T., according to many, it will be my Honor to accept their invitation, and work to make it the GREATEST, HOTTEST, and MOST SPECTACULAR DINNER, OF ANY KIND, EVER!"

In a statement of her own, WHCA President Weijia Jiang said, "We're happy the president has accepted our invitation and look forward to hosting him." Suffice to say, coaxing the president into attending by designating him as some sort of "honoree" is sure not to sit well with many members

Futurism, Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes, Maggie Harrison Dupré, March 2, 2026. Benj Edwards is no longer working at Ars Technica following an AI controversy that angered readers.

March 1 

Status, The Sunday Spotlight: The Trouble Covering Tehran, Natalie Korach, March 1, 2026. As U.S. and Israeli forces launch deadly strikes on Iran, the inherent challenges of covering the country are exacerbated by recent newsroom cuts, social media distortion, and a White House prone to telling lies.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Americans watched the war unfold through footage captured by journalists embedded with troops across the region. Two decades later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign correspondents from U.S.-based networks raced to Kyiv and other areas of conflict, broadcasting live as missiles struck Ukrainian territory. But when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran over the weekend, there were few, if any, Western journalists in the country to document the damage firsthand.

In a nation largely closed to Western media and with broadly limited internet access, the conflict is unfolding as something of an information black box, forcing news organizations to cover one of the most consequential military escalations in years largely from the outside. Adding to the challenge: Whether they can trust pronouncements coming from a Trump administration that has exhibited few compunctions about lying, from the president on down; and the degradation of social media, especially X, which is no longer a reliable source of information in breaking news situations.

Major television news networks and newspapers tasked with covering the war are having to piece together events from government statements, grainy videos circulating online, and reports from Iranian state media. In an era where many news organizations have been forced to scale back foreign bureaus and reporting resources—most notably the recent and devastating cuts at The Washington Post—the conflict is quickly becoming a test for media, exacerbated by the fact that Iran remains one of the most difficult places on earth for journalists to operate safely.

The geographic spread of the reporting team at CNN, the U.S. network with arguably the most foreign reporting resources, illustrates the challenge. The network has reporters fanned out across the region—Erin Burnett, Nick Paton Walsh, and Jeremy Diamond in Tel Aviv, Nic Robertson in Riyadh, Becky Anderson in Abu Dhabi, Paula Hancocks in Dubai, and Clarissa Ward reporting from Erbil in northern Iraq. Elsewhere across cable news, Fox News had Trey Yingst reporting live from Tel Aviv, Nate Foy on the ground in Cyprus, and Lucas Tomlinson in Istanbul. But none appeared to be inside Iran as of Sunday afternoon.

The New York Times is similarly mobilizing its global newsroom to cover the unfolding conflict. A spokesperson for the paper told Status that “hundreds of journalists from across The Times' global newsroom–in New York, Washington, London, Seoul and a large and growing reporting team on the ground in the region–have been coming together to produce comprehensive coverage of every aspect of this military action.”

But few news organizations still possess the global infrastructure to support half a dozen or more reporters monitoring the situation on the ground in neighboring countries. Years of budget cuts have thinned the ranks of foreign correspondents in the region across the industry. At The Post, recent layoffs hit international coverage particularly hard, with the paper’s entire Middle East desk laid off. In January, Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati, who had been covering Iran, publicly appealed to owner Jeff Bezos on social media alongside colleagues, noting that she had spent months covering developments inside the country and wanted to continue the work. The appeals to Bezos to save the foreign reporting staff went unheeded.

“If I were The Washington Post right now, I’d still want international journalists,” Ian Bremmer wrote on social media, where many experts called attention to the terrible timing of The Post’s retrenchment during this moment of crisis abroad. Spokespersons for The Post did not respond to requests for comment, but the paper’s rolling coverage of the conflict dominated its homepage all weekend.

 

Though she has retired from acting, Christina Applegate (here in front of her home) appeared onstage at the Emmy Awards in 2024 (Photo by John Shearer via Getty Images).

New York Times, Christina Applegate Planned to Burn Her Journals. She Made a Memoir From Them Instead, Elisabeth Egan, March 1, 2026. Christina Applegate was not going to meet in person, no matter how many times I promised to be flexible if she had to cancel because of a flare-up of her multiple sclerosis.

It was Zoom or bust, which was fine because Applegate, 54, the Emmy-winning star of “Married … with Children” and “Dead to Me,” among many other series and movies dating back to her 1972 debut on “Days of Our Lives,” turned out to be an impeccable virtual host.

Before we started talking about her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, Applegate set the scene in her bedroom in Laurel Canyon, where she reclined against a tall headboard wearing a black T-shirt, a crescent moon necklace and a floppy topknot.

“I’m scared,” Applegate said as conversation turned to her book, coming out from Little, Brown on March 3. “I’m probably going to cry.”

Applegate has long been known as a fast-talking funny girl but, as her Cyndi Lauper-inspired title indicates, “You With the Sad Eyes” is unlikely to be accompanied by a laugh track.

Funny, furious and profane, “You With the Sad Eyes” finds the TV star facing childhood trauma and reflecting on the limits imposed by illness.

The book focuses primarily on Applegate’s first three decades and includes multiple accounts of abuse beginning when she was 5 years old.

There was the neighborhood “caregiver” who forced Applegate to perform oral sex on her. (“This is where the story darkens almost to black,” Applegate writes.) Her mother’s boyfriend, who picked up Applegate by her hair and threw her against a wall. (He also facilitated her mother’s drug addiction, she writes.) And finally Applegate’s own boyfriend, who slammed her head against the floor with such force that the hairdresser on “Married … with Children” had to get creative to mask the swelling.

As Applegate said, “I went to work and it was funny. But I went home and — not funny.”

New York Times, DealBook: Lloyd Blankfein on Trump, Epstein and Life After Goldman Sachs, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Feb. 28, 2026. In a wide-ranging interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, Goldman’s former C.E.O. discussed his life and new memoir.

If there’s one thing to say about Lloyd Blankfein, it’s that he rarely holds back — and when he lets loose, he has a wicked sense of humor (which sometimes gets him in trouble).

As C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018, Blankfein shepherded the firm through a brutal public reckoning after the financial crisis, often serving as the primary lightning rod for the world’s critics. In his new memoir, “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs,” Blankfein finally shares the raw reality of that climb, and of surviving cancer while steering the world’s most influential — and scrutinized — investment bank.

New York Times, Justice Thomas Bemoans Incivility as Security Prompts Cancellation of In-Person Speech, Ann E. Marimow, Feb. 28, 2026 (print ed.). The justice participated remotely in a closed-door session of a legal conference, a reminder of the heightened threats facing jurists in recent years.

During a closed-door session of a legal conference this week, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed concerns that the Supreme Court faced increasing polarization, incivility and security threats, including one that apparently led the justice to appear at the event remotely instead of in-person as planned.

In rare remarks, Justice Thomas told a crowd of lawyers and students gathered at American University’s law school that he had hoped to attend the event but that a security risk had forced him to alter his plans, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times.

“I apologize for having to change things, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t endanger anyone by my mere presence,” he said, appearing from the Capitol Hill office of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, without specifying the security concern.

“At the same time, I encourage you not to follow the example of the things that have happened that prevent us from being together,” the justice added.

The unusual episode offered a reminder of the heightened threats facing judges — including the justices — in recent years, as well as of the wall the Supreme Court has often erected around the justices, who do few interviews and make only periodic public appearances.

All nine justices have received increased security since the leak in 2022 of the court’s draft decision to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion. Since then, threats against judges of all kinds have risen, particularly as President Trump, his advisers and his allies have harshly attacked the legitimacy of the jurists who rule against the administration.

Justice Thomas’s remarks to the conference this week were closed to the news media “due to an agreement between our organization and Justice Thomas’s team,” according to an official with the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, the event’s sponsor, a legal organization named for an early 20th-century Mormon leader and prominent lawyer.

In addition to Justice Thomas, the group’s two-day conference drew academics, high-profile lawyers, Mormon Church leaders and Trump administration officials, including Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.

Before the event, student groups had expressed opposition on social media to the justice’s planned appearance, circulating messages asking, “Why is Clarence Thomas Speaking at AU?”People who attended the conference on Thursday afternoon said a group of about a dozen who appeared to be students had gathered outside the venue to protest the justice’s appearance and the Trump administration. They carried placards with the message “No Kings.”

It was not clear whether the protest was the security concern that prompted Justice Thomas to cancel his in-person appearance. A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. In general, the court does not comment on the justices’ security.

From the university’s perspective, there was a plan and a team in place to deal with any potential demonstrations.

Camp Mystic, a nearly century-old Christian summer camp for girls in Texas devastated by floods that swept away dozens of campers at night with scant warning. Some said the Trump Administration's firing of some 600 employees of the National Weather Service this year may have contributed to the lack of warning (New York Times photo-graphic).

New York Times, After the Tragedy of Camp Mystic, a Rift Among Families That Won’t Heal, Ruth Graham, Updated Feb. 25, 2026. The camp has been the foundation of an invisible network of status and power in Texas. Now, following the flood, that social web is beginning to fray.

Like many Texas women who spent their girlhood summers along a certain stretch of the Guadalupe River, Carla Smyrl cries these days when she talks about Camp Mystic.Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“My whole life has been influenced by this place,” Ms. Smyrl said over a cup of tea in Dallas. “Once a Mystic girl, always a Mystic girl.”

Starting in 1976, she spent nine years as a camper and five as a counselor at the all-girls retreat, sent her three daughters to camp, and then worked for more than a decade as Mystic’s liaison to families in Austin, where she lives.

On July 4, 27 campers and counselors died in heavy flooding, along with the camp’s longtime executive director.

The disaster was shattering to Mystic’s thousands of alumnae, even if they hadn’t set foot there for decades.

For many, the flood was a moment to draw on a tight network of lifelong relationships that has long been a core part of the Mystic mystique. Within the first hours and days, there were text chains, prayer services, old photos shared on private Facebook pages, and teary alumnae gatherings, including one at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. (Laura Bush is a former Mystic counselor.)

It was a reminder that in Texas, camp is not just a way to while away the sticky hours of a Southern summer, but the foundation of an invisible network of status and power.

Going to Mystic places you in a “social web,” as one former counselor, Laura Beth Calvert, put it, that leads to the right college, the right sorority, the right husband, the right private preschool for your children, and then right back to Mystic.

But more than seven months after the flood, that social web is beginning to fray. In September, the camp’s longtime owners, the Eastland family, announced they would partly reopen this summer, a move vocally opposed by most of the parents of the victims, who have united under the name Heaven’s 27. Soon after, multiple Heaven’s 27 families filed lawsuits against the Eastlands, claiming gross negligence in both long-term emergency planning and in their actions on July 4.

Mystic is now facing mounting pressure from elsewhere in the state. On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sent a blistering letter asking the Texas Department of State Health Services not to issue a new license to the camp, noting that he would not be comfortable sending his grandchildren there. (A lawyer for the camp said that it was in compliance with all safety laws, and that Mr. Patrick had rendered a political verdict before a state investigation had begun its work.) 

Feb. 27

 

Media mogul Larry Ellison (New York Times photo).

New York Times, Tech, TV, Movies and News: Ellisons on Brink of Colossal Empire, John Koblin and Brooks Barnes, Feb. 27, 2026. If Paramount can close its deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, Larry and David Ellison will influence nearly every corner of news, entertainment and tech.

As little as a year ago, Larry Ellison, at 80 years old, appeared to be winding down his long career as a tech mogul. And his son David Ellison owned a lone Hollywood company, and a rather minuscule one at that: Skydance Media.

But now the two are on the brink of overseeing an empire that touches nearly every corner of news, entertainment and tech.

If the Ellisons close their deal to fold Warner Bros. Discovery into what is now Paramount Skydance, as they are poised to do after Netflix abandoned its bid on Thursday night, the family will control companies as powerful and varied as CBS, Oracle, CNN, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures and HBO.

Add in Oracle’s recent 15 percent stake in the venture that controls the American arm of TikTok, and their holdings would rival those of the Murdoch family at the height of its powers. In the 2000s and 2010s, the patriarch, Rupert, oversaw a major Hollywood studio, the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, the FX cable network, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Sky satellite television service in Europe.

Even without TikTok and Oracle, the Ellisons will have assembled a collection of Hollywood properties that, while smaller, puts them in the orbit of superpowers like Disney.

Here is a look at what the Ellisons could control if Paramount Skydance — formed when Skydance merged with Paramount in August 2025 — ultimately closes on its deal for Warner Bros. Discovery:

Oracle

The $430 billion database software giant is main source of Larry Ellison’s fortune of about $175 billion. The company, which he founded, works closely with major companies, including OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on data centers that can run and deliver its technology to consumers. Mr. Ellison serves as Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer. The company had $58 billion in revenue last year, a 9 percent increase from 2024.

TikTok

As of last month, Oracle controls 15 percent of the joint venture that operates TikTok, the enormously popular video app, in the United States. Oracle’s stake is as high as that of any of the other investors, which include Silver Lake, an investment company, and MGX, an Emirati investment firm. The venture has licensed the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm from ByteDance, and it will also have the ability to moderate content in America.

CBS

Even in the diminished state of broadcast television, CBS, which the Ellisons took over with the Paramount deal last year, remains a powerful weapon. The network owns marquee sports rights to the N.F.L., the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament and the Masters golf tournament. With prime-time hits like “Tracker,” “Survivor” and “Matlock,” the so-called Tiffany Network has ranked No. 1 among the broadcast networks for years. David Ellison has publicly called it “a remarkable asset.” 

CBS News

The Ellisons promised major changes to CBS News, one of the country’s most decorated news organizations, after they purchased Paramount last year. “60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning” remain among the most popular TV series in broadcast news. In October, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss, a critic of traditional news companies, as its top editor. She has since appointed a new “CBS Evening News” anchor, Tony Dokoupil, who has gotten off to a bumpy start, and she postponed a “60 Minutes” report that was critical of the Trump administration, drawing accusations of political interference.MoviesImageA white water tower bearing the WB logo of Warner Bros. rises at the far end of a street between studio buildings.Warner Bros. Discovery had initially agreed to sell most of its business to Netflix.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

HBO Max

Simply: HBO remains the crown jewel of premium television. The network, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, has won the best drama award at the Emmys eight times in the last decade, dominating well-heeled rivals like Netflix, Apple and Amazon. The network has been on a roll lately, with a surprise hit medical drama, “The Pitt,” as well as its latest “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” HBO is led by long-tenured executives, including its chairman Casey Bloys. Add in one of the most enviable premium libraries in TV — “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Veep,” “The Wire” — and another surprise in “Heated Rivalry,” a show HBO Max licensed from Canada for very little money, and it will be a boon for the Ellisons.Cable Networks

Cable viewership and revenues have plummeted, but the Ellisons are betting they can wring some life out of them. Paramount Skydance already owns MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and BET. Coming with the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition: HGTV, the Food Network, Discovery, TLC, Adult Swim, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, TBS and TNT.

Paramount Pictures

Hollywood’s fourth-place movie studio in 2025, with roughly $565 million in domestic ticket sales, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Paramount has struggled to compete in a franchise-focused movie business; most of its big properties, including “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek” and “Transformers,” have been overworked and need reinvigorating. Paramount’s library includes more than 4,000 films, including “Top Gun,” “The Godfather” and “Grease.” The 65-acre Paramount lot has some of Hollywood’s biggest soundstages and production facilities, including a 900,000-gallon water tank for aquatic scenes. 

Paramount+

After taking over Paramount, Mr. Ellison promptly enlisted Cindy Holland, one of the key architects of Netflix’s original programming strategy, as the head of Paramount+, which has 79 million subscribers. Paramount+ is home to Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman,” “Tulsa King,” “1923” and “Lioness” dramas, as well as the U.F.C. and the “Star Trek” universe. Paramount has rights to Mr. Sheridan’s future TV output through the end of 2028.

CNN

The self-branded “worldwide leader in news” may have diminished ratings and declining revenue, but it remains a hugely influential news source with a very big newsroom. The network, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, has more than 3,000 employees worldwide, and a strong bench of talent that includes Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Kaitlan Collins and John King.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. is Hollywood’s second-biggest trove of movie properties after Disney. Its franchises include “Harry Potter,” “Batman,” “The Conjuring” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Warner Bros. also owns cartoon characters like Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones and Bugs Bunny. The studio’s library contains more than 10,000 movies, including “Casablanca.” (Through an acquisition in the 1990s, Warner’s library also includes other classic films like “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.”) The 110-acre Warner lot in Burbank, Calif., has more than 30 soundstages.

New York Times, Pentagon Standoff Is a Decisive Moment for How A.I. Will Be Used in War, Adam Satariano, Julian Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, Feb. 27, 2026. The Pentagon’s contract dispute with Anthropic is part of a wider clash about the use of artificial intelligence for national security and who decides on any safeguards.

The fight between the Department of Defense and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has ostensibly been about a $200 million contract over the use of A.I. in classified systems.

But as the two sides careen toward a 5:01 p.m. Friday deadline over terms of the contract, far more is at stake.

Amid the legalese and heated rhetoric are questions being asked globally about how to use A.I., what the technology’s risks are and who gets to decide on setting any limits — the makers of A.I. or national governments.

Underlying it all is fear and awe over the dizzying pace of A.I. progress and the technology’s uncertain impact on society.

“Something like this dispute was inevitable,” said Michael C. Horowitz, who worked on A.I. weapons issues in the Defense Department during the Biden administration. “Because the technology is advancing so quickly, we’re having these debates now. A.I. has moved from being in a niche conversation to something really at the center of global power.”

The clash centers on the Pentagon’s use of a classified version of Anthropic’s A.I. model, Claude. The company wants to embed safeguards in its technology to prevent its use for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop.

 

New York Times, Investigation: Elon Musk’s Secret Web of Companies in Texas, Kirsten Grind, Susanne Craig and Alex Klavens, Produced by Leo Dominguez, Feb. 27, 2026. The megabillionaire was tied to about 90 companies in the state, which he uses for everything from paying nannies to buying land to supporting Donald Trump’s re-election, according to a Times examination.

In 2020, Elon Musk announced he was moving to Texas from California and embarking on a personal austerity campaign to strip his life of belongings.

“I am selling almost all physical possessions,” he posted on social media. “Will own no house.”

But in the years since, Mr. Musk, 54, has quietly built an empire of more than 90 companies and other legal entities in Texas, which have amassed a vast collection of assets, according to an examination by The New York Times.

The secretive network offers a glimpse into just how central one of the world’s richest men, who has a net worth of more than $650 billion, has made Texas to his operations and ambitions. More than 50 of his at least 90 companies there are subsidiaries or other entities affiliated with his business empire, such as the rocket company SpaceX and the electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as his nonprofit Musk Foundation.

But The Times identified at least 37 companies that appeared to be largely for Mr. Musk’s personal use. Among them was one that owns two multimillion-dollar condominiums totaling more than 7,000 square feet in the Austin Proper Hotel, with sweeping views of downtown. Other companies managed planes that Mr. Musk uses for private travel and a portfolio of more than 1,000 acres of land, which when combined is bigger than Central Park in New York. The lines between Mr. Musk’s business and personal interests are often blurry, and some of the companies most likely served both purposes.

The Times’s examination also offers a window into how Mr. Musk used private companies to support Donald J. Trump during the 2024 election. Tapping these companies to cover the expenses of a super PAC is highly unusual, campaign finance experts said, and ended up obscuring how money was being spent because they are not subject to the disclosure requirements of super PACs.

The vehicle that Mr. Musk frequently turned to is one that many of the ultrarich use: limited liability companies, which are designed to shield owners from legal and financial risks, as well as public scrutiny. Whatever Mr. Musk’s intent, the effect of using these companies has been to disguise how he is spending his money.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:The Midterms Can’t Come Soon Enough, Staff report, Feb. 27, 2026. ANTHROPIC STAYS THE COURSE:

Anthropic isn’t backing down. Yesterday, we covered the Defense Department’s remarkable and head-scratchingly contradictory threats against the makers of AI platform Claude, which is currently the only AI platform used by the military in classified settings. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted Anthropic to drop its objections to Claude being deployed for purposes of mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems; if it refused, Hegseth warned, the Pentagon would either make Anthropic cooperate by invoking the Defense Production Act or do the exact opposite: cancel its Anthropic contracts and ban all DoD contractors from working with them, too.

In a statement last night, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced that the company would not abandon its red lines. “Some uses are simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do,” he wrote in a statement. “It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider.”

The letter, which is worth reading in full, was a reminder of just how few AI capabilities Anthropic is trying to keep off the table. Amodei doesn’t even object to fully automated weapons systems in principle; he just argues that the models aren’t yet reliable enough to entrust them with so heavy a responsibility.

How the Defense Department will respond remains to be seen. So far, they’re taking it with all the tact and grace you’d expect. “It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex,” Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said. “He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”Subscribed

NETFLIX BOWS OUT: All of a sudden, the great Paramount/Netflix battle over acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery is over. Netflix announced yesterday it would not try to compete with Paramount’s latest, splashiest bid of $31 a share, way up from their opening salvo of $19 a share last September. “We’ve always been disciplined,” Netflix CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement. “At the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”

For months, it’s seemed as though the crucial factor in this bidding war could turn out to be which side the Trump White House decided to bless. On the Paramount side, billionaire Trump allies David and Larry Ellison heavily implied in their pitches to Warner Bros. stockholders that Netflix’s offer would not survive regulatory scrutiny. As recently as this week, Trump publicly threatened Netflix to fire an alumna of the Obama White House from their board “or pay the consequences.” In the end, though, the fight came down to dollars and cents: Paramount was more willing to overpay than Netflix was.

THE WORLD’S STRANGEST BROMANCE CONTINUES: Let no one say Zohran Mamdani doesn’t understand Donald Trump. When the New York mayor made an unexpected trip to the Oval Office yesterday to pitch the president on a housing proposal (shown above), he came bearing two things the president loves: an audacious policy pitch and a shameless appeal to his ego. The AP reports:

Anna Bahr, Mamdani’s communications director, said the mayor’s team created a mock front page and headlines for Trump to look at and demonstrate what kind of reaction new federal housing investments could bring. The mock New York Daily News front page says “Trump to City: Let’s Build”—a riff on the famous 1975 cover that read “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to Gerald Ford’s vow to veto financial assistance to the city. . . .

Bahr said Trump was “very enthusiastic” about Mamdani’s proposal, which would allow 12,000 new affordable homes to be built at Sunnyside Yard in Queens by securing more than $21 billion in federal grants to build a deck over the rail yard site. The mayor’s office estimates that the project could create 30,000 jobs and would be the biggest housing and infrastructure investment in more than 50 years.

“Very enthusiastic” seemed about right, going by the picture:

Even more remarkable was the policy concession Mamdani managed to get immediately. Yesterday morning, ICE officers arrested a student at Columbia University, Elmina Aghayeva, after repeatedly lying that they were searching for a missing child to gain access to her building. Mamdani brought the matter up to Trump, who promised to look into it. Within hours, Aghayeva was released.

 

Block Co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey (Joe Raedel photo via Getty Images).

CNBC, TechOpinion: Block’s layoffs might just be the biggest story of a tumultuous week. Here’s why, Steve Sedgwick, Feb. 27 2026. Block, Jack Dorsey’s payments company, will cut 4,000 of its 10,000 workers as it embraces AI. CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick says it’s “time we got better answers” to questions about what jobs the technology is going to create. “The news from a medium-sized tech payments company might have longer term tremors and be a warning of societal upheaval far greater than other stories of the week.”

Block shares pop more than 20%, announces plan to reduce workforce by almost halfwatch nowVIDEO01:00Block shares pop more than 20%, announces plan to reduce workforce by almost half

In a week where the News Gods have given us a cornucopia of stories, it’s a fool’s game to pick out the biggest one.

Was it Trump’s extraordinary State of The Union? The phenomenal Nvidia results that failed to answer questions over whether the enormous hyperscaler splurge will result in significant profits further down the line? The rising tensions between Iran and the U.S.?

Let me play the fool for a moment, because I think the news from a medium-sized tech payments company might have longer term tremors and be a warning of societal upheaval far greater than other stories of the week.

Block, a $33 billion company, surged in extended trading on Thursday after cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey, best known for cofounding Twitter, told the market he is laying off nearly half his workforce.

He wrote to shareholders that 4,000 of the 10,000 were “being asked to leave or entering into consultation” to leave. Again: That is nearly half his workforce!

Block CFO Amrita Ahuja said the job cuts would position the company “for our next phase of long term growth.”

“We are choosing to shift how we operate at a time when our business is accelerating and we see an opportunity to move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work,” Ahuja wrote.

Job cuts happen all the time, but what Dorsey had to say should be a wake-up call for everyone.

He said he expects other companies to similarly overhaul their workforces as they see more efficiency gains from “intelligence tools.”

Let that sink in: Dorsey expects other companies to similarly overhaul their workforces as they see more efficiency gains from “intelligence tools.”

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” he wrote.

Do the math: 10,000 jobs to just under 6,000 replicated across industries across the nation, across the world.

So a new, growth company, not an old economy business, has just said companies will cut huge swathes of their workforces as new intelligence tools become diffuse.

I keep getting told on CNBC that AI will create new jobs to replace those being lost. I’ve been asking the same question for years now. “What are those jobs? Where are the mass of jobs for the millions whose roles are set to be made redundant?”

And I hear the same old trope every time – “oh those jobs haven’t been created yet.”

 

Vicky Ward Investigates, A Question Congress Must Put To Bill Clinton: Why Did His Aide Work To Discredit The Farmer Sisters? Vicky Ward, Feb 27, 2026 Jim Kennedy, A Clinton Aide, Worked With Epstein And Maxwell To Remove The Sisters And Their Allegations From My 2003 Vanity Fair Article. Why?

Today Bill Clinton is answering questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Unlike yesterday’s farcical hearing with Hillary Clinton, which she rightly turned into an own goal for the Republicans, given that she’d never met Epstein, this hearing matters.

Clinton has insight into how both Epstein and Maxwell wormed their way into the lives of the global elite, which wound up protecting him (consciously or not) from facing justice for decades. He needs to be pressed on all aspects of his relationship with both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell - because, based on my reporting, he was closer to the latter than the former.

However, there’s one new aspect of their relationship that is bothering me: the role of a Clinton aide, Jim Kennedy, in discrediting the Farmer sisters (and me).

I had never heard of Kennedy until a few weeks ago.

But I have discovered that in 2002, when Epstein went behind my back to my then boss Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, the person advising him and Maxwell on strategy, and even composing “letters’ to me and the magazine was Jim Kennedy, a former aide to Clinton’s White House Counsel, who went on to work for the Clinton Foundation. I had never heard of Kennedy until a few weeks ago.

But I have discovered that in 2002, when Epstein went behind my back to my then boss Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, the person advising him and Maxwell on strategy, and even composing “letters’ to me and the magazine was Jim Kennedy, a former aide to Clinton’s White House Counsel, who went on to work for the Clinton Foundation.

WTF? It appears from the above email it was Kennedy who drafted the letter below, then sent to me and to Vanity Fair. I don’t know if I ever received the “revision” mentioned in Maxwell’s email to him. But I do know that it was after the magazine received all these and after Epstein visited Graydon Carter in his office, that the Farmer sisters were dropped. (And, incidentally, I found this note from Epstein to Carter in the files alluding to that meeting and the photographs he provided for the article).

And also:

Congress: Please ask Bill Clinton what the heck he knew about this!

If the Farmer sisters had been included in my story, history would look very, very different.

Feb. 26

 

 

New York Times, Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover, Lauren Hirsch, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Feb. 26, 2026. The move was a stunning development in the long-running corporate battle for the storied media giant.

Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison.

Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer financially attractive.”

“This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” the Netflix co-chief executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said in a statement.

Netflix reached an $83 billion deal in December to acquire a large portion of Warner Bros. Discovery’s business, including HBO and the storied Warner Bros. movie studio. The acquisition was poised to cement Netflix, once a striving outsider to the film and entertainment business, as the pre-eminent juggernaut of Hollywood.

But Mr. Ellison, himself a relative newcomer to the industry whose bid is backed financially by his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, pledged to fight on. Paramount eventually submitted a revised offer of $111 billion, which Warner on Thursday had decreed a “superior deal,” giving Netflix four business days to decide if it would counter.ImageDavid Ellison, the chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Skydance Corp. walks through the U.S. Capitol to the State of the Union address on Tuesday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

As it turned out, Netflix decided not to.

Any purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery will be scrutinized by regulators in the United States and Europe, including the Justice Department’s antitrust division. In an event where Paramount is unable to secure the proper regulatory approvals, Netflix could potentially revive its interest as a buyer.

For now, though, the war for Warner Bros. appears to have been all but decided in favor of Mr. Ellison, a 43-year-old budding mogul who came to Hollywood two decades ago as an aspiring actor and, somewhat improbably, could now control two of the town’s most famed movie studios, along with the prestige television channel HBO and the 24-hour news network CNN.

President Trump broke precedent last year by inserting himself directly into the sale process, saying he would “be involved” in the outcome and offering public commentary about Netflix and Paramount.On Thursday, Mr. Sarandos spent much of the day in Washington at the White House, where he discussed the transaction with aides to Mr. Trump and officials at the Justice Department. 

Feb. 24

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: The Trust Trap: What Jeff Bezos, Bari Weiss, and RFK Jr. Have in Common, Don Moynihan, Feb. 24, 2026. Beware of leaders who promise to "fix" institutions by breaking them.

The formula is pretty simple: People don’t trust this institution, so we need to take charge.

The implication is that once they’re in control, they will rebuild trust.

The reality is that those who complain the most about trust usually have no credible plan to rebuild it. Instead, they use distrust as an excuse to pursue an agenda that weakens the institution they lead, further eroding it’s legitimacy. Call it the “trust trap.”

If you work in media, education, or government, you might recognize the trust trap. Some people — such as those working on election administration, public health, or higher education — have heard it a lot from the people who have been actively undermining trust. You are failing, we will fix it. They don’t deliver because they are either clueless or never wanted to succeed.

Lets take three examples.

Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post

Before the 2024 election, Jeff Bezos explained that people did not trust the media:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Because of that distrust, the Washington Post, which he owns, had to do something different. OK. So what was the new Bezos strategy, and how has it worked out?

Bezos wrote his note was to justify his decision, unprecedented in the paper’s history, to spike an editorial page endorsement of a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

Bezos then up-ended the editorial board and opinion writers, which had been broadly bipartisan, to now focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” The longtime right-wing Post contributor Marc Thiessen was more upfront in saying: “We’re now a conservative opinion page.” The editorial board routinely parrots Trumpist justifications in an era of growing authoritarianism. So much for personal liberties.

Most recently, Bezos oversaw a gutting of The Post, firing more than 300 reporters, including entire teams, such as reporters covering climate change. The Post is now about half as large as it was when he bought it, even as his net worth is 10 times greater, at about $250 billion.

In short, Bezos fundamentally changed the Post. Do people trust it more?

No.

Marty Barron, the legendary editor that Bezos hired to rebuild The Post, was explicit about how his former boss has undermined trust.

The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands. The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall…Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.

More than 75,000 Post readers cancelled their subscriptions after the recent cuts. An even larger number bailed after Bezos killed the endorsement of Harris, but now the decline feels terminal. Bezos does not want a great paper with a conservative opinion page (like the Wall Street Journal). He seemingly barely wants a paper at all.

It’s a remarkable about-turn. As late as 2024, Bezos promised: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Now, he is treating one of the most important American media institutions like an embarrassing child from a previous marriage that no longer fits his lifestyle.

It is not just that Bezos’ investment in The Post is a rounding error on his ever-growing wealth. He now sees it as a risk to that wealth, because it critically reported on a President willing to threaten the Bezos fortune. The refashioning and throttling of the Post is akin to Bezos’ $75 million bribe to the Trump family with the Melania documentary.

Under Trump, Amazon’s tax bills dropped from $9 billion to $1.2 billion even as its profits jumped by 45% to $90 billion. Those are the the kinds of numbers that can reshape people’s political views. But you won’t read about this in The Post, which fired the reporter that covered Amazon.

And here we get to the crux of the problem. There are certainly conservatives and members of the Trump administration who might be pleased with a weakened Washington Post, but they are not going to support the newest version of the paper. The traditional subscriber base of The Post valued in-depth coverage that held their government to account. The Post was the paper that broke Watergate, after all. That base is exiting, and not being replaced by Trump voters.

In terms of trust then, people trust both Bezos and the remnants of The Post less than they did before. Whatever Bezos said about his desire for rebuilding public trust, he has done the opposite.ArticlesPre-Bunking Trump's SOTU Gaslighting of AmericaLincoln Square · Feb 23Pre-Bunking Trump's SOTU Gaslighting of America

Note from the Editor: We originally shared this with a small group of supporters yesterday as part of our “Five-Point Plan To Reclaim Democracy on the Digital Front” fundraising series, but the response was too powerful to keep private. With the need to counter the gaslighting from the State of the Union reaching a fever pitch, we’re sharing it with eve…

Bari Weiss at CBS News

Bari Weiss talks about trust a lot. She told CBS staff “I don’t want to live in an America where there is no trust in our great institutions” and “trust in mainstream news organizations and the legacy press” is at “historic lows, and it’s not hard to understand why.”

Just a side note here: Trust in lots of institutions is broadly declining over time, and the reasons are perhaps less obvious than Weiss will admit.

Weiss, shown at left, might not have the financial clout of Bezos, but she is similarly killing trust in CBS even as she invokes declining trust as a justification for her actions.

She defended her decision to delay the 60 Minutes CECOT prison segment in a memo to employees, saying that CBS News had to do “more legwork” to “win back” the trust of American audiences. She determined the story needed more comment from an administration that had been offered a chance to comment, didn’t, and then didn’t comment again.

So how is this going? Thus far, CBS has been losing viewers under Weiss. Weiss seems to be intent on turning CBS into a version of The Free Press, her publication that has treated wokeism as a far more serious threat to America than Trumpism. The Free Press might be large for a Substack publication, but it is still a niche publication. And the heart of The Free Press was a critique of the mainstream media, not a recipe for rebuilding it.

As CBS viewers suspect Weiss is pulling punches about the Trump administration, they can go elsewhere, but will not be replaced by Fox and NewsMax viewers. A pale copy of the old CBS News or Fox News is appealing to no-one.

Trust in the media may be declining, but neither Bezos nor Weiss have shown any real evidence they can reverse it. Indeed, both have better track records at eroding trust rather than rebuilding it. In both cases, the broad suspicion is that their actions reflect a desire of corporate media to better serve the consolidation of wealth that is happening under a President who has promised a Putinesque oligarchy to tycoons who stay in line.

To win the favor of the Trump administration, CBS paid Trump $16 million dollars on a phony bias claim, pushed Stephen Colbert out the door, accepted a Republican “bias monitor” to approve their programming, and is now cancelling interviews with Democratic candidates. Weiss is not responsible for these decisions, but she symbolizes that ecosystem, the handpicked choice of the new owners of CBS, the Trump-supporting Ellison family. Trump has personally praised that choice, saying of CBS News: “I think you have a great new leader, frankly.”

RFK Jr. and Public Health

Lets take just one example from government. RFK Jr., right, has said “public health system has squandered the trust of our citizens” and that “American people no longer believe the CDC has their best interests at heart” in a Wall St. op-ed entitled: “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC.”

RFK Jr. posted his message about restoring trust in the news outlet of a billionaire Trump supporter as a form of crisis management after he pushed out CDC leadership when they refused to manipulate scientific findings to align with his policies.

So, let me ask you, do you trust the CDC more under RFK Jr.?

Most people don’t. Trust in the CDC had already been declining since the pandemic, mostly driven by Republicans and independents. The decline is continuing under Trump, now driven by Democrats and independents.

Look more closely at the period before and after Trump was elected, and the large loss in confidence among Democrats and Independents is not offset by gains in trust among Republicans. The most recent polling shows that only 47% of the public express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the CDC when it comes to vaccine information, a significant decline. Similar post-Trump election declines in trust are happening for the National Institutes of Health.

In justifying a new federal vaccine schedule for children, RFK Jr. again invoked trust, saying: “This decision protects children, respects families, and rebuilds trust in public health.” But thats not true. Surveys from KFF, the nonpartisan health policy group, found less than half of Americans trust federal health agencies after RFK Jr.’s changes, including when it comes to making recommendations about children’s vaccines.

The more people know about what RFK Jr. is up to, the less they trust the services he oversees. People who have heard about the vaccine schedule changes are about twice as likely to say they will have a negative impact on kids rather than a positive impact. More than half says it reduces their trust in the health agencies, compared to just 14% who say they trust them more.

Political scientists like Dan Carpenter and George Krause have argued that scientific agencies are especially dependent upon their reputation for technical expertise to maintain public trust. As the technical competence of the organization becomes questioned, and the internal processes of the agency appear to be corrupted by politicization, trust collapses.

This is a problem for RFK Jr. because lots of credible technical experts can critique his new policies as departing from the scientific consensus. So if parents do their own research by looking at what medical professionals who treat kids say, they will find that the CDC is now out of step with those professionals.

The evidence on the politicization of science under RFK Jr. is plentiful. He purged vaccine advisory panels. The FDA has also initially refused to review new mRNA vaccines, a regulatory stance that fits with RFK Jr’s long-held personal suspicion of vaccines and mRNA vaccines in particular. Federal websites increasingly no longer reflect scientific standards.

Some of RFK Jr.’s views might be classified as “batshit but sincere” but it is hard to ignore how cynical other positions are. RFK has said he believes the chemical glyphosate cause cancer, and was even a plaintiff’s lawyer in a $289 million verdict against Monsato for using products with glyphosate. But when Trump signed an executive order calling for ramping up production of the chemical, RFK Jr. issued a supportive statement. When Trump introduced work requirements for Medicaid for the first time, RFK Jr. wrote a supportive op-ed in the New York Times for a policy that will mean fewer poor people will have health insurance.

It is hard to Make America Healthy Again when you expose people to cancerous chemicals, and then deny them access to health care. And it is hard to trust in the MAHA movement if such blatant hypocrisies must be accepted to keep RFK Jr. in Trump’s good graces.

This politicization of science is not limited to the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, the Trump administration has recently withdrawn the finding that climate change is a threat to human health and the environment. The science has not changed, but the government’s acceptance of science has. Indeed, President Trump referred to climate scientists as “stupid people,” who produced a finding that “had no basis in fact.”

EPA Commissioner Lee Zeldin doesn’t bother to pretend he is engaged in some project of trust restoration. In this respect, he is at least more more honest than those setting the trust trap. He is not exploiting the good will of people who actually care about institutional legitimacy, and are willing to respond to the concerns of their critics. Indeed, when EPA employees wrote a public letter stating that Zeldin was undermining trust in science and the EPA, they were put on administrative leave.Conspiracists Can’t Persuade the Institutionalists

When Bezos justified the need for The Post to regain trust, he inadvertently acknowledged the cross-institutional nature of declining trust, and the impossible standards that institutions must now live up to.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

I thought about this last week while I listened to a panel of election officials talk about their work and how it had changed since 2020. They now spend more time working on transparency, ethical training, and communication to rebuild public trust they had no hand in damaging. It is not enough for the institutional actor to do their job well and honestly. They are also tasked with persuading the conspiracy theorist, even though the people who believe elections are crooked are operating in a completely different world.

Many have simply given up. About 2 in 5 election officials who were in place in 2020 have left the job by 2024, a rate of turnover that is unprecedented and unsustainable.

Years of independent audits, extensive oversight, and transparency: none of this has been enough for election deniers. The well has been poisoned. Many Americans believe Trump’s conspiracy theories about stolen elections, even as he threatens to take over elections to retain Republican control of Congress. Trump does all of this, while tossing aside transparency guidelines, ethical norms and accountability standards for his own administration. The actions that actually build trust are not of interest to an administration concerned with maintaining power, enriching themselves and enacting revenge.

My sense is that polarization fuels distrust in a couple of ways. One is straightforward. We are more trusting of government when co-partisans are in power.

But there is a second, more ominous problem with polarization and trust that reflects the Trump era. This problem matters not in a pox-on-both-their-houses way, but in a deeply damaging and asymmetric way: Anti-institutionalists, more likely to be on the Republican side, have fueled moral panics and conspiracy theories about a range of American institutions: education, health, elections and the media to name but a few. They use that distrust to take power. But when they’ve taken charge, they lose the trust of those who valued the institution, and cannot persuade their fellow conspiracists that the institution is trustworthy now. They have salted the earth so that no growth in trust is possible.

The use of the trust trap becomes more likely under the conditions we are seeing now: real declines in trust, strategic attack on institutions, and the consolidation of financial and political power. Under those conditions, those wishing to wrest control from institutionalists need a rationale, and the trust trap provides it.

So whats the lesson? Beware people bemoaning declining trust in institutions. Taking them at face value is likely an error, giving them your help a fool’s errand.

It’s a safe bet to assume they don’t understand the underlying reasons for the loss of legitimacy, don’t have a realistic plan to restore trust, but are using it as an excuse to pursue their preferred priorities. In some cases, the people pointing to declining trust have contributed directly to the assault on institutions as critics, and will further weaken organizational legitimacy as failed stewards of the institutions they are charged with leading. Don’t fall for the trust trap.

Feb. 23 

New York Times, Trump Calls on Netflix to Oust Susan Rice From Its Board, Lauren Hirsch, Feb. 22, 2026. The president made the attack as Netflix and Paramount Skydance face a key deadline in a bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery.

President Trump appeared to wade anew into the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, calling on Netflix, one of the suitors, to fire a member of its board, Susan Rice, right.

“She’s got no talent or skills — Purely a political hack!,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media Saturday evening, sharing an X post by the right-wing agitator Laura Loomer. Ms. Loomer’s post quoted Ms. Rice as saying that companies that took “a knee to Trump” would face accountability from Democrats if that party wins a majority in Congress in the midterm elections in November.

Ms. Rice worked in the Clinton, Biden and Obama administrations. She served as the American ambassador to the United Nations and as national security adviser to President Barack Obama and joined the Netflix board in 2018, then left in 2020 to work in the Biden administration, and then joined again in 2023.

Netflix declined on Sunday to comment.

Warner Bros. announced a deal in December to sell a large portion of its business to Netflix for $83 billion, beating an offer by Paramount Skydance to acquire the whole company for $108 billion. Netflix is now seeking federal regulatory approval for the deal, including from the Justice Department.

Paramount has continued to pursue its own bid. It has taken its offer to shareholders and threatened a proxy war. Last week, Warner Bros. reopened talks with Paramount after its latest sweetened offer, giving Paramount until Monday to present its best and final offer. Antitrust experts have raised concerns about both deals.

 

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: The US Olympic women’s hockey team has REFUSED Trump’s invitation to visit the White House after he insulted them! Staff and wire reports, Feb. 23, 2026. It looks like the President won’t be sharing the spotlight with the gold medal-winning Team USA women’s hockey team, who "sincerely appreciate the invitation but "due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games, the athletes are unable to participate,” said the team in a statement.

Obviously, they had to be polite about it, but it’s not hard to figure out why they WOULD’NT want to come.

On top of his authoritarianism, his association with pedophiles, his disgusting racism, his long history of sexual assault and misogyny, he also insulted the team during a phone call with the men’s squad, saying "I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached."

Thanks, Trump, nice to know the women of Team USA are an irritating afterthought despite winning 8 out of the 12 gold medals picked up by Team USA.

 

Trump's Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dillon, lead prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a protest at a Minneapolis church of abuses by federal immigration employees of abusive anti-immigration enforcement tactics.'

Emptywheel, Analysis: Harmeet Dhillon Confesses She Blew Off Her Don Lemon Homework, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Feb. 22, 2026. There’s a line in the response Don Lemon and Georgia Fort gave to DOJ’s bid to delay their trial that likely explains the real reason that Harmeet Dhillon and her lawyers are asking for a delay in their case: DOJ is experiencing “technical issues” with accessing the phones of the nine defendants, which might be another way to say at least some of the defendants have complex passwords for their phones, which can add months to exploiting them.

In their papers and at Mr. Lemon’s arraignment, the Government raised particular concern about the ability to timely produce the “data found in seized cellphones” because of the use of a filter team, id. at 4-5, and because technical issues with accessing the data itself. This case involves, at most, the cell phones seized incident to the arrests of the nine defendants, and data from conduct that allegedly occurred over a single day.

That’s not the excuse DOJ (which was too slovenly to change the title of the document they used as boilerplate) offered, though. They’re claiming that the amount of evidence in this case — described as 2,000 pages of reports!!!! — merits a complex designation.

Moreover, the Government submits that this case involves a large volume of discovery. The Government estimates that discovery will include approximately 2,000 pages of reports and various other documents, plus multiple videos of the incident, BWC videos of St. Paul PD interviews of some church members/victims, photographs, and data from cellphones and social media. The process of reviewing and producing some discovery materials (e.g., data found in seized cellphones) also will be prolonged by the Government’s use of a “filter team” to conduct initial reviews and privilege screens of seized data to ensure that defendants’ rights are adequately protected. Additional discovery materials are still being received. Accordingly, the Government will need additional time — certainly more than seven-days — to process the discovery (e.g., redact, number-stamp, index the discovery, etc.) and provide fulsome and orderly disclosures to defendants.

And if that doesn’t work, DOJ threw in at the end, could they pretty please have another 30 days and then still another 30, on top of the 31 they’ve already had, again hinting that they’ve had problems accessing some of the evidence in this case?

If the Court denies the motion for a complex case designation, the Government nonetheless asks, in the alternative, for an order that extends the deadline for the Government’s initial production of Rule 16 discovery for a period of 30 days, with an extra 30-day period for discovery materials that are not yet possessed by, or accessible to, the Government.

Lemon, left, and Fort’s attorneys (remember, both have a long-time former MN AUSA on their defense teams) mocked the claim that this merited complex case designation, pointing to what gets called a complex trial in the district, including the fraud cases that served as pretext for this invasion.

In recent years, this District has seen cases of unusually massive scope and evidentiary volume, such as the Feeding Our Future cases or the Highs RICO prosecution, each of which warranted complex case designation by mutual agreement of the litigants. Cases like those involved approximately fifty defendants each, millions of pages of evidence, and conspiracies of sweeping temporal and geographic scope. This case has none of those characteristics.

Magistrate Judge Wright recently rejected the complex designation in a case charging five defendants with eight counts related to alleged drug trafficking over at least an eight-month period. See United States v. Alm, et. al., No. 25-CR-289-LMP-EMB, ECF 84 (Sept. 2, 2025). The Court characterized the case as “hardly unusual in this District,” despite the fact that the Government identified substantially more discovery and counts than it has identified here.

The other seven defendants called DOJ’s claim they need more time than they want to prepare for trial “paternalistic.”

When all accused demand adherence to the statutory timeline, the Government may not manufacture “complexity” by asserting that additional preparation time would be beneficial. The statute does not permit suspension of the Speedy Trial clock based on a paternalistic assessment of defense needs that the defense itself rejects.

But the real issue — again from the Lemon and Fort filing — is that DOJ rushed to charge this before investigating. Again, two defense teams with DOJ career prosecutors scold Trump’s legal blow-ins for failing to follow DOJ polices.

The Government provides no explanation (other than its unpreparedness) why it cannot get its house in order. But the Government cannot manufacture urgency and then invoke its own unreadiness as an excuse for delay.

As the Government should know, the Department of Justice’s own internal policies reinforce that prosecutors are expected to thoroughly assess evidence and discovery obligations before charges are brought, as part of the charging decision, not afterward. The Justice Manual’s criminal discovery provisions direct prosecutors to fully understand their obligations under Rule 16, Brady, Giglio, and the Jencks Act and to “consider thoroughly how to meet discovery obligations in each case.” These important policies reflect how the Justice Department itself expects prosecutions to be conducted: investigate first, evaluate the evidence, and then determine whether and how to bring charges. There is nothing in the record before the Court that evinces thoughtful deliberation from the Government about this case. To the contrary, the Government’s backwards approach of charging first and investigating later underscores the points raised—and the relief sought—in Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort’s Joint Motion to Disclose Grand Jury Proceedings. ECF 125.

And the problem may go further than difficulty accessing some of the phones; it may go to why they need to access the phones.

The government needs to show defendants used “force or threat of force or [] physical obstruction” to prove the FACE Act charge, for which there’s at best flimsy evidence, especially from Lemon and Fort.

They need to prove a conspiracy and intent to deprive Cities Church parishioners of their right to exercise their faith to prove the Conspiracy against Rights charge, something incompatible with the purpose of the protest. They might find evidence to support this in phone evidence; or they might find exculpatory evidence. Going to trial without knowing what is there would be reckless.

But they didn’t bother to look for this evidence before they charged it. Instead, Harmeet, especially, simply trolled and trolled and trolled, making false claims about what evidence existed without — she now confesses — having bothered to check what kind of evidence was there.

Feb. 18

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: CBS censors Colbert, bowing to pressure from Trump’s FCC, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Feb. 18, 2026. CBS forbade Late Show host Stephen Colbert from interviewing Texas State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Senator John Cornyn. The incident is a chilling example of how the Trump administration and allied media organizations are colluding to suppress critical coverage of the administration.

Addressing the incident on Monday night’s show, Colbert, shown above at center, said he was also told by CBS’ lawyers not to discuss the decision to spike the Talarico interview. But Colbert, whose show is being canceled in May, ignored that directive.

At issue was the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “equal time rule,” which states that if a broadcast radio or television station provides time to a candidate for political office, it must provide equal time to all other candidates. (The rule does not apply to cable, streaming, or other non-broadcast platforms.) There is, however, an exception to the rule for news coverage and interviews. And, for decades, that exception has also applied to interviews of politicians by talk show hosts.

In a January 21 “Public Notice,” the FCC declared that interviews of political candidates on late night and daytime talk shows would no longer have a blanket exemption. Rather, the FCC would make a case-by-case determination of whether a program was conducting interviews for “bona fide” news purposes or for “partisan purposes, such as an intention to advance or harm an individual’s candidacy.” The notice did not provide any guidance as to what makes a show “partisan.”

Without the exception, airing political interviews would be effectively impossible. For example, there are 15 declared candidates running for U.S. Senate in Texas. Without the exemption, if the Late Show interviewed Talarico for 10 minutes, every CBS affiliate in the country would need to provide 10 minutes of primetime airtime to the other 14 candidates — including those with little support and no chance of victory. Recent polls show Talarico in a virtual dead heat with Cornyn in a hypothetical general election matchup.

“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbert said Monday. “Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.” At a January 29 press conference, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr (R), a Trump loyalis (shown above in an inset with Colbert)t, said the Commission would not grant an exception to the equal time rule for broadcasts it considers “fake news.”

In a Fox News interview, Carr made clear that the rule was targeting Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Carr said that if Colbert or Kimmel did not want to comply with the new requirements, they could move to cable or a podcast, which are outside the FCC’s jurisdiction.

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez (D, shown above at center) noted that the FCC “has not adopted any new regulation, interpretation, or Commission-level policy altering the long-standing news exemption or equal time framework.” She called the Public Notice “misleading” and “an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.” She urged broadcasters to “not feel pressured to water down, sanitize, or avoid critical coverage out of fear of regulatory retaliation.”

CBS, however, is using the Public Notice as justification to censor the broadcast of an interview with a Democratic political candidate. Notably, the network was recently sold to a new owner in a transaction financed by billionaire Larry Ellison, a major Trump supporter. The CEO of CBS’ new parent organization, Paramount Skydance, is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. In October, David Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a conservative pundit, as the new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, CBS denied that it prohibited Colbert from airing the interview.

Not every broadcast network is falling in line. ABC’s The View interviewed Talarico on February 2. An anonymous FCC source then leaked to Fox News that the Commission had launched an investigation into the interview. “Fake news is not getting a free pass anymore,” the FCC source said.Carr turns a blind eye to right-wing talk radio

While the equal time rule applies to broadcast radio as well as television, the FCC’s January 21 Public Notice only mentions broadcast television. Talk radio shows typically lean more conservative, and would likely be forced to include more Democratic guests if the equal time rule was also enforced in radio.

Carr was asked in the January 29 press conference if the new guidance applied to “political talk radio.” Carr noted that while the equal time rule “applies to broadcast radio and TV,” the new guidance “was focused on those TV precedents.”

Carr argued that the FCC “wanted to be very clear” about the precedents for broadcast television because “there had been some broadcast television-related decisions by the FCC over the years, and it had appeared that some in [the] industry had misread, overread, or misconstrued those decisions.” Carr argued that the guidance was not necessary for radio, as “there wasn’t a relevant precedent that we saw that was being misconstrued on the radio side.”

Later in the press conference, however, Gomez reiterated that the equal time rule applies to radio as well. “And I also want to note what the administration is not focusing on, that these rules apply to all broadcasters, television and radio,” Gomez said. Gomez argued that the rules “must be applied evenly to the administration’s friends and critics alike.”How Carr has weaponized the FCC

Since the start of the second Trump administration, Carr has used the FCC as a cudgel to intimidate news organizations and advance the Trump agenda.

On January 22, 2025, Carr reopened an investigation into whether CBS had deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes in October 2024. Carr’s investigation was launched as Paramount, CBS’s owner, faced a defamation lawsuit from Trump over the Harris interview. Paramount was also seeking FCC approval for its merger with Skydance.

In February 2025, the New York Times reported that Paramount executives hoped that settling the lawsuit with Trump would pave the way for the FCC to approve the merger. Ultimately, the lawsuit was settled on July 1 for $16 million, and the FCC approved the merger three weeks later. The approval was granted on the condition that CBS hire an ombudsman to review bias in news coverage and that Paramount and Skydance shut down all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

A few weeks after Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences,” Carr sent a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC, saying that the FCC was investigating its DEI policies. The letter said, “the FCC will be taking fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act and the agency’s EEO rules, including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T have also caved to Carr’s threats and ended DEI programs to secure FCC approval for proposed mergers.

In the last year, Carr has also threatened several other media companies for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration. For example, early in Trump’s term, the FCC launched an investigation into San Francisco radio station KCBS over its coverage of ICE operations in San Jose. According to the AP, the station’s news directors told employees to ensure that the station’s coverage did not anger the FCC.

Carr’s most high-profile threat came in September when he implied that ABC could face punishment after Kimmel made a comment about the murder of Charlie Kirk. On a podcast with MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Carr said, “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Within hours, Kimmel was suspended by ABC, although it was reinstated about a week later.

New York Times, Stephen Colbert Finds a Place to File CBS’s Surprise Statement, Trish Bendix, Feb. 18, 2026.  “I don’t even know what to do with this,” Colbert said about the network’s news release on a scrapped interview with a Democratic politician, before putting the paper in a dog waste bag.

Stephen Colbert addressed the fervor around Monday’s “Late Show” on Tuesday, remarking that he’d said his piece after CBS wouldn’t air his interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative.

“We made some jokes — that’s what they pay me for — and I was ready to let it go, until a few hours ago, when my group chat blowed up because, without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release,” Colbert said. He pulled out a statement issued by CBS on Tuesday, which he called “a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it’s trying to cover.”

“Now, clearly, this statement was written by and, I’m guessing, for lawyers. Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs. But since they seem intent on telling me how to do mine, here we go.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“Fellas, fellas, I am well aware that we can book other guests. I didn’t need to be presented with that option. I’ve had Jasmine Crockett on my show twice. I could prove that to you — I could prove that to you, but the network won’t let me show you her picture without including her opponents. So I guess just … I’ll have to show you this picture of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein instead. They made me do it! I didn’t want to.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“So, we obeyed our network and put the interview on YouTube, where it’s gotten millions of views. And I can see why. Talarico is an interesting guy. I don’t know if he should be the senator, but it was a good discussion. I wish we could have put it on the show, where no one would’ve watched it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“For the record, I’m not even mad. I really don’t want an adversarial relationship with the network. I’ve never had one. As I said last night, in my interview with James Talarico — check it out, it’s on YouTube, it’s pretty good — I said, I said to him I’m grateful to have worked for CBS for the last seven years and worked with George and David and Amy and everyone at the network; the Sheldons of every age, the Matlocks of every sex. I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies. Come on, you’re Paramount! No. No! No, you’re more than that. You’re Paramount+. Plus what? I guess we’re all going to find out pretty soon.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“And for the lawyers to release this without even talking to me is really surprising. I don’t even know what to do with this crap.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, before putting the paper statement in a dog waste bag. 

 

BIG, Analysis of Too Big: Paramount Has a Secret Plan to Buy Hollywood Before the Cops Arrive, Matt Stoller, right, Feb. 18, 2026. Paramount consigliere Makan Delrahim has plans to close the Paramount-Warner deal and do mass layoffs before antitrust enforcers can even file a case.Matt StollerFeb 18 READ IN APP

For a few months now, there’s been a bidding war between Paramount and Netflix to buy Warner Bros Discovery. Netflix seemed to have clinched the deal when the board of WBD accepted their offer. Paramount, which is owned by the billionaire Ellison family, got very nasty about the situation, suing on procedural grounds and trying to get shareholders to revolt. Ultimately, they are going to do what they had to do from the very beginning to win the bidding war - offer more money.

But a contact let me on to something odd about the Paramount approach: the company says it has mostly completed the extensive legal paperwork necessary to acquire WBD. And that’s both very weird and very important, for reasons I’ll get into, because it suggests Paramount’s people believe the fix is in, on their behalf.

First, let’s discuss the bidding war itself. Both the Paramount and Netflix offers are legally problematic, for slightly different reasons. If Netflix wins, it will likely end up killing the theatrical release business, and entrenching its dominance in streaming. European antitrust enforcers are wary of Netflix, as is the Trump DOJ. Paramount has a different legal problem. The case is much simpler, because it’s a combination of two direct rivals going head-to-head in a concentrated market. A merger of Paramount and WBD would include two out of five movie studios and distributors, two major TV studios, two big sports distributors, and so forth. This chart is from TD Cowan.

We know what happened when Disney bought Fox - the number of released movies by 44%. The same thing will happen here, especially considering how many people Paramount is likely to fire. That violates all sorts of merger guidelines, which are the way enforcers think about how the Clayton Act works.

There’s an additional problem for Paramount, and that’s the obvious censorship and cronyism. The Ellison’s are new to owning Paramount, having bought it last year. And in that time, they have taken a number of steps, including firing Stephen Colbert, that are obvious attempts to please Trump. Then this Monday night, Colbert, in his last few months on the job, claimed that CBS, which is owned by Paramount, would not allow him to interview a Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico. As former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya notes, the conspiracy is pretty open.

Now, it’s not an antitrust problem that CBS censored this interview, but it is a media consolidation issue. As I’ve noted, we should repeal the Telecom Act of 1996 and break up these conglomerates, restoring vertical separation between distribution and production of video content and update that for the streaming world. Otherwise, we’re living in a censorship machine.

The way this behavior intersects with antitrust law is that it will change who might want to challenge each merger. A Netflix acquisition brings Trump enforcers and anti-big tech Europeans into play, while a Paramount acquisition likely puts them on the sidelines. At the same time, Democratic state officials will be more likely to challenge a Paramount deal, because of the obvious partisan cronyism going on.

And that’s where the legal strategy of Paramount comes in. The company’s main antitrust lawyer is a savvy and cynical operator named Makan Delrahim. Delrahim is a close confidante of David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, who is financing the deal. And Delrahim’s goal is to get the deal through before enforcers know what hit them.

To understand how requires a bit of a detour into the technical details of merger law. When two big companies announce a merger, they don’t immediately combine operations. They can’t just start moving the furniture, firing people, reordering business lines, and redesigning org charts. Both companies must remain independent, with two CEOs, two CFOs, two marketing departments, and so forth, in case the merger falls apart and they have to go their separate ways. That remains the case until the companies sign a deal, line up financing, get permission from their shareholders, and clear antitrust hurdles.

There are a number of steps to overcoming potential antitrust objections. A merger of big companies must go through what’s called the Hart-Scott-Rodino process. Both companies file a form with the antitrust enforcers offering “such documentary material and information” that would help the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice figure out whether the combination is a violation of antitrust laws.

Once they file that form, there’s an automatic delay of 30 days, during which time the companies can’t merge operations. If enforcers decide to investigate further, they can send a bunch of questions, known as a “second request,” to the two parties. The merger then gets delayed until they parties answer those questions.

Fulfilling that second request is time-consuming and expensive. Corporations will negotiate with the government over the extent of the document requests and search terms, trying to limit the amount of information they have to hand over to minimize exposure to legal risk. There’s a reason for that, monopolization cases can come out of information acquired in the merger process. Once enforcers start poking around in your dirty laundry, they are apt to notice things you didn’t want them to see. So second requests take between a year or two, costing millions or tens of millions in legal fees.

Once a second request is done, the shot clock for the government starts ticking again. At that point, enforcers have to actually file a case and ask a judge to keep the operations of the company separate until the litigation is over. If they don’t, the deal closes and the companies can combine operations. Layoffs start, people get moved around, new projects get green lit.

That doesn’t mean challenging a deal that has already closed is impossible. Technically, there’s no legal difference between undoing a deal rather than preemptively stopping one. But the incentives for the merging parties change once a deal closes. If they are still separate, time works against the merging parties. They will cooperate with the government on document requests so as to to get the process over, get their deal bonuses, and so forth. But once a deal closes, there’s no more incentive to do anything but delay, as they already have what they want, aka a completed merger. In fact, they will work hard to mingle the assets immediately to make it hard to untangle them, and even shut things down.

Delrahim knows how this process works, and so he’s had Paramount do something unusual for an acquiring party. His company has filed an HSR form without signing a merger deal or even winning the bid for the company with whom it is trying to combine. And not only has Paramount filed an HSR form, it has already “substantially” fulfilled the second request for information from the DOJ. That’s astonishing. It means Paramount paid tens of millions to lawyers to comb through documents on a rush job. It also likely implies they did no negotiations whatsoever with the government, and just gave them everything they asked for. I’m told that is unheard of.

Why take such cumbersome and risky steps if Paramount is not even assured victory in the bidding war? Well, there’s a specific timeline involved if they make a cash tender offer. If the Netflix deal falls apart and Paramount wins the bidding war, then the antitrust enforcers have just fifteen days to rush a complaint out to a court to ask to pause the merger.

Now, the DOJ Antitrust Division may still be able to file a case. They have hundreds of lawyers and they know how to challenge mergers. They examined the Disney-Fox deal, the Warner-Discovery deal, they are antitrust enforcers first and foremost. But Delrahim believes, not without reason, that the Trump Antitrust Division will be fine with Paramount buying WBD. He is also likely banking on enforcers being unable/unwilling to comb through all of their documents and put a case together on time, because DOGE slashed the number of capable antitrust lawyers there.

Of course, I’ve never been particularly optimistic about this administration challenging mergers. But there are other possible litigators - state attorneys general, particularly from Democratic states. State enforcement lawyers are not experienced at challenging mergers, especially big ones, they rely on the DOJ to do that for them. There are opportunities here - a savvy state AG could send a civil demand to Paramount and get all the second request data sent over to the Federal government, which is a treasure trove of sensitive information.

Still, a fifteen day crunch to challenge a $90 billion deal is difficult. And while there is a broad anger in Hollywood over the deal, it’s not clear the institutions representing creatives are prioritizing a merger challenge over more prosaic things like bargaining with studios over health care. And so far, key industry leaders, a generally cautious and wealthy bunch, are still weighing on whether to engage. That’s why we’re mostly not seeing Hollywood stars speaking out.

So if the Trump enforcers refuse to challenge the merger, or do some sort of consent decree where Paramount makes promises to release a certain number of films, that erects an additional hurdle to state enforcers. At that point, if the states don’t prepare and file a case very quickly, the deal closes. Then Paramount will own WBD. It will start layoffs, renegotiating terms with theaters and sports leagues, combining streaming properties, and restructuring entities like CNN.

Even if state enforcers bring a case, it will be much harder to win. It could take many years, and in that time, Paramount will effectively have consolidated the industry. Enforcers won’t be asking for a judge to halt a merger, but to break up a company. And judges get very nervous about that.

Moreover, states will have to prove to a judge not only that the deal is illegal, but also that the Federal government was wrong in its analysis of the deal. The last time they attempted such a challenge was in 2019-2020, during the first Trump administration, when states brought a case against the Sprint-T-Mobile merger even as the Federal antitrust enforcers did a consent decree. The judge let the merger happen because he believed the Federal government was more credible than the states.

Oh, and who was the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust when that Sprint-T-Mobile merger happened over state objections? It was a guy named… Makan Delrahim. So that’s the plan. Buy off the Feds, overwhelm and intimidate the states, roll-up Hollywood.

Of course, that plan relies on a number of things to fall into place, including Paramount winning the bidding war and sustaining its financing. If that happens, then what’s standing in the way of a combination of Paramount and WBD is Hollywood power players and Democratic state attorneys general. Now, there are reasons they could challenge, and I know they are paying close attention. But… it’s the Democrats. There are moments when they could actually change their brand to a party willing to take risks for working people, instead of box-checking bureaucrats using tired rhetoric about fighting. This could be one of them.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. 

Feb. 16

 

 

An undated photograph released by the Justice Department shows Stephen K. Bannon with Jeffrey Epstein. Bannon coached Epstein on how to deal with newly surfaced allegations that he was a serial pedophile, documents suggest.

New York Times, Despite Epstein’s Toxicity, Steve Bannon Stood by Him, Texts Indicate, Sharon LaFraniere and Teresa Mondría Terol, Feb. 16, 2026. Mr. Bannon, a MAGA podcaster, developed a seemingly chummy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking. He said it was in the name of getting Mr. Epstein to open up.

Midafternoon in late June 2019, Stephen K. Bannon sent Jeffrey Epstein an excited series of texts. “Dude!!!!!” he wrote. “Is this real Tell me this is real.”

Mr. Epstein had just texted him a headline from The Miami Herald. It reported that victims of Mr. Epstein’s sexual abuse had lost a court battle to nullify a decade-old agreement that protected him from prosecution for those crimes.

Off and on for months, Mr. Bannon, a leader in the MAGA movement and a former top aide to President Trump, had been advising Mr. Epstein on how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial pedophile. Mr. Bannon recommended which lawyers to hire — his own — when to lie low and when he should jump on an opening to push his narrative. He scheduled what the two men called “media training.”

“First we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist,” Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein in April 2019. That was five months after a Miami Herald series exposed how prosecutors had ignored evidence of Mr. Epstein’s crimes.

The three million pages of Epstein-related documents released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30 reveal for the first time the extent of Mr. Bannon’s efforts to advise Mr. Epstein when many of his friends were abandoning him. In the six months before Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged with the sex trafficking of minors in July 2019, Mr. Bannon’s name appears nearly every day in the files, often because the two men exchanged texts.

In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Bannon said his relationship with Mr. Epstein was strictly professional.

“I am a filmmaker and TV host with decades of experience interviewing controversial figures,” he said. “That’s the only lens through which these private communications should be viewed — a documentary filmmaker working, over a period of time, to secure 50 hours of interviews from a reclusive subject.”

He said the film would fully expose Mr. Epstein and “destroy the very myths he created.” A spokesman said Mr. Bannon planned to release the film, now six years in the making, later this year.

Mr. Bannon is one of the biggest political names to be caught up in the latest chapter of the Epstein scandal. Mr. Bannon is a headline speaker at major Republican political events and hosts one of the nation’s top political podcasts. Like many other prominent members of the MAGA movement, he had called for the release of the files pertaining to Mr. Epstein.

A torrent of text and email exchanges show that after Mr. Bannon and Mr. Epstein met in late 2017, Mr. Bannon promised to help Mr. Epstein rehabilitate his reputation. As Mr. Epstein’s legal troubles mounted in 2019, Mr. Bannon helped strategize a defense, the documents indicate.

He told Mr. Epstein several months before his arrest: “we must counter ‘rapist who traffics in female children to be raped by worlds most powerful, richest men’ — that can’t be redeemed.”

A spokesman for Mr. Bannon said his client sought only to ingratiate himself with Mr. Epstein for the documentary. But written communications during the year and a half before Mr. Epstein’s death in custody in August 2019 suggest that far from wary, Mr. Epstein was eager to cater to Mr. Bannon’s wishes and needs.

He shipped Mr. Bannon and his son Apple watches. He offered Mr. Bannon his private jet to fly around Europe, joking: “How does it feel to have the most highly paid travel agent in history?”

He proposed that Mr. Bannon get a full medical work-up in Mr. Epstein’s “private area” at a high-end concierge emergency clinic, telling him that “your medical expenses from a to z have been covered by me.” Mr. Bannon’s spokesman said he never saw Mr. Epstein’s doctor, nor did he fly on his private jet.

As Mr. Bannon promoted himself as a strategist to populist and nationalist political parties abroad, Mr. Epstein tried to help him build connections.

“Whatever you need, I’m in,” he wrote to Mr. Bannon in mid-2018.

A host of prominent figures in the United States and abroad have been tarnished and toppled by the documentation of their contacts with Mr. Epstein in the newly released files. Most recently, Kathryn Ruemmler, a former top Obama administration lawyer, resigned from Goldman Sachs after emails revealed a lengthy friendship with Mr. Epstein.

Mr. Bannon, 72, has faced a string of legal troubles in recent years. The court cases partly explain why the documentary has yet to be released, his spokesman said.

He served four months in prison in 2024 for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify before the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department is now seeking to wipe out that conviction.

An effort to fund Mr. Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico led to charges that Mr. Bannon had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds from contributors. A state court sentenced him to three years’ probation on a fraud charge in February 2025, but Mr. Bannon escaped a trial on related federal charges when Mr. Trump pardoned him just before leaving office in January 2021.

Federal agents had arrested Mr. Bannon the previous year while he was on a yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, who was later convicted in a separate $1 billion fraud scheme. Mr. Bannon was named as a co-conspirator in that case but was not charged.

“Someone has to fund his nonsenses,” Mr. Epstein emailed an associate who asked why Mr. Bannon had allied himself with Mr. Guo.

Mr. Bannon has continued to be a featured speaker at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference and at Turning Point USA, the conservative organization founded by Charlie Kirk. At a Turning Point event last July, he shouted to a crowd, “It’s deeper than Epstein!”

 

Sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, left, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt illustrating his connections to the university, converses with his close friend and attorney Alan Dershowitz, right, a longtmie and now retired law professor at Harvard Law School whose private clients have included Epstein and Donald Trump.

New York Times, Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising, Alan Blinder, Feb. 16, 2026. Professors and presidents are often eager to raise outside cash. Some are now facing blowback after connecting with Jeffrey Epstein.

Their buildings can be architectural wonders. The discoveries made in their laboratories can be spellbinding and lifesaving.

But America’s colleges and universities are chronically searching for money, a reality that brought academic leaders and researchers into both Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit and his inbox. The schools had the prestige to lend him legitimacy. Mr. Epstein had the money to bankroll projects.

It worked well for some, until it didn’t.

Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.

Some schools have spent years trying to distance themselves from Mr. Epstein, donating his contributions and condemning his crimes. But recent document releases from the Justice Department have prompted new recriminations and regrets.

Many academics whose names appear within the Epstein files say they turned to him only because of his money and the possibility that it could underwrite college budgets and research efforts — even if their exchanges came after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor.

“As I have said for years, engaging with Jeffrey Epstein was in service of one agenda, which was fund-raising for Bard,” the college’s president, Leon Botstein, said in a statement.

Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale, wrote in an email that he had only met Mr. Epstein once, “in the context of fund-raising for my lab.”

“We never got any funding from him,” he said, adding, “Like other academic scientists, I am responsible for the financial support of my lab.”

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, said in an email that colleagues had told him about Mr. Epstein, saying that he was interested in science.

“When Epstein invited myself and my wife (who is also a well-known scientist) to have dinner at his New York home with other colleagues, we accepted and we both attended,” said Dr. Damasio, who said he had never received any money from Mr. Epstein

Mr. Epstein’s motives for connecting with college professors and presidents were not always clear. He gathered celebrities and power brokers into his network; a Harvard professor who benefited from the Epstein largess once noted that the financier also collected scientists.

Mr. Epstein rarely followed through with the multimillion-dollar contributions he suggested were on offer, but he drew people in and appeared attentive to academia’s unending quest to pay its bills. Private philanthropy has long been an essential part of higher education’s business model, and some college presidents say they spend at least a quarter of their time fund-raising.

Feb. 14 

 

 

A group of Jeffrey Epstein sex assault and trafficking survivors raise their hands to signal they’ve been ignored by Trump’s DOJ as Attorney General Pam Bondi, shown at right front wearing a gold crucifix as a neck ornament and backed by youthful Justice Department personnel seated to hear rear, refuses to look at the victims during a hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 11, 2026. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt for AFP via Getty Images and Bluesky).

Emptywheel, Analysis: Pam Bondi’s Rap Sheet, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Feb. 14, 2026. Pam Bondi’s DOJ has a longer rap sheet of misconduct than anything that Lemon or Fort are described to have done in the indictment.

On Tuesday, February 10, Joe Thompson filed a notice of appearance to defend Don Lemon,left, against Klan and FACE Act charges in Minnesota. As I wrote here, until January 13, Thompson had been Minnesota’s top public corruption prosecutor and the number two in the US Attorney’s Office; he stepped down because of all the corrupt bullshit that Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dhillon were engaged in in Minnesota.

According to the motion for grand jury transcripts that Lemon and Georgia Fort (the other journalist charged in the case) filed yesterday, also on Tuesday, their attorneys had a video meeting with whoever plans to prosecute this case, at which DOJ opposed the bid to get transcripts.

On February 10, 2026, counsel for Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort met and conferred by video with government counsel and advised of their intent to file this joint motion. The government, through counsel, indicated they oppose this motion.

That explains something I noticed during Pam Bondi’s testimony, which was the following day, February 11: each time she addressed the Don Lemon indictment in the hearing, even when responding to a planned, softball question from Jim Jordan (and more aggressively later in response to someone else), she described that she was limiting herself to the “four corners” of the indictment in a voice just as contemptuous as when she attacked Democrats.

Bondi had exercised no such discretion, limiting her statements to what appeared in public filings, before Wednesday’s hearing. In the interim, I suspected and this seems to confirm, she had been admonished for violating DOJ rules on extrajudicial statements, and she was just as pissy about that as she was about having to respond to questions from Democrats and Tom Massie.

It’s as if Bondi never imagined that DOJ’s conduct — her conduct, and especially, Harmeet Dhillon’s misconduct (who continues to violate DOJ rules on extrajudicial statements) — would be on trial as much as Don Lemon by bringing this indictment.Harmeet Dhillion’s big mouth

As I noted in that post on Thompson joining the team, it was always going to be the case that Abbe Lowell would demand grand jury transcripts to find out what a lawyer reporting to Harmeet, right, said to the grand jury to get it to indict after two judges refused to charge Lemon. It was always going to be the case that Harmeet’s big mouth, in particular, would become an issue.

And parts of this filing track what I expected, with a recitation of that process by which two judges asserted there was no probable cause, as well as a very abbreviated list of public comments from Trump, Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Harmeet, all in the period before Harmeet’s office got an indictment without any line prosecutor.

Perhaps most notably, President Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General (AAG) Harmeet Dhillon, sat for an extensive interview to discuss the matter, while the Eighth Circuit was considering the Emergency Petition for Mandamus. In relevant part, AAG Dhillon explained:

[Don Lemon] is not out of legal jeopardy, and he has lawyered up . . . . We’re gonna pursue this to the ends of the earth. 9 . . .

The attorney general herself was there on the ground and managing this process with my principal deputy, a brilliant young lawyer. And so you know we are not giving up the fight here at all[.]10 . . .

Abbe Lowell, his lawyer, had nothing to do with the magistrate judge refusing to sign off on arresting Don Lemon. So you have to understand that we at the Department of Justice, these days, in the most aggressive and important fights that we’re facing, we’re kind of out-manned two against one. You know, he didn’t even need a lawyer. The magistrate judge was kind of standing in as judge and jury.11

In yet another statement, AAG Dhillon denounced Mr. Lemon’s reporting as “pseudo journalism” unworthy of First Amendment protection.12

9 The DOJ WILL Continue Pushing For Criminal Charges Against Don Lemon, Reveals Harmeet Dhillon, The Megyn Kelly Show (Jan. 23, 2026), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i5xhWd2o2w, at 1:54–2:06.

10 Id. at 5:06–5:18.

11 Don Lemon’s Outrageous “N Word Treatment” Comment and Promises WAY More Arrests, w/ Harmeet Dhillon, The Megyn Kelly Show (Jan. 23, 2026), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylRbkf2umF8, at 1:57–2:23.

12 @AAGDhillon, X (Jan. 18, 2026, 7:21 PM), https://x.com/AAGDhillon/status/2013044166062936417.

The filing argues that includes one misstatement of the law from Harmeet.

AAG Dhillon, in interview discussing the indictment in this case, wholly mischaracterized the law as it relates to journalistic activities:

[I]n my opinion, in a private property house of God, church, synagogue, mosque, whatever, there is only one paramount First Amendment right there, and that’s the right to freely worship. The right to assemble, the right to protest, freedom of the press, etcetera—those have time, place, and manner restrictions on them—you can’t just do anything you want anywhere, even on public property. So here, it’s just like doing it in somebody’s house or in somebody’s business. It’s not protected by the law. If you wear the badge “journalist” or you claim, “I’ve got a microphone, I’m a journalist,” that is legally irrelevant in the statute. 18

Rather than being “legally irrelevant in the statute,” Congress expressly limited the FACE Act so that protected First Amendment expression cannot form the basis of criminal liability. The FACE Act’s rules of statutory construction in 18 U.S.C. § 248, subsection (d) are clear: “[n]othing in this section shall be construed” “to prohibit any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution,” or “to create new remedies for interference with activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution, occurring outside a facility, regardless of the point of view expressed, or to limit any existing legal remedies for such interference.”

18 @AAGDhillon, X (Feb. 3, 2026), https://x.com/AAGDhillon/status/2018710583290315193, at 0:04–0:42 (emphasis added).

Nevertheless, there are several notable things about this filing.

The timing

Start with the timing. When Abbe Lowell, right, asked for grand jury transcripts in the Letitia James case, he did so on the same day as he submitted a motion to dismiss for outrageous government conduct (largely based on Ed Martin and Bill Pulte’s fishing expedition) and ten days after he filed a vindictive and selective prosecution challenge. Here, he (and Thompson and Fort’s attorneys, which include another former public corruption AUSA, Matthew Ebert, though he quit last summer) are starting with the grand jury transcripts. I would be shocked if they don’t eventually file some kind of motion to dismiss based on misconduct.

But first they’re going to attempt to learn how this case ever got charged.

The District

The filing references how things are normally done in the District, capital-D, more than eleven times. It starts in the first paragraph, which describes the circumstances of this prosecution as “never before seen in this District.” [my emphasis throughout this section]

Its conduct has been highly unusual, nakedly political, and inconsistent with practice in this District. Multiple judges considered the government’s “evidence” against Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and declined charges. Undeterred, the government took the prosecution President Trump demanded to a grand jury and obtained an indictment. These circumstances—never before seen in this District, and for good reason—raise serious concerns about the government’s presentation to the grand jury.

Several references describe DOJ’s treatment of Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz: his conclusion, following that of Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko, that there was no probable cause against Lemon, DOJ’s appeal of Micko’s decision to Schiltz and his survey of other judges about DOJ’s attempt to bully him into approving a complaint, followed by DOJ seeking a writ of mandamus without telling Schiltz. [The following are not in the order they appear in the filing.]

This case has an extraordinary and singular procedural history, which includes two judges (including the Chief Judge) in the District of Minnesota reaching the same conclusion: no probable cause existed to charge Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort with the exact same charges as those brought in the indictment. See supra at 3–5.

[snip]

Unsatisfied, the government took the unprecedented step of asking the district court to review this Court’s no-probable-cause determination. Id., Pet. at 4. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz was randomly assigned to the matter. See id., First Letter from Chief Judge Schiltz to Chief Judge Colloton (Jan. 23, 2026) (“First Letter”). Chief Judge Schiltz surveyed every judge in the District of Minnesota and all Chief Judges of the Eighth Circuit and failed to identify a single instance where a district court judge reviewed the decision of a magistrate judge to deny an arrest warrant. See id. at 2; Id., Second Letter from Chief Judge Schiltz at 1 (Jan. 23, 2026) (“Second Letter”).

[snip]

To the contrary, the record before this Court paints a picture of stunning and unremitting irregularity in this case. As described by Chief Judge Schiltz, when the government sought the extraordinary remedy of a writ of mandamus to order the District of Minnesota to issue arrest warrants the Court had previously rejected for lack of probable cause, Chief Judge Schiltz characterized the government’s request as “unheard of in our district or, as best I can tell, any other district in the Eighth Circuit.” First Letter at 2. Chief Judge Schiltz noted that the government had not even granted him “the courtesy to tell me that they would be filing such a petition, nor did the United States serve the petition on” him, and further that the arguments advanced by the government were tantamount to stating that the Court “must accept [its] as true because they said it, and they are the government.” Id. at 1, 3.

There’s the description of DOJ obtaining an indictment with no line prosecutor involvement anyway, along with a footnote cataloging all the times when DOJ’s Civil Rights Division partnered with MN USAO, during the past three Administrations, including the first Trump Administration.

The resulting two-count felony indictment, returned on January 29, does not bear the name of a single line prosecutor from this District’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. That is irregular and represents an unusual departure from the many years’ collaboration between the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Civil Rights Division throughout multiple administrations, particularly in civil rights cases and cases that are notable in the Minnesota community. 15

15 See, e.g., Press Release, Joint Statement of the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota Andrew M. Luger, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Vanita Gupta and Special Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis Division of the FBI Richard T. Thornton (Nov. 17, 2015), https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/joint-statement-united-states-attorneydistrict-minnesota-andrew-m-luger-assistant; Press Release, Three Illinois Men Indicted On Federal Civil Rights And Hate Crime Violations In The Bombing Of Bloomington, Minnesota, Islamic Center (June 12, 2018), https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/threeillinois-men-indicted-federal-civil-rights-and-hate-crime-violations-bombing; Press Release, Justice Department Files Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against Owners Of Minneapolis Area Rental Properties (Sept. 16, 2020), https://www.justice.gov/usaomn/pr/justice-department-files-sexual-harassment-lawsuit-against-owners-minneapolisarea-rental; Press Release, Three Former Minneapolis Police Officers Convicted of Federal Civil Rights Violations for Death of George Floyd (Feb. 24, 2022), https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/three-former-minneapolis-police-officersconvicted-federal-civil-rights-violations-death; Press Release, Justice Department Finds Civil Rights Violations by the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis (June 16, 2023), https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-civilrights-violations-minneapolis-police-department-and-city; Press Release, Justice Department Secures Landmark Agreement with City of Anoka, Minnesota, to End Disability Discrimination in “Crime-Free” Housing Program (May 21, 2024), https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-landmark-agreementcity-anoka-minnesota-end-disability.

There’s a curious reference to this op-ed, written on February 10 (and so after the Lemon indictment) by two guys who quit as AUSAs years ago, referencing chatter they have been hearing about statements made to grand juries.

Two former federal prosecutors with nearly forty years’ combined experience in this District recently framed these mounting concerns about the grand jury process well, saying:

Unfortunately, recent actions by the DOJ demonstrate that the DOJ is wrongfully using the grand jury as a tool in its campaign of retribution and intimidation. We are particularly concerned about reports that federal prosecutors may be intentionally misrepresenting the correct legal standards and circumventing legal procedures, stripping the grand jury of its deliberative function . . . The American public must have confidence that the grand jury remains an independent body of citizens, not an “illegitimate” extension of the executive branch, seeking to gloss over unconstitutional actions by government actors. It is the duty of any person summoned to serve on a grand jury to preserve the grand jury’s independence by applying the law, not rubber-stamping government overreach.21

21 John Marti & Hank Shea, The last line of defense: We the people as a check on government power, Minn. Star Trib. (Feb. 10, 2026), https://www.startribune.com/constitution-democracy-founding-fathers-governmentamendment-jury/601579837.

If Marti and Shea have heard specific allegations, it’s likely that Thompson and Fort’s former AUSA attorney, Matthew Ebert, have too. Possibly even about this grand jury. That is, they may be starting with the grand jury transcripts because they have some very specific reason to do so.

The filing also described several local judgements ruling that DOJ had squandered any presumption of regularity, the normal rule that DOJ is entitled to great deference even when it makes bullshit claims.

Just last week, in this District, a court concluded that “Plaintiffs rebutted the ‘presumption of regularity’ that ordinarily attends public officials’ actions” in a case against federal agencies possessing evidence collected from the scene of Alex Pretti’s death. Minn. Bureau of Crim. Apprehension v. Noem et al., 2026 WL 266463, at *7 (D. Minn. Feb. 2, 2026). And in the wake of Operation Metro Surge, courts in this District have increasingly signaled that the government, under the direction of this Administration, is no longer operating in a manner entitled to any presumption of regularity.

And, finally, it described other irregular practices the Trump Administration has conducted in Minnesota.

More broadly, federal judges in this District are facing a growing onslaught of unlawful and irregular practices wrought by the senior levels of the federal government. See Patin Arevalo v. Bondi et al., No. 26-CV-0396-LMP-JFD, ECF 8 at 3 (D. Minn. Jan. 23, 2026) (“In what is fast becoming a disturbing trend, the Government has yet again violated (and is continuing to violate)” court orders.); Jin v. Noem et al., No. 25-CV-1391- PJS-DLM, ECF 13 at 6 (D. Minn. Apr. 17, 2025)

This focus on how things normally work in this District emphasizes the degree to which DOJ has invaded Minnesota to serve Trump’s demands, rather than guarding rule of law to serve Minnesotans.

It was two days after that meeting before a local attorney, Flavio De’ Abreu — a guy who prosecuted misdemeanors for Minneapolis — joined the team as a Special AUSA.The rap sheet

The last two references to the District appear in a 6-page rap sheet arguing that, “the government is not entitled to the presumption of regularity” that would normally shield grand jury transcripts.

That rap sheet includes:

A page reviewing the treatment of Chief Judge Schiltz and the misconduct of Trump, Bondi, Blanche, and Harmeet The ruling that MN had rebutted the FBI’s presumption of regularity in the wake of the Alex Pretti murder and Schiltz’s ruling cataloging all the rulings ICE ignored Four more MN judges’ rulings that the government has ignored rules A 2-page footnote replicating the list of orders identified in this Paul Friedman opinion An Oregon opinion rejecting one of Harmeet’s efforts to obtain state voting records William Fitzpatrick’s order granting Jim Comey access to his grand jury transcripts A Zia Faruqui order complaining about Jeanine Pirro’s gaming of Federal and Superior grand juries in DC

Several of these abuses point to Bondi’s weaponization of DOJ against Trump’s enemies; others condemn Harmeet’s misconduct, including the intervention in the Alex Pretti case that followed Harmeet’s intervention into the Renee Good case which led to Thompson’s resignation.

But they make it clear — in one of the first documents filed in this case — that Pam Bondi’s DOJ has a longer rap sheet of misconduct than anything that Lemon or Fort are described to have done in the indictment.

Feb. 12

Salon, Commentary: “Hindered by fear”: CBS producer paints picture of Bari Weiss’ “vision” in resignation letter, Alex Galbraith, Feb. 12, 2026. A producer for "CBS Evening News" said network journalists were "hindered by fear" in her farewell letter. 

A producer for “CBS Evening News” worried about the direction the network is taking in a farewell letter to her colleagues, saying that the “excellence” employees “seek to sustain is hindered by fear and uncertainty.”

The letter from producer Alicia Hastey was shared on social media by New York Times reporter Ben Mullin. While Hastey never mentioned Bari Weiss or newly appointed anchor Tony Dokoupil by name, she fretted about the “sweeping new vision” of the Tiffany Network.

“There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” she said. “Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Halsey said that the new era of CBS “pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.” She closed her letter with a nod to legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, quoting his response to the idea that his news coverage leaned too liberal.

“If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism – that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased,” Cronkite said.

Weiss’ tenure has been marked by criticism from CBS employees and the network’s former stars. David Letterman raged that the network’s news division had been “eviscerated by idiots” shortly after Weiss promoted Dokoupil to lead CBS’ flagship news program.

“CBS News is a wreck, it’s just gone!” he said. “Ed Murrow would be broadcasting the blitz of London from the rooftop of buildings in London for CBS Radio. And it was that mentality that drove the integrity of CBS News that has been trampled on, pissed on, and eviscerated by these idiots that have taken it over!” 

Feb. 9

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The NFL Is “Socialist” on Purpose, and It Exposes Republican Economic Stupidity, Thom Hartmann, Feb. 9, 2026. The NFL proves that rules, referees, and “redistribution” are the only way any game, including the American economy, actually works…

Last night’s NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.

But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, “socialism,” and the differences between Republican “free market” nuts and FDR’s re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation’s citizens.

Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the League the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times.

But that’s pretty much exactly what Reagaonics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it’s the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.

For capitalism to work in a way that doesn’t produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.

The NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other, and under what circumstances.

The NFL’s super-socialist regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise up through the ranks in the following season.

It’s much like progressive income taxation and the estate tax, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top. These regulations guarantee the safety and stability of the game itself, and also guarantee that fans of football have a consistent experience, because everybody understands and follows the rules.

That’s not meritocracy; it’s planned redistribution of future resources to maintain league balance. If American public policy worked this way, the millionaire opinion bots at billionaire-owned Fox “News” would spontaneously combust.

The league also pools its television and licensing revenue and divides it equally among all teams: No owner gets richer just because they’re in a bigger market. In a pure “free market,” the Cowboys and Giants would drown everyone else in cash. The NFL says, “Nope, everybody eats.” That’s redistribution by design.

And they impose a hard salary cap so rich owners can’t simply buy championships, and they require owners to spend what is effectively a minimum wage on players rather than hoarding profits. Teams that overspend are punished: that’s collective control of capital to prevent oligarchy, the exact thing conservatives scream about.

NFL teams are also required to spend a minimum percentage of shared revenue on their players. Owners can’t just hoard money; they must reinvest in labor. That’s closer to social democracy than laissez-faire capitalism.

The NFL figured out something America forgot after Reagan: markets only work when rules prevent the powerful from rigging the game.

In other words, the NFL is a regulated market with enforced rules that prevent monopolies, protect labor, and preserve competition. And because of that, small-market teams can win, dynasties don’t last forever, and fans get a fair game.

If the American economy were run more like the NFL, we’d have fewer oligarchs, more competition, and a much healthier middle class.

But imagine if Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, or the other idiots like them who first advised the Reagan administration and now have guided Republicans ever since were to have taken over the NFL.

The teams with the wealthiest owners would always get the best players, and thus would win every game. They might even decide that the team that gave the NFL the most money could have an extra player or three on the field at various times.

They’d assure us that the teams that didn’t perform as well just have to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Perhaps their problem is just that their players are “lazy,” these people would tell us, and the solution is to cut their salaries and reduce the amount of protective equipment they can wear so that they will have a “incentive” to play harder and increase their performance.

Then the richest teams would begin buying the poorer teams, until all the teams are owned by three or four billionaires. Sounds like every industry in today’s America. But conservatives would try to convince you it would create a football paradise, right?

Of course it wouldn’t be a paradise: Fans would stop watching, kids would stop dreaming of playing, and the game itself would collapse under the weight of rigging and unfairness. Not to mention that if the socialist NFL ever actually tried some crazy “free market” stupidity like that, Congress would be holding hearings within a week and the public outrage would be deafening.

But when the same thing happens in our economy, we’re told by Republicans that it’s just “the free market.” We’re told that “monopolies are natural,” that “billionaires are geniuses,” and that working people who can’t get ahead in a rigged system somehow “deserve their fate.”

Politicus USA, News and Commentary: "Melania" Is Officially A Box Office Bomb And Another Trump Failure,Jason Easley, Feb. 9, 2026. The box office for what looks like a bribe disguised as a documentary "Melania" withered and died on its second weekend as the film is cementing its box office bomb status.

Donald Trump has a pattern of cheating to make it look like he is winning when he is actually losing. From bogus right-wing polls to cooked investment numbers that are made up out of thin air, Trump has always been successful at creating the illusion of success instead of actually being successful.

Super Bowl weekend is one of the slowest movie-going weekends of the year. The film industry punts on Super Bowl weekend and focuses on using the Super Bowl to advertise summer blockbusters and future releases.

None of this stopped Jeff Bezos from pushing Melania into hundreds more theaters as the movie spent the weekend showing on 2000 screens nationwide, and the result was a box office decline of 67%.

Politico reported:

“Melania,” from Amazon MGM, added 300 theaters in its second weekend but dropped steeply to $2.4 million in ticket sales, down 67% from its much-discussed debut. The rapid downturn means the Brett Ratner-directed documentary is likely heading toward flop territory given its high price tag. Amazon MGM paid $40 million for film rights, plus some $35 million to market it.

The North American total for “Melania” stands at $13.4 million. Amazon MGM has not released international figures, though they’re expected to be paltry.

Kevin Wilson, head of domestic distribution for the studio, said the movie’s box-office performance “is a critical first moment that validates our wholistic distribution strategy, building awareness, engagement, and provides momentum ahead of the film’s eventual debut on Prime Video.”

That was a nice bit of goalpost moving by the head of distribution, as the point of releasing a movie in thousands of theaters wasn’t to get people to pay for tickets, but to build momentum so that Americans will watch the movie for free on Amazon Prime.

It is either the worst business strategy in history or a total lie. As Jeff Bezos just got done gutting The Washington Post, he has enough money throw $50 million or more down the drain and treat it with the nonchalance that someone who dropped a penny on the sidewalk might.

There are reports of bulk ticket buying, where tickets were sold but people didn’t show up. It is a similar tactic to how the best seller lists are rigged through bulk buying, especially on the right to land conservative books on the best seller list.

Allegations have been made that some members of the military have been forced to go see the movie, and there was the White House and Fox News endlessly pushing the movie to try to save face so that this dud would not look as embarrassing as it is.

The problem with doing a documentary about Melania Trump is that it is a documentary about Melania Trump, a person who manages to be empty, dull, and thoroughly unlikable all at the same time.

A documentary about a First Lady who refuses to live in the White House, or show up to do anything related to being First Lady, would be interesting if that person had any personality or a desire to be honest.

Melania Trump is just like her husband. She’s here for the money, and America is definitely not here to watch a movie about an absentee First Lady who manages to constantly say nothing in the most distasteful way possible.

National Press Club (NPC), NPC Statement on the Sentencing of Journalist and Publisher Jimmy Lai, National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. released the following statement:

“Issuing a 20-year sentence to journalist and publisher Jimmy Lai today is a grave affront to press freedom and the fundamental rights that underpin open societies.

Mr. Lai is not being punished for committing a crime. He is being punished for publishing, for dissenting and for refusing to abandon the principles of a free press. Today’s action sends a chilling signal to journalists worldwide: Truth-telling can be met with imprisonment and accountability journalism carries extraordinary personal risk.

Mr. Lai, the 78-year-old founder of Apple Daily, was convicted under Hong Kong’s national security law in December following a trial conducted without a jury. His publishing activity and public commentary were central to the case. The 20-year sentence handed down Sunday evening equates to a life sentence for Mr. Lai.

Mr. Lai’s case stands as a stark example of how legal systems can be weaponized to silence independent journalism by punishing those who dare to report, publish and speak freely.

The National Press Club affirms unequivocally that journalism is not a crime. The work of informing the public, questioning power and defending democratic values must never be treated as a threat.

The international community must not look away. Governments, democratic institutions and press freedom advocates have a responsibility to speak out forcefully and consistently against the persecution of journalists and to demand the immediate release of Jimmy Lai.

What happens to Jimmy Lai matters not only to Hong Kong, but to journalists and citizens around the world who depend on a free and independent press to safeguard democracy.”

Slate, I Watched the “All-American” Super Bowl Halftime Show. It Was Even More Embarrassing Than You Imagined, Heather Schwedel, Feb. 9, 2026. Kid Rock doing... something.

Just because there’s one very famous story about an underdog taking on a leporine opponent and winning does not mean it worked out that way for Turning Point USA in its quest to compete with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. In fact, don’t insult the tortoise community by bringing them into this. TPUSA has only itself to blame for the utter lameness of its All-American Halftime Show.

The right-wing nonprofit’s decision to offer counterprogramming to the official halftime show followed a wave of conservative backlash over the selection of the Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking artist Bad Bunny as this year’s headliner. Though President Donald Trump has frequently struggled to get big-name artists to perform at events associated with him, he was able to land Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts, and more for his second inauguration, and that was before Nicki Minaj went MAGA. I knew that TPUSA’s show wouldn’t be able to compete with the production value or the star power of the real show, but I had no idea how bad it would be.

About a week ago, the organization announced its slate of performers: Kid Rock would be headlining, joined by Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. That Kid Rock, he of the private jet with a middle finger on its tail, has embraced Trump is still vaguely disappointing—I’m old enough to remember his glory days, such as they were—but no longer surprising. And if your reaction to the latter of those three names is that they sound made up, well, I was right there with you.

My report after watching? It was as dumb as I expected it to be, but satisfying in one important way: They clearly struggled to fill the room. While it was more crowded than, say, a New York City screening of Melania (I would know), the VMAs this was not. At times, there was enough room between that stage and the extremely subdued audience to safely do a cartwheel. The YouTube stream earned 16 million views, so the audience was not no one, but it’s nevertheless nice to know that when it comes down to it, people can criticize mainstream pop culture’s supposedly overly woke values till they’re blue in the face, but they didn’t want to skip their Super Bowl parties for this gallery of has-beens and nobodies. That very much includes our president, who, despite complaining bitterly about the performers, tuned in to the real thing anyway. We know this because he posted a little review on Truth Social: He declared the show “one of the worst, EVER!”

Trump hates to be associated with losers, and he could sense the loser energy of the All-American Halftime Show from Air Force One. I don’t actually believe he watched most of the Bad Bunny performance, by the way—his ADHD is too raging. (His poor attention span is the excuse he gave for not attending the game in person, though he was probably worried about booing too.) Some of us weren’t as blessed as Trump in this regard. Don’t worry, though: I didn’t have to skip Bad Bunny for Kid Rock and friends. It was prenegotiated with my editor that I was allowed to watch the real halftime show first.

Feb. 7 

 

Washington Post Chief Executive William Lewis (Washington Post photo by Elliott O'Donovan).

New York Times, Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis Steps Down After Stormy Tenure, Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Erik Wemple, Feb. 7, 2026. His departure came days after the company cut 30 percent of the staff. He will be replaced in the interim by Jeff D’Onofrio, the chief financial officer, the company said.

Will Lewis, the embattled chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post, has stepped down, the company announced Saturday.

Mr. Lewis said in a statement that he had made the difficult decision “in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.” His farewell email, which was terse, thanked only Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, and did not mention any journalists at the newspaper.

Mr. Lewis stepped down days after the company undertook a significant round of layoffs that cut 30 percent of the staff — more than 300 journalists — setting off widespread recrimination from current and former Post employees. Marty Baron, the celebrated former editor of The Post, called it one of the “darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

Mr. Lewis will be succeeded by Jeff D’Onofrio, the chief financial officer of The Post.

In a news release announcing Mr. Lewis’s replacement, Mr. Bezos said that The Post has “an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity.” He added, “Each and every day our readers give us a road map to success.” He did not mention the cost-cutting in his statement.

Mr. Lewis was brought in by Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, at the beginning of 2024 to transform the publication and turn around years of financial losses and audience decline. The Post has yet to achieve consistent profitability, despite a hodgepodge of new strategies rolled out by Mr. Lewis, including the use of artificial intelligence, the inclusion of new opinion product called “Ripple” and a “big hairy audacious goal,” or B.H.A.G., of reaching 200 million paid users.

It’s is unclear how many paid subscribers The Post has, since it’s a private company, but management cited the annual losses as one of the factors leading to the layoffs this past week.

Mr. Lewis’s tenure has been marked by a mass exodus of journalists and broad dissatisfaction in the newsroom. He got off to a rough start after news outlets, including his own, began looking into his conduct at British newspapers that raised questions about his journalistic ethics.

In May 2024, Mr. Lewis announced his plan to create a third newsroom division at The Post, separate from core news coverages areas of politics and business and focused on social media and service journalism. The Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, abruptly resigned, and Mr. Lewis hired two of his former colleagues as top editors.

The New York Times reported that Ms. Buzbee and Mr. Lewis had clashed shortly before her exit when he objected to the newsroom’s plans to cover developments in the phone-hacking lawsuit winding its way through the British courts that named him. Mr. Lewis has not been charged and has repeatedly rejected accusations that he had acted to conceal wrongdoing while an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp more than a decade ago. He denied that he had pressured Ms. Buzbee not to cover the story.

Mr. Lewis, who started his career in Britain as a reporter before rising in the ranks, was previously the chief executive of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which he left in 2020.

 

Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.

New York Times, Hegseth Says Defense Department Will Cut Ties With Harvard, Chris Cameron, Feb. 7, 2026 (print ed.). Mr. Hegseth’s order appeared to target his alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School for public policy.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that the Defense Department would sever its academic ties with Harvard University, the latest broadside by the Trump administration in its pressure campaign to force the university to cut a deal with the government.

In a statement and video published on Friday evening, Mr. Hegseth attacked the university in hyperbolic language, decrying it as a politically liberal institution, and said that, beginning in the new school year in September, the Defense Department will “discontinue graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at the school.” Mr. Hegseth added that military personnel who are attending classes will be able to finish those courses of study.

It is unclear what programs will be affected, and to what extent, but there are several graduate-level programs for military officers at Harvard. Mr. Hegseth’s order appeared to squarely target his alma mater: Harvard’s Kennedy School, which teaches government and public policy programs.

The Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, for example, has a national security fellowship for mid-level U.S. military officers. Retired Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., the highest-ranking officer in the armed forces for part of President Trump’s first term, is also a fellow at the Belfer Center. There were 12 officers enrolled in the national security fellowship this year. (David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, is a lecturer at a defense program in the Belfer Center.)

The Kennedy School also offers programs for senior U.S. military leaders. The “Senior Executives in National and International Security” program, for example, is open to U.S. generals and admirals. Mr. Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer with the National Guard, graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2013 with a master’s degree in public policy.

In the past, Harvard leaders have said the school is working to make the campus culture welcoming to different viewpoints, but have pushed back strongly against the Trump administration’s assertions that it is hostile to conservatives.

Public statements by the university have previously highlighted programs focused on veterans, or service members who are about to leave the military, as well as officer cadets who are enrolled at the university, but it is unclear if those programs would be included in the embargo.

When asked which programs, specifically, would be cut as part of Mr. Hegseth’s order, the Pentagon said in a statement that it didn’t have “anything more to provide beyond the secretary’s video.” Harvard University did not respond to a request for comment.

Harvard has been the top target in Mr. Trump’s sweeping campaign to exert more control over higher education. Mr. Trump views many top universities, including Harvard, as hostile to conservatives and his presidency. Earlier this week, Mr. Trump said he would demand $1 billion “in damages” from the university and threatened the school with a criminal investigation. 

Pro Publica, Grant Guidelines for Libraries and Museums Take “Chilling” Political Turn Under Trump, Jaimie Seaton, February 6, 2026. Former Institute of Museum and Library Services leaders from both political parties expressed concern that the new funding guidelines could encourage a more constrained or distorted view of American history.

A library in rural Alaska needed help providing free Wi-Fi and getting kids to read. A children’s museum in Washington wanted to expand its Little Science Lab. And a World War I museum in Missouri had a raft of historic documents it needed to digitize. They received funding from a little-known federal agency before the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to dismantle it last year.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle. But this time, it has unusually specific criteria.

In cover letters accompanying the applications, the institute said it “particularly welcomes” projects that align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America.

These would include those that foster an appreciation for the country “through uplifting and positive narratives,” the agency writes, citing an executive order that attacks the Smithsonian Institution for its “divisive, race-centered ideology.” (Trump has said the museum focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”) The agency also points to an executive order calling for the end of “the anti-Christian weaponization of government” and one titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.

The solicitation marks a stark departure for the agency, whose guidelines were previously apolitical and focused on merit.

Former agency leaders from both political parties, as well as those of library, historical and museum associations, expressed concern that funded projects could encourage a more constrained or distorted view of American history. Some also feared that by accepting grants, institutions would open themselves up to scrutiny and control, like the administration’s wide-ranging audit of Smithsonian exhibits “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

The new guidelines are “chilling,” said Giovanna Urist, who served as a senior program officer at the agency from 2021 to 2023. “I think that we just need to look at what’s happening with the Smithsonian to know that the administration has a very specific goal in mind when it comes to controlling the voice of organizations and museums across the country.”

An agency spokesperson told ProPublica it is not unusual for the institute to publish directors’ letters with grant applications, and that this one informs readers “about this Administration’s thematic emphases in the semi-quincentennial year.” He did not comment on criticisms that those letters insert political themes into a historically nonpartisan program.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, IMLS is working to revitalize our cultural institutions, urging less traditional applicants to consider working with us, and to promote civic pride and a deep sense of belonging among all Americans,” he said, adding that any institution that “meets programmatic requirements and goals” outlined in the funding opportunity “will receive all due consideration and undergo peer review.”

The spokesperson did not say how alignment with Trump’s executive orders would be weighed in the selection process or address concerns about the administration’s intrusion into funded institutions.

Established in 1996, the institute is the only dedicated source of federal support for libraries and one of the primary federal funders of museums and archives. Its long-running grant programs promote community engagement and public access to information, while bolstering institutions’ ability to care for collections and prepare for disasters. One grant, named after former first lady Laura Bush, helps recruit and train library professionals.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: My Head Talking to Hasan Minhaj, Paul Krugman, right, Feb. 7, 2026. Including thoughts on Bitcoin.

I didn’t interview anyone this week. So I thought I’d repost an interview I did a few months ago with Hasan Minhaj, which happens to include an airing of my Bitcoin skepticism, just after the 20 minute mark.

Host Hasan Minhaj introduces his guest on the topic: "Why the Stock MarketHasne't Crashed Yet" as follows:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for the New York Times for 25 years. But those stuffed shirts at the Times just couldn’t handle the heat from those Krugman takes, the fire he was spitting. So he left last year for Substack where he can let his freak flag fly. So I asked Professor Krugman to come on the show to help me make sense of the economic chaos President Trump is unleashing on the country and the world. I also asked him his thoughts on crypto. I think crypto is basically a scam. Whether the Nobel Prize for economics is basically just a kid’s choice award for intellectuals. You get a surfboard. And if he’s getting in touch with his inner Chapo trap house on Substack. Paul, you team Luigi or what?

You were at a huge institution for two and a half decades and now we get to see Kugman unleashed. This goes pretty hard in the paint. Uh the title of this on your Substack is “health insurance is a racket.”

Paul Krugman: Um I think I would have been able to say that for 24 years at the Times. Not sure in the last year I would have gotten away with it.

Feb. 4

 

Washington Post headquarters in Washington, DC (Washington Post photo).

New York Times, Washington Post Begins Laying Off More Than 300 Journalists, Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Erik Wemple, Feb. 4, 2026. The layoffs will cut into The Post’s local, international and sports coverage, and reduce the number of all its employees by about 30 percent.

The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.

“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”

Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”

“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.

The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.

Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.

Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.

As emails notifying employees that they were laid off began landing in inboxes, journalists at The Post began notifying their colleagues that their positions had been cut. “Eliminated,” "Eliminated,” “Eliminated,” their messages to one another read.

Mr. Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions. Mr. Lewis has experimented with several changes to transform the organization, notably embracing artificial intelligence to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.

Much of his tenure has been tumultuous, including a shake-up of newsroom leadership and scrutiny of his ties to a phone-hacking scandal while he worked for News Corp. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Lewis announced a new policy from Mr. Bezos ending presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, which blocked a drafted endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.

In a staff meeting in 2024, Mr. Lewis warned that The Post was in trouble. “We are losing large amounts of money,” he said. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”

 

Washington Post Chief Executive William Lewis (Washington Post photo by Elliott O'Donovan).

Status, Bezos’ WashPost Bloodletting, Oliver Darcy, Feb. 4, 2026. As The Washington Post cleaved off a third of its workforce, chief executive Will Lewis and owner Jeff Bezos were nowhere to be found—leaving the storied institution to profusely bleed while its top leaders hid from accountability.

On Wednesday morning, staffers at The Washington Post were jolted awake by a 6 a.m. email from Executive Editor Matt Murray and the head of human resources, instructing them to stay home for a Zoom meeting to announce “some significant actions across the company today.” The message confirmed what many at the Jeff Bezos-owned news organization had feared for months: the mass layoffs longanticipated since the fall had finally arrived.

During the 8:30 a.m. all-staff call, Murray detailed a “broad strategic reset” at the newspaper that he said would result in a “significant staff reduction.” Murray, The Post’s top editor, delivered the news alone to the legion of staffers watching at home on their computers, many nervously waiting to learn whether they would survive the cuts.

The sweeping cuts to the storied publication, which impacted one-third of the workforce, hit nearly all news departments on some level, with some sections reduced so heavily that they were effectively shuttered, Status has learned. Among those hardest hit: The sports department was closed, with most of its roughly 45 staffers laid off. The international desk, with reporters deployed to war zones and hot spots around the world, was gutted. The 40-person metro desk was decimated. The Post also closed its books section and suspended the “Post Reports” podcast. All of the paper’s staff photographers were laid off, as well as the majority of the video team. Elsewhere across the newsroom, the team tasked with covering the technology industry was hollowed out, eliminating some three-quarters of the 20-person desk, including most of the San Francisco bureau, and notably, The Post’s Amazon beat reporter.

“It's biblically bad,” one Post journalist told Status, adding, “It will be a miracle if they can put out a paper tomorrow because no one is working." Another staffer called it a “death knell,” while a senior editor described the layoffs as…

New York Times, Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance,’ Vimal Patel, Feb. 4, 2026. Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain.

College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves.

In Oklahoma, a student disputed an instructor’s grading decision, drawing the notice of a conservative campus group, Turning Point USA, that has long posted the names of professors criticized for bringing liberal politics into their classrooms. The instructor was removed.

In Texas, a student recorded a classroom lesson on gender identity that led to viral outrage and the instructor’s firing. Now, Texas has set up an office to take other complaints about colleges and professors.

And several states, including Texas, Ohio and Florida, have created laws requiring professors to publicly post their course outlines in searchable databases.

The increased oversight of professors comes as conservatives expand their movement to curb what they say is a liberal tilt in university classrooms. In the last couple of years, they have found sympathetic ears in state legislatures with the power to pressure schools, and their efforts have gained momentum as the Trump administration has made overhauling the politics and culture on campuses a focus.

But all of this, some professors and free-expression groups say, is leading to a wave of censorship and self-censorship that they argue is curbing academic freedom and learning.

 

Meidas Touch Network, GOP Candidate Hoping for Trump’s Endorsement Gave Away Free Melania Tickets, J.D. Wolf, Feb. 4, 2026. Andy Barr ,above,used a theater buyout for a campaign event.

A GOP Senate candidate’s decision to give away free tickets to a Melania Trump film as part of a campaign event highlights the increasingly blurry line between MAGA political organizing and Trump family business ventures.

On Facebook, GOP Senate candidate Andy Barr framed the free ticket giveaway as a celebration of the first lady. Barr, who currently serves in congress, has been trying to secure Donald Trump’s endorsement.

While campaigns often offer free food or swag, distributing tickets to a commercial film tied to a living political figure, and promoting it as part of a Senate campaign, raises ethical questions about soft vote-buying and the proper use of campaign funds.

It also raises questions about box office results for the Melania documentary, a film that has been met with mockery, empty theaters, and mediocre sales.

However, that hasn’t stopped the MAGA political machine from promoting the movie as a huge success.

Furthermore, the decision to give away tickets undercuts claims of organic success for the film itself. Packing a theater with campaign volunteers and MAGA activists on someone else’s dime makes boasts of a “packed house” largely meaningless as a measure of public demand.A group photo from Andy Barr’s free Melania movie event

A group photo from Andy Barr’s free Melania movie event

If the campaign paid for the tickets, donors may reasonably question why their money was meant to promote a movie rather than a Senate bid.

Perhaps the key to a Trump endorsement is buying out theaters and then giving away Melania movie tickets for free. We will see if Barr’s move pays off for him. 

New York Times, The Questionable Science Behind the Odd-Looking Football Helmets, Ken Belson, Updated Feb. 4, 2026. The N.F.L. claims Guardian Caps reduce the risk of concussions. The company that makes them says, “It has nothing to do with concussions.”

The N.F.L. claims the cartoonish caps reduce the risk of getting a concussion, convincing some players that they are worth wearing. The company that designed and manufactures Guardian Caps, though, makes no such claim. 

Feb. 3 

 

Meidas Touch Network, Massie and Greene Clap Back After Trump Attacks Massie's Wife Over Epstein Files, Troy Matthews, Feb. 3, 2026. Trump is REALLY sensitive about Massie's calls for tranparency on the Epstein files.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) clapped back against Donald Trump after the president attacked his wife in a post on Truth Social, Monday. Trump called Massie's wife a "Radical Left flamethrower" and suggested Massie's efforts to seek transparency in the Epstein case is tied to him becoming a liberal as a result of their marriage, saying Massie "didn't know what he was getting into."

Massie was quick to point out that his wife voted for Trump three times, but also that she had pushed Massie to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to release additional Epstein files.

"So now he’s attacking my wife who voted for him three times," Massie posted. "Maybe someone told him she’s actually the one who suggested I ask Pam Bondi in person at a dinner when we would get Phase 2 of the Epstein files. Bondi said there were no more files. As they say, the rest is history."

Massie's ally in the fight for Epstein transparency—former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—was quick to slam the president and his allies for attacking Massie, who is a loyal Trump Republican on every issue except for his fight to force the administration to release the evidence of the massive global pedophile ring, in which Trump is mentioned thousands of times.

Greene,left, pointed to the recent upset victory of Democrat Taylor Rehmet in deep red Texas as a warning sign for Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms.

"President Trump treats those who support him the most like crap," Greene wrote. "Losing elections to Democrats in super red districts, like TX senate, where Trump endorsed, should be sending warning alarms across the President’s desk. But instead he’s attacking REPUBLICAN Thomas Massie with one of the most conservative voting records in the House and his new wife with a three time MAGA voting record."

"And all the weak Republicans in the House stay silent refusing to utter even a word of support for their 'friend' Thomas Massie," Greene continued. "Shame on every one of you. Cowards. You make me sick."

Meidas Touch Network, White House Advisor Pushed Bulk Sales for Melania Movie, J.D. Wolf, Feb. 2, 2026. Supporters are encouraged to buy group tickets and private screenings, raising questions about ethics and actual attendance.

Bulk sales of the new documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History are being promoted through emails from the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), a faith coalition led by Paula White-Cain, shown above in the White House, who also served as a senior advisor in the White House Faith Office. The film had a $7 million opening weekend.

The message encourages supporters to purchase group tickets and private theater buyouts, directing them to a custom sales portal which offers private screenings for groups of more than 30 people. Recipients are encouraged to watch the movie to "support our first lady," because "supporting this film is about standing up for grace over the noise, dignity over distortion, and for the truth.” 

The message then provided a link to purchase "a group of tickets" or to set up "private screenings." The customer service email for the group sales page has an Amazon domain, the same company that paid nearly $75 million to acquire and promote the movie.

 

 

A FAQ page indicates that buying out a showing of Melania varies but can "typically range from $1,500–$3,000” with "final quotes come directly from the theater." Private screening implies that the theater is empty except for the party intending to watch the movie. In order for this to happen, seats are paid for and count toward box office sales, yet could remain empty.

The industry doesn’t publicly report attendance for bulk group sales.

In other words, while the theater buyouts count as box-office sales, it is not clear how many of those seats are actually filled with attendees. It also is not clear if this group sales process is being used to inflate box office numbers for the Melania movie. It raises questions.

 

White House advisor Paula White-Cain, shown also below right, and MAGA pastors praying for Trump in the Oval Office

Concerning the promotion of the group sales by a person at the White House, the overlap of a roles raises ethical and transparency questions. White-Cain is both a Trump administration appointee and the leader of a group affiliated with the Trump campaign, prompting concerns about whether a federally connected figure is promoting a commercial project tied to the First Lady.

Also, without independent data on attendance versus purchased seats, the reported sales of the film are suspect, as they may reflect coordinated bulk buying more than actual audience interest.

New York Times, Peter Attia ‘Ashamed’ After Epstein Emails Become Public, Maggie Astor, Updated Feb. 3, 2026. The longevity influencer said he “never witnessed illegal behavior” but would not defend his crude remarks about women and comments on Jeffrey Epstein’s “outrageous” life.

The physician and longevity influencer Peter Attia is facing criticism after correspondence between him and the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released on Friday as part of a large tranche of files related to Mr. Epstein.

Dr. Attia’s name appears in more than 1,700 documents, some of which include direct correspondence in the mid-2010s between him and Mr. Epstein, a disgraced financier who had at that point already pleaded guilty to prostitution charges. Mr. Epstein would later be charged with trafficking underage girls for sex.

Dr. Attia, who is in his early 50s, said in a lengthy statement posted on X on Monday that he “never witnessed illegal behavior and never saw anyone who appeared underage” in Mr. Epstein’s presence. He added that he “was never on his plane, never on his island, and never present at any sex parties.”

Some of the emails, though, show the two men speaking crudely about women, and Dr. Attia said Monday that he was embarrassed and ashamed of himself. “Whatever growth I’ve had over the past decade does not erase the emails I wrote then,” he said.

In one email on Feb. 19, 2016, titled “confirmed,” Dr. Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” A couple of days earlier, he had offered his medical services to Mr. Epstein and asked, “Have you decided if you’re interested in living longer (solely for the ladies, of course)?”

Dr. Attia has become highly influential in recent years among people seeking to improve their health. He hosts a popular podcast, wrote a best-selling book and runs a health practice that charges more than $100,000 for personalized exercise, nutrition and preventive testing programs; he is also a prominent backer of David protein bars. Just last month, CBS News hired him as a contributor.

CBS did not respond to requests for comment about the documents or the future of Dr. Attia’s relationship with the company. However, David said on Tuesday that Dr. Attia had stepped down as its chief science officer. (Dr. Attia was interviewed at The New York Times’s Well Festival last May.)

Some of the messages that have drawn the most attention are vague. Among the 1,700-plus documents is an email exchange dated June 24, 2015. Dr. Attia initiated it with an email to Mr. Epstein under the subject line “got a fresh shipment”; it is not clear what he was referring to. Mr. Epstein replied, “me too,” with a photo that is redacted in the released document. Dr. Attia responded, “Please tell you found that picture on line…bastard,” to which Mr. Epstein said, “fraid not.”

Dr. Attia then wrote: “You the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…”Editors’ PicksTips for Lowering Your Credit Card Interest RateThey Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live DeliberatelySlumping in the West, the Art Trade Eyes the Gulf

In his statement, Dr. Attia said that the shipment he had been referring to was the medication metformin — a diabetes treatment that some people use to try to slow the effects of aging — and that Mr. Epstein’s photo had been “of an adult woman.”

“Reading that exchange now is very embarrassing, and I will not defend it,” Dr. Attia wrote in his statement. “I’m ashamed of myself for everything about this. At the time, I understood this exchange as juvenile, not a reference to anything dark or harmful.” He added that his reference to being unable to tell anyone about Mr. Epstein’s “outrageous” life was about “the discretion commanded by those social and professional circles–the idea that you don’t talk about who you meet, the dinners you attend and the power and influence of the people in those settings.”

Other documents show Dr. Attia saying that he goes “into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him” and suggesting that he wants to visit Mr. Epstein’s island.

Dr. Attia emphasized in his statement that he had never visited Mr. Epstein’s island or ranch. But in a series of emails from 2015, an assistant made plans for Dr. Attia to visit Mr. Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, going so far as to book plane tickets before Mr. Epstein said the scheduled dates no longer worked for him.

New York Times, Colleges See Major Racial Shifts in Student Enrollment, Stephanie Saul, Feb. 3, 2026. An analysis finds that flagship state universities, as well as less selective colleges, had major increases in Black and Hispanic students following a ban on race-conscious admissions.

The Supreme Court ruling in 2023 banning race-conscious college admissions led to declines in Black and Latino admissions at highly selective universities. At many other schools, the opposite occurred, according to a new analysis.

Overall, freshmen enrollment of underrepresented minority groups increased by 8 percent at public flagship universities. The analysis, by a nonprofit organization, Class Action, concludes that those schools were among institutions that benefited as a result of higher rejection rates for Black and Hispanic students at the nation’s 50 most selective schools.

At those top 50 schools, Black freshmen enrollment was down by 27 percent and Latino enrollment down by 10 percent.

The data from Class Action, which works to promote equity in education, was based on 2024 federal enrollment figures released in January covering more than 3,000 colleges and universities.

Data released publicly by a smaller number of schools have hinted that highly selective schools admitted fewer Black and Latino students following the Supreme Court decision, but the report was one of the first efforts to analyze the impact of the decision on enrollment demographics across a broad swath of the nation’s colleges.

While the data covers only freshmen enrollment the first year after the Supreme Court decision went into effect, it bolsters the prediction by some education experts that the decision would create a chain of consequences. Highly qualified Black and Latino students, who might have been admitted to the Ivy League and other similar schools before the Supreme Court decision, enrolled in less-selective schools as a result of the decision, potentially leading to a “cascade” of less qualified minority students enrolling in even less selective institutions.

Some research suggests that the phenomenon, called a “cascade” effect and identified in California following a statewide ban on affirmative action in 1998, may have long-term effects on employment opportunities and earnings for the students who ended up in the least selective institutions.

The new report concludes that the Supreme Court decision reduced the number of students of color at institutions with the highest graduation rates and largest median incomes after graduation, a result that the authors said could lead to persistent racial inequities in income.

While public flagship universities were the biggest beneficiaries of the shift, four-year public colleges overall also gained, with Latino freshman enrollment increasing 7 percent and Black freshman enrollment growing 4 percent.

New York Times, Trump’s Kennedy Center Shutdown Plan Jolts Workers and Performers, Adam Nagourney and Julia Jacobs, Feb. 3, 2026.  The administration’s announcement to shut the center for a major overhaul led to a swirl of confusion and anxiety among performers and patrons about its future.

The abrupt announcement by President Trump that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would close this summer for a two-year construction project plunged the Washington cultural institution into uncertainty Monday, raising questions about where its orchestra would play and what would happen to its subscribers and its hundreds of employees.

“We’re kind of in shock right now,” said Anne Vantine, the president of a union local that represents box office workers. She said she had spent much of the night after the president’s announcement fielding calls and texts from Kennedy Center employees who were fearful of losing their jobs.

Leaders of the National Symphony Orchestra, who had not joined an exodus of performers protesting Mr. Trump’s actions at the center — which included the Washington National Opera — told its musicians that the center had assured them it would help find other venues where they can perform while the renovation takes place.

“The Center’s administration is committed to the National Symphony Orchestra and its role in Washington, D.C. and beyond,” the officials, Joan Bialek and Jean Davidson, said in a note to musicians, orchestra staff and the orchestra’s board of directors. “We are now working on a formal plan and will share more with you in the weeks to come.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement asserting that the center was dilapidated and needed to be closed and renovated into a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex” caught center executives, patrons, musicians, and even some members of the institution’s board of directors by surprise. The closing date, on July 4 as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary, is just five months away.

His approach is a marked shift from the painstaking way cultural institutions typically approach a project like rebuilding an established concert hall. The key, several orchestra executives said, was to develop step-by-step plans to minimize the disruption for audience members, contributors and orchestra members.

“We had planned for years in advance of our construction,” said Deborah Borda, who served as president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic during the $550 million rebuilding of what is today David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. “It was very difficult and it was hard on the orchestra.”

Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead the Kennedy Center, has described the closure as a temporary, strategic move intended to accelerate necessary renovations on a “decrepit” building. In an email to employees on Sunday, he promised that more clarity on “staffing and operational changes” would be coming.

The decisions have the potential to affect a raft of workers, including musicians, actors, stagehands, artistic programmers, security personnel and specialists in costuming, hair and makeup. It was unclear whether the center’s marquee event — the Kennedy Center Honors, which Mr. Trump hosted in December — would move forward during the shutdown.

Legal Schnauzer, Words such as "rape," "murder," and "forcing oral sex" are directed toward President Donald Trump in claims from the DOJ's Jeffrey Epstein document dump, Roger Shuler, right, Feb. 3, 2026. Donald Trump twice is accused of taking actions that meet the legal definition of rape in documents from last Friday's Department of Justice (DOJ) release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump also was accused of being present for the murder of a newborn, according to a report from Mediaite. The complaints come in the form of uncorroborated tips to the FBI.

Writer Zachary Leeman notes that after their initial appearance, the complaints mentioning Trump were removed from the DOJ website with a “page not found” message being given to people trying to search for them. The complaints, however, have been widely copied and shared on social media. As of last night, a search still produces a "page not found" message.

As for the allegations against Trump, Leeman reports under the headline "Latest Epstein Files Include Wild Trump Allegations, including rape":

In a complaint made by a friend, the president was accused of forcing a 13-14-year-old to perform oral sex on him.

“[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ. The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. The friend said she was also abused by Epstein,” the complaint reads. In the “response” column, it is noted that an investigator was sent to Washington to conduct an interview.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, acts of rape include "oral sex forced upon a victim." All of the claims against Trump are disturbing, but on a scale of depravity, the following would get my vote to be at the top:

Another complaint — for which there was no contact information provided — alleged that “calendar girls” parties at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago involved genital measurements for children.

“Jeffrey Epstein would bring the children in, and Trump would auction them off. He measured the children’s vulva and vaginas by entering a finger and rated the children on tightness,” the complaint reads.

The person alleged people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump were present at these parties.

The word "sickos" comes to mind as a descriptor for any person who would directly engage in, or be present for, such behavior. Per the FBI, acts of rape include "vaginal or anal penetration without consent."

Reading about other incidents involving Donald Trump does not get any more pleasant. Leeman writes:

Another in Epstein’s orbit made allegations of “sex trafficking” and murder. The unidentified person was following up on a tip given to the NYPD in which the person said they were raped at 13. The person also alleged Trump regularly paid them to perform sexual acts and claimed he was present when her newborn child was murdered.

“Complainant reported Donald Trump participated regularly in paying money to force her to perform sex acts with him and alleged Trump was present when her uncle murdered her newborn child,” notes on the complaint read.

According to the paperwork, there was “no contact made.” That apparently means no investigation was conducted.

Another incident involved a famed figure in the world of television. From the Mediaite report:

One complainant claimed they witnessed a “sex trafficking ring at the Trump Golf Course” in Rancho Palo Verdes, California between 1995 and 1996. The person alleged Ghislaine Maxwell, a former Epstein associate now serving 20 years for sex trafficking, was a “madam” and “broker” for deals involving girls.

The person claimed they witnessed Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach “strangle a young girl” at a party. The person also told of a threat from Trump’s head of security if she “ever talked.” She claimed he said she would “end up as fertilizer for the back nine holes like the other c*nts” if she spoke about what she had seen.

We are left with the following question: Who are the worst people in all of this -- Trump himself or the people he has been known to hang out with? Either way, it's a grim scenario, especially with the president of the United States involved. 

 

Meidas Touch Network, Trump Sends Deceptive Tariff Check Email to Supporters ...Again, J.D. Wolf, Feb. 3, 2026. The message shows an AI image of Trump holding up cash.

Donald Trump and the Trump/Vance campaign are again fundraising off a fictional “tariff rebate check,” sending another early-morning email on February 1 claiming recipients must confirm their name before Trump signs their check.

The message, sent at 3:16 a.m., features an image of Trump holding up cash, warns of an “11:59 PM DEADLINE,” and declares itself “the only tariff rebate email authorized by President Trump.” Despite the official tone and imagery, there is still no legislation authorizing any rebate, tariffs remain in legal limbo, and Trump has no authority to issue checks to the public.

New York Times, Police Search X’s Premises in France as Prosecutors Summon Elon Musk, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Feb. 3, 2026. The move followed a yearlong investigation into X and escalated a wider standoff between European officials and American tech companies over the regulation of social media.

The French police searched the premises of X in France on Tuesday as prosecutors issued a summons to the social media company’s owner, Elon Musk (shown above in a file photo), raising the stakes in a yearlong investigation into the platform that has heightened a wider trans-Atlantic dispute over how to regulate tech companies.

The cybercrime division of the Paris prosecutor’s office is investigating X in relation to seven accusations, including complicity in distributing images of a child of pornographic nature, denial of crimes against humanity and fraudulent extraction of data, according to a statement on Tuesday from the city’s chief prosecutor, Laure Beccuau.

The investigation was opened after Éric Bothorel, a French centrist lawmaker, wrote to the prosecutors with concerns over X’s algorithm, the digital process that organizes data on the platform. The case was expanded after further accusations that Grok, the platform’s A.I. chatbot, was spreading Holocaust denial claims and sexual deepfakes, Ms. Beccuau said in the statement.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After the investigation began last year, the company said in a public statement in July that it “categorically denies” accusations about its algorithm and use of data. It said the investigation was “politically-motivated” and a distortion of French law “in order to serve a political agenda and, ultimately, restrict free speech.” The statement added that X would not cooperate with the French authorities’ demands.

The search on Tuesday marked an escalation in a broader dispute between European governments and American tech companies — one that has revealed sharp trans-Atlantic differences over the definition of free speech and the question of whether and how to regulate social media platforms. The issue has become particularly tense under the Trump administration, which has spoken and acted increasingly aggressively against Europeans it associates with the push to regulate American tech firms.

In recent years, the European Union has enacted sweeping regulations over the companies, whose platforms pervade modern communication, threatening them with fines unless they police their platforms for illicit content, misinformation and hate speech.

In December, the European Union issued the first fine under its new Digital Services Act, penalizing X with $140 million for violations. Last week, European Union regulators announced an investigation into X over the spread of sexualized images generated by Grok.

Europeans see their actions as a democratic prerogative necessary to protect citizens from abuse. The Trump administration sees the fines as an unfair money grab from American companies and considers the regulations to be an attack on free speech. Though there are very few restrictions on speech in the United States, in countries like France there are criminal penalties for hate speech, Holocaust denial and attacks on religion.

Mr. Bothorel, the lawmaker, praised the prosecutors’ moves on Tuesday, saying on social media: “In Europe, and particularly in France, the rule of law means that ‘no one is above the law’ and that European regulations, transposed into French law, apply to everyone.”

The prosecutor’s statement on Tuesday said that people associated with X, including Mr. Musk and Linda Yaccarino, the company’s former chief executive, had been summoned to speak to the French authorities.

 

Elon Musk, right, joins Donald Trump in a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

Emptywheel, Analysis: Elon Musk Under Investigation for Trafficking Child Sexual Abuse Material, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Feb. 3, 2026. Make no mistake. Elon is trying to use his fascist machine to support far right parties and political violence in Europe. And then he decided to start disseminating non-consensual porn and child sexual abuse material, outsourcing all agency to his robot creation. Which gave French authorities cause to execute a warrant.

I’ll be honest. I been thinking that Elon Musk stubbornly refused to do anything about his Grok CSAM machine as a provocation to Europe.

After all, when the European Commission fined Elon for fraudulent violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for misrepresenting the Blue Check as verification, covering up his ad repository, and refusing to give researchers access to public data, he and allies misrepresented the nature of the fine, falsely claiming this was about censorship. That same month, Elon’s allies in the Administration sanctioned five Europeans, including the father of the DSA, Thierry Breton, and Elon’s nemesis, Imran Ahmed, whose Center for Digital Hate Elon has sued repeatedly.

That month, December, is when Grok’s CSAM appetite went into overdrive.

But WaPo reported just yesterday that Elon’s unwillingness to impose protections on his AI and CSAM machine arises in significant part from an effort to chase “user active seconds” to make xAI more relevant as compared his AI rivals.

Since leaving his role overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service in May, Musk has become a constant presence at xAI’s offices — at times sleeping there overnight — as he has pressed to increase Grok’s popularity, according to two of the people. In meeting after meeting he has championed a new metric, “user active seconds,” to granularly measure how long people spent conversing with the chatbot, according to two of the people.

As part of this push for relevance, xAI embraced making sexualized material, publicly releasing sexy AI companions, rolling back guardrails on sexual material and ignoring internal warnings about the potentially serious legal and ethical risks of producing such content, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen former employees of X and xAI, as well as multiple people familiar with Musk’s thinking — some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution — and documents obtained by The Post.

At X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022, safety teams repeatedly warned management in meetings and messages that its AI tools could allow users to make sexual AI images of children or celebrities that might violate the law, according to two of the people. Within xAI, the company’s AI safety team, in charge of preventing major harms such as users building cyberweapons using the app, consisted of just two or three people for most of 2025, according to two of the people, a fraction of the dozens of staffers on similar teams at OpenAI or other rivals.

As one after another country (including, timidly, Ireland) started investigating, Elon claimed ignorance, like he often does.

That behind-the-scenes shift in xAI’s philosophy burst into public view last month, when Grok generated a wave of sexualized images, placing real women in sexual poses, such as suggestively splattering their faces with whipped cream, and “undressing” them into revealing clothing, including bikinis as tiny as a string of dental floss. Musk appeared to egg on the undressing in posts on X.

Grok also generated 23,000 sexualized images that appear to depict children, according to estimates from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

California’s attorney general, Britain’s communications regulator and the European Commission have opened investigations into xAI, X or Grok over the features, which regulators allege appear to violate laws against AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material.

In the wake of the “undressing” scandal, Musk said he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.”

“When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” he said last month. “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”

In spite of Elon’s lip service, Reuters is out, today, with a story reporting that Xitter remains worse than other social media sites.

After Musk’s social media company X announced new curbs on Grok’s public output, nine Reuters reporters gave it a series of prompts to determine whether and under what circumstances the chatbot would generate nonconsensual sexualized images.

While Grok’s public X account is no longer producing the same flood of sexualized imagery, the Grok chatbot continues to do so when prompted, even after being warned that the subjects were vulnerable or would be humiliated by the pictures, the Reuters reporters found.

[snip]

The Reuters reporters – six men and three women in the U.S. and the UK – submitted fully clothed photos of themselves and one another to Grok between January 14 – 16 and between January 27 – 28. They asked the chatbot to alter the images to depict them in sexually provocative or humiliating poses.

In the first batch of prompts, Grok produced the sexualized images in response to 45 of 55 instances. In 31 out of those 45 cases, Grok had also been warned that the subject was particularly vulnerable. In 17 out of the 45 cases, Grok generated images after being specifically told they would be used to degrade the person.

Five days after first seeking comment, Reuters ran a second batch of 43 prompts. Grok generated sexualized images in 29 cases. Reuters could not determine whether the lower rate reflected model changes, policy changes, or randomness.

And that’s important background to the search of Xitter in Paris. What had started as an investigation into things specific to Europe — data and algorithmic abuse — expanded to include Xitter dissemination of CSAM.

The raid and the summoning of Musk – which could further increase tensions between Europe and the U.S. over big tech and free speech – are linked to a year-long investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives.

In a statement the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was widening that investigation following complaints over the functioning of X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

The probe will now also investigate alleged complicity in the “detention and diffusion” of images of a child‑pornographic nature and the violation of a person’s image rights with sexually explicit deepfakes, among other potential crimes.

Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino were summoned to a hearing on April 20. Other X staff were also summoned as witnesses.

To be sure, Elon is treating this as if the EU were undermining his efforts to spread fascism via machine.

On the same day France searched Xitter, Jim Jordan (a man with a history of protect sexual abuse) released a second report fabricating claims of censorship in Europe, including in ways that affect elections.

Some of these are downright absurd, both because they claim interference in fuddy-duddy elections like Ireland’s and targeting Tik Tok. Think about that?!?! The US has literally demanded Tik Tok restructure because of security and data collection concerns, and after Trump’s billionaire buddies took over it immediately started censoring more aggressively than Europe ever has.

The Ireland mention, in particular, is a gratuitous complaint about a few meetings, but it’s there because Ireland plays a key role in regulating most US social media companies by dint of their location here.

And of course, Jordan and his sex abuse cover-up specialists wildly misrepresented the fine against Elon, citing their own tweet as source.

In December 2025, the European Commission issued its first fine under the Digital Services Act, targeting X for a litany of ridiculous violations in an obviously pretextual attempt to penalize the platform for its defense of free speech.61 The European Commission fined X €120 million—slightly below the statutory cap of six percent of global revenue—for alleged violations including “misappropriating” the meaning of blue checkmarks by changing how they were awarded. 62

61 Commission Decision of 5.12.2025 pursuant to Articles 73(1), 73(3) and 74(1) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act); Case DSA.100101, DSA.100102 and DSA.100103 – X (formerly Twitter), C(2025) 8630 final; see Ex. 302 (hereinafter “X Decision”); see also House Judiciary GOP (@JudicaryGOP), X (Jan. 28, 2026, 4:09 PM), https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2016619751183724789. 62 Id

Make no mistake. Elon is trying to use his fascist machine to support far right parties and political violence in Europe.

And then he decided to start disseminating non-consensual porn and child sexual abuse material, outsourcing all agency to his robot creation. Which gave French authorities cause to execute a warrant.

 

New York Times, The Numbers, and Questions, Behind Musk’s Mega-Merger, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Niko Gallogly, Brian O’Keefe and Ian Mount, Feb. 3, 2026. The combination of SpaceX and xAI will create a rocket-and-A.I. giant. But investors and experts have concerns about the consequences of the deal.

The biggest merger in history, with an asterisk, just happened: SpaceX has acquired xAI to create a $1.25 trillion giant. It’s an all-stock deal — and the stock is private (and privately valued, hence the asterisk), though SpaceX plans to go public later this year.

All this was orchestrated by one person, Elon Musk, who controls both firms. It would make SpaceX a vertically integrated company for putting data centers in space and then using them for artificial intelligence services. There are questions about whether SpaceX needs xAI and about whether it complicates the SpaceX I.P.O. story, but it certainly helps Musk’s investors in xAI (some of whom previously invested in the social media site X, which xAI acquired).

There’s also a long-term antitrust question: If data centers in space become a reality — if and Musk has a near-monopoly on them — would other A.I. model makers be able to use them? More below.The big questions about Musk’s big deal

Elon Musk had a busy Monday, combining his SpaceX rocket company and his xAI artificial intelligence start-up to create the world’s most valuable private enterprise,.

Musk described the merged company as “the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” The deal transpired before a long-planned I.P.O. for SpaceX that could happen this summer.

But investors and others are raising questions about what the merger actually accomplishes, especially for SpaceX, which was already riding high and now has a more complicated story to sell to investors.

The details: The deal valued SpaceX at about $1 trillion, up from the roughly $800 billion cited in December; xAI was valued at $250 billion, slightly up from its last fund-raising round. (The move required SpaceX to issue about $250 billion of new stock, drastically diluting the stakes of existing investors.)

Musk argues that the combined company will be better able to set up space-based A.I. data centers, which in theory can transcend the limitations on power use and physical land needs of Earth-based ones. “In the long term, space-based A.I. is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote in a memo to employees that SpaceX also issued publicly.

The optimist case: The combined company makes SpaceX “a lot more attractive” to investors because it eliminates distractions for Musk, Andrew Rocco, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told DealBook.

SpaceX, which reportedly earned about $8 billion on more than $15 billion in revenue last year, could funnel cash to the money-losing xAI, which has already raised $42 billion from investors since its founding in 2023, according to Pitchbook. (Bloomberg previously reported that xAI was burning through about $1 billion a month.)

There are concerns, too:

SpaceX, which has been seeking to raise a record $50 billion from its I.P.O., had a relatively clean story to tell: It’s the world’s biggest rocket company and satellite internet operator, and it’s very profitable. But SpaceX must now explain to prospective investors why it also has a deeply unprofitable A.I. arm (one that includes X, a social network that has frequently run afoul of government regulators.)

Making celestial data centers a reality requires solving complex problems including how to cool them (radiators to do so might need to be bigger than tennis courts) and how to shield them from cosmic radiation. A big issue is cost, with experts reckoning that the price of shipping components to space would need to fall about tenfold. Google projected that this might happen in the 2030s; Musk estimated on Monday that it might happen in two to three years.

Michael Sobel, an investor whose firm buys secondary stakes in privately held companies, told The Information that he has heard from SpaceX shareholders who have some questions about the deal. Many are open to its logic and trust Musk, he said, “but they’re like, ‘Hmmm.’”

New York Times, Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti, Updated Feb. 3, 2026. The comments, made on a conservative podcast, follow a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections.President Trump has long been fixated on the false claim that voter fraud is rampant in the United States. 

President Trump called in a new interview for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States, an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.

During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released on Monday by Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Under the Constitution, American elections are governed primarily by state law, leading to a decentralized process in which voting is administered by county and municipal officials in thousands of precincts across the country. Mr. Trump, however, has long been fixated on the false claims that U.S. elections are rife with fraud and that Democrats are perpetrating a vast conspiracy to have undocumented immigrants vote and lift the party’s turnout.

Mr. Trump’s remarkable call for a political party to seize the mechanisms of voting follows a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections, as he and his allies continue to make false claims about his 2020 defeat.

Last week, F.B.I. agents seized ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., where his allies have for years pursued false claims of election fraud. The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump had spoken on the phone to the F.B.I. agents involved in the Fulton County raid, praising and thanking them.

The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.

In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that tried to make significant changes to the electoral process, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day. But that effort has largely been rebuffed by courts.

On social media, Mr. Trump has pushed for even more drastic changes. In August, he wrote that he wanted to end the use of mail-in ballots and potentially the use of voting machines.Editors’ PicksBook Club: Read ‘Wuthering Heights,’ by Emily Brontë, With the Book ReviewHow Weight Lifting Took Over America28 Things to Do in New York City in February

The president’s claims of election fraud have been debunked over and over, by both independent reviews and Republican officials. A review of the 2024 election by the Trump administration that began last year had found little evidence of widespread voting fraud by noncitizens as of last month, The Times reported.

Mr. Trump’s escalated remarks about elections come at a moment when Democrats have outperformed the G.O.P. in a series of contests. New Jersey and Virginia elected Democratic governors in landslides in November, and on Saturday, a Democrat won a special election for a Texas State Senate seat by 14 percentage points in a district Mr. Trump had carried by 17 points in 2024, an enormous swing.

Sensing that Republicans were vulnerable to the traditional midterm backlash against the party in power, Mr. Trump last year kick-started an extraordinary effort to gerrymander congressional maps to give his party an edge. The push, which started in Texas but has since expanded to both Democratic- and Republican-controlled states, became a central part of the president’s midterm strategy.

Mr. Trump has made little secret of his interest in expanding the federal government’s role in administering American elections. Last month, he told The Times that he regretted not dispatching the National Guard to seize voting machinery after the 2020 election.

During his interview with Mr. Bongino, Mr. Trump tied his desire for partisan control of voting mechanisms to his administration’s agenda to find and deport undocumented immigrants from American cities.

“If Republicans don’t get them out, you will never win another election as a Republican,” he said, referring to undocumented immigrants. “It’s crazy how you can get these people to vote. If we don’t get them out, look, Republicans will never win another election.”

There is no evidence that a significant number of noncitizens have voted in any American election. A 2024 audit by Georgia’s secretary of state found that just 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia were not citizens, and only nine had ever voted.

More On U.S. Politics, Governance

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: 10 Years of Trump, and the Alarm Keeps Going Off, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Feb. 3, 2026. Every day of the past decade has felt like Groundhog Day.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s populist insurgency against Donald Trump continues!

The former congresswoman told a radio interviewer yesterday that the president’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was “all a lie”: “What MAGA is really serving in this administration, who they’re serving, is their big donors,” she said. “The big, big donors that donated all the money and continue to donate to the president’s PAC and donate to the 250th anniversary and are donating to the big ballroom.”

As we keep finding reason to say: When she’s right, she’s right. Happy Tuesday.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The plot to undermine the 2026 elections, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Feb. 3, 2026. The Trump administration is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the 2026 election.

At the center of the effort is President Trump himself. In a Monday appearance on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump said:

Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there. I won the state three times, but I got no credit for it. I won that state three times but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft.

The Democratic presidential candidate won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which he continues to make repeatedly, have been exhaustively debunked.

In his podcast appearance, Trump went on to suggest that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” because “we have states that I won that show I didn’t win.” The Constitution says that the “times, places, and manner of holding elections“ will be determined by the states.

Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms are not just rhetorical. On January 28, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. The agents executed a warrant to seize records related to the 2020 election.

Former President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. But, without any factual backing, Trump has claimed that he was the true winner. On January 2, 2021, in a recorded call, Trump famously pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 additional votes — enough to make him the winner — in Fulton County.

The warrant authorized the seizure of physical ballots, voting machine “tabulator tapes,” voter rolls, and electronic data, which Trump administration officials claimed constituted evidence of a crime.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was on site during the Fulton County raid. The DNI has no role in domestic law enforcement and is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence gathering. According to the Wall Street Journal, she has “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost.”

While the raid is unlikely to uncover any actual evidence of wrongdoing, it does demonstrate Trump’s willingness to use the full spectrum of federal government power to interfere with state election administration and advance his political interests.A national voter purge

Beginning in May, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began sending letters to state officials requesting complete, unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive information on voters, including drivers license and social security numbers.

The Trump administration has claimed it has authority to ask states for their voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires states to maintain accurate lists of their registered voters and make certain records available to the public. The DOJ is arguing that it needs to inspect state voter rolls to “​​ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.” However, The NVRA does not require states to disclose sensitive voter data to the public or to the federal government. In reality, the Trump administration is creating a national voter roll in order to purge what it alleges is widespread voter fraud by noncitizens.

At times, the administration has admitted this purpose openly. In a statement to Democracy Docket, about an agreement with the DOJ to use some of the voter data, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote that the goal of using the data is to “prevent illegal aliens from corrupting our republic’s democratic process and further ensure the integrity of our elections nationwide.”

The actual number of noncitizens who illegally vote in U.S. elections is very small. However, any attempt to purge voters would likely lead to many eligible voters being removed from the voter roll, as has already played out in states purging their own voter rolls.

In August 2024, for example, Alabama’s Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced that he wanted “to ensure that Alabama has the cleanest and most accurate voter file in the country.” So, he removed over 3000 people from the state’s voter roll that he claimed were non-citizens. However, it turned out that over 700 of those people had recently become citizens and were eligible to vote.

As of the end of January, at least 44 states and Washington D.C. received requests from the DOJ for their voter rolls. Eleven states, all led by Republicans, have said they will comply with this request. Twenty-four states and Washington D.C., mostly led by Democrats, have been sued by the DOJ for refusing to provide voter rolls. (These lawsuits are rife with errors, including being addressed to the wrong officials and citing laws that do not exist.)

In Minnesota, the DOJ has recently turned to a new tactic for getting sensitive voter information. On the same day that Alex Pretti was shot and killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz stating that he could “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” if he cooperated with the federal government on “common sense solutions.”

One proposed solution was turning over the state’s voter rolls to the Trump administration. The letter made no attempt at explaining how sharing voter data would help reduce tensions between federal agents and Minnesota officials and residents. Instead, it was an effort to leverage the killing of U.S. citizens by CBP officers to advance the administration’s plans to disrupt future elections.Voter suppression by presidential fiat

The Trump administration has also attempted to use executive orders to overhaul and federalize the election system. On March 25, Trump signed an executive order, entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” that instructs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form. It also requires that the Secretary of Defense add a proof of citizenship requirement to the voter registration form used by military and overseas voters. The executive order does not mention birth certificates as a valid proof of citizenship, instead listing a passport, military ID, or a government-issued ID that indicates citizenship. This would require most people to use a passport to prove their citizenship, something only around half of Americans have.

Additionally, the order instructs the Attorney General to take action against states that count mail-in ballots mailed prior to Election Day that were received afterward, a practice that is allowed by more than a dozen states. The order also instructs federal agencies, including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to review state voter registration lists and records for instances of voter fraud. States that do not comply with parts of the order are at risk of losing federal funding.

It is already against the law for noncitizens to vote, and studies have found that noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. A proof of citizenship requirement could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. A 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 21.3 million people, or over nine percent of voters, “don’t have proof of citizenship readily available.”

Multiple judges have since blocked much of Trump’s executive order. Last week, a federal judge permanently blocked two parts of the order “that sought to impose proof-of-citizenship rules.” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly argued in the ruling that Trump’s attempts to control elections were unconstitutional. “Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

The Trump administration has floated additional executive orders related to election administration. In August, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial” voting machines. “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” Trump wrote. Trump went on to falsely claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”

In November, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the White House was “working on an executive order to strengthen our elections in this country,” suggesting that the order would relate to mail-in voting.

The Epstein Files

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: Newly discovered Epstein file swears that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump! Staff and wire reports, Feb. 3, 2026. Well, well, well, well. A new document shows a former assistant of Epstein, who swore to tell the truth under penalty of perjury, says the story of how Trump and his third wife Melania met is false, and the reality is that she was introduced to Trump by none other than millionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“[Redacted] put [redacted] in contact with an agent named PAOLO ZEMPOLI who worked with ‘ID Models,’” the second page of the document begins, referring to Paolo Zampolli, Melania’s former modelling agent, who Trump appointed as “special envoy for global partnerships” last year.

“ZEMPOLI was trying to buy Elite Models with EPSTEIN. EPSTEIN introduced MELANIA TRUMP to DONALD TRUMP.”

This opens up a whole new swathe of questions about Donald Trump and his wife. After all, who among us isn’t provided with girlfriends by our sex-trafficking pedophile best friends?

Investigate, investigate, investigate. We need to clean out the entire DOJ of every one of Trump’s minions and replace them with people who are actually interested in discovering the truth and holding everyone accountable for the deeply disturbing crimes alleged in these files.

Editor's Note: The correct name spelling is Paolo Zampolli, right. Since March 2025, he has served as the Trump-nominated United States Special Representative for Global Partnerships. In the mid-1990s, Zampolli founded ID Model Management in New York City. 

2005 article, among other articles, confirms Zampolli brought Melania Trump to the United States in 1996. It was reported that Zampolli met Melania while she was working for Metropolitan Models. Zampolli made a bid to buy Elite Model Management and lost, prompting him to call Donald Trump in December 2004. He went on to form a partnership with the Trump Organization as Director of International Development.

 

 

Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, center right, joins other Trump administration officials in boasting in February 2025 outside the White House that they held in their hands "The Epstein Files" in binders that they would soon release. That was a year ago.

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: Top Trump DOJ official claims “it’s not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein” in shocking defense of the pedophile and his pedophile accomplices! Staff and wire reports, Feb. 3, 2026. There you have it, folks. After years and years of screaming about pedophile cabals, child sex predators, and grooming, the right-wing is now hand-waving away heinous acts of sexual violence as “partying.”

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to carry water for pedos and his pedophile boss, Donald Trump.

The white supremacist host asked Blanche “Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged in relations with minors will be prosecuted? Any chance?”

Blanche replies, “I'll never say no. And we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct. But as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And so as horrible as it is, it's not a crime to email with Mr. Epstein.”

“Some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will, but it's also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn't a crime to party with Mister Epstein.”

Todd, what the f*ck do you think was going on at those parties? Given all we know about Epstein and the shocking crimes he and his accomplices committed, it almost certainly was a crime to participate in his parties!

It is shocking and revolting to see the Department of JUSTICE try to minimize the mass sex trafficking and rape of young girls as “partying.”

He needs to resign immediately and be replaced with someone who will actually enforce the law and carry out prosecutions against everyone involved.

 

Implicated In The Epstein Files: Steve Tisch, principal owner of the New York Giants football team and scion of a family long prominent in entertainment, shown in a 2018 photo.

New York Times, N.F.L. Says It Will Look Into Steve Tisch’s Ties to Epstein, Ken Belson and Jenny Vrentas, Feb. 3, 2026. Recently released emails reveal that Jeffrey Epstein sought to connect Mr. Tisch, whose family is a part-owner of the New York Giants, with multiple women.

The National Football League said on Monday that it would look into the New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch’s involvement with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, after the connection between the two men was revealed in documents released by the Justice Department.

“We are going to look at all the facts, we are going to look at the context of those, we are going to try to understand that,” Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, said at a news conference in San Jose, Calif., days before the Super Bowl. Mr. Goodell, though, stopped short of saying the N.F.L. would open a formal investigation into Mr. Tisch’s actions at this point.

Mr. Tisch, 76, was one of the prominent new names made public in the millions of documents the Department of Justice made public on Friday in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The documents showed the two men communicating frequently in 2013, with Mr. Epstein seeking to connect Mr. Tisch with multiple women. Their exchanges were often crude, with Mr. Epstein often describing women by their ethnicity or anatomy, and Mr. Tisch on more than one occasion using slang terms to ask if a woman Mr. Epstein wanted to connect him with was a sex worker.

The N.F.L., which waited three days before commenting on Mr. Tisch’s interactions with Mr. Epstein, finds itself in a not unfamiliar position of having to address questionable conduct of a team owner.

The league’s personal conduct policy covers both illegal activities and behaviors that may tarnish the reputation of the N.F.L., America’s largest and most popular professional sports league. Mr. Goodell suggested that the league was still fact-finding to determine if it would open an investigation into potential policy violations.

In the past, the league has responded cautiously to issues that involve the personal conduct of its team owners.

The league, for example, did not penalize Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, in 2019 after he was charged with two misdemeanor counts of soliciting sex, part of a wide-ranging investigation into possible human trafficking in South Florida. Mr. Kraft challenged the charges, which were ultimately dropped.

Mr. Tisch said in a statement last Friday that he’d had a “brief association” with Mr. Epstein that he deeply regretted, and that the women they had discussed were adults. There is no indication in the files that any of the women Mr. Epstein sought to connect Mr. Tisch with were underage.

The Giants, one of the league’s most storied franchises despite their recent on-field struggles, must also grapple with Mr. Tisch’s ties to Mr. Epstein, but the team has not made any public statements about if or how it is addressing Mr. Tisch’s position with the organization.

Mr. Tisch, who has worked as a movie producer, is the representative for his family, which owns 45 percent of the team. He has served as the team’s chairman and executive vice president since 2005, after the death of his father, Preston Robert (Bob) Tisch, the president of Loews Corporation, who had purchased half the franchise in 1991. Both of his siblings are board members, and his brother, Jonathan, is also treasurer of the team.

The Tisches are a prominent New York family. Bob’s brother, Laurence, was chairman of CBS, which was part-owned by Loews and is a longtime broadcast partner of the N.F.L. Laurence Tisch’s granddaughter Jessica is New York City’s police commissioner

Steve Tisch’s footprint in N.F.L. circles is relatively light. The Giants co-owner and president John Mara, whose family bought the franchise in 1925, has been more involved in the day-to-day running of the team, though Mr. Tisch used his private plane to fly in the Giants’ new head coach, John Harbaugh, for his interview with the team.

In the past, team owners have been penalized by the league for bad behavior, though these instances involved either misconduct toward N.F.L. employees or a conviction.

The Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay was suspended for six games and fined $500,000 in 2014 after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of operating a vehicle while intoxicated. During his suspension, Mr. Irsay had to stay away from the team facilities, games and social media.

Feb. 2

Donald Trump, in a collages with Russia's Vladimir Putin and Jeffrey Epstein (image via The Hartmann Report)

The Hartmann Report, Political Analysis On The Manchurian Billionaire: How Trump’s Rise Mirrors Every Classic Intelligence Takeover, Thom, Hartmann, right, Feb. 2, 2026. Debt, ego, sexual compromise, and fear: why Trump’s behavior makes sense only when you realize he’s been in Putin's pocket for years…

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Putin has basically owned Trump for years, even before he ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50%) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Senator Ron Wyden, the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …

“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

— Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?— Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?— Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?— Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?— Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?— Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?— Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?— Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?— Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?— Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?— Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Senator Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Arresting Two Journalists Is Pure Fascism, Jennifer Rubin, right, Feb. 2, 2026. Pam Bondi (shown above) must go.

The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for simply covering a protest at a St. Paul, Minn., church personify theTrump regime’s accelerated sprint toward fascism. These arrests also remind us that no one has been more instrumental than Attorney General Pam Bondi in the assault on Americans’ civil liberties and the rule of law domestically and internationally.

Facing a political debacle that threatens to destroy the remainder of Trump’s presidency, the regime doubled down in a display of tyrannical petulance. Bondi, you may recall, failed twice to get warrants for Lemon’s and Fort’s arrests. The federal magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence refused to sign off on warrants for their arrest.

The Justice Department’s bizarrely inappropriate effort to get the 8th Circuit to order the warrants’ signing (via a writ of mandamus) failed. Having struck out twice and earning a tongue-lashing from Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, the Justice Department scrounged up a grand jury to indict Lemon and others.

Press advocacy organizations, Democratic leaders, Lemon’s former colleagues at CNN, and civil liberties groups denounced the attempt to criminalize core First Amendment activity. “Don Lemon’s arrest is an egregious violation of the 1st amendment. Reporters in America are free to view, document, and share information with the public,” said Public Citizen Co-President Lisa Gilbert in a written statement. “This arrest is a constitutional violation, an outrage, an authoritarian breach, and utterly appalling.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, right, was among the first to blast the Trump regime. “The arrest of journalists for going into a church in the course of reporting is shocking enough, but what’s even more alarming is that it’s no secret that Don Lemon is a Trump critic,” she said in a written statement.

After release without bond in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon, Lemon told reporters: “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now.” He added, “There is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.”

On his show that night, Lemon thanked former CNN colleagues but admonished legacy media journalists to stop enabling Trump:

[CNN journalists] need to tell Warner Brothers Discovery stop playing and get your hands out of the newsroom.

CBS needs to tell Paramount and David Ellison and whatever get out of our newsroom, get out of our journalism!

Bari Weiss, take your hands off of it! Let the journalists be the journalists…. [T]hat goes for every single corporate entity that owns a journalistic organization. Let the journalists be the journalists because they’re going to save our democracy!

Lemon, below left, reminded media and other institutions that “the way to stand up to a bully, to a tyrant is not to bend the knee. It’s not to acquiesce. It is to metaphorically punch them right in the nose.” He went on: “And you need to introduce not only Donald Trump and the folks who work for him and his administration but the corporate overlords and the gatekeepers, you need to introduce them to the word ‘no’!”

It is virtually inconceivable that the government will prevail in prosecution of Lemon and Fort. Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote for The Guardian that the two statutes cited in the indictment — one prohibiting conspiracies to interfere with exercise of constitutional rights and the other barring intentional interference with religious worship — do not remotely apply.

“The journalists, of course, didn’t conspire with anyone to do anything nefarious. They simply documented news,” Stern explained. “It’s ironic that Lemon and Fort are accused of exactly what the Trump administration actually did — intimidating those who exercise core constitutional freedoms, like documenting news.” The other statute requires intent to interfere with a religious service, “not the lawful documentation of news events by journalists who neither plan protests nor participate in them.” He added, “Journalists follow the news — they don’t decide where it happens,” which explains why no attorney general ever “personally involved herself in pursuing vindictive criminal charges against journalists the administration doesn’t like, who merely covered a protest.”

In the short run, this unconstitutional outrage will make Lemon and Fort journalist rock stars, furthering their reach. But the ripple effect may be much greater.

The massive crowds that turned out on Friday for the ICE Out protests, including in Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles, show that Americans will not be mollified by half-steps and vague promises (e.g., sending “Border Czar” Tom Homan to Minneapolis, reversing a decision to not conduct a civil rights investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing). Lemon’s and Fort’s arrests (coupled with the incomplete release of more heavily redacted Epstein files and the seizure of Fulton County, Ga., voting materials) will intensify the rage sweeping across the country, driving Trump’s horrid polling numbers even lower, and giving Bondi the edge in the “Cabinet secretary most deserving of impeachment” contest.

The latest arrests follow other vindictive prosecutions of Trump enemies (e.g., Letitia James, James Comey). She has refused (reversed in Pretti’s case) to investigate the regime’s killings or cooperate with local law enforcement; her DOJ attorneys habitually defy court orders; she dissembled about and delayed the still-incomplete release of the Trump-Epstein files; and she dispatched Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to confer with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was then moved to cushy quarters, during the pedophile coverup. These dwarf any predecessor’s misdeeds. (She also repeatedly insults lawmakers and refuses to answer their questions during oversight hearings, purged DOJ attorneys believed by the Trump regime to be “disloyal” and solicited new hires based on loyalty to Trump’s agenda, and oversaw the Office of Legal Counsel’s bogus justifications for extrajudicial killings on the high seas and the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president.)

Voters must hold accountable every senator who confirmed Bondi. Democrats should vow that once in the majority they will conduct exacting oversight of the Justice Department, pursue Bondi’s impeachment, and ensure she and her accessories are held accountable to the fullest extent of the law and face disbarment. Democrats must commit to a top-to-bottom housecleaning of DOJ and the imposition of stringent professional standards and penalties for misconduct.

Although it is too soon to say if Trump’s social media rant vowing to stay away from protests in major cities signals an actual retreat (deploying tear gas in Portland suggests ICE’s reliance on violence continues), Lemon’s and Fort’s arrests must not stand. All Americans must ensure that these cases mark the beginning of the end of Bondi’s disastrous career and the ruinous era of DOJ corruption.

Feb. 1

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, which President Trump has sought to rename to include his name first despite a law stating its official name as honoring only the late President Kennedy.

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Kennedy Center to Close for 2-Year Construction Project, President Says, Adam Nagourney, Feb. 1, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• Kennedy Center: President Trump announced that he would shut down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which has been battered by cancellations and boycotts, for two years starting this summer. The move came after a major backlash by performers, contributors and audience members and amounted to a significant setback to one of the key initiatives of his second term. Read more ›
• Immigration Crackdown: Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old who was detained by federal agents while wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat, has returned to Minnesota with his father after a federal judge ordered them released from an immigration detention center in Texas. Read more ›
• Shutdown Talks: A shutdown of a large portion of the federal government that began on Saturday could continue until Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday. The Senate passed a bipartisan spending package late Friday to fund most of the government while Democrats negotiate restrictions on the administration’s immigration crackdown. The deal is fragile, though, and could still fall apart. Read more ›

President Trump announced Sunday that he would shut down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which has been battered by cancellations and boycotts, for two years starting this summer. He said that would allow his administration to transform what he called “a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center,” into “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement came after a major backlash by performers, contributors and audience members and amounted to a significant setback to one of the key initiatives of his second term. From his first weeks in office, Mr. Trump set out to remake the center, opened as a tribute to John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, in his image.

He attached his name to the center, has installed loyalists to run it, including Richard Grenell, and called for changing the programming there to make it more in line of what he said was widespread American tastes and sensibilities: more “Les Miz” and less “Hamilton,” as he put it on one visit to the center.

The reaction has been harsh and unrelenting. Last week, Philip Glass, the acclaimed American composer, said he was withdrawing Symphony No. 15, which had been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in tribute to Abraham Lincoln, that was to be performed there in June. A week earlier, the acclaimed soprano Renée Fleming canceled a performance there.

The Washington National Opera announced last month that it was cutting its ties to the center and the other classical music anchor there, the National Symphony Orchestra, has been playing to empty seats.

But Mr. Trump, in his social media post, made no mention of the cancellations or the patrons who are now staying home: attendance at the National Symphony Orchestra is down 50 percent over last year. Instead, he presented it as his latest effort to rebuild part of Washington — following the demolition of the East Wing of the White House — in this case a performing arts center.

The Kennedy Center underwent a major renovation and expansion in 2019 under Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center president who left shortly after Mr. Trump took office. But Mr. Trump had earlier seemed unhappy with that expansion, which cost $250 million, saying “they built these rooms that nobody is going to use.”

The president said that funding had been found for the project — but did not say how much it would cost or where the money was coming from. Last year, Mr. Trump secured $257 million from Congress to help with capital repairs on the building.

He offered no details of what kind of reconstruction he had in mind, other than to say it would entail “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”

The center will shut down on July 4, he said Sunday, coinciding with the nation’s celebration of its 250th birthday. He said that a dramatic step was necessary to safeguard one of Washington’s most treasured cultural institutions.

“In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer,” he wrote on Truth Social. The temporary closure will produce a much faster and higher quality result!”

There was no immediate word where the National Symphony Orchestra, which has vowed to keep playing at the center in the midst of the exodus, would perform over those two years. In a typical year, the orchestra plays as many as 150 performances at the Kennedy Center.

The Washington National Opera has already begun to find other halls.

Mr. Trump made his announcement on what has always been a busy night for American culture and music: the Grammy Awards are taking place in Los Angeles. And it came two days after he used the center as a venue for the black-tie premiere of a documentary about his wife, “Melania.”

 

New York Times, ‘Melania’ Arrives With Strong Box Office Showing for a Documentary, Brooks Barnes, Jan. 31, 2026. Amazon backed up the Brink’s trucks to promote the vanity film, resulting in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8 million, or 60 percent more than expected.

Amazon’s gold-plated rollout for Melania Trump’s documentary is likely to result in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8.1 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts projected on Saturday. That would give “Melania” the best start for a documentary (excluding concert films) in 14 years.

It would be a face-saving result for the first lady — just a few days ago, ticket sales were pacing at about $5 million — but not for Amazon, which spent an exorbitant $75 million to buy distribution rights to “Melania” and market its release. Theater owners keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales, meaning that Amazon would end the weekend with about $4 million to show for its investment. (Overseas ticket sales are expected to be negligible. Specific estimates were not yet available on Saturday. Analysts project weekend ticket sales by collecting Friday sales data from various theater circuits, measuring presales for Saturday and Sunday and extrapolating from there.)

EntTelligence, a research firm, estimated that theaters in rural areas would contribute roughly 46 percent of the opening-weekend total for “Melania,” far higher than is typical for a film opening. Republican counties would also over perform, contributing about 53 percent of ticket sales, according to EntTelligence. Top states included Florida, Texas and Arizona.

The audience was overwhelmingly female (72 percent) and over the age of 55, according to Amazon.

At the Cinemark Valley View in Cleveland on Friday, the audience for a “Melania” screening included a couple of buses worth of people from a nearby senior center. “It was a nice fluff piece,” Gordon Wilson, 80, said as he exited. Another Cleveland attendee, Anita Dloniak, 68, chuckled when she heard that some of the other ticket buyers called the film propaganda. “What did they think it was going to be?” she said.

Bob Schmidt, 60, went to see “Melania” at the Alamo Drafthouse on Staten Island on Friday. He rarely goes to the movies anymore, he said, but he bought a ticket to send a message to what he called the liberal movie industry. “I wanted to see this movie kick Hollywood’s ass,” Mr. Schmidt said. (During the screening, attendees erupted in applause during the scene when President Trump is sworn in. Someone shouted, “Trump 2028!”)

Amazon, of course, can also monetize “Melania” on its Prime streaming service, where the film is expected to become available in three to four weeks. But the company’s spending on the documentary was so extreme — it paid $40 million for the rights alone, about $26 million more than the next closest bidder — that a question will linger: Was this all just an attempt for Amazon to ingratiate itself with President Trump?

Amazon’s lavish spending on “Melania” coincided with 16,000 layoffs at the company (on top of the 14,000 corporate employees it expunged in October), adding to a bumpy moment for the company’s brand.

The company declined to comment on Saturday. Previously, Amazon had said it bought Mrs. Trump’s documentary “for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”

People who went to see “Melania” gave it an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls. “Elegant, informative and beautifully done” was Lynn Suter’s review, as she left a sold-out Friday showing of the film near Jupiter, Fla. Ms. Suter, a member of Conservative Gals of Palm Beach County, a Facebook group with more than 400 members, added that she intended to “tell everyone to go see it.”

But critics savaged Mrs. Trump’s affectionate self-portrait. (She produced the film and had editorial control.) “It’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial,” wrote Owen Gleiberman, chief movie critic for Variety, the Hollywood trade publication.

Meidas Touch Network, My Most Important Sunday Message Yet, .Ben Meiselas, right, Feb. 1, 2026. I normally post this earlier, but I didn’t sleep that much last night. I’ve been going through the 3 million Epstein files over and over again, making connections that I’ve been sharing on our YouTube page. I alsospent a lot of time last night and into the early hours of this morning reflecting on the state of independent journalism.

On this Sunday, we should reflect on how independent journalism is under attack and what we need to do to protect it. As the largest independent media platform in the world, I know it is a moral imperative to use this platform and my voice to defend other independent reporters, to bring us together, and to rally us all in a common cause. I have been in communication with leaders in independent reporting to find ways to support each other’s work even more.

I also know that as the largest independent news platform in the world, the MeidasTouch Network is the top target for Trump and his DOJ. We knew we had to prepare for the day when Trump would try to arrest us and shut us down. For me, this network was, and is, always about this community and not me. If something happens to me personally, this network can live on since MeidasTouch stands for something bigger and more universal. We have intentionally built out a decentralized organizational structure to withstand attacks on our leadership, and we built out an international structure to withstand internet and communication blackouts in this country.

It is not a coincidence that Trump’s crackdown on independent journalism has accelerated with the partial release of the Epstein files. Trump knows that corporate news has been captured and won’t report how devastating those documents are. He wants to shut us down because he knows that more people get their news from us than anywhere else.

So where do we go from here? It is important we remain fearless in our reporting. It is important we don’t flinch or blink in the face of the threats. It is important that if something happens to me or our other leadership, the network’s operations are not impacted at all. It is critical that we keep our joy and not let Trump take away our empathy, our love for what we do, and our desire to bring people together rather than divide them. It is imperative we grow our operations here in the United States and, equally importantly, across the world. That is my pledge to you.

In return, as I reflect this weekend on everything, I have a simple request from you. Please share the MeidasTouch Network with people in your life today. Show them this Substack. Show them all the YouTube videos I’ve posted today on the MeidasTouch YouTube channel since 4 AM PT and let them see the truth.

Jan. 31

 

 

The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood, Melania’ Review, The first lady's reality show,.Sonny Bunch, Jan. 31, 2026.  As a general rule, my theory of criticism is that the only thing that really matters is the work on the screen. Jan. 31, 2026. 

Producer is corrupt? Director has been hit by sexual harassment claims? Star is embroiled in tabloid drama because they have ties to a sexually deviant blackmailer who flew people to his private island? Not really germane to the action on the screen.

But Melania is hard to separate from the off-screen nonsense as it only exists because of the off-screen nonsense. Just to briefly recap the ways in which this movie is . . . odd:

Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to make Melania, a deal the Wall Street Journal reported came about after a dinner between Jeff Bezos (who has, shall we say, multiple interests of great value that could be hurt or helped by Donald Trump’s White House) and the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago. Melania’s cut of that pie? Seventy percent.

Bezos and company have spent another $35 million advertising the film, which, as I noted in Morning Shots yesterday, means that it needs to recoup about $150 million at the box office to break even. And while there is a case to be made for conservative documentarians being an undervalued cinematic niche—a lot of dupes out there find great value in Dinesh D’Souza’s work—it is not a “$150 million worldwide haul” niche.

The director of the film, Brett Ratner—who was introduced to Trump by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin—was forced out of Hollywood in disgrace after the Los Angeles Times in 2017 reported allegations that he forced actress Natasha Henstridge to perform oral sex on him and masturbated in front of Olivia Munn without her permission. (Ratner would later claim to have had sex with Munn, humiliating her further, before admitting that was a lie. He denies the more salacious allegations and has not faced criminal charges.)

A photo of Ratner (above) was included in the Epstein files, though his relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is unclear. Just as it is unclear what Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is, given the DOJ’s refusal to release all of the Epstein files.

Ratner has attempted to parlay his relationship with Trump into a return to Hollywood writ large, using Trump’s leverage over Paramount’s father-son duo, Larry and David Ellison, to get a new Rush Hour film made.

All of which is to say that there is no reason for Melania to exist outside of rank corruption. The Trumps are using the power of the presidency to grift Jeff Bezos; Bezos hopes that this bribe will keep his companies safe from government interference; Ratner is worming his way into Trump’s good graces as a way to get past his own history of alleged sexual misconduct; and the Ellisons are putting up with Ratner’s return and potentially distributing a new Rush Hour in the hope that Trump will use his considerable influence to push the FTC toward allowing Paramount Skydance to swallow up Warner Bros. Discovery.

It’s all quite disgusting.

But is the documentary any good?

You see how we here at The Bulwark suffer for you, the reader? You see what we put ourselves through? If you haven’t signed up to become a paying Bulwark+ member just yet, maybe do so now to demonstrate that such immiseration is worth it, would you? I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to be buying any pricey banner ads for Melania in this here newsletter after he reads what follows.

Well, no, it’s not any good—and that’s partly because “documentary” here is a category error. This isn’t a documentary, as the opening moments make plain, Melania entering the frame and hitting her marks while a camera swoops overhead and watches her enter her SUV, which we then track as it arrives at an airport, private jet waiting as “Gimme Shelter” and then “Billy Jean” play in rapid succession. The term “documentary” is all wrong for something this stage-managed, this carefully put together.

No, this is reality TV with a hint of HBO’s long-defunct series Entourage, a strange combination of lifestyle porn and hagiography with the barest hints of public policy flitting around at the edges like fruit flies circling a moldy melon. Keeping Up With the Kardashians by way of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and the White House, say, albeit one that looks better than any reality TV show I’ve seen.¹

Set in the period between the re-election of Donald Trump and his second inauguration, Ratner’s camera follows the once and future first lady as she does all the things a first lady does: obsess over her hat brim’s straightness, ensure that the tablecloths and plates for the billionaires at the donor’s ball match the marble of the National Building Museum, and chit-chat with other first ladies about limiting screen time for teenagers. I don’t want to downplay all of her work here—there is a genuinely moving sequence with a survivor of October 7th whose husband was still being held hostage by Hamas when filming took place—but this is not a film that is particularly interested in Melania’s absurdly named Be Best campaign.

No, the film’s real interest is in the clothes and the glitz and the style; Ratner lovingly shoots Melania from the heels up, so routinely tracking her high-heeled feet up to her torso that one can’t help but feel as if he’s auditioning to be Quentin Tarantino’s second unit director. We learn all about the seams of her inaugural gown (it’s going to be in the Smithsonian one day, don’t you know) and how smart she is about clothes. It’s true: she’s a former model (it’s how she got her Einstein visa, don’t you know) and quite pretty and knows how to flatter herself.

Look: This movie’s not for me. If you’re reading this at The Bulwark, it’s probably not for you, either. The target audience seemed to enjoy it fine; the 12:40 p.m. showing at the AMC NorthPark in Dallas was 80 percent full and laughed in all the right places. It preaches to the faithful with great reverence and they were thrilled to bask in the golden glow of Trump Tower. But it’s fascinating to see so pure and naked an instrument of graft and propaganda deployed to great effect on an audience happy to lap it up. 

 

The Daily via PoliticusUSA, Commentary: Beware the Firehose of Falsehood, Sarah Jones, right, Jan. 31, 2026. The firehose of falsehood is a Russian disinformation strategy that often involves overwhelming the information environment with massive amounts of conflicting, bizarre, or fabricated content.

Steve Bannon described Trump’s media strategy as “flood the zone.”

The latest Epstein files dump is truly disturbing. It appears to smear Trump as well as his allies and foes with the suggestion of wrongdoing, but also at the same time fails to produce actual evidence.

Coming more than a month after Trump’s DOJ missed the deadline set by Congress, they dumped more than 3 million pages and 180,000 images on Friday. They have not yet explained all of the redactions, either.

PBS’s Ali Rogin said of the newly released materials, “I think most notably what people are looking for is mentions of President Trump. And there are thousands of them in these documents. Many of them, we should note, are news clippings.

“But there are some lists and summaries of unsubstantiated claims made against him from individuals alleging wrongdoing, including graphic depictions of alleged sexual abuse, including of underage girls. Some of those complaints date back to the ‘90s, others from more recently around when he was campaigning for president.

“What we don’t know, though, is whether any of these claims have been substantially investigated. But the Department of Justice says that they were required by law to release everything, including those documents that were fake or falsely submitted.”

Trump’s former attorney and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed they had not protected Donald Trump.

His comments sounded like he knew people would not be satisfied with the document dump, “We complied with the statute, we complied with the act, and there is no -- we did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect or not protect anybody. There’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s -- it’s not -- there’s nothing I can do about that.”

The administration did what has become its usual thing of dumping on a Friday and then taking the documents offline for a short time, only to come back later with presumably more redactions, thus creating chaos and sparking suspicion.

Some of the accusations included are outlandish, which I suspect is intentional.

We’re cautioning readers because confirmation bias is one hell of a drug. Yes, Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist. Yes, he has lusted after teenagers in public, including his own daughter. Accusations made in the 90s would hold more weight off the bat because they wouldn’t be dismissed as potentially political, however many women will come forward during a political campaign because they feel a duty to warn the public.

But importantly, accusations that have not been tested are not facts.

This is not meant as a defense for the big names mentioned in this dump, including Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Melania Trump’s “love” email to Ghislaine Maxwell, but rather a reminder of the pattern we have seen before from this administration.

The Trump administration briefly took down the portion of the Epstein files it published on January 30, 2026. By taking it offline, they created an even a bigger story about what could be red herrings. Was this deliberate or are they this incompetent?

Either way, it’s a very real Russian technique, referred to by nonpartisan policy researchers at RAND as the “firehose of falsehood”.Disinformation

The firehose of falsehood is a Russian disinformation strategy that often involves overwhelming the information environment with massive amounts of conflicting, bizarre, or fabricated content to erode public trust.

 

Occupy Democrats, Democratic Advocacy: Brave reporter REFUSES to let Trump bully her, and sends him into a tantrum challenging him on his plot to steal *billions* in taxpayer dollars! Staff Report, Jan. 31, 2026.

ABC News’ Karen Travers, shown above left, was one of the few reporters daring enough to ask the president a *real* question during his White House presser today, asking why he was suing the IRS for $10 billion dollars over imaginary claims they leaked his tax records — which we all know is just an excuse so he can siphon the public’s money into his pockets.

The issue is apparently a touchy subject for Trump, who immediately lost his temper and threw a tantrum.

“Why are you suing?” asked Travers.“Who are you with?” snaps Trump.

“I'm with ABC News,” she responds. “You're a loud person. Very loud. Let somebody else have a chance,” he says, trying to dismiss her and move on.

But she won’t budge. “Can you answer the question? Why are you suing IRS?”

"ABC fake news! You're — I didn't call on you. [to another reporter] Go ahead, please. Go ahead. Go ahead. Do you think the upcoming talks... [Trump interrupts him] ABC, by the way, is truly one of the worst!"

Kudos to Travers for risking her ability to be in the Oval Office by asking Trump to explain his transparent effort to bully an arm of the government into giving him a huge payout based on nothing but conspiracy theories and bullsh*t.

President Insecurity Projection's response makes it very clear that there is nothing legitimate about this lawsuit, and the media needs to be hounding him left and right for trying to extort TEN BILLION DOLLARS from the US taxpayer. 

Meidas Touch Podcast, Melania gets DITCHED as Epstein Emails EXPOSE HER, Jan 31, 2026. Host Ben Meiselas reports on Melania Trump having the worst week of her life as her movie premiere was ruined because no one showed up and because of she got exposed by an email in the Epstein email dump on Friday.

Jan. 30

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, The Reckoning Is Coming, Steve Schmidt, above, Jan. 30, 2026. Last night, Melania Trump held the premiere of a movie no one wants to watch. Steve Schmidt condemns Trump’s sycophants for celebrating a blatant act of corruption while they continue assaulting constitutional rights.

Variety, ‘Melania’ Review: Brett Ratner’s First Lady Documentary Is a Cheeseball Infomercial of Staggering Inertia, Jan 30, 2026. There's no drama to a film that should have been called "Day of the Living Tradwife."

“Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial.

Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”

The movie was shot, by director Brett Ratner and a trio of prestige cinematographers, over the course of the 20 days leading up to (and including) the 2025 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump. And to the extent that it allows Melania Trump a whisper of personality or agency, it’s as a designer. She helps to tweak the design of her own outfits. She has chosen the color of the inaugural invitation envelopes (a lovely shade of scarlet). She offers design tips about the plates and flowers and glassware. And, during the first Trump presidency, she helped to redesign sections of the White House.

All of this plays out, in “Melania,” as if she’s planning her wedding. The movie opens to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which makes it sound like the film is going to strike an attitude of defense against those who have been mean to Melania. But no, “Melania” is so studiously celebratory, like a piece of state-sanctioned propaganda out of 1960s Communist China, that it never even wades into those controversial waters.

The movie plunks us down at Mar-a-Lago, where Melania struts out the door and into the back of an SUV, which will take her to the red-white-and-blue private plane painted with the word TRUMP that’s waiting for her at the airport. Wherever she lands, she’s in a mobile bubble, jetting from the palace of Palm Beach to Trump Tower in New York, where she meets for a fashion fitting in what looks like a dining room of the Titanic designed by Liberace, then to St. Patrick’s Cathedral right down the block (where she attends an anniversary mass for her mother) and on to the renovated 19th-century charm of Blair House in Washington, D.C., then back to Trump Tower and back to the Capital.

Melania came out of Slovenia as a teenage fashion model, but she was always less Brooke Shields than Nico, and now, at 55, in her Terminator sunglasses and thick mascara eyelashes and omnipresent four-inch pumps (she wears them in every scene, even when she’s just relaxing on the couch), she still has that frozen-for-the-camera hauteur, as well as the thick accent that blankets everything she says, giving it all the same emotional neutrality. “Can we do the lapel a little bit beeger?” she asks her designer, Hervé Pierre, and he, like everyone else in the room, reacts with a grin of jovial agreement, as if Marie Antoinette had just asked for a piece of cake. The movie is stitched together by Melania narrating her life in voice-over, most of it along the lines of “This is my last flight as a private citizen, before stepping back into my public life” or “The people I like have to share my vee-sion.”

Variety, 'Melania': Why Would Amazon Spend $75 Million on a Movie This Boring? Regine Mahaux, Jan. 30, 2026. About midway through the documentary “Melania,” a piece of imagemaking whose interest comes only occasionally and accidentally, the film seems to acknowledge the oddity of its own making.

First Lady-to-be Melania Trump, in the days before her husband’s 2025 inauguration, has inked a deal to appear in the very film the audience is watching; her aides are fielding inquiries from a journalist about the potential ethical issues this deal raises. One of the two soon-to-be East Wing workers laughs; the inquiry is destined to go unanswered.

Perhaps it just goes without saying. Whatever benefit the Trump administration is to gain from the message of “Melania,” such as it is, playing out on cineplex scenes nationwide seems minuscule compared to the material gain: Amazon paid a reported $40 million fee to Melania’s production company, and has invested some $35 million more in promoting the film. Before the logo for Muse Films, Melania’s company, the film opens with the banner for Amazon MGM Studios, whose “Art for Art’s Sake” slogan has rarely seemed more ironic.

That’s because the film itself exists as a striking rebuttal to the idea that it exists for reasons beyond the transactional. (Now that Amazon has made a payment to the First Family, perhaps whatever regulatory concerns they are to have in future might be eased.) “Melania” is a fascinating document: An attempt to look behind the image of a person who resolutely refuses introspection, a vérité confessional undertaken by someone constitutionally averse to the act of confession. It plays like a film by Pablo Larraín, that great documenter of female celebrity behind “Jackie” and “Spencer,” minus the moment when our great diva has an emotional catharsis, or expresses an emotion. And it is many things — but it’s not $75 million worth of movie.

The film’s box-office prospects seem abysmal; it’s tracking very low, and, anecdotally, it became apparent that all of the 20 or so people in my screening room were, to a one, journalists reporting on the movie. Why would civilians care? After all, for much of its 108-minute running time, “Melania” is primarily a film about a woman walking into and out of rooms. This is true from the very first: The movie opens with a lengthy sequence, scored to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” in which Melania enters a car to leave Mar-a-Lago, puts on sunglasses, exits that car, boards a plane, removes her sunglasses and sits down, her head hitting the headrest just as the “Rape! Murder!” chorus of the song kicks in. (The scoring of this movie, including two plays of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” is gaudily expensive throughout, a funny reminder that pop music is one of our current president’s great interests.)

Melania, here, is spending her last weeks as a private citizen while planning the inauguration, and we are shown that prep at a level of detail that shifts from painstaking to painful. (Not once but twice are we shown lengthy fitting sequences, as she instructing a tailor on the manner in which her inaugural looks need to be altered.) She speaks in voiceover throughout the planning process, deliveringparagraphs with incantatory rhythms that can have the effect of concealing that they contain no substance at all. “My education in architecture gives me a serious design approach,” she tells us. Later: “For me, it’s important that timeless elegance shines through in every element.”

One senses little feeling behind the words, not least because they seem at times to directly contravene what’s actually happening in the world, from relatively trivial to high-stakes. She proudly informs viewers that, in her husband’s first term, she “restored the Rose Garden”; it’s since been paved over. Later, reflecting on the outpouring of support she felt on Inauguration Day, she tells us that “In the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.” A director not beholden to the Trump administration — unlike Brett Ratner, whom Melania tapped to make this film, and who had previously been cast out of the industry following multiple allegations of sexual assault — might find the interesting friction between these words and the ongoing refusal to acknowledge the humanity of immigrants and those who advocate for them. Instead, the words just lie there.

The Parnas Perspective,  News Updates and Commentary, Trump DOJ Arrests Don Lemon, Trump Calls Pretti an Insurrectionist, a Major First Amendment Attack, Aaron Parnas, right, Jan. 30, 2026. Federal authorities arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon late Thursday in what amounts to an unmistakable act of overreach—one that directly threatens the First Amendment and signals a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against dissent and press freedom.

As I said in the video, it has never been scarier to be a journalist in America, and I mean it. It’s also never been more important to fight back and continue reporting. I will never stop no matter what. Subscribe if you can to support my work:Subscribed

Lemon was taken into custody over his presence at a protest that disrupted a church service earlier this month in St. Paul, Minnesota, despite overwhelming evidence that he was there solely as a journalist documenting events, not participating in them. A statement from Lemon’s attorney is below:

The precise charges against Lemon, left, were still unclear at the time of his arrest. What is clear is the extraordinary path the Trump Justice Department took to get there. Just days earlier, a magistrate judge refused to sign a criminal complaint against Lemon, finding the evidence insufficient.

Rather than respecting that judicial determination, the administration appears to have deliberately maneuvered around it—either by seeking a grand jury indictment or shopping the case to another magistrate judge. This is not normal law enforcement. It is the weaponization of prosecutorial power to punish a reporter whose coverage the government did not like.

The events in question occurred on Jan. 18 at Cities Church, where protesters opposing the administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown interrupted a service led by a pastor who also serves as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. Protesters chanted “ICE out,” and federal prosecutors quickly moved to bring charges against eight individuals under a statute meant to protect worshippers’ rights. Lemon was swept into that dragnet despite the fact that he was not chanting, organizing, or disrupting the service—he was reporting.

A magistrate judge recognized that distinction, approving charges against only three individuals and rejecting the case against Lemon and others. A federal appeals court later declined to override that ruling. Lemon’s arrest, therefore, is not the result of new facts or new evidence.

In a functioning democracy, journalism is protected precisely because it often involves proximity to conflict, protest, and power. Lemon has been explicit about what he did inside the church: he observed the unfolding protest and spoke with those involved, including the pastor, congregants, and demonstrators. Criminalizing that conduct is not about preserving order—it is about intimidation. It sends a clear message to reporters everywhere: cover the wrong story, ask the wrong questions, and you could be next.

This crackdown unfolds against a backdrop of escalating violence and repression in Minneapolis. Federal agents have killed two protesters in recent weeks, including Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse shot by Customs and Border Protection officers. Rather than expressing restraint or concern, President Trump publicly smeared Pretti as an “agitator” and “perhaps an insurrectionist.”

Even as tensions spiral, the White House has attempted to project moderation. President Trump has suggested he may seek to “de-escalate” the situation, replacing the Border Patrol official overseeing the crackdown with border czar Tom Homan. Homan has floated the possibility of negotiating with local officials and reducing the federal footprint in the city. Yet these gestures ring hollow when paired with the arrest of a journalist whose conduct had already been deemed lawful by the courts.

Inside the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, the strain is becoming impossible to hide. Multiple prosecutors have resigned following internal confrontations over the administration’s refusal to investigate the shootings carried out by federal agents. Attorney General Pam Bondi has since called in reinforcements from other Midwest offices, underscoring both the scope of the unrest and the administration’s determination to press forward regardless of internal dissent.

Don Lemon’s case now stands as a warning—and a test. It raises the question of whether the federal government can simply override judicial skepticism, criminalize journalism, and use the machinery of the state to silence those who document its abuses. This is not about a single protest or a single reporter. It is about whether constitutional protections still function when power feels threatened.

In authoritarian systems, the press is not outlawed overnight. It is intimidated, prosecuted, and worn down case by case. The arrest of Don Lemon is not an anomaly. It is a signal.

 

Trump National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard and the anti-democratic prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.

Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Investigative Commentary: America's democracy is being Modi-ized, Wayne Madsen, Jan. 30, 2026. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard are close to the right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- and that is a five-alarm fire for America's free and fair elections.

The appearance on January 28 of FBI agents at the Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City, outside of Atlanta, is a direct threat by the Trump regime to America’s system of state-run free and fair elections. Pursuant to a federal court —approved search warrant, the FBI loaded into trucks records related to the 2020 election. The records included ballots, ballot envelopes, stubs, and digital files from the 2020 election.

More worrisome is the fact that Fulton County officials said they did not know why the materials were taken or where they were being transported. And even more ominously, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was photographed standing near FBI evidence trucks during the raid. The DNI possesses no authority to participate in domestic criminal investigations. Her presence at the election office triggered concerns from Democrats and Republicans. FBI director Kash Patel and Gabbard’s involvement in investigating the 2020 election in Georgia should result in more than “concern.”

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Both Patel and Gabbard are closely linked to the anti-democratic right-wing Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Perhaps that is why the anti-Modi Hindustan Times of India, which has called out Modi’s undermining of what was once the world’s most populous democracy, reported the following about the Georgia incident: “Multiple lawmakers, including Sen. Mark Warner and Sen. Jon Ossoff, publicly questioned why she [Gabbard] was “bizarrely and personally lurking” at the scene. The Hindustan Times has reported in-depth on how the Indian opposition to Modi has seen their candidates and office holders arrested and physically harmed, and elections they have won being annulled.

Justice Department insiders reported that Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County office was not requested by them. The White House stated that Gabbard was present during the documents seizure on the orders of Donald Trump.

The involvement of Patel’s FBI agents and Gabbard’s presence is a warning sign of what may be coming in the way of Trum’s interference in the mid-term elections this year and beyond. During Trump’s first presidential term, Trump introduced Patel to Modi as “my intel guy.” Patel had no background in intelligence at the time. Patel’s family hails from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, a region plagued by religious violence, often instigated by Hindu nationalist leaders against Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. In 2002, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi was accused of condoning Hindu violence against Muslims that resulted in the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus.

Patel has vehemently criticized American press coverage of Modi and the Ram Temple issue, arguing that U.S. outlets misrepresent Indian history and unfairly target Modi. The Ram Temple in Ayodhya is a major Hindu temple consecrated on January 22, 2024. It was built on the site of the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque, which was destroyed by Hindu rioters in 1992. Patel has also claimed that Washington “elites” prefer to “liken Trump and Modi as similar figures,” which Patel believes the media uses as cudgel to undermine Modi. At times, it’s difficult to ascertain whether Patel works for Trump or Modi. FBI director Kash Patel assures India full support in the fight against terrorism amid recent Pahalgam attack Kash Patel

Gabbard met Modi in Washington within hours after her confirmation as DNI. In fact, Gabbard was first U.S. official to meet Modi during his 2025 visit, which was a rather peculiar breach of diplomatic protocol. Gabbard had met Modi previously and has been publicly supportive of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party political identity, a rejection of the more secular policies of the center-left Indian National Congress adopted since independence by INC leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh, and Manmohan Singh.

Newsweek has reported on Gabbard’s ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the Hindu militant paramilitary organization of which Modi is a lifelong member. RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar, who led the organization during World War II, took inspiration from Adolf Hitler's ideology of racial purity. Golwalkar and other RSS leaders also supported the fascist policies of Benito Mussolini. The RSS was banned by the Indian government three times following independence. The bans occurred in 1948, following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; 1975, following the suspension of the Constitution; and 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Gujarat. Modi’s 2008 book, Jyotipunj, contains life sketches of 16 RSS leaders who shaped his worldview. The longest and most reverential chapter is devoted to M.S. Golwalkar, With his new book “Golwalkar: The Myth ...

Gabbard is not of Indian origin, but she is the first Hindu elected to the U.S. Congress. Gabbard followed her mother in embracing the Science of Identity Foundation cult, a Hawaii-based offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement led by Chris Butler, aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa.

Patel’s and Gabbard’s close links to Modi should be setting off alarms all over the United States. Multiple independent democracy‑watching organizations argue that Modi has significantly weakened India’s democratic institutions. The actions of Patel and Gabbard appear to be following the Modi template, which in India has occurred “through the fully legal harassment of the opposition,” rather than through a coup or mass arrests. Modi’s actions have included the frequent use of investigative agencies like the Department of Revenue Enforcement Division (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against opposition leaders; pressure on state and territorial governments; and criminal cases that critics argue are politically motivated.

 

Under Modi, intimidation of the media is a key mechanism of democratic erosion. Modi’s regime has raided independent newsrooms, pressured journalists, and concentrated media ownership among pro‑government media corporations.

Modi’s government has pursued a strong‑executive model that centralizes authority in the Prime Minister’s Office, reducing the autonomy of institutions that historically acted as checks. This has adversely affected bureaucratic independence, federalism, and parliamentary oversight.

Modi has attempted to stamp out political opposition by targeting opposition office holders. In 2024, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of the opposition Common People’s Party, was arrested by the ED in a liquor‑licensing case. His deputy and party Member of Parliament were already jailed. The opposition parties claimed the actions were part of a pre‑election crackdown.

The opposition was correct. Other opposition leaders were also arrested during pre-election campaigning in 2024. Hemant Soren, the Chief Minister of Jharkhand, was arrested by the ED hours after resigning. His party, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, denied the corruption allegations. Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel of Chhattisgarh and leader of the state’s branch of the INC was picked up by ED officials right before the 2024 state elections. The ED also arrested Chaitanya Baghel, son of former Chief Minister Baghel. Multiple Baghel aides were also raided. Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav of Bihar and leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal was also raided by federal authorities before the election.

Additionally, former Congress Member of the Legislative Assembly of Haryana, Dharam Singh Chhoker, was arrested. Most of Modi’s actions against the opposition occurred just before elections. Modi has attempted to paint the opposition as corrupt even though he leads the most corrupt Indian government since independence.

Civil society leaders have also been targeted by Modi. In 2024, Harsh Mander and his think tank, the Center for Equity Studies (CES) in New Delhi, were raided by the CBI, India’s version of the FBI, allegedly over charges that they had accepted illegal foreign contributions.

Delhi, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh all saw their Chief Ministers arrested by Modi. This paralyzed governance and weakened the opposition’s ability to campaign. Modi’s government also froze the INC’s bank accounts, which hampered its ability to campaign. The ED, acting on the orders of Modi, has questioned INC leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi for several hours. Rahul Gandhi was suspended from parliament for three days in 2023 for defaming Modi in a 2019 campaign speech. Gandhi merely asked the following question, “Why do all thieves have Modi as their surname?"

Federal law enforcement agencies have conducted raids on INC offices and associated trusts and have repeatedly summoned multiple senior INC figures for questioning. This is the same sort of political intimidation and law enforcement misuse that the Trump regime is now employing against Democratic leaders, journalists, and other opposition figures

Patel’s and Gabbard’s actions against Fulton County’s election process means that we will see Modi-style action taken by the Trump regime prior to the mid-term elections and beyond leading up to the 2028 presidential election. The seizure of the data devices of a Washington Post reporter, the arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, indictments of Democratic politicians, the opening of criminal investigations of leading Democratic political leaders in Minnesota and possibly other states, and other malign actions place the United States in the same position as India prior to its 2024 elections.

Jan. 29

 

Anthony James Kazmierczak is tackled after spraying an unknown substance at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),left, during a town hall meeting in Minneapolis on January 27, 2026. (Photo by Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images)

False Flag via The Bulwark, News and Comment about Propaganda: Did Ilhan Omar Stage Her Attack? Of Course Not. But Trump Thinks So, Will Sommer, Jan. 29, 2026. 

At a town hall gathering in Minneapolis on Tuesday night, a troubled man sprayed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with a mysterious substance from a syringe. It was a scary moment, one that underscored how widespread political threats and acts of violence have become. But on right-wing media, it quickly became something else: a false-flag assault designed to let Omar aura farm.

MAGA media figures spent much of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning insisting that Omar had somehow made the suspect, Anthony James Kazmierczak, spray her with the mysterious substance, which they concluded was likely apple cider vinegar. Much of the suspicion focused on the fact that Omar appeared ready to fight her assailant, before her security guard pulled the man away.

Popular MAGA X user “Zeek Arkham” (484,000 followers) wryly declared the incident “totally, totally wasn’t staged.”

Breaking down the incident as if it were the Zapruder film, Arkham wrote: “She then bravely runs towards him, without reflexive safety reaction as most people would do, to tune him up as her security gets there, without concern for her own safety. Then, instead of taking her to a hospital to get checked out regarding this unknown liquid, she continues her speech as if nothing happened.”Subscribed

Lest you think this is just the musings of a hyper-online rando, the president of the United States—himself hyper-online but hardly a rando—picked it up too.

“She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” Donald Trump told ABC News.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) had the same thought, declaring the attack “staged” in an appearance on Benny Johnson’s show.

In a world where the January 6th riot happened—and elected officials are regularly the targets of violence—the idea that a kook would attack Omar doesn’t seem far-fetched. That’s especially true considering how much Trump and fellow conservatives have verbally attacked the congresswoman in recent weeks, accusing her of corruption and criticizing her home city of Minneapolis.

But to acknowledge that Omar was, indeed, threatened would require the right to grapple with the possibility that Trump’s rhetoric may have inspired the threat. And so, they’ve chosen to reflexively argue that Omar concocted the entire thing.

Conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler claimed Omar made some kind of “head nod” toward the suspect before the incident, even demanding an investigation of the congresswoman. Many others, perhaps revealing more than they’d like about their own fortitude, questioned Omar’s decision to charge at the man even after he sprayed her (the congresswoman told MSNow on Wednesday that she thought he had spit on her and that she “instinctively tried to, like, punch him.”) Some online accounts noted that the alleged assailant appears to have goth kids—a non sequitur to people outside of the right-wing media bubble but taken as proof within it that Kazmierczak must be a member of Antifa.

Hyperpartisans on both sides of the aisle are prone to act in ways that are defensively conspiratorial in these types of moments. In the immediate aftermath of the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on Trump, there was a flood of social media posts claiming that it was fake.

But the new Omar conspiracy theory is being pushed by the actual president and a sitting U.S. senator. And that’s not the only reason it stands out. It also reflects, like so many other things in the Trump era, the right’s refusal to grapple honestly with news events whose implications they don’t like. School shootings are false-flag attacks meant to promote gun control. Wildfires have to be started by lasers fired from outer space to fan fears about global warming.

With Trump promoting the same ideas, it’s quite unlikely that things will get sane in right-wing media anytime soon.

Looking Ahead

Next week, the emotional former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino will finally be in a position to make real change in this country: as a podcaster!

Despite working for less than a year at the FBI, Bongino made a lot of enemies in right-wing media, both by not arresting high-profile Democrats and for insisting that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Having had to restrain himself as a government employee working out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, he now appears ready to take on his detractors from behind a mic. For example, after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos called Bongino a “pedophile’s pit bull” on Tuesday, Bongino dredged up Yiannopoulos’s own remarks downplaying pedophilia.

What grievances will Bongino settle? Will his fans hold the whole Epstein files coverup against him? These are important questions, not just for a sicko like me.

That’s because Bongino returns to a right-wing media industry that is less tethered to reality than ever. His reception will say a lot about the state of the movement. As does the hot topic of today’s newsletter, which is on right-wing media’s insistence that Rep. Ilhan Omar staged an attack on herself on Tuesday just to come off as cool. It’s conspiratorial, a bit depraved, and totally devoid of humanity. Just my cup of tea. Admit it, you love it too.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Social media as state media, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Jan. 29, 2026. Silicon Valley was once viewed as a tool for liberation. Now, from blocking apps to banning groups, it is helping the White House suppress dissent.

In the past, social media platforms were viewed as engines of social change, empowering everyday citizens to band together against repressive governments. In 2009, during the Green Movement, millions of Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to coordinate gatherings and circumvent government media blackouts.

Social media, it seemed, was an effective tool that ordinary citizens could use to counteract the excesses of the powerful.

Times have changed.

In the wake of a violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis that left two American citizens dead, TikTok users reported they were unable to upload videos critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On Sunday, law professor Stephen Vladeck reported that he “recorded a video on TikTok about why DHS’s arguments for the power to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases are bunk.” However, after nine hours, the video was still “under review” and could not be shared.

Other prominent figures, including comedian Megan Stalter and California State Sen. Scott Wiener (D), also said they were unable to upload anti-ICE videos or that such videos appeared suppressed by the TikTok algorithm.

The controversy emerged days after TikTok’s United States operations were acquired by a consortium led by Oracle, which was co-founded by billionaire and Trump loyalist Larry Ellison. Politico reported the acquisition “puts President Donald Trump’s allies in charge of yet another driver of American culture.”

TikTok insists this is all a big misunderstanding. It attributed the problems some users had uploading videos to an outage at a U.S. data center. But the timing has raised concerns, and other issues, including the inability of some users to send direct messages that included the word “Epstein,” have not been explained.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) said he would launch an investigation to determine whether TikTok’s explanation is credible. Regardless of the outcome, the larger trend is unmistakable. During Trump’s second term, large technology companies have served as an arm of the state, undermining protest and dissent.Apple and Google ban ICE-related apps

During the second Trump administration, both Apple and Google have removed apps from their app stores that track sightings of federal agents after facing pressure from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

ICEBlock, for example, allows users to anonymously report sightings of ICE officers and notifies users if agents are reported within a 5-mile radius. The app does not allow for photographs or videos of officers and the alerts expire after four hours. The app also notifies users that it is “for information and notification purposes only,” and that “[i]t is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.”

In October, Apple removed ICEBlock from its app store in response to a request by Attorney General Pam Bondi. “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” Bondi told Fox News. Bondi argued that the app was “designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”

ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron told CNBC that the app “went through a heavy review process with both Apple’s legal and senior officials in App review” when it was first submitted to its app store. Nevertheless, Apple told Aaron in an email that ICEBlock did not meet app store guidelines around “objectionable” and “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” CNN reported. In a statement, Apple said that, “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it.” In December, Aaron sued top Trump administration officials, arguing that they pressured Apple to violate his First Amendment rights.

Apple also removed other apps that allow users to track ICE from its store. Shortly after, Google followed suit. (ICEBlock never appeared in the Google app store.) Among the removed apps were Red Dot and Eyes Up. Red Dot, which was removed by both companies, allows users to report ICE activity and notify nearby community members. Eyes Up, which was removed by Apple, was designed to “document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement” that could later be used in legal cases. The app “only archives publicly posted materials,” including social media posts, news articles, and videos, but does not offer real-time tracking.Meta deletes ICE group, blocks ICE-related websites

Meta has established a pattern of censoring information related to ICE officers and operations.

In October, when ICE was in the midst of an operation in Chicago, Facebook users created a group, “ICE Sightings-Chicagoland,” to post photos and other information about where ICE officers had been seen. On October 14, when the group had reached over 80,000 members, it was taken down.

According to Bondi, Meta removed the ICE group at the DOJ’s behest. Bondi claimed in a social media post that the group was being used to “dox and target” ICE agents.

“The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs,” Bondi wrote on X. “The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.”

Similar Facebook groups exist for other cities targeted by ICE operations, like Portland, but have not yet been taken down by Meta.

This week, Meta began blocking links to a popular website called ICE List. The site compiles information on Department of Homeland Security employees in order to “document federal immigration enforcement, preserve evidence, and maintain a public record for accountability.”

Links to ICE List that have already been posted now display an error message when clicked on, and users attempting to make new posts linking to ICE List are blocked from doing so. According to ICE List’s creator, Dominick Skinner, ICE List has been asking for tips on DHS employees and posting links to its site on Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for six months without issue.

In an interview with WIRED, Skinner said, “I think it’s no surprise that a company run by a man who sat behind Trump at his inauguration, and donated to the destruction of the White House, has taken a stance that helps ICE agents retain anonymity.”

Meta denied that it was blocking ICE List links in order to appease the Trump administration, saying instead that the site violated its policy on sharing personally identifiable information. However, WIRED found that much of ICE List’s information on DHS employees was originally shared by employees themselves on public platforms such as LinkedIn.

 

 

 

 

A Craigslist advertisement paying people $50 has reportedly been posted as the film struggles to sell any tickets at all ahead of it's opening weekend this week.

Irish Star, Struggling Melania movie inspires Craigslist listing paying $50 to sit through film, Jack Hobbs, Jan. 29 2026. A Craigslist advertisement paying people $50 has reportedly been posted as the film struggles to sell any tickets at all ahead of it's opening weekend this week.

While many people might have lined up to watch historical films such as Darren Aronofsky's Oscar-nominated Jackie or Showtime's Viola Davis-led The First Lady, it seems the team promoting Melania Trump's new documentary might have a bit more trouble filling seats.

It was reported that the Amazon-backed film has allegedly posted an advertisement on Craigslist offering $50 to anyone who responds, as well as free tickets to watch the film in Boston, Massachusetts. The one stipulation, however, is that they must remain in the movie theater for the entire showing.

According to the posting, the desperate plea to fill seats came on Wednesday and could be fulfilled by attending a showing "at any Boston area theater during opening weekend." Of course, the post found its way to social media, where many users tried to claim the ad was not real.

Melania Trump's film crew 'want names removed from credits' of $40m documentary

"Why would anyone bother doing this? The Melania movie exists as a way for Bezos to legally bribe Trump," one person wrote. "He pays $40 million directly to Trump, no oversight, for some vague "rights." That's done. Trump has the money. The movie doesn't need to pretend to make a profit."

"omg ... they are hiring seat fillers? Why and whose paying?" a second person added. One person noticed a loophole in the advertisement.

According to the posting, the desperate plea to fill seats came on Wednesday and could be fulfilled by attending a showing "at any Boston area theatre during opening weekend."

"Doesn't say anything about having to actually pay attention, or that you can't be incredibly distracting and make tons of noise etc," they commented. "That being said, only $50? nah, gonna need to do better than that to get people to be willing to fill seats for her ego."

"If I’m going to sit through that garbage, I want $1M," a third person said bluntly. The plea for seat fillers comes after one user posted a screenshot of a showing with not a single seat sold.

The one stipulation, however, is that they must remain in the movie theater for the entire showing. Who's who?

Earlier, it was reported that many of the film's crew requested that their names be kept off the project. One crew member, who spoke to Rolling Stone magazine on condition of anonymity, expressed regret about their credit appearing in the film.

Social media engaged in an online debate whether the advertisement was real or not

"I'm much more alarmed now than I was a year ago," they said. Even those whose names still appear on the production hope the film disappears. "Unfortunately, if it does flop, I would really feel great about it," a production insider told Rolling Stone.

According to those who spoke to the magazine, the main grievance wasn't directed at the First Lady herself, who was described as "boring" but "nice." It was, however, director Brett Ratner, who was accused of multiple sex scandals after several women came forward.

Ratner has "categorically" denied all the allegations and has never faced charges. One member of the production team claimed there was more discussion about Brett's conduct than there was about Melania throughout the shoot.

The full guest list for Melania Trump's documentary premiere has been unveiled just a day before the film debuts at the Kennedy Center. The $40 million production is scheduled to hit screens at what's now being called the Trump-Kennedy Center on Thursday, with a roster of VIPs confirmed to attend.

According to The Daily Beast, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams and television personality Dr. Phil are among those expected to attend the screening. President Donald Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. , has also confirmed his attendance.

In addition, several White House personnel, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the controversial Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, are all expected to be in attendance.

New York Times, Amazon’s Promotion of ‘Melania’ Has Critics Questioning Its Motives, Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, Jan. 29, 2026 (print ed.). The tech giant is spending $35 million to promote its film about the first lady, far more than is typical for documentaries.

The film’s rollout is huge — a $35 million marketing campaign that includes television commercials during N.F.L. playoff games and a premiere simulcast in 25 theaters in the United States. Starting Friday, the film hits 3,300 theaters worldwide.

The latest superhero movie?

Try Amazon’s all-hands-on-deck handling of “Melania,” which follows Melania Trump, the first lady, in the days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration. Ms. Trump produced the film, which was directed by Brett Ratner, who has not made a movie since 2017, when multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. He has denied those accusations.

Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for “Melania” is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.

All of which has a lot of Hollywood questioning whether Amazon’s push is anything more than the company’s attempt to ingratiate itself with President Trump.

“This has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” said Ted Hope, who worked at Amazon from 2015 to 2020 and was instrumental in starting the company’s film division. “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”

Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and host of the “Pure Nonfiction” podcast, called the deal “startling” because of Mr. Ratner’s involvement and because Amazon’s payment for the film had “no correlation to the marketplace.”

Some employees in Amazon’s entertainment division had similar concerns, according to three sources with knowledge of discussions inside Amazon. They were told that the project was mandated by the company’s leadership and that employees could not opt out of working on the film for political reasons. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, and Mike Hopkins, who runs Amazon Studios, attended a private screening of the film at the White House on Saturday.

Amazon, when asked for comment about its promotion of the movie, repeated a statement it had released in the past: “We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”

Representatives for Ms. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

To grasp just how uncustomary Amazon’s marketing push for “Melania” is, consider how Magnolia Pictures handled “RBG,” a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her 25th year as a Supreme Court justice, in 2018.CNN Films produced “RBG” for around $1 million. The promotional budget, including an awards campaign that helped it land two Oscar nominations, totaled about $3 million. The film debuted in 34 theaters and expanded into 432 locations over several weeks. It ultimately collected $14 million, enough to rank as the year’s No. 1 political documentary.

Jan. 28

New York Times, Sundance Says Thank You, and Goodbye, to Park City, Nicole Sperling, Visuals by Maggie Shannon, Jan. 28, 2026.As the thousands of movie industry insiders and fans make their annual pilgrimage to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival this week, their memories about the event’s past are threatening to overwhelm the films.

That is because this is the last year that the event will be held in Park City, its home for 40-plus years. (Its future home is Boulder, Colo.) And because this is the first festival since the death of its founder, Robert Redford.

“As a generation that grew up on ‘Star Wars,’ it’s hard not to feel a disturbance in the force,” said Mr. Hawke, who first came to Sundance in 1994 as an actor in “Reality Bites.” He returned the next year with “Before Sunrise” — a movie chosen by Mr. Redford for the opening night.

Or as Mr. Greenfield put it: “I feel sad in a nostalgic way, but I also feel hopeful that it’s an opportunity for the next phase.”

“It’s hard not to feel a disturbance in the force,” said Ethan Hawke, whose acting career took off after his early movies appeared at the Utah festival in the 1990s.

Jan. 27

  

In the past month, government agencies have made dozens more social-media posts that include iconography associated with far-right extremist groups. Donald Trump's U.S. Department of Labor published the slogan and image above: "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage." Of course, the slogan sounds better in the original German, shown below with the Nazi-era image of that land's leader.

New York Times, Administration Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging, Evan Gorelick, Jan. 27, 2026. A flurry of posts from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security have included images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right.

The posts have referred to neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies, mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.

Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.

To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.

This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.ImageA social media post reads, “We’ll have our home again,” with a B2 bomber overheads and a cowboy on horseback before snowy mountains.A social media post from the Department of Homeland Security uses the phrase “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is also the title of a song written by white nationalists and embraced by groups like the Proud Boys.

“There are two types of people to whom these messages will quickly look familiar,” Oren Segal, a vice president for counterextremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said of the panoply of postings, “white supremacists, and those who study white supremacists.”

A Homeland Security spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said that if the ICE recruiting post were actually about the song, it “would be a problem” and “morally repugnant.” But, she said, the post had no relation to the white-supremacist anthem.

“There are plenty of references to those words in books and poems,” she said, adding that she was “in charge of everything” posted on the department’s social media accounts.

But when the post was opened on Instagram’s mobile app, audio from the chorus of the song played in the background. After a reporter pointed this out, Ms. McLaughlin said The Times was participating in a left-wing conspiracy theory.

“I’m telling you it’s not there,” she said.

Less than 40 minutes after the interview on Thursday, the Instagram post — including audio from the song — disappeared from social media. Posts on X and Facebook, which did not include an audio component, are still visible.

It was The Times, Ms. McLaughlin said, that was “mainstreaming racism” by tying the agency’s post to the white nationalist anthem.

Richard Hanania, a political scientist who once wrote for white-nationalist publications under a pseudonym before moderating his views, said such accusations were part of the game.

“They do everything up to the line; it’s kind of clever,” he said. “‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’ is a white-nationalist song.” He added that to his knowledge, no other groups would use it.Editors’ PicksHow Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America?For This Influencer, Rejection Is the New PerfectionI Let My Wife Have an Affair. Do I Have to Console Her Now That It’s Over?

In the past month, government agencies have made dozens more social-media posts that include iconography associated with far-right extremist groups. 

Jan. 26

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The corporate enablers of the ICE crackdown, Judd Legum, right, Jan. 26, 2026. How Amazon, AT&T, and Citizens Bank are profiting from the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

On Saturday morning, federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis. While administration officials claimed that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” video of the incident showed Pretti was holding a phone. The officers were in Minneapolis as part of a large-scale crackdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As Pretti was attempting to assist another person who had been pepper-sprayed in the face, a group of federal officers pushed him to the ground, beat him, and shot him multiple times at close range. Pretti was licensed to carry a gun, but there is no indication that he was ever holding a weapon, much less threatening the officers.

Pretti’s death was the latest in a string of horrific, violent, and fatal incidents by federal officers participating in ICE’s Minneapolis operation.

Hours after Pretti was killed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (shown above left in a file photo with company founder Jeff Bezos) was in Washington, DC, visiting the White House for a screening of Melania, a documentary produced by First Lady Melania Trump. As Jassy and other guests entered, a military band played “Melania’s Waltz,” a song composed for the film. Guests received “glossy, commemorative black and white popcorn boxes for guests, served by gloved waiters.”

Amazon paid $59 million for the rights to the vanity project, most of which went to Melania Trump herself. According to Matt Belloni, Amazon is paying another $35 million to promote the film. Despite the massive budget, Amazon “has not shared the film with critics,and won’t before its release.”

Although Melania will almost certainly lose tens of millions of dollars for Amazon, it is a small price to pay to stay in the good graces of President Donald Trump and his administration. Amazon has billions in government contracts and provides much of the technological backbone for ICE’s surveillance and deportation activities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS hosts the database, known as Investigative Case Management (ICM), that ICE uses to target and deport immigrants. ICM, which was created by Palantir, “integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them.” The data includes “a person’s immigration history, family relationships, personal connections, addresses, phone records, biometric traits, and other information.” Through Palantir, AWS receives millions of dollars annually from the federal government to host ICM.

Last April, the Trump administration awarded Palantir a new $30 million contract to create “ImmigrationOS,” which is “a new tool to provide [ICE] with enhanced capabilities to support deportation efforts.” ImmigrationOS is likely hosted on AWS, which has a strategic partnership with Palantir.

AWS also hosts a massive surveillance system for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The $6 billion system, known as Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), is designed to hold “personal and biometric data on over 270 million people, including 6.7 million iris scans and 1.1 billion face images.”

In a 2022 letter to Amazon, advocates argued that by “hosting DHSʼ HART database, AWS is directly facilitating the creation of an invasive biometrics database that will supercharge surveillance and deportation, risking human rights violations.” They urged Amazon to stop powering the HART database, which is still in development, but the company did not respond.

When Amazon employees urged then-CEO Jeff Bezos to terminate its relationship with ICE in 2018, Bezos defended the practice. “There aren’t other countries where everybody is trying to get in,” Bezos told WIRED. “I’d let them in if it were me. I like ‘em, I want all of them in. But this is a great country and it does need to be defended.”

On its corporate webpage, Amazon says it “support[s] our refugee and humanitarian-based immigrant population because we recognize the challenges they face in the U.S.” This is the same population being targeted in Minneapolis.

In November 2025, Amazon announced it was investing $50 billion to build out its cloud and AI services for the federal government. ICE and related agencies are in a position to provide Amazon with a return on its investment. Trump’s megabill, enacted last year, “allocated more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement.”

Amazon, which did not respond to a request for comment, is one of several consumer-facing brands with deep financial connections to ICE.

Citizens Bank

Since Trump returned to the White House for a second term, the population of migrants held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has exploded — from below 40,000 in January 2025 to over 73,000 today. This has created a massive demand forprivate prison companies, including GEO Group and CoreCivic, to build new facilities.

Numerous financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp, pledged in 2019 to stop working with the private prison industry. (Bank of America and SunTrust have since “softened their policy statements to allow financing again for detention companies in some circumstances.”)

But Citizens Financial Group, which operates Citizens Bank, has continued to provide financing for private prison construction. In July 2025, Citizens provided a $450 million revolving credit line to GEO Group. Earlier, in March 2025, Citizens underwrote $500 million in bonds for CoreCivic.

On its website, Citizens says it is “committed to strengthening communities“ and works “to advance social equity.” The company did not respond to a request for comment.

AT&T

In September 2024, AT&T inked a 10-year, $147 million contract with ICE’s parent agency, DHS, to “provide mission-critical communications services.” The agreement provides ICE and other DHS subdivisions with “end-to-end voice priority over the AT&Tcommercial wireless network.” In August, the Trump administration awarded AT&T an $11 million no-bid contract to provide ICE with “data analytics and support services.”

AT&T pitched FirstNet, its specialized network for first responders, to the federal government, touting its ability to use “photographs, real-time audio/video feeds, and databases from other state, local, or Federal agencies… to aid in the identification… of undocumented immigrants.”

AT&T’s Human Rights Policy, last updated in August 2025, says the company seeks “to ensure that we are not complicit in human rights abuses.” It also stresses that “all people, regardless of status or circumstance, deserve the dignity and freedom of human rights protections.”

Last November, activists in Chicago accused AT&T of “lin[ing] its pockets with public dollars” from ICE, “whose agents are masked, unidentifiable, and operating without warrants as they terrorize members of the public.”

AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Media, Culture, Education 

New York Times, Public Media Holds Its Apocalypse at Bay, for Now, Benjamin Mullin, Jan. 26, 2026. Though Congress cut $500 million from NPR and PBS stations, vanishingly few have closed their doors. Angst about their long-term future remains.

Things looked bleak last summer for KCAW, a tiny public radio station serving the remote community of Sitka, Alaska (population 8,393).

Congress had just slashed $500 million in funding for public media, blowing a $187,500 hole in the station’s budget. Mariana Robertson, the station’s general manager, said she had faced a potential “doomsday” situation that included cutting staff.

Then the donations poured in.

Now, Ms. Robertson is one of many station directors across America who find themselves in unexpected territory: first, expecting the worst, but then buoyed by a flood of emergency funding that has kept their stations stable and surviving. For now.

“It’s a huge success story, and we’re so grateful and thrilled,” Ms. Robertson said. “But the future is unclear.”

When government funding disappeared from public media last year, experts predicted dire consequences for scores of stations. According to one estimate, 78 public radio stations and 37 TV stations were at risk of going dark as a result of the cuts. President Trump recently said NPR and PBS had “closed up.”

But six months after the funding cuts, few public TV or radio stations have closed their doors. Many have scraped together a patchwork of funding from concerned donors, philanthropies or government grants. Others, facing insurmountable budget issues, have resorted to mergers with bigger stations to stay online. NPR and PBS have not gone anywhere.

In fact, the country’s public media system — more than 1,000 radio and TV stations, serving millions of people — remains largely intact, despite the disappearance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

But there is not a lot of celebrating among public media executives and supporters. Much of the angst about the long-term future remains. They point out that much of the money making up for the loss in federal funding has come from one-off donations and grants — short-term fixes — that may have managed only to defer the true financial pain.“We’re not out of the woods at all,” said Tim Isgitt, chief executive of Public Media Company, a nonprofit that has stepped in to provide $30 million in emergency funding to rescue public TV and radio stations. 

Jan 25

 

 

New York Times, How the Trump Administration Rushed to Judgment in Minneapolis Shooting, Tyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz, Jan. 25, 2026. The administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Alex Pretti, even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account.

Not long after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident on Saturday, senior members of the Trump administration were ready with their conclusions about what had happened and who was to blame.

Stephen Miller, President Trump’s homeland security adviser, called the victim, Alex Pretti, who was filming Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, a “domestic terrorist.” Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Mr. Pretti was out to “massacre law enforcement.” The Department of Homeland Security said an agent had fired “defensive shots” because he was “fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers.”

Even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, the Trump administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Mr. Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him. The rush to blame Mr. Pretti and exonerate the immigration agents — even while officials were still gathering the facts — deviates entirely from the way law enforcement investigations are normally carried out.

But it also underscores what has become a pattern by Mr. Trump and top administration officials to justify an increasingly violent crackdown: immediately going on the offensive and demonizing the victim, often distorting the facts in the process.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump said Democrats were to blame for the killings, not federal agents.

His reasoning, which he laid out on social media, was that Democrats were not cooperating with the ICE operation in Minneapolis, which has created “dangerous circumstances for EVERYONE involved.”

Daniel Altman, a former Customs and Border Protection official who served in the Trump and Biden administrations, said presidents often tried to find political advantage in moments of crisis. But he said it undermined public confidence in the investigation process to make snap judgments about motive and blame.

Mr. Altman, who oversaw internal investigations into use of force, said there were well-established procedures for such cases, including timelines for notifying Congress and the public. “Those measures are designed to promote transparency and accountability,” he said.

Shortly after Mr. Pretti was shot, officials at D.H.S. and the White House were in contact about how to respond to the incident, according to a person familiar with the communications who asked for anonymity to describe internal procedures.

The officials sought information from the ground in Minneapolis and worked with lawyers to prepare the statement issued by D.H.S. Some details were removed before the statement was published because they were still working to get a more complete picture of what happened, the person familiar with the process said.

Still, the statement claimed that Mr. Pretti “approached” officers with handgun and the “armed suspect violently resisted” when officials tried to disarm him.

Videos of the encounter show Mr. Pretti, who had a permit to carry a firearm, stepping between a woman and an agent who was pepper spraying her. Mr. Pretti (shown above with a cellphone in his hand) is then hit with pepper spray before a group of agents pile on to him, restraining and disarming him before the barrage of gunfire. Videos show that he never drew his weapon.

Kristi Noem (shown above in a file photo), the homeland security secretary, labeled Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” saying that was just “the facts” of the case and claiming to know his motive: “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

The same day D.H.S. issued its statement, Mr. Miller and Mr. Bovino, the key architects of Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, showed little restraint. Their social media posts are not subject to review, and their public comments are rarely carefully worded. In November, a federal judge found that Mr. Bovino had lied multiple times about federal agents’ use of force during immigration enforcement operations in Chicago.

The killing of Mr. Pretti — and the administration’s handling of the case — has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Democrats assailed the Trump administration and quickly signaled that they would oppose legislation to fund large parts of the government because it included $10 billion for ICE.

Major gun rights activists and groups, typically allies of Mr. Trump’s, also denounced his administration for suggesting that Mr. Pretti’s killing might have been justified because he was carrying a pistol.

Bill Essayli, left, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, wrote on social media, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said in a post on social media that it condemned Mr. Essayli’s “untoward comments.”

Some Republicans in Congress also raised concerns about the shooting, a reflection of fears within the party of how backlash to the administration’s aggressive tactics could damage their political prospects in the midterm elections.

“The credibility of ICE and D.H.S. are at stake,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who also called for a “full joint federal and state investigation” into Mr. Pretti’s death. “We can trust the American people with the truth.”

U.S. Culture, Arts, Sports, Education, Media

 

Occupy Democrats, Political Advocacy: Grammy Award-winning opera singer Renée Fleming cancels her highly-anticipated symphony performances at the Kennedy Center as Trump's disastrous leadership claims another defeat, Staff and wire reports, Jan. 25, 2026. This is a huge black eye for MAGA.

“Renée Fleming regrets that, due to a scheduling conflict, she must withdraw from her May 2026 concerts with the NSO,” a message on the center’s website reads. “A new soloist and repertoire will be announced at a later date, and the remainder of the program remains unchanged.”

Fleming, shown above right in a file photo, was slated to perform with conductor James Gaffigan and the National Symphony Orchestra.As anyone in the business will tell you, "scheduling conflict" is almost always a diplomatic way of saying "I no longer wish to do these performances." Fleming previously served as as artistic adviser at large for the center but left after Trump took over and stocked the board with his under-qualified cronies.

Since that taekover, a long string of prominent artists have pulled out of appearances at the Kennedy Center in protest including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Issa Rae, "Wicked" composer Stephen Schwartz, and the Washington National Opera.

Those protests have been validated by Trump's increasingly absurd leadership, which included his minions on the board voting (perhaps illegally) to rename the center to “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts."

The best thing about this peaceful form of protest is that it's EXACTLY the kind of thing that gets under Trump's infamously thin skin. He cares deeply about celebrities and wants nothing more than to be accepted by this nation's luminaries. We can never allow that to happen. Fascism cannot become normalized. 

New York Times, Columbia Selects University of Wisconsin Chancellor as Its President, Sharon Otterman, Jan. 25, 2026. Jennifer Mnookin has led the flagship campus of the state university system since 2022.

Columbia University has chosen Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as its next president, hoping to usher in a period of growth and stability after a tumultuous two years on its campus, according to two people with knowledge of the selection.

Dr. Mnookin, 58, is a legal scholar who served as the dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law before arriving at Wisconsin to lead its flagship state university in 2022. Her academic work focuses on evidence, proof and decision making in the legal system.

Her own academic pedigree is something of a top-tier trifecta. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a law degree from Yale University and a doctorate in the history and social study of science and technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her résumé has echoes of that of Lee Bollinger, who led Columbia between 2002 and 2023 and was a lawyer who had been president of the University of Michigan. In finding a candidate with deep roots in American academia, Columbia’s board appears to be trying to correct for its last hire, Nemat Shafik, a London economist who resigned in 2024 amid campus turmoil over the Gaza war.

At Columbia, Dr. Mnookin will find a large, complex research university that has been coping with challenges on many fronts, including cuts to its research enterprise by the Trump administration and deep divisions over how it handled a burst of student protest activity on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Mnookin also contended with student protests in 2024, charting a path that resulted in ending a student encampment while also seeking engagement with demonstrators. 

 

New York Times, Washington Post Tears Up Plans to Cover Winter Olympics, Benjamin Mullin and Erik Wemple, Jan. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The abrupt change in direction came just weeks before the Olympic Games are set to begin in Italy.

The Winter Olympics is a quadrennial media spectacle, drawing parka-clad sportswriters, photojournalists and TV anchors from around the world.

This year, a team from The Washington Post won’t be among them.

Kimi Yoshino, a managing editor of The Washington Post, sent a terse and unexpected email to more than a dozen of the newspaper’s journalists on Friday, notifying them that their coverage plans were abruptly being changed.

“As we assess our priorities for 2026, we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics,” Ms. Yoshino wrote. “We realize this decision and its timing will be disappointing to many of you, so please reach out to me if you want to talk further.”

Ms. Yoshino’s email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, took journalists at The Post by surprise, since it came just two weeks before the Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Italy in early February. Many had already paid for their travel arrangements, according to two people familiar with their plans.

The Post’s decision not to send its journalists to cover a major sporting event with widespread global appeal breaks with years of precedent at the newspaper. Since the newspaper was purchased more than a decade ago by Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, above, The Post has aggressively expanded its international presence, opening editing hubs in Seoul and London and hiring reporters to cover breaking news around the world.

But The Post has been retrenching in recent years as losses at the paper have piled up. In 2023, The Post offered buyouts to eliminate 240 jobs amid losses of $100 million and overly rosy projections for subscriptions and advertising revenue. Last year, The Post offered another round of buyouts that were accepted by many of the paper’s marquee journalists.

The Post generally sent about 10 to 20 newsroom employees to cover the Olympics, though it typically devoted more resources to the summer games than to the winter competitions. In 2024, for example, the newspaper sent 26 journalists to cover the summer games in Paris — a peak deployment for The Post, according to one Post employee. It had secured 14 credentials for the Milano Cortina games, the person said.

According to the Post employee, the newspaper has already paid the vast majority of its expenses to cover the competition. Those include flights for the journalists, housing and office space at the Olympics site. Housing alone tallies at least $80,000, the employee said. Post management approved the outlays at each step along the way, according to the employee.

Status, The Sunday Spotlight: Post Parting Depression, Natalie Korach, Jan. 25, 2026, Looming cuts at The Washington Post threaten to decimate key coverage areas as staffers question the motives and commitment of billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.

In the spring of 2016, two years after Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post, the billionaire joined then-executive editor Marty Baron for an interview. During the sit-down, Bezos declared he was “even more optimistic today” about the newspaper's future than he was when he bought it. “I’ve always believed…that democracy dies in darkness,” Bezos said, using The Post’s signature slogan, adding that “certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.”

Nearly a decade later, staffers at The Post are questioning Bezos and publisher Will Lewis’ commitment to the health of the paper—and publicly pleading for them to change course—as they brace for upwards of 100 newsroom layoffs that are expected to hit the sports, metro and foreign teams hardest, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. As of August, the newsroom headcount sat around 800 staffers. Including those anticipated newsroom cuts, as many as 300 Post employees across the broader company could be impacted by the February trim-down, Status has learned.

Jan. 24 

 

Independent journalist Don Lemon, formerly a longtime news anchor at CNN.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Minneapolis Chief Judge Attacks Pam Bondi's False Claims about Don Lemon, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Jan. 24, 2026. 

As we await more details about CBP’s latest murder in Minneapolis, I wanted to point to an attempt by DOJ to get a writ of mandamus because Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko denied five of eight arrest affidavits they asked for, targeting Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen and others who protested at a church led by the local ICE commander.

As MN Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz explained in a letter to the 8th Circuit’s Chief Judge, Steven Colloton, minutes after Micko refused warrants for five of the people DOJ targeted, the US Attorney came to him, asking for a District Judge to issue the warrants.

After Schiltz, left, was assigned on the case, he asked the other District Judges if they had ever heard of DOJ asking a District Judge to override a Magistrate’s decision; none had. He told DOJ he would not issue arrest warrants until after speaking with the other judges at a bench meeting scheduled for Thursday. That meeting got delayed to January 27 because of security concerns arising from the presence of Pam Bondi, right, and JD Vance at the Federal building.

So DOJ filed for an an emergency writ of mandamus, claiming there was an emergency requiring the arrests of the other protesters immediately.

As Schiltz describes DOJ’s claim of emergency:

The five people whom the government seeks to arrest are accused of entering a church, and the worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence. The learders of the group have been arrested, and their arrests have received widespread publicity. There is absolutely no emergency. The government could have sought indictments from a grand jury on Tuesday, January 20, Wednesday, January 21, or Thursday, January 22, but chose not to do so.The government can still take its case to a grand jury any time it wishes. Instead, the government is insisting that I do something that, as best as I can tell, no district judge in the history of the Eighth Circuit has done.

In a follow-up email, Schiltz accuses DOJ of saying things that are true of only some of the people DOJ has targeted, clearly describing that Don Lemon and his producer did not commit any crime.

The government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them. Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged inany criminal behavior or conspired to do so.

More importantly, Schiltz described other more pressing emergencies, including ICE defying multiple orders, including regarding a two year old girl.

I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old). And I have been given a little over an hour to submit this additional response.

A panel of the Eighth Circuit denied the writ (though one of them, Trump appointee Steven Grasz, declared there was probable cause against all five others, including Lemon and his producer).

Schiltz is a two-time Antonin Scalia clerk and a George W. Bush appointee. This is who is getting impatient with Pam Bondi’s theatrics. 

The big question is why DOJ simply didn’t go to the grand jury. Are they so sure they’d get no-billed, or do they simply not have any local AUSAs who are willing to present this case? 

Emptywheel, Analysis: What Is DOJ Really After in Raiding Hannah Natanson? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Jan. 24, 2026.

I shuddered when I read this article from Hannah Natanson in real time, in December, which was the first I really took notice of the name behind a flood of important reporting on Trump’s attack on the government. A chronicle of the hell Trump had subjected government workers to, it was a great article.

I shuddered when I read this article from Hannah Natanson in real time, in December, which was the first I really took notice of the name behind a flood of important reporting on Trump’s attack on the government. A chronicle of the hell Trump had subjected government workers to, it was a great article.

Signal message sent Feb. 23: I think about jumping off a bridge a couple times a day.

Signal message sent March 21: I want to die. It’s never been like this.

Signal message sent May 21: I have been looking at how much I am worth alive, as opposed to dead.

But in telling that story, Natanson told how she protected the anonymity of her sources.

Colleagues told me to join our internal tip-sharing Slack channel #federal-workers, then talk to Washington economics editor Mike Madden, who was coordinating our DOGE coverage. I started copying and pasting tips there as fast as I could, scraping out identifying details. Then, phone buzzing every few seconds, I speed-walked around the building until I found Mike. Skipping with grace over the fact we’d never met (and I didn’t work for him), he ferried me to every corner of the seventh floor: Meet the team covering technology. The team covering national security. The White House editors. Eventually, The Washington Post created a beat for me covering Trump’s transformation of government, and fielding Signal tips became nearly my whole working life.

[snip]

After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — “Transportation Employee,” “FDA Reviewer,” “EPA Scientist” — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)

Three weeks later, FBI seized the phone on which all those contacts were labeled with aliases. When they searched her home, she was logged into the Slack on which she had shared all those leads with colleagues. They seized the encrypted drive on which she had her notes.

In short, she publicly revealed where to look for everything else, and three weeks later, Trump agents came and took it all.

(For the record, this is not the only time I’ve shuddered about publicly disclosed operational security lately; far too many profiles on anti-ICE activism describe how their Signal trees are structured and what tools the central dispatcher uses to keep everything flowing.)

And that’s one of many reasons the unusual openness of the indictment against Aurelio Perez-Lugones — the pretext FBI used for raiding Natanson — terrifies me.

As I laid out here, I find it exceedingly unusual that DOJ laid out precisely what information got leaked and its classification level, described to be the following stories to which Natanson contributed.

This October 31, 2025 story about Venezuela asking Russia and China for security assistance included Top Secret/SCI/NOFORN information. This November 11, 2025 story about potential targets in a US attack included Secret/NOFORN information. This December 8, 2025 story about Maduro’s plans includes Confidential information. This January 6, 2026 story tallying 75 dead in Trump’s invasion includes Secret information. This January 9, 2026 story about an unsuccessful attempt to find an escape for Maduro includes Secret/NOFORN information.

Even as a legal issue, identifying the specific information that got leaked and how sensitive it is only serves to further compromise the information. It undermines prosecutors’ ability to prove that DOD (which is obscured in the indictment but which Pam Bondi freely identified) was trying to protect this information, a necessary element of the offense.

Seizing two MacBook Pros, an iPhone, a portable hard drive, her Garmin running watch, and a voice recorder from a journalist (while also sending WaPo a subpoena) when you already had proof that Perez-Lugones sent her classified information is more than overkill.

It’s the Garmin that really gets me. According to the declaration Natanson submitted in a bid to get her stuff back, she only communicated with Perez-Lugones via Signal or phone. The FBI is trying to obtain evidence about other people she met with, face-to-face.

So I want to consider what else DOJ might be looking for.

Did Perez-Lugones obtain proof of what Trump is really pursuing in Venezuela?

First, Garmin watch aside, it’s possible that Perez-Lugones took things that did not show up in Natanson’s reporting, yet, that DOJ is attempting to remove from her custody. The only thing classified at TS/SCI that Perez-Lugones is accused of leaking is a report based on an intercept of a letter Nicolás Maduro sent to Putin.

In mid-October, [Ramón Celestino] Velásquez, the transportation minister, traveled to Moscow for a meeting with his Russian counterpart, according to Russia’s Transport Ministry. According to documents obtained by The Post, he was also meant to deliver the letter from Maduro to Putin.

In the letter, Maduro requested that the Russians help boost his country’s air defenses, including restoring several Russian Sukhoi Su-30MK2 aircraft previously purchased by Venezuela. Maduro also asked for assistance overhauling eight engines and five radars in Russia, acquiring 14 sets of what were believed to be Russian missiles, as well as unspecified “logistical support,” according to the documents.

Maduro emphasized that Russian-made Sukhoi fighters “represented the most important deterrent the Venezuelan National Government had when facing the threat of war,” according to the U.S. records.

Maduro asked Russia for a “medium-term financing plan of three years” through Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense conglomerate. The documents did not specify an amount.

The documents also indicate that Velásquez was slated to meet with and deliver a second letter to Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. They do not state whether or how the Russian government responded to Maduro’s outreach or whether the trip took place.

Nevertheless, DOJ successfully defeated an initial release order by citing all the TS/SCI information in Perez-Lugones’ brain.

Perez-Lugones is similarly positioned as the defendants in these cases: he has had decades of access to TS/SCI systems and, like these other defendants, what he knows is not erased simply because his access to the information ended. Further, like these defendants, because Perez-Lugones has “transcribed” and “photographed” highly classified information, it is likely he can recall it. Therefore, as the Government argued at the detention hearing, Perez-Lugones will be able to disseminate this information if released.

There is one document, classified Secret/Rel to NATO and identified as Document E, which Perez-Lugones allegedly photographed and sent to Natanson, that the indictment does not describe to be incorporated in this story including an account of an effort by the Pope to arrange an off-ramp for Maduro, the last of Natanson’s stories before his arrest.

On Christmas Eve, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, second-in-command to the pope and a longtime diplomatic mediator, urgently summoned Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, to press for details on America’s plans in Venezuela, according to government documents obtained by The Washington Post.

[snip]

For days, the influential Italian cardinal had been seeking access to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the documents show, desperate to head off bloodshed and destabilization in Venezuela. In his conversation with Burch, a Trump ally, Parolin said Russia was ready to grant asylum to Maduro and pleaded with the Americans for patience in nudging the strongman toward that offer.

[snip]

In his Dec. 24 meeting with Burch, according to the documents obtained by The Post, Parolin said Russia was prepared to receive Maduro. He also shared what is described in the documents as a “rumor”: that Venezuela had become a “set piece” in Russia-Ukraine negotiations, and that “Moscow would give up Venezuela if it were satisfied on Ukraine.”

The materials Perez-Lugones shared are consistent with Trump having a quid pro quo with Russia, a swap of Venezuela for Ukraine. If he had obtained proof that he may or may not have shared, it might explain the need to seize any shred that he shared; but if so, the raid has nothing to do with national security, but instead with covering up Trump’s secret alliance with Russia.

A potentially related story describes that State was going to blow $50 million protecting Greenland’s polar bears, basically slush in support of Trump’s bid to conquer the entire hemisphere.

Is DOJ targeting specific whistleblowers, including Chuck Borges?

Remember how I noted that the new disclosures about DOGE’s unlawful access to Social Security data referenced an ongoing investigation?

“SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.”

WaPo was not the first outlet to report on Borges’ allegations of grave compromise of Social Security data, allegations that were partly confirmed by these recent disclosures; NYT was.

But WaPo, including Natanson, was the first outlet to interview Borges after he quit in October.

“Prove me wrong,” Borges told The Washington Post last week in his first media interview since his disclosure. “The only way I feel like we’re going to get to that point is with continued public interest, continued public pressure, and I’m willing to lend my name.”

Although he had until now avoided talking to the media, Borges told Post reporters that he had decided to go public to draw attention to his concerns about the safety of Americans’ data and his hope that the agency will share documentation to prove that the data wasn’t put at risk. At his Maryland home — decorated with photos of his family, his prolific board game collection and Navy paraphernalia — the self-described “data geek” said his fears while working at Social Security had kept him up at night.

And that interview linked several earlier WaPo articles, including an earlier Natanson one.

At the same time, the agency was exploring plans to lay off workers, and others were getting reassigned to jobs they were unfamiliar with or choosing to voluntarily leave. In those especially taxing days, Borges said, he saw co-workers breaking down in meetings or while sitting at their desks.

“I cannot count how many employees I saw cry, and that is at all levels of the agency, from executives downward,” Borges said.

In the summer, Borges first heard from colleagues that DOGE had transferred sensitive data to a cloud environment. He began to ask questions but got little information in response.

In Natanson’s Christmas Eve piece, she cited both a Social Security employee (the interview with Borges cites multiple others who back Borges’ claims, one of whom is Leland Dudek) and an IRS official who sent data to DOGE.

A Social Security employee: “Every piece of our data may be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.”

An IRS staffer: There is “a team figuring out how to get … data sent to Doge,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.

In short, DOJ may have raided Natanson in attempt to target a different whistleblower, one who went through formal channels to reveal an unprecedented assault on US person privacy.Natanson’s sustained reporting of Trump’s dragnet

But it’s not just the Social Security data.

An earlier Natanson story described DOGE’s effort to effectively merge a bunch of massive government databases.

The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.

The team overseen by Elon Musk is collecting data from across the government, sometimes at the urging of low-level aides, according to multiple federal employees and a former DOGE staffer, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The intensifying effort to unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out fraud in government payments. And it follows a March executive order to eliminate “information silos” as DOGE tries to streamline operations and cut spending.

At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” Davis did not respond to a request for comment.

Natanson was part of a story revealing the Postal Service is involved in the migrant dragnet.

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has quietly begun cooperating with federal immigration officials to locate people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to two people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The Washington Post — dramatically broadening the scope of the Trump administration’s government-wide mass deportation campaign.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a little-known police and investigative force for the mail agency, recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.

She revealed the effort to use Medicare data to target immigrants.

Trump immigration officials and the U.S. DOGE Service are seeking to use a sensitive Medicare database as part of their crackdown on undocumented immigrants, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Washington Post.

And another describing how DOGE was using HUD data for a similar purpose.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

These are some of Trump’s most egregious privacy violations, potentially the cornerstone of vast new data mining on Americans, including both immigrants (the ostensible focus) and citizens (clearly implicated in Borges’ allegations). If the Trump Administration believes Natanson has details about the real purpose of these data grabs, it might explain their raid of her devices: to prevent her from building on this reporting.

Relatedly, a Natanson story that should have generated more attention described how Trump is effectively trying to usurp DC’s policing sovereignty by boosting the numbers of Park Police.

The U.S. Park Police is seeking to double its ranks in D.C. over the next six months, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post detailing plans of an expansion that would bolster the federal agency’s role in the Trump administration’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.

[snip]

The Park Police website now boasts of a $70,000 hiring bonus, promotion potential and a “streamlined, virtual hiring process with quick turnaround.”

This was a one-off story. But it felt to me when I read it like a parallel to Stephen Miller’s creation of a national paramilitary force at ICE (the expansion of which has also been featured in Natanson reporting).

Like Natanson’s reporting on Trump’s data violations, this could reveal underlying plans for authoritarian power grabs.

Elon Musk’s corruption

Or maybe DOJ is after Natanson’s more general reporting on DOGE.

A number of her stories last year described how DOGE served to benefit Elon Musk and implant Musk’s businesses even more centrally in the Federal government.

One story last year (also relying on court filings and interviews) described all the agencies that Musk gained access while overseeing DOGE.

The Post reviewed court documents and interviewed dozens of current and former U.S. government officials to determine which records DOGE aides were able to examine while Musk led the unit. Reporters also spoke with experts and business competitors about how that information, if improperly shared with Musk’s companies, could give them a competitive advantage.

DOGE aides, for example, were given near-blanket access to records at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, court records show. The agency holds proprietary information about algorithms used by payment apps similar to ones that Musk has said he wants to incorporate into his social media platform, X.

NASA employees told The Post that DOGE aides were able to review internal assessments of thousands of contracts, including those awarded to rivals of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which has already won billions of dollars of government work and is competing for more. (Among SpaceX’s competitors is Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Blue Origin and its executives did not respond to requests for comment.)

And Labor Department employees said in court filings that DOGE aides were allowed to examine any record at the agency, which holds files detailing dozens of sensitive workplace investigations into Tesla and other Musk companies as well as their competitors.

Another broke the story of how State was pushing foreign countries to adopt Starlink (which would put Musk at the center of a global surveillance network).

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, the country’s communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink.

The satellite business, owned by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk’s firm the nation’s first-ever satellite internet service license, slated to last for 10 years.

[snip]

A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.

She was part of a series of stories on Starlink’s bid to replace an existing FAA contract.

So some of her many sources on DOGE last year exposed the corruption at the core of DOGE.

Obviously, DOJ could have targeted Natanson for no other reason than they want to go after all 1200 Signal contacts she had.

But whatever the reason, or reasons, the Aurelio Perez-Lugones seems like a pretext, a convenient national security case DOJ can invoke to try to identify thousands of whistleblowers, including whistleblowers who have firsthand evidence about the increasing authoritarianism of the Trump power grab.

 

Civil rights 1960s advocate Walter Gadsden, left, attacked by police and their dogs in Birmingham, Alabama.

Emptywheel, Analysis: How Do You Want Your Family to Remember You? Peterr, Jan. 24, 2026. Do you want to he remembered as the guy being attacked by the dog, or as the guy controlling the dog?

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about ugly government. Comparisons with the Gestapo have been increasingly prevalent, but other parallels have dominated my own thoughts.

When I was in seminary, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I got to know a West German pastor who was at my US seminary for continuing education. Eberhart also had connections with his East German colleagues, who at that time were leading a growing resistance movement in Berlin, and their chief opponents were the East German Stasi. The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.

When I read Marcy’s post about Hannah Natanson, I could not help but think of the Stasi.

In the course of my ministry, before South Africa abandoned apartheid, I came to know a South African Lutheran pastor named T. Simon Farishani. Farisani ran afoul of the legendarily violent South African Police, and was not simply arrested for making statements about equality but imprisoned and subjected to torture not once or twice, but four times. US Lutheran leaders who knew of his plight raises a huge international stink, which ultimately led the South African regime to release him and expel him from the country, allowing him to be treated at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The night before he was released, he told me that he prayed to die, so that he would be spared more torture the next day.

When I heard the news today of yet another killing by ICE in Minneapolis, I could not help but think of Farisani.

As I’ve watched the news from Minnesota, where I have more than a few clergy friends, I could not help but fear for them. More and more clergy are stepping away from benign statements of peace and love, and taking a pro-active stance against what is happening in their midst. I thought of them, and at the same time though about Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was appointed archbishop by Pope John Paul II based on his relatively conservative views, but as he watched what the Salvadoran government was doing to the poor and needy, he became increasingly vocal in challenging the regime. His sermons were broadcast on nationwide radio, and when he preached that the members of the Salvadoran military should refuse to do the dirty work of the government, the government decided that Romero had to be stopped. The next day, as Romero was holding the chalice at the celebration of Holy Communion, a government death squad burst into the sanctuary and shot him as he stood at the altar.

When I heard about the arrests of dozens of clergy in Minnesota, I could not help but think of Romero.

In the course of my ministry, I became friends with Bob and Jeannie Graetz. Bob was a white Lutheran pastor who took a call in Montgomery, Alabama, shortly after another young pastor came to town. Maybe you’ve heard of him: Martin Luther King Jr. Graetz had a choice between joining the white ministerial alliance as befitting his race, or the black ministerial alliance as befitting his congregation. He chose the black alliance.

Rosa Parks was a neighbor and a friend, and Bob and Jeannie were staunch supporters of the Montgomery Bus boycott that followed her refusal to give up her seat on a Mongomery bus. Bob and Jeannie joined their black neighbors in their protest work. They offered rides to people who were boycotting the buses. When the Montgomery City Council passed an ordinance against this, calling it an illegal taxi service, Bob continued offering rides, using the language of the ordinance that allowed giving rides to “friends.” Because to Bob and Jeannie, every black person in Montgomery had become one of their friends.

At one point, the black community decided to invite more arrests as a strategic move, so that the white community would look even worse in the eyes of the rest of the world. Bob volunteered to join his black clergy colleagues in this action, but they adamantly refused to let him. “Bob, if *we* get arrested,” meaning the black pastors, “they will throw us in cells on the black side of the jail. To our cellmates, we will be heroes. But if *you* get arrested, they will throw you in the cells on the white side of the jail. To your cellmates, you will be a traitor, and you know what happens to traitors. You don’t have to prove anything to us, so leave this kind of protest to us, and you keep up the work outside the jail.”

Bob and Jeannie Graetz paid a price for their support of the black community. They dealt with ostracism from the white community in Montgomery, and they had their home bombed not once but twice. And yet, they persisted.

I see the white community of Minneapolis, standing up to support their neighbors of color against the abuses of ICE, and I remember Bob and Jeannie Graetz.

My dad grew up in a bilingual German/English household, and when the family moved from Nebraska to central Missouri in 1943, his mom warned the kids not to speak German in their new town. “You can speak it at home, but not at school, not with your friends, and not around town.” And they didn’t. My dad, his older sister and his younger siblings, all kept their German to themselves.

When I hear about families in Minnesota not sending their kids to school, or sending them with proof of citizenship in their little pockets, or sending them with documents allowing their teachers to take custody of them if the parents were suddenly seized by ICE, I think about my dad.

As a teenager, I was an exchange student in West Germany. The dad in my host family was a kid during WWII and had been a member in the Hitler Youth as a kid, in the same way that thousands of US kids were Cub Scouts. It’s what you did at that age. He wasn’t old enough to have been pushed into military service during the war, but every one of his older relatives – dad, uncles, cousins, etc. – were. He and I talked not so much about the war as about the post-war occupation. He had some hilarious stories about clueless American soldiers (mostly 2nd lieutenants who were too filled with their own self-importance), as well as powerful stories that expressed his delight that his town was occupied by the US rather than the Soviet Union.

I remember all these folks, and am struck by how these memories are not about past events, past struggles, and past oppression. I remember all these folks, and how their stories about then are the stories we are living through right now.

I think of the Stasi then, and think of databases at the DOJ, databases built by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and databases no doubt built by Peter Thiel and Palantir.

I think of the unaccountable South African Police then, and think of the unaccountable ICE and CPB today. If an ICE officer utters the magic words “I feared for my life,” they seem to be as free as bloodthirsty and vengeful and unaccountable old South African Police. Lock up those alleged terrorists, beat them and torture them, mock them and abuse them, and no one can stop you.

As I go about my work as a pastor, and see my colleagues doing the same — speaking up more and more loudly about the abuse being dished out by ICE and CPB — I wonder when the Archbishop Romero moment will come. Not if, but when. The shooting of a suburban mom a couple of weeks ago has escalated to the shooting today of an ICU nurse from a VA facility, and I cannot help but wonder when a shooting akin to Archbishop Romero will happen. Not if, but when.

No one who has heard me preach would ever accuse me of ignoring what is happening in the news. My parishioners might not agree with my politically, even as I challenged their own political views, but they have accepted my willingness to be the pastor of *everyone* in my congregation, not just those who shared my political stances. One member once put it like this, in the midst of a huge churchwide debate about gays and lesbians in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: “Pastor, I’m probably as far on the conservative end of the spectrum as you are on the liberal end, but I am honored to have you as my pastor.”

No comment about my pastoral work since then has ever warmed my heart more.

• The stories of the Stasi are not simply remembrances of the past.
• The stories of apartheid-era South African Police are not simply remembrances of the past.
• The stories of Bob and Jeannie Graetz are not simply the remembrances of the past.
• The stores of Archbishop Romero are not simply remembrances of the past.
• These stories are playing out again today, in our midst, on the streets of the United States of America in 2026.

I remember these stories. I see Stephen Miller, and remember harangues of Hermann Goering and the departure of trains to concentration camps. I see Kash Patel and Greg Bovino, and remember Petrus Coetzee and brutality of the South African Police. I see ICE assailing the protesters of Minneapolis, and remember Bob and Jeannie Graetz. I see Kristi Noem, and remember my dad and his German-speaking siblings in central Missouri.

Surveillance-induced fear. Brutality-induced fear. The potential for governmental death squad-induced fear. This is our world today, and anyone who says otherwise is living with their head in the sand.

Between now and January 31st, Congress will be considering the appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and CBP, and the main battle will be fought in the Senate. My senators are Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt — two of the most knee-jerk Trump supporters around — but I am not about to let them off the hook.

Do you want to be remembered like the Stasi? Then keep doing what you are doing.

Do you want to be remembered like the apartheid-era South African Police? Then keep doing what you are doing.

As things continue to escalate, do you want to be remembered like the killers of Archbishop Romero? Then keep doing what you are doing.

Ordinary Germans had a choice in how they reacted to the Stasi. Ordinary South Africans had a choice in how they reacted to the South African Police. Ordinary Americans had a choice in how they reacted to Bob and Jeannie Graetz and how they reacted to my bilingual dad, his parents, and his siblings.

Forget about how history will remember Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump, I will tell my senators. How do you want history – your neighbors, your kids, and your descendants — to remember you?

Jan. 22

  Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is shown delivering a hard-hitting speech on Canada's break with the United States at the World Economic Summit at Davos, Switzerland (Associated Press photo via the New York Times). President Trump is shown below in a file photo.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Courageous Carney vs. Demented Donald, Paul Krugman, right, Jan. 22, 2026. Canada’s leader is a sane adult. America’s leader isn’t.

On Tuesday Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, gave a remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In effect he announced, calmly and lucidly, that Canada is filing for divorce from the Pax Americana:

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

And he urged other nations — implicitly, although he didn’t say it in so many words, the nations of Europe in particular — to join Canada in a new alliance of democracies no longer willing to take orders from an abusive hegemon:

[T]he middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

It was a brave stand to take. Canada sits right next to the United States, whose economy is a dozen times larger. Moreover, as the map at the top of this post shows, Canada’s population lies almost entirely within a narrow band on top of the U.S. Back when I was writing a lot about economic geography, I used to joke that Canada was closer to the United States than it was to itself. Nature wants Canada and the United States to be closely intertwined. And for this reason Canada is arguably more exposed to the consequences of Trumpian wrath than any other nation.

But democracies can no longer maintain close ties with the U.S. The day after Carney spoke, Donald Trump showed why.

I listened to Trump’s Davos speech with fear: How much damage will this demented, vindictive individual do to America and the world? I also felt a deep sense of shame: What is wrong with my country, that we put someone like this in a position of unprecedented power?

As the whole world watched, the president of the United States (God help us) repeatedly referred to Greenland, which he is willing to blow up NATO to acquire, as Iceland.

Don’t dismiss this as trivial: if any previous president had been that befuddled, the whole press corps would have been howling about senility and demanding that he step down.

And of course Trump’s press secretary insisted that he didn’t say what we all saw and heard him say.

Trump also repeatedly displayed his trademark willful ignorance, for example when talking about renewable energy. While berating Europe for using wind energy, he admitted that China also has big wind farms — someone must have showed him pictures — but declared that

They put up a couple of big wind farms, but they don’t use them. They just put them up to show people what they could look like. They don’t spin, they don’t do anything.

In reality, China accounts for almost 40 percent of total world generation of electricity from wind power, substantially more than Europe.

Beyond confusion and ignorance, Trump delivered menace.

The horrifying details of Trump’s rant aside, what strikes me about the Trump administration’s performance at Davos — not just Trump himself but his minions — was the utter lack of purpose. The whole Trump team seems to have gone to Europe with no goal other than to belittle and insult their hosts.

On Tuesday evening Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary, spoke to a private dinner at Davos — at which he belittled European economies and their lack of competitiveness. He was reportedly booed, and Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, walked out.

On Wednesday morning Scott Bessent, above, the Treasury secretary, dismissed reports that one major Danish pension fund has decided to divest itself of U.S. bonds by declaring that “Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant.”

And Trump devoted much of his speech to portraying Europe as a hellhole, its economy destroyed by renewable energy and its society destroyed by immigration.

Never mind whether any of this is true. (It isn’t.) What was the point of saying such things? Do Trump and his Mini-Mes imagine that they can convince European leaders that they, their economies, and their societies are all pathetic losers?

To say what should be obvious but apparently isn’t, we don’t need top government officials playing at being shock-jock podcasters, getting clicks by being outrageous. God knows, MAGA has plenty of those already. Official speeches aren’t supposed to be rants that provide red meat to your political base. They’re supposed to influence people who aren’t your supporters, in ways that serve the national interest.

This doesn’t mean that official speeches must be mealy-mouthed and boring. Mark Carney’s speech definitely wasn’t. But Carney had a clear purpose: To rally other nations into solidarity against U.S. economic blackmail.

Trump, on the other hand, just wanted to swagger, whine, and mostly hear himself talk. And all he accomplished was to turn suspicions that he’s gone off the deep end into certainty.

American power and influence have always rested, much more than many people realize, on the perception of American trustworthiness. We didn’t always do the right thing, but we honored our agreements and were the least greedy imperial power in history.

That’s all over. At Davos, Mark Carney called for giving up hope that the Pax Americana can be restored, and Donald Trump proved him right. 

 

The Triad via The Bulwark, A Great Rupture of the World Order, Jonathan V. Last, above, Jan. 22, 2026. As Europe reacts to Trump’s Davos rant, America’s capacity for self-delusion remains boundless.

Many Americans want to believe that Trump’s sudden climbdown yesterday in Davos has resolved the Greenland crisis.

It has not.

The foundation of the crisis is the decadence and degradation of American society. For a decade, Americans have looked at the fantastic prosperity they enjoy and assumed that it was their natural right. That they did not have to take civics, or governance, or the rule of law, or international obligations seriously. That they could elect an aspiring authoritarian, tolerate an attempted coup, endorse the embrace of America’s enemies and betrayal of its allies—and there would be no consequences.

In other words:

1. The Greenland crisis is rooted in our self-delusion.

And Trump’s decision to pivot from (a) the United States must have complete and total control of Greenland; to→ (b) military action is possible; to→ (c) the declaration of a trade war; to→ (d) a soft disavowal of force; to→ (e) never mind—in the space of 108 hours—will enable even more self-delusion in America.

But the rest of the world is not nearly so foolish. Our adversaries in Russia and China have taken the full measure of the American people. And so have our former friends.

After the conclusion of Davos, EU leaders will meet in Brussels to discuss the new realities of the transatlantic relationship. Here are some quotes from these Europeans in Politico:

The sense of dread and skepticism remains, and the summit will still go ahead, despite Donald Trump declaring late Wednesday that he’s struck a deal on Greenland and won’t impose tariffs on European countries after all — underscoring how the gathering has become more than just about the latest blowup. . . .

But the moment for making nice “has ended” and “the time has come to stand up against Trump,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO secretary-general and ex-Danish prime minister, told BBC radio. . . .

“Our American Dream is dead,” said an EU diplomat from a country that has been among the bloc’s transatlantic champions. “Donald Trump murdered it.” . . .

“After the back and forth of the last few days, we should now wait and see what substantive agreements are reached between [NATO Secretary-General] Mr. Rutte and Mr. Trump,” Germany’s Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil told German broadcaster ZDF. “No matter what solution is now found for Greenland, everyone must understand that we cannot sit back, relax, and be satisfied.” . . .

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen summed up the mood during her Davos speech Tuesday.

“The world has changed permanently,” she said. “We need to change with it.” . . .

“We are experiencing a great rupture of the world order,” said a senior envoy from a country that was seen in the EU as a key American ally. Leaders will discuss “de-risking” from the U.S., the diplomat said — a term that has previously been reserved for the EU’s relationship with Beijing. “Trust is lost,” they said. . . .

Two senior diplomats POLITICO spoke with separately compared the current state of the U.S. with the time leading up to World War II.

“I think we are past Munich now,” said one, referring to a 1938 meeting where Britain, France and Italy appeased Adolf Hitler by allowing him to annex Czechoslovakia. “We realize that appeasement is not the right policy anymore.”

What’s done is done. And the fact that Americans will tell themselves that the crisis is over just because Trump didn’t drop the 82nd Airborne into Nuuk is why we’re here in the first place.

2. An Authoritarian State

Another pleasant fiction people tell themselves is:

Things may be bad in America right now, but it’s not actual fascism. Not yet, at least.

Well that depends on who you are and where you live, doesn’t it?

For me, a middle-aged white guy in New York City, my day-to-day life is pretty normal. No actual fascism detected.

But for Renee Good, there was quite a lot of actual fascism. She was killed by a masked agent of the state. The federal government then labeled her a “domestic terrorist” and lauded her killer. This same government is now attempting to prevent any investigation of, or legal accountability for, the killer’s actions.

ChongLy Scott Thao is living with actual fascism. Masked, armed agents of the state showed no warrant before dragging this U.S. citizen out of his house, mostly naked, in the freezing cold, detaining him, and interrogating him before finally letting him go.

Citizens attempting to exercise First Amendment rights in Minneapolis are living with actual fascism:

A protester detained, her bra removed and wedding ring cut off, and some of her clothes never returned. The “gratuitous deployment” of pepper spray. A couple’s car surrounded by agents, who pointed semiautomatic weapons at them at close range.

A federal judge in Minneapolis cited the episodes in an unusually detailed ruling on Friday that found a pattern of misconduct by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and ordered them and other immigration agents to stop using excessive force against protesters while conducting their operations in the city.

Federal officials have unilaterally declared that they don’t need warrants to break into homes. Though I suppose reasonable people could disagree on whether or not this constitutes actual fascism until such time as the Supreme Court rules on it.

The point is: If you live in Minneapolis, right now, you cannot walk the streets without fear of violence being done to you by masked, armed agents of the state. If these agents harm you, you have no redress and they will face no accountability. Your children are not safe from government violence when they are in school. Your home can be invaded at any moment. Armed agents may demand to see your papers. They may shoot you if you are “disrespectful” to them.

That is actual fascism, right here, in America.

The fact that this actual fascism is not everywhere, all at once, does not change its character.

And finally: In societies where actual fascism does exist everywhere, all at once, it always begins as localized episodes. That a majority of Americans does not seem to appreciate this fact is another facet of our self-delusion.

3. ICE Is Different

Radley Balko is always a must-read.

Police agencies in the United States kill more than 1,000 people each year. After many of those deaths, the agencies involved put out statements. Those statements often use what’s known as the exonerative voice to minimize officers’ involvement. The first statement from the Minneapolis Police Department after George Floyd’s death, for example, said that the officers at the scene “noted that he appeared to be suffering from medical distress.” Quite the understatement. These communications often cast events in a light most favorable to the officers involved, sometimes to the point of deception. Too often, they’ll try to smear the deceased by citing a criminal record or suggesting a drug addiction or gang affiliation.

I have been covering policing for more than 20 years and have read and parsed a lot of these statements. The Department of Homeland Security’s response after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this month is something else entirely.

For all their flaws, typical communications from police officials usually include a modicum of solemnity. There are assurances that there will be a fair and impartial investigation, even if those investigations too often turn out to be neither. There’s at least the acknowledgment that to take a human life is a profound and serious thing.

The Trump administration’s response to Ms. Good’s death made no such concessions. There were no promises of an impartial investigation. There was no regret or remorse. There was little empathy for her family — for her parents, her partner or the children she left behind. From the moment the world learned about her death, the administration pronounced the shooting not only justified but an act of heroism worthy of praise and celebration.

It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable. All the evidence we’ve seen so far, including a meticulous Times forensic analysis of the available footage, makes clear that at worst, Ms. Good mildly obstructed immigration enforcement, disobeyed ambiguous orders or perhaps attempted to flee an arrest. None of those are capital crimes, nor do law enforcement officers get to dole out punishment in such cases. At one point, President Trump justified her shooting by claiming she’d been “very disrespectful” to immigration officers. That isn’t a crime at all.

The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power. 

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: Appeasement Never Works, Only Strength, Simon Rosenberg, right, Jan. 22, 2026.  Lessons From An Ugly Week (New Video, Analysis): We must remember at all times that Trump has chosen not to govern with us, or for us, but against us - for they are scared of us, of the power of the people. Some takeaways from my weekly talk, video above and transcript here:

In Davos Trump Was Humiliated, And Humiliated Himself. He Is A Much Weaker Global Figure Today.

I cannot stress how much Trump looked like a clown, buffoon, madman, idiot, bully/coward -- choose your words -- to the world yesterday [now Monday]. His rambling, incoherent speech confirmed to many that is he addled, and not fit to lead a great nation. He also showed the world that he cannot take a punch, and is weak, cowardly, pathetic, desperate.

As we discussed with Rob Shapiro yesterday, Europe has enormous leverage over the US, and can cripple our economy if they so choose. They began selling US Treasuries, the markets freaked, and Trump folded (for now). Trump learned this week that there are checks to his power other than his “own mind.”

I also think it is critical that we do not allow the narrative of what happened this week to be about Trump retreating. For what he did, as we discussed with Rob yesterday, is the greatest policy mistake by an American President in our history. He has done enormous, lasting damage to the country.

We are a far weaker nation today, and calls for him to resign should grow. Not for his madness, his corruption, his rancid cover-up of the Epstein files but because is a historic, titanic fuck up who cannot be trusted to run the country any longer. He will go down in history as our worst leader who pursued an agenda of sabotage, plunder, and betrayal, and did enormous damage to the causes of freedom and democracy here and around the world.

My hope is that Trump’s wild anti-European buffoonery these past few weeks will also weaken the far-right in Europe, and strengthen the liberal parties fighting him head on.

Trump’s early January 2026 escalation -- Minnesota, Venezuela, Greenland/War with Europe -- that we talked about with Glenn Kirschner earlier this week has also left him weaker here at home. In a rash of new polling we’ve received this past week Trump has clearly fallen further, as the country again rejects his new strongman plays. Look at this data: everything is coming at or below what was the 40%-56% FiftyPlusOne job approval average from a week ago:

• 35%-63% (-28) ARG
• 37%-57% (-20) Economist/YouGov
• 40%-59% (-19) CNN
• 41%-59% (-18) CBS News
• 39%-57% (-18) Marist
• 41%-58% (-17) Strength in Numbers
• 41%-58% (-17) Ipsos/Reuters
• 39%-56% (-17) Civiqs
• 40%-56% (-16) NYTimes

Look at this issue breakout from the new NYT poll today. It’s across the board erosion and repudiation. Like in other polls in recent days his handling of immigration has gone from strength to incredible liability.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Will Democrats Be as Strong as the Europeans? William Kristol, Jan. 22, 2026 Can the Democrats in Congress match the performance of the Europeans in Davos?¹ Will the Democratic opposition to Trump’s assault on liberal democracy here at home be as clear-eyed, as tough-minded, as unintimidated, as the European opposition to Trump’s attack on the liberal international order abroad? We’ll see when Congress returns next week and the battle over government funding comes to a head in Washington.

In the run-up to Davos, Trump blustered and threatened. He said that he needed full control of Greenland. He announced that he’d impose 10 percent tariffs on goods from eight European countries if he were denied that control. He refused to rule out the use of military force to obtain that control. “There can be no going back,” Trump posted on Tuesday.

But, as Joshua Keating put it, Trump “seemingly went back.” The “seemingly” is important: Trump didn’t entirely rule out the use of military force. And the fact that Trump may have pulled back for now doesn’t change the fact there’s been a fundamental rupture in the post–World War II global order. The spectacle of the United States behaving like an out-and-out mob boss can’t be unseen.

But at least the Europeans realized that further appeasement of Trump was untenable, and that refusing to face reality wasn’t working. Last July, the EU agreed to a one-sided trade deal with the United States in hopes of placating the bully—and, perhaps, buying time to think up better options. Now, French President Emmanuel Macron speaks for much of the continent when he says, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them.”

And so the EU announced that it would move to suspend parliamentary approval of that trade deal. It also indicated that reciprocal tariffs against American goods were on the table. And there was talk of denying American service providers, such as tech companies, access to the European market, and even of a refusal to buy more U.S. treasury bonds.

Europeans faced bullying with strength, and the bully at least temporarily backed down.

One of the most powerful statements of European resistance came from an unlikely source, the conservative populist and Flemish nationalist prime minister of Belgium, Bart De Wever. On a panel at Davos on Tuesday, De Wever was blunt:

Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House. We were very lenient, also with the tariffs, we were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war. We were in a very bad position at the moment, we were dependent on the United States, so we chose to be lenient.

“But now,” he continued,

so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice between your self- respect. Being a happy vessel is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy is your dignity.

The right-wing Belgian prime minister went on to paraphrase the famous remark by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters.” “It’s up to [Trump] to decide if he wants to be a monster, yes or no,” De Wever concluded.

Of course Trump is a monster, and he’s not going to stop being one, and he has three more years in office in which to do great damage at home and abroad. But the lesson of this week was that if you want to defend the liberal international order, facing the truth works better than averting your gaze. Standing your ground is more effective than rolling over. Behaving with self-respect and defending your dignity is a better guide than calculating and calibrating various degrees of appeasement.

Do those who have the responsibility of defending liberal democracy at home understand these lessons? Will Democrats fund ICE and DHS without attaching any limitations or restrictions on their truly monstrous activities? For that matter, will they do nothing to insist on the overdue release of the Epstein files? And will they say nothing about Trump’s shameful betrayal of Ukraine?

In an age of monsters, one needs to hold firm to the guardrails of self-respect and dignity. Europeans now seem to understand that. Do Democrats?

 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: January 2, 2026 [Exhauster, Angry Trump Targets Western World Leaders], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Jan. 22, 2026. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this morning, a visibly exhausted president of the United States of America rambled in angry free association in a speech before the world’s leaders.

At one point, speaking of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) dignitaries, he told the audience: “Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right, last time. Very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”

He meant Greenland.

The president of the United States went on to give a virulently racist, insulting, rambling speech in which he complained that people call him a dictator but that “sometimes you need a dictator.” More than anything, though, the speech demonstrated his mental unfitness for his position. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote: “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.”

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark, left, wrote of Trump’s hostility to traditional U.S. allies today: “As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.” Egger likened this to Aesop’s fable about the greedy farmer who butchered the goose that laid golden eggs.

Later, Trump backed off on the tariffs he had threatened to impose on the countries standing against his seizure of Greenland, claiming he had just had “a very productive meeting” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and had “formed the framework for a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations.” Because of that framework, he said, he would not be imposing the tariffs he had threatened on those nations opposing his designs on NATO.

As Ron Filipkowski, right, of MeidasNews noted, this was not a new deal, but Trump surrendering. The U.S. and NATO have always been free to do whatever they want in Greenland, but Trump had insisted he needed to own it for “psychological” reasons. Now he has reverted back to the original agreement.

Amongst all of Trump’s other lies and threats at his Davos speech, one stood out. Talking about Russia’s war against Ukraine, he said: “It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged—it was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out.” This is Trump’s Big Lie, and it has been thoroughly debunked; the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen from him.

But then Trump went on to say: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news but it should be. It was a rigged election. You can’t have rigged elections.”

This is an astonishing threat. It says he intends to prosecute Department of Justice officials and others for refusing to help him steal the presidency. The timing of this particular threat is not accidental. Tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern Time, former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, will testify publicly about the evidence that led a grand jury to indict Trump and led Smith himself to conclude a jury would convict Trump.

Lately, Trump has been rehashing his grievances from that election, repeating debunked claims of rigged voting machines and so on. The issue is clearly on his mind. Jack Smith knows what happened, Trump knows that Smith, left, knows what happened, and it appears Trump is eager to discredit him at the very least.

This afternoon, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes, courts have always interpreted that amendment to mean that a judge must sign a warrant to allow law enforcement to break into a home. Now the Department of Homeland Security says it does not need such a judicial warrant, but can simply use an administrative warrant signed by an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or ICE if immigrants believed to be inside a home have a final order of removal.

The legal training manual for DHS itself quotes a 1984 Supreme Court decision that “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

Immigration law specialist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that this memo is a big deal: it is “the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.”

Two ICE whistleblowers provided the memo to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), explaining that they were shown the memo. They suggested that ICE supervisors seemed to understand the order was unlawful, as the supervisors only told agents about the memo rather than sharing a hard copy with them, and that at least one long-time employee resigned rather than be forced to teach material they thought was illegal.

Blumenthal, left, wrote a scathing letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Lyons noting that the “new policy is based on a secret legal interpretation and is directly contrary to Fourth Amendment law and agency practice.” He demanded to know how many DHS agents had been trained on the memo and where the training had taken place, how many homes had been broken into under the terms of the memo, the legal determination for the memo, and so on.

“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home,” Blumenthal wrote on social media. “It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.”

“I am deeply grateful to brave whistleblowers who have come forward & put the rights of their fellow Americans first,” Blumenthal wrote. “My Republican colleagues who claim to value personal rights against government overreach now have an opportunity & obligation to prove that rhetoric is real.”

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who at the beginning of 2025 was considered a moderate on immigration, wrote: “Yeah I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.”

Now ICE has landed in Portland and in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, where it claims to have 1,400 targets for arrest.

 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism:DOGE staffer signed deal to share Social Security data with election deniers: Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Jan. 22, 2026. 

Editor's Note: This week, Popular Information was honored by the Harvard Shorenstein Center, which awarded this newsletter the 2025 David Nyhan Prize for Public Policy Journalism. From the announcement:

Praised as “timely, fearless, and factual,” Judd Legum is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. Trained as a lawyer and steeped in practical political experience, Legum has built a model of journalism that combines meticulous investigative reporting with clear, accessible explanations of how power operates—and who benefits.

Through Popular Information, Legum has repeatedly shown how a single, well-documented story can spur tangible change. Nyhan Prize judges celebrated his dedication to digging up under-reported stories, and his ability to see a story with the eyes of both an editor and reporter.

…Through dogged reporting, clear-eyed analysis, and a steadfast focus on accountability, Judd Legum exemplifies the people-centered political journalism that the Nyhan Prize was created to honor.

Thank you for your support, which makes this work possible.

Regarding the site's latest report: After months of denials, the Trump administration has admitted that staffers affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) misused Social Security Administration (SSA) data. In an extraordinary court filing, “NOTICE OF CORRECTIONS TO THE RECORD,” government lawyers representing the SSA revealed that in March 2025, a DOGE staffer signed an agreement to share the private data of Americans with a “political advocacy group” seeking to “overturn election results in certain States.”

SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.

The filing says that emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The use of government data for political purposes is unlawful. The Hatch Act prohibits a federal employee from using “his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” In the filing, government lawyers say the DOGE employees involved were referred to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for possible Hatch Act violations.

The filing does not reveal the identity of the two DOGE members involved in the scheme.

Antonio Gracias, a DOGE staffer who was embedded at the SSA, publicly spoke about using Social Security data to “expose” voter fraud. During a March 30 rally in Wisconsin alongside Elon Musk, Gracias — a billionaire and the Chief Investment Officer of Valor Equity Partners — made a variety of false and misleading claims.

During the rally, Gracias claimed that 2.1 million non-citizens obtained Social Security numbers and said that this was evidence of pervasive fraud. But these Social Security numbers were given to immigrants who were legally present and had work permits. Gracias claimed that he “took a sample and looked at voter registration records, and we found people here registered to vote in this population.”

Non-citizens with work permits are not able to use their Social Security numbers to register to vote, however. Nevertheless, Gracias claimed that he had identified non-citizens who had voted and “referred them [for] prosecution.” There are no known charges or convictions resulting from those alleged referrals.

Gracias went on Fox News a few days later and, speaking from the White House lawn, made similar claims. He stressed the importance of allowing databases to “talk to each other.”

Gracias also went on the All-In podcast, where he described the issuing of Social Security numbers to non-citizens — a standard practice for those with work permits and other categories of legal residents — as a “move to import voters.”

Another DOGE staffer embedded at SSA, Aram Moghaddassi, reached out to Florida officials in March 2025 to obtain voter registration data he could cross-check with government databases to identify voter fraud.Which “advocacy group” seeking to overturn election results conspired with DOGE?

While the court filing does not name the “political advocacy group” coordinating with DOGE, there is evidence pointing to True the Vote, a right-wing group with a history of pushing false claims of election fraud. True the Vote published “An Appeal to DOGE” in March 2025, the same month that the DOGE staffer signed an agreement with the political group. In the open letter, published on the group’s website on March 5, True the Vote encouraged DOGE to investigate the country’s voter registration system. At the top of the letter, Democracy Docket notes, True the Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote, “We’ve received word that this message is being carried forward.”

“Given DOGE’s mandate to enhance governmental efficiency and your recent insights into federal data discrepancies, we urge you to extend your investigative rigor to the nation’s voter registration systems,” True the Vote wrote in the letter. “By combining DOGE’s access to federal databases with our assembled voter roll information, we can efficiently identify discrepancies and work toward a cleaner, more reliable election system.”

True the Vote was heavily involved with pushing false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election. In November 2020, True the Vote filed lawsuits alleging voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Less than a week later, the group dismissed all four cases.

True the Vote was also involved in 2000 Mules, the debunked documentary from Dinesh D’Souza. 2000 Mules was based on claims made by True the Vote about alleged ballot stuffing during the 2020 election. The group claimed that it had bought geolocation data from electronic devices that showed that people were repeatedly visiting ballot dropboxes, and therefore were stuffing ballots. The claims were “thoroughly debunked by election and cyber experts.” In one example flagged by True the Vote, the Georgia Secretary of State found that a man was legally dropping off ballots for himself and his family members.

The movie was eventually pulled from the market by its distributor, and D’Souza issued an apology for misrepresenting key video footage.Musk linked programs like Social Security to voter fraud

As the head of DOGE and with a close relationship to Gracias, it is unlikely that Musk was unaware of the “Voter Data Agreement” to share SSA data with an outside political group. In fact, while working in the Trump administration and for several months prior, he repeatedly tied Social Security payments to voter fraud.

Musk has long amplified the conspiracy theory that Democrats are luring illegal immigrants to the United States by offering them government assistance such as Social Security in order to increase their voter base. Starting in July 2024, when Musk endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign, Musk began posting frequently on X about this claim, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants are ineligible to receive Social Security payments.

On July 8, 2024, he posted, “The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible.” Musk got millions of views on his posts making false claims about illegal immigrant voting, and he continued to spread the conspiracy theory when he joined the Trump administration in early 2025 to lead DOGE.

While working with the Trump administration, Musk placed a particular emphasis on Social Security as a way for Democrats to “attract” illegal immigrants. On an episode of Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) podcast from March, when the Trump administration was pushing for cuts at the SSA, Musk said, “By using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants and buy voters. Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat, as has been demonstrated in California.”

A month before, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk said, “Entitlements fraud for illegal aliens is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.”

 

From the archives, a sample screed from the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk shows how vicious and extreme his organization functioned as it sought to radicalize America's youth into an ultra-right fascist force. Following his assassination, his successors have found new and arguably even more extreme ways to sow chaos through America, in one instance targeting newborns and their mothers, as described below. 

False Flag! via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: A Government Of Influencers, By Influencers, For Influencers, Will Sommer, Jan. 22, 2026. I regret to tell you that Turning Point USA has a terrible new cause: preventing newborn babies from getting birth certificates.

On Monday, TPUSA host Alex Clark gave her leading MAHA show “Culture Apothecary” over to midwife influencer Lindsey Meehleis, who used the platform to argue that true “sovereign citizens” never report their childrens’ births to the government.

“Why is it better to not have a Social Security number or a birth certificate?” Clark asked.

“They are the ones that have full sovereignty of their child,” Meehleis explained. “Their child is not owned by the state.”

Clark, who boasts 720,000 subscribers on YouTube, is no stranger to crazy ideas. My favorite may have been the theory discussed on her show that sunglasses should be worn only indoors.

How crazy is this recommendation to eschew birth certificates? Sure, you and I may think it’s totally nuts. But the idea that children lose their freedom and become property of the state once their births are registered is getting surprisingly popular in certain circles. Last year on a podcast for the “Free Birth Society,” a nightmarish organization devoted to avoiding traditional medicine during pregnancies, anti-birth-certificate guru Veda Ray explained that she didn’t get her baby a birth certificate after the baby sent her messages to that effect while still in the womb. She also argued that not getting a birth certificate is a great way to help your future child avoid ever paying taxes. (Who knew that was all it takes.)

That said, Meehleis’s appearance on “Culture Apothecary” marks a significant new level of prominence for the anti-birth-certificate movement, giving it the imprimatur of TPUSA, one of the right’s most important institutions.

And speaking of the power influencers have on the right, Minneapolis has for weeks been roiled by the power of MAGA YouTubers. It’s the latest, most vivid, example of how political battles aren’t waged just in the halls of Congress or on the streets at protests, but in the online forums where each side is fighting for algorithmic dominance. That’s the subject of today’s newsletter—let’s dive in!

LIKE MANY OF HIS FELLOW right-wing influencers, Nick Sortor came to Minneapolis this month. Sortor—made famous last year when he was briefly arrested after a scuffle with left-wing activists outside an ICE facility in Portland—once again had come to a troubled city looking for content.

But Sortor’s plans to shoot video of the unsettled city were delayed on Sunday after, in his telling, a woman stole his $1,000 camera.

As fellow influencer Cam Higby faced off near Sortor with a crowd of people filming on their own smartphones, Sortor tried to grab hold of the woman’s car. Instead of giving up the camera, the woman drove off down a snowy sidewalk with Sortor clinging perilously to the side.

While the FBI has vowed to find justice for Sortor, the bizarre incident has become just one more scene in the flood of social-media content coming out of Minneapolis. Following the ICE deployment and the shooting of Renee Good, much of the fight over who the good guys and the bad guys are in Minneapolis has played out among social media personalities.

Of course, there’s no bigger name in Minneapolis content at the moment than another twentysomething Nick S.: Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old right-wing influencer whose video on supposed fraud at Somali-American daycares went viral in late December. While many of Shirley’s claims have been debunked, and there are obviously other reasons daycares might not be willing to open up and allow Shirley to inspect their children, the controversy provoked by his video was used by the Trump administration to justify the surge of ICE agents in the city.

Watching Shirley in a follow-up video this month as he pursues supposed fraud in healthcare transportation companies, I’m struck by the looseness of his connection to what qualifies as evidence. He’s led around by an older Minnesota activist who has called Muslims demonic, and quips to Shirley that Somalis are “the most violent community.” That guy takes Shirley to various storefronts or apartment buildings where transportation companies are registered—and if no one opens the door, Shirley declares that it has to be fraud.

It sure seems like a libel lawsuit waiting to happen, but for now, it’ll also win Shirley some more attention and give Republicans more reasons to cut funding from Minnesota or surge federal agents into the state.

Support this newsletter’s coverage of the right, the far-right, and the far-out right—sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today:Subscribed

SHIRLEY’S VIDEO and the shooting of Renee Good set off waves of social media content in Minneapolis. There are countless posts in which Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino is mocked for his height, or how he dresses, or for being kicked out of a convenience store. And ICE opponents had their own social-media disaster over the weekend after protesting in a church.

There are some precedents for MAGA social media craze over Minneapolis . The protests and counterprotests last year outside the Portland ICE facility that eventually earned Sortor a trip to the White House serve as the blueprint here, with right-wing influencers putting their bodies on the line in attempts to get explosive video that could double as an excuse for the Trump administration to intervene.

And going back even further, in 2019 a crew of MAGA influencers that included Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl traveled to Minneapolis to “investigate” whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) married her brother. The trip produced a “documentary” that saw the crew furtively traveling around Minneapolis like their lives were constantly at risk, but the project ultimately unraveled after Wohl was caught faking death threats to himself and reporting them to the police.

The Minneapolis tumult has attracted even less savory right-wing figures. Over the weekend, Jake Lang—a Hitler-saluting January 6th rioter whose hateful remarks about Muslims and Jews have prompted even those on the right to accuse him of being a federal agent out to make Trump supporters look bad—held a small rally against “fraud” that collapsed after he fled attacks from counterprotesters.

As for Shirley, he has apparently struggled with his newfound Minneapolis fame, revealing that he didn’t know the meaning of the word “benevolent” in an appearance on popular YouTube channel “Channel 5,” then feuding with host Andrew Callaghan for claiming he was unfairly edited.

Still, Shirley spoke Wednesday at a congressional hearing, saying the really big fraud is happening in California—a call that’s already been echoed by right-wing influencers like Benny Johnson, and that has the added appeal on the right of undermining California governor and potential presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom. Clearly, the right’s Minneapolis model is going nationwide.

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Fishback Rising

There are plenty of reasons why Florida gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback will never be governor. He faces a legal bill to his former hedge-fund employer that could reach $2 million—due, in no small part, to failed schemes Fishback devised himself. He’s also running a wildly racist campaign against primary rival and Trump pick Rep. Byron Donalds, calling him “By’Rone” and vowing to send him back to the “ghetto.”

And then there are those court allegations that, as an adult, Fishback dated a 17-year-old high school student while involved in an anti-woke debate nonprofit.

And yet, since I last wrote about Fishback in December as the electoral face of white nationalist groyperism, he’s only gotten bigger.

In focus groups featured on an upcoming episode of The Bulwark’s The Focus Group podcast, Gen-Z Trump voters brought up Fishback without prompting as someone they’d like to hear more from. They’re big fans of his proposed 50 percent tax on earnings from OnlyFans creators, an idea that prompted angry replies from a top OnlyFans celebrity and, in turn, brought even more attention to Fishback. He’s followed that up with a proposed (and almost certainly illegal) $50,000 tax on New Yorkers moving to Florida.

It also now appears that Fishback isn’t as much of an outcast in Florida politics as his critics portray him to be. On Sunday, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s top aide, Christina Pushaw, admitted to advising Fishback’s early campaign. Pushaw, a pugnacious X personality in her own right, acknowledged this as part of her attempt to cut ties with Fishback, in part because of “allegations involving additional minors.” Fishback responded by posting text messages that purport to show Pushaw urging him to delete evidence of her support for his campaign.

Fishback’s electoral prospects still look bleak. He’s set to make an announcement “about the future of the Florida governor’s race” later today. But he appears to be well on his way to obtaining a job much more fun and lucrative than governor: right-wing media celebrity.

But one thing could still hold him back: his genetic code. In December, Fishback, racist as ever, challenged Donalds to publish genetic results from 23andMe, saying he would post his own results “soon.”

More than a month later, Fishback hasn’t posted his genetic results, and fumed in an online chat this week when he was asked when he’d finally release his ethnic background. Perhaps he saw something that might damage his brand as a leading white nationalist. For his part, Fishback tells me he just doesn’t have his results back yet.

 

 

White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump's Vulnerability and the Bunker-Ballroom, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Jan. 21, 2026. Trump tied his own sense of vulnerability to his rush to rebuild the bunker under the ballroom.

I have long suspected that one reason Stephen Miller has so much control over Donald Trump right now is he played a big part of getting Trump back on his feet after the Butler shooting, which really (and unsurprisingly) rattled him for weeks. Trump’s return coincided with a particular turn to the fascist.

That’s one reason I find this exchange from NYT’s “interview” with Donald Trump interesting.

He directly tied the security of the bunker-ballroom to some trauma (he had earlier raised it, and sent a valet to get all his ballroom models). Then they spoke off the record (one of perhaps four times they do so, aside from the call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro).

President Trump

This is a much more important thing to do. So, this is the ballroom right here. It’s beautiful. People love it. It’ll hold — it’s being designed with bulletproof glass, 4 to 5 inches thick. Can take just about any weapon that we know of. I wish I was in it about a little while ago. [Mr. Trump laughs.]

[Mr. Trump speaks briefly off the record.]

Tyler Pager

Mr. President, on the record, you haven’t even been here a year yet, and you’ve made many renovations. Are there other plans for you to make changes?

They came back on the record with a slightly different topic: renovations generally.

From there, Trump discussed a plan to add a second floor to the West Wing, because the roof that’s there now is not used given that long range rifles could hit them.

Tyler Pager

What about at the White House complex?

President Trump

I may do an upper West Wing. This area. Cover it with one floor because it needs more space. It would be —

David E. Sanger

Including the Oval? Or Oval would be separate?

President Trump

No, less. Short of the Oval. If you take the L [shape] —

David E. Sanger

So you’d put it up — there’s a second floor. It’s sort of in the attic.

President Trump

Well there’s a second floor now that was, that was meant to be a park. People don’t use it as a park. Now with long-range rifles, you tend not to use it.

[snip]

Katie Rogers

The L. Is that why you were on the roof that day?

President Trump

Exactly.

Katie Rogers

What were you doing?

President Trump

I was looking at doing office space.

Grandpa Sundown took a diversion to show a picture of Don Jr holding a rattlesnake while wearing flip-flops.

Then Trump brought out one after another model of the ballroom. When David Sanger asked him about its cost, he distinguished between the aboveground portion — the ballroom — from the stuff below ground (which has not been discussed on the record) — the bunker.

The current $400 million cost does not include the bunker.

President Trump

But I said, “Ultimately, they win.” You better be careful. So ready? Don’t take any pictures of this ’cause you’ll scare people. So I started off with a building half of the seats —

[Mr. Trump puts a model for a new White House ballroom on the table.]

— and then it just kept growing and growing, and the money kept pouring in and pouring in. No, no, please. So I started with that — started with this.

[Mr. Trump puts a model of what he said was the smaller, original planned ballroom on the table.]

And I said: “Wow, I’ve got all this beautiful land. I don’t want to waste it.” So I said: “All right. I’ll go a little bit larger.” This would have seat — seated 450 people. So I said, “Let’s go a little bit larger.” So then I said, “Let’s do this.”

[Mr. Trump removes the smaller model and puts another model for the new ballroom on the table.]

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

What’s the updated price tag on all this?

President Trump

Well, every time I make it larger it goes — but I’ll do it for — I’m under budget and ahead of schedule. You know, I’m — I’d build it larger.

David E. Sanger

Are you at about $400 million now?

President Trump

I’ll bring it in for less than — it’s, it’s ahead of schedule and under budget so far.

David E. Sanger

What’s the budget?

President Trump

Under $400 million.

David E. Sanger

And that’s just the aboveground, not —

President Trump

That’s the aboveground.

According to CNN a White House official acknowledged the security enhancements going on underground.

During a recent meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission where the ballroom was discussed, White House director of management and administration Joshua Fisher said broadly that the overall ballroom project will “(enhance) mission critical functionality,” “make necessary security enhancements” and “(deliver) resilient, adaptive infrastructure aligned with future mission needs.”

Fisher was pressed on why the project broke with precedent by starting the demolition process without the commission’s approval — and he indicated that the “top-secret” work taking place underground was the motivation.

“There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on. That does not preclude us from changing the above-grade structure, but that work needed to be considered when doing this project, which was not part of the NCPC process,” he said.

And to the NYT, Donald Trump tied the bunker-ballroom to his own sense of vulnerability.

New York Times Interesting Times Podcast, Opinion: No, Young Men Are Not Returning to Church, Hosted by Ross Douthat, right, Produced by Andrea Betanzos, Jan. 22, 2026. All the religious trends you’re wrong about.

In the early 2020s, something unexpected happened: America stopped becoming less religious.

The share of Americans with no religious affiliation had been rising for decades. Suddenly, that increase stopped. And all over the media, there was talk about religious revival. About trad wives and orthobros. About Gen Z potentially being more religious than their parents.

My guest today is the perfect person to talk about what’s really happening in American religion. Ryan Burge is an ordained minister who witnessed American Christianity’s decline close up. In 2024, he had to close the doors of the church that he’d been pastoring. He’s also, in my own opinion, the best data analyst tracking trends in American religion right now, with a new book, “The Vanishing Church: How The Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us.”

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Ryan Burge, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Ryan Burge: My absolute pleasure to be here.

Douthat: So I want to start just by talking about the big recent religious trends in American life, and especially the claim that secularization might be going into reverse, or even that revival is in the air.

Before we talk revival, I want to start by defining a very important term for understanding what’s been happening in the U.S. for the last 20 years. That term is “none.” And I do not mean Catholic nuns, but something else. What is a “none”?

Burge: So, “nones” are people who identify with no religious tradition. What that means is we ask a question about affiliation, and they describe their religion as “atheist,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.”

That third piece is the one that we forget about a lot. These are people who look at all the options — Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Mormon — and they just shrug their shoulders and say: “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist either.” And they just click “none of the above.” So the “nones” are those three groups together: atheist, agnostic, nothing in particular.

That group has grown from 5 percent of America in 1972 to about 30 percent of America today. It’s the biggest social movement happening in America — or happened in America over the last 30 years — that we just don’t talk about that much.Editors’ PicksHow Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?Forget the Cynics. Here’s Why You Should Get Your Dog a Stroller.Inside an Exploding Marriage: Belle Burden in Her Own Words

Douthat: I don’t know if I agree that we don’t talk about it that much. I feel like commentary on religion, as long as I’ve been a pundit, has been dominated by the sense that America is getting less religious. That people are disaffiliating.

But then something changed around 2020 to 2021.

Burge: Yeah. I think we’re moving into a new era of what’s happening with American religion. It was rapid secularization from 1991 to 2020. Now we’re in a period of stasis. The share of Americans who are nonreligious has really stuck at that same level, around 30 percent. The share of Americans who are Christians is in the low 60s, maybe 63 or 65 percent, and it’s been that way for the last five years now.

This is a plateau, not a reversal. This is not a revival. The directions are not reversing themselves. They’re just staying where they are right now.

Douthat: Give me some speculation, though, about why we’ve seen the plateau. Why do you think it seems like there is basically just a chronological pattern where for a while, you could just count on each generation being substantially less religious than the previous generation. And with Gen Z and the millennials, they are less religious, but it’s just not as strong a pattern as you’ve seen before.

And I know this is outside the realm of data — I’m going to do this to you repeatedly in the interview — but did something change in 2017 to 2025 that would put a floor under religion that would make it seem a little more resilient?

Burge: The way I think about it is, there’s a bedrock of American religion that I don’t think exists in any other Western country. What’s happened over the last 30 years is that a lot of people were loosely affiliated. They’d say they were Protestant or Catholic, they’d go to Mass once every two or three years, and they would say they’re Catholic or Protestant because that’s culturally acceptable. But as times have changed and the nones have continued to rise, it used to be you didn’t want to say you were an atheist — there’s a lot of stigma against it — and now there’s —

Douthat: God didn’t like it too, right?

Burge: No! Exactly.

Douthat: People were nervous.

Burge: And America didn’t like it. Think about it: In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, we had the Cold War. We were fighting against Communism, which was atheistic, so there was sort of a stigma that we could not get over. And now, over the last 30 years, that stigma went away, and more and more people, I think, were actually being honest when they took surveys in saying they were nonreligious. But once you scoop off all that loose topsoil — those marginally attached people — you get closer and closer to bedrock.

I think what we’ve realized is: There’s a core of religiosity in America. I mean, I just don’t see a future in America where the share of Americans who are nonreligious rises above 50 percent. There’s just nothing in the data that says that. Whereas, if you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said: Numbers keep going up. And that’s not happening now.

Douthat: How do the identification numbers interact with actual data on church attendance, which I know is itself really hard to measure? People also will say they go to Mass or church or synagogue more than they really do. But is it something where religious identification has fallen faster than church attendance, or has attendance declined meaningfully in the last 20 years?

Burge: So we think about religion with three components: Behavior, belief, and belonging.

So, behaviors, like church attendance — that’s actually fallen the fastest of all of them.

The way we think about it is behavior is the first one that goes. Then usually it’s followed with belonging, and then belief is behind all those things.

If you look at “never attending” people, they actually are more likely to say, “God exists, without any doubts,” than they are to say, “God doesn’t exist at all.” So there’s still this core of belief in America that you don’t see in the rest of the world.

More On U.S. Law, Rights, Justice, Crime

Occupy Democrats via Facebook, Advocacy: Trump’s skeezy plot BACKFIRES immediately as Jack Smith shames Trump and his Republican cronies in a powerful statement and REFUSES to back down from his decision to prosecute Trump!  Staff and wire reports, Jan. 22, 2026. Jan. 22, 2026.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is testifying before the Judiciary Committee today because Trump and his cronies want to bully him into recanting his decisions and smear him for conducting a partisan witch-hunt against Trump for breaking the law and trying to overturn the 2020 elections.

What they got was nothing of the sort.

Instead, Jack Smith turned the tables on them and reminded the nation that it is Trump and his J6 conspirators who are the treasonous criminals who should be behind bars.

“I love my country and believe deeply in the core principles upon which it was founded. For nearly three decades, I've served as a career prosecutor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. I've handled cases ranging from domestic assault and gang violence to public corruption and election crimes across the United States and have prosecuted war crimes overseas. I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law,” said Smith.

“Throughout my public service, my approach has always been the same. Follow the facts and the law without fear or favor. Experienced prosecutors know that specific case outcomes are beyond our control. Our responsibility is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. These principles have guided me through my career, including as special counsel.”

“During my tenure as special counsel, we followed Justice Department policies, we observed legal requirements, and took actions based on the facts and the law. I made my decisions without regard to President Trump's political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 election. President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law, the very laws he took an oath to uphold. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power. “

“After leaving office in January of 21, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Social Club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

“As I testify before the committee today, I want to be clear. I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including the decision to bring charges against President Trump. Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican.”

“No one should be above the law in this country and the law required that he be held to account, so that is what I did. To have done otherwise on the facts of these cases would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and as a public servant, which I had no intention of doing,” finished the Special Counsel.

Thank you for your service to this once-great nation, Mr. Smith. We cannot apologize enough that you now have to be dragged before this kangaroo court of spineless cowards as punishment for doing your job, upholding the law, and attempting to hold the criminal traitor Donald Trump accountable for his many, many, crimes.

Every American needs to read these words and be reminded of what a true patriot looks like. They’re in short supply in Washington these days — but hopefully we can fix that in November.jority of Americans, 51 percent, said that Mr. Trump’s policies had made life less affordable for them.

Democracy Docket, U.S. attorney pretender Halligan gets the boot, Jacob Knutson, She illegitimate, she’s incompetent, she’s shambolic — and now she’s out of the Department of Justice (DOJ). Say goodbye to Lindsey Halligan, shown above right (alongside Trump-nominated federal judge David Novak, who ruled that she was not entitled to the job or title,, the loyalist President Donald Trump tapped to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Halligan’s four-month tenure was a comedy of errors. Her cases failed. Her reputation for typos in court filings is now legendary. And after being disqualified from office, she for weeks falsely continued to claim the title of U.S. attorney — even dropping the words “interim” or “acting,” though she was never confirmed.

Beyond Halligan, this week was filled with more Trumpian chicanery. The DOJ has subpoenaed a group of Minnesota Democrats — including Gov. Tim Walz — over their opposition to Trump’s immigration raids. It also revealed that DOGE employees misused Americans’ personal data and communicated with election deniers. And Trump’s attempted ouster of Fed governor Lisa Cook had its day in the Supreme Court — and even some conservative justices appear alarmed.

More On U.S. Politics, Governance

The Contrarian, Opinion: So, You Want to Run for President? Jennifer Rubin, right, Jan. 22, 2026. What 2028 aspirants should consider before running.

It is no secret that a group of Democrats have their eyes on a 2028 presidential run. The many capable governors (e.g., JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California, Andy Beshear of Kentucky) are obvious contenders. But, just as no one had paid much attention to Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, or Barack Obama two-plus years prior to their successful presidential runs, there are contenders not presently on anyone’s radar screen who may vie for the nomination. (Illustration Credit: Vitalii Abakumov)

Whatever their name ID, 2028 contenders should spend their time wisely. That will require more than merely speaking out against the mad wannabe king’s domestic and international outrages or preparing (as Obama and Zohran Mamdani did) to viscerally engage the public, create a volunteer army, and activate people previously never political.

Rather, 2028 hopefuls should start refining their vision if they want to run credible campaigns. Several big challenges deserve serious, extended reflection before announcing.

What to do about accountability: The failure to prosecute Trump criminally in time to avert his return to power does not mean Democrats must ignore the trail of corruption, constitutional outrages, and rank illegality he will leave behind. The 2028 contenders should start thinking now about how they want to handle Trump and his cohort of lawless democracy vandals.

Options from criminal to civil liability (including recovering ill-gotten gains) to court martial to disbarment should be on the table. But candidates should not get bogged down in prescribing the prosecutions and penalties to pursue against specific MAGA offenders. Pledging to engage a special prosecutor or series of prosecutors, tasking inspectors general with full reviews, and empaneling an esteemed commission of historians, lawyers, and former government officials to create an official account of the Trump-era outrages would be preferable (and not prejudge prosecutions). Thinking now about that serious challenge would help clear the decks for candidates’ campaign messages and governing agendas.

What to do about democracy: Running to “restore” democracy is the wrong approach. Trump has broken our Constitution and shown its fault lines. Considering a rebirth of (as Lincoln did at Gettysburg) or reinvention of democracy should occupy 2028 contenders’ time. With the aim of making our system more democratic/responsive and less captive to oligarchs, candidates might consider a game plan for each branch of government. (Fixation with the current filibuster as an excuse for not pursuing these items makes evident a refusal or lack of readiness to reinvent our democracy.)Subscribed

The Supreme Court has disgraced itself and lost the public’s confidence. Nevertheless, institutional changes can repair it (e.g., expanding the court, setting term limits, installing an inspector general, instituting a mandatory ethics code, eliminating the shadow docket except in limited cases). The president, with help from Congress, can return the Court to its appropriate role to check the other branches and defend of our constitutional rights.

Candidates must also consider curbs on executive power — not a popular idea with presidents of either party. These can include (ideally, by legislation to make permanent) eliminating many “emergency powers,” limiting the Insurrection Action, putting teeth into both the Emoluments Clause and the Hatch Act, requiring financial disclosure for the president and vice president, abolishing recission authority, bolstering the independence of agencies (e.g., the NLRB, FTC), prohibiting political interference with the Justice Department, and strengthening the Freedom of Information Act.

The nominee will have to develop specific immigration policies but should not miss the opportunity to pledge wholesale reorganization/dismemberment of the Department of Homeland Security, which has bureaucratized the national security structure and created rogue, lawless immigration enforcements that have devolved into fascist street thugs. This should be a mainstream position. (Keep the Education Department, Dismantle DHS!)

The next president, aside from a policy agenda, will need to prepare massive democracy enhancement legislation. That can include updating/reinstituting the Voting Rights Act, setting up independent commissions to prevent gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting, re-establishing workable causes of action (so-called Bivens cases) to hold federal officials liable for constitutional violations, imposing strict campaign finance rules (let a new Supreme Court revisit Citizens United), criminalizing phony elector schemes and other efforts to subvert elections, and granting statehood to D.C.

The next president should not throw up his or her hands because of horrendous Roberts’ Court decisions. Pass the laws, litigate the cases, and push for a reformed court to overturn ill-conceived precedent.

What to do about foreign policy: One can only imagine what will remain of U.S. alliances and international stature in 2028. Contenders without extensive foreign policy experience should start traveling, studying, and planning for restoration of American leadership. Convincing allies ever to trust us and aggressors to ever respect us will be an uphill task but the 2028 nominee should be ready with an agenda that limits foreign adventurism, eschews imperialism, re-emphasizes international law, and repairs the post WWII world order. This will be a multi-decade process, but has to begin somewhere. A good start: Immediately lifting any remaining Trump retaliatory and nonsensical tariffs, getting out of Venezuela, and recommitting to NATO.

What to do about oligarchy/concentration of wealth: American have never objected to getting rich. But they do object to billionaires getting wealthy at average Americans’ expense and using vast fortunes and outsized power to control government. Thinking through ways to empower workers and promote opportunity (e.g., subsidize childcare, remove barriers to unionization, increase minimum wage with a COLA) and devise an agenda for shared prosperity to appeal to a broad swath of Americans must be a high priority for 2028 contenders.

A good starting place would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech at the National Press Club calling that Democrats “acknowledge the economic failures of the current rigged system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big, structural change.”

Warren is correct that there is no shortage of good ideas (universal childcare, tough anti-trust enforcement, crackdown on corruption, a fair taxation system, etc.). And while each contender will have specific proposals, the eventual nominee will need to convey their determination, as Warren put it, to “build an economy for everyone.”

Democratic candidates should embrace Americans’ ambition to get ahead and not be shy about celebrating the benefits of a well-regulated market economy. However, they must commit to ending the kind of predatory, crony capitalism that has made it harder and harder for average people to attain the American dream.

In short, “Democrats need to earn trust — long-term, durable trust — across the electorate,” as Warren put it. Trust, in this case, means demonstrating that they “actually understand what’s broken and … have the courage to fix it — even when that means taking on the wealthy and well-connected.”

Bottom Line: Candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination will face a Herculean task but also an enviable opportunity. To be ready, they need to prepare now and start accumulating a brain trust to help them think through not only an election but a path to a renaissance of democracy.

Occupy Democrats via Facebook, Advocacy: Prominent right-wing newspaper finally admits that Trump “needs therapy” and is “throwing his presidency away” over Greenland, Staff and wire reports, Jan. 22, 2026. 

When even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal starts whispering that Donald Trump might be “flirting with cognitive decline,” you know the Trump circus has gone from tragic to dangerous.

For months, the president has been hell-bent on seizing Greenland — confusing diplomacy with real estate, and sovereign nations with beachfront condos.

But this week, conservative editorial board member Holman W. Jenkins Jr. finally said the quiet part out loud: Trump “needs therapy more than the United States needs to own the island.”

“Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with owning Greenland, like his Nobel Prize obsession, would be best addressed elsewhere: in therapy,” Jenkins continued. “I’m perfectly serious. Once he started unburdening himself of his insecurities and traumas, he probably wouldn’t stop for a week. The world, and the U.S., would be better for it.”Ouch.But Jenkins didn’t stop there. He reminded MAGA diehards that you can’t just invade a NATO ally to settle a midlife crisis — Congress literally made it illegal. “This isn’t international law, MAGA types, it’s U.S. law,” he wrote, laying out how the military and Supreme Court would shut Trump down “six ways from Sunday” if he tried it. Oh, and it would likely trigger a third impeachment.

Meanwhile, Trump staggered into Davos like a “bear dragged from hibernation,” huffing, wobbling, and repeatedly calling Greenland ‘Iceland,’ and vice-versa — an international humiliation so cringe that even Fox News had to look away. At one point, the president claimed Iceland “called him Daddy.” Unsurprisingly, both Iceland and Greenland deny using any such term of endearment.And here’s the kicker: the people Trump wants to “take over” want nothing to do with him. Polls show over 85% of Greenland opposes U.S. annexation, and Fox News’ own “Trump fan” from Nuuk turned out to be a serial criminal — because that’s what it takes to find a pro-Trump interview subject up there.For over a year, the president has displayed bruised hands, swollen ankles, and a growing habit of dozing off during high-stakes meetings. His rambling, incoherent press conferences have become so alarming that even conservative media can’t pretend anymore. Murdoch’s empire isn’t exactly filled with Resistance liberals — so if they are sounding worried, buckle up.

The story isn’t just that Trump is losing it. It’s that Republicans, billionaires, and right-wing media have known for ages — and stayed silent as he tanks markets, shreds alliances, and threatens to start a war over an island that wants nothing to do with him.But now the spell is breaking. And the question practically writes itself: If even Rupert Murdoch’s media can see the decline… what’s the Republican Party’s excuse?Please like and share!

Jan. 18

New York Times, One Month Later, CBS Airs Postponed ‘60 Minutes’ Report With Few Changes, Michael M. Grynbaum, Jan. 18, 2026. A 13-minute segment about Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration had been pulled at the last minute by CBS News’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss.

CBS News faced a firestorm last month after its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, postponed a “60 Minutes” report hours before it was set to air. Ms. Weiss said the piece, which featured the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal Salvadoran prison, needed work; the correspondent who reported the segment called the decision “political.”

The 13-minute report finally aired on Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” without any changes to the version that the correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, originally finished last month. (That version was accidentally streamed by a Canadian broadcaster, and then circulated widely online.)

But CBS News added two short segments, at the beginning and the end of the report, that included new comments from the Trump administration and additional details about the criminal backgrounds of the Venezuelan men who were sent to the prison, addressing two concerns that Ms. Weiss had previously expressed.

The decision by CBS to air the segment came after days of tense discussions among top personnel. Ms. Weiss wanted to make changes within the piece that was originally scheduled to run last month; Ms. Alfonsi refused, arguing that it would set a poor precedent for the program’s editorial independence, according to two people briefed on internal discussions.

Ms. Weiss,shown below, and her allies believed the changes they requested were reasonable, and they were frustrated by Ms. Alfonsi’s unwillingness to adjust her report, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

In a statement on Sunday, CBS News said that its “leadership has always been committed” to airing Ms. Alfonsi’s segment. “Tonight, viewers get to see it, along with other important stories, all of which speak to CBS News’s independence and the power of our storytelling,” the network said.

Most of the new material appeared in a concluding segment that Ms. Alfonsi taped in the “60 Minutes” studio over the weekend. She noted in the new material that 33 of the 252 Venezuelan prisoners had been convicted of a crime in the United States, and reiterated a statistic from the original report that eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent crime.

Ms. Alfonsi also noted that the Department of Homeland Security had provided a photograph in recent days showing that one of the two detainees featured in the “60 Minutes” segment once had a tattoo of a swastika on his arm. The man had modified the tattoo when he sat for his “60 Minutes” interview.

“He told us he got the offensive tattoo at 15 and didn’t know what it meant,” Ms. Alfonsi told viewers, adding that experts on Latin American gangs told “60 Minutes” that swastikas had no symbolic meaning for the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.Editors’ PicksA New Look at the Sex-Abuse Case Against TV’s ‘Frugal Gourmet’One Was Ready for a Life Partner. The Other, a ‘Vaccine Summer.’The Dinner Yotam Ottolenghi Can’t Wait to Eat in Front of the TV

Ms. Weiss’s decision in December to pull the report rattled “60 Minutes” journalists. In a memo at the time to her colleagues, Ms. Alfonsi called her story “factually correct” and wrote that she believed the decision to postpone it was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

New York Times, 'We’ll Sue’: White House’s Warning to CBS Is Sign of a New Media Status Quo, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Jan. 18, 2026 (print ed.). In previously unreported remarks, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CBS News that Mr. Trump would “sue” the news outlet if it did not air an interview unedited.

It was an aside, caught on camera, that said a lot about the uneasy business of conducting journalism today.

Moments after President Trump finished taping a 13-minute interview on Tuesday with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil in Michigan, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, approached Mr. Dokoupil and his colleagues to convey a message from the president.

“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,’” Ms. Leavitt said in an even tone, according to a recording of the exchange obtained by The New York Times.

“Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah,” Mr. Dokoupil, right, responded.

Ms. Leavitt replied: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”Karoline Leavitt Exchange With CBS News

In 2024, Mr. Trump did sue CBS over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview — and the network’s corporate parent paid $16 million to settle the case, even though many legal experts said it had little merit.

Some of the CBS personnel who were there absorbed Ms. Leavitt’s remarks as being in jest, according to a person familiar with their thinking. CBS News aired the full unedited interview that evening, which the network said was its plan all along.

“The moment we booked this interview, we made the independent decision to air it unedited and in its entirety,” CBS News said in a statement on Saturday.

Ms. Leavitt, right, reached for comment, said: “The American people deserve to watch President Trump’s full interviews, unedited, no cuts. And guess what? The interview ran in full.”

Not long ago, the notion of a White House press secretary’s casually threatening a lawsuit if a journalist does not obey her orders would be shocking.

But Mr. Trump has made abundantly clear that he is serious about pursuing legal or regulatory action against media outlets whose coverage displeases him.

Jan 14

Washington Post, FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home, Perry Stein, Jan. 14, 2026. The reporter, Hannah Natanson, covers the federal workforce and has been part of The Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage of the first year of the second Trump administration.

The FBI executed a search warrant Wednesday morning at a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.

The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia at the time of the search. Federal agents searched her home and her devices. The warrant said that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement, according to an FBI affidavit.

Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been a part of The Washington Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While it is not unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations around reporters who publish sensitive government information, it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.

Natanson said a phone and Garmin watch were seized. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

The Guardian, UPenn faculty condemn Trump administration’s demand for ‘lists of Jews,’ Alice Speri, Jan. 14, 2026 (print ed.). Groups say EEOC demand for names and personal details echoes dark history and threatens safety and civil rights.

Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania – including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses – as government abuse with “ominous historical overtones”.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

The EEOC sued Penn in November over the university’s refusal to fully comply with its demands. On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.

“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff – a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the groups argued.a woman in green clothing and headscarf and wearing glasses looks aheadTufts student can resume research after Trump officials revoked her visa, judge rulesRead more

“We are entering territory that should shock every single one of us,” said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund on a press call. The fund is representing the faculty groups along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the firm Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin and Schiller. “That kind of information – however purportedly benign the excuses given for it – can be put to the most dangerous misuse. This is an abuse of government power that drags us back to some of the darkest chapters in our history.”

The EEOC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The University of Pennsylvania was among dozens of US universities to come under federal investigation over alleged antisemitism in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. In response, the university established a taskforce to study antisemitism, implemented a series of measures and shared hundreds of pages of documents to comply with government demands.

But the university refused to comply with the EEOC’s July subpoena for personal information of Jewish faculty, students and staff, or those affiliated with Jewish organizations who had not given their consent, as well as the names of individuals who had participated in confidential listening sessions or received a survey by the university’s antisemitism taskforce. A university spokesperson said in November that “violating their privacy and trust is antithetical to ensuring Penn’s Jewish community feels protected and safe”. Instead, the university offered to inform all its employees of the EEOC investigation, inviting those interested to contact the agency directly.

But that was not enough for the commission, which brought the university to court to seek to enforce the subpoena.

“The EEOC remains steadfast in its commitment to combatting workplace antisemitism and seeks to identify employees who may have experienced antisemitic harassment. Unfortunately, the employer continues to refuse to identify members of its workforce who may have been subjected to this unlawful conduct,” the EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, said in a statement at the time. “An employer’s obstruction of efforts to identify witnesses and victims undermines the EEOC’s ability to investigate harassment.”

The EEOC request prompted widespread alarm and condemnation among Jewish faculty, and earned rebukes from the university’s Hillel and other Jewish groups.

Steven Weitzman, a professor with Penn’s religious studies department who also served on the university’s antisemitism taskforce, said that the mere request for such lists “instills a sense of vulnerability among Jews” and that the government cannot guarantee that the information it collects won’t fall “into the wrong hands or have unintended consequences”.

 

 

The Bulwark, Political Commentary: Media Matters Says It’s Ending Its Presence on Xnding Its Presence on X, Andrew Egger, right, Jan. 14, 2026.The liberal watchdog says changes to the terms of service make it impossible for them to keep posting on the platform.

MEDIA MATTERS, THE LEFT-LEANING WATCHDOG of right-wing media that has been a staple of blue Twitter for nearly two decades, will cease posting on the site starting tonight—a direct result of their lengthy legal fight with the company now known as X and its owner, Elon Musk.

Their reason for going dark, according to staff: changes to X’s terms of service, scheduled to go into effect at midnight tonight, that seem specifically designed to hurt Media Matters’ chances in their legal battle—and highlight the lengths to which Musk will sometimes go to punish his critics.

“Some of the changes to X’s terms of service underscore Elon Musk’s ability and seeming willingness to change the rules of the platform to punish speech,” said Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters, in a statement on Wednesday evening. “There’s little reason to believe similar tactics wouldn’t be used again at crucial moments, like in the runup to elections. Having so much power to control the flow of information should concern everyone invested in democracy.”

The two companies have been fighting in court since 2023. That November, Media Matters published a report criticizing Musk’s anything-goes moderation policies and demonstrating that advertisers’ content was sometimes showing up next to hate speech and neo-Nazi posts. X—which was then suffering through a damaging exodus of advertisers due to exactly these concerns—quickly filed what Musk, right, described as a “thermonuclear lawsuit” accusing Media Matters of gaming X’s algorithm in a way that “misrepresented the real user experience.” Media Matters called the lawsuit “frivolous,” accused Musk of trying to weaponize the law to silence critics, and vowed to fight it out in court.

Much of the recent court wrangling, however, hasn’t concerned the merits of Musk’s accusation but a preliminary procedural matter: Which court or courts provide the proper venue for trying the case?

X didn’t file its lawsuit in San Francisco, where X was then based, or in Washington, D.C., home of Media Matters. Instead, it brought the case in the Northern District of Texas—a frequent court-shopping destination for conservatives looking for legal advantage—where it landed on the desk of Chief Judge Reed O’Connor. In addition to a lengthy track record of pro-conservative rulings, O’Connor has faced criticism for presiding over Musk-related lawsuits while personally owning Tesla stock. While O’Connor recused himself from a different 2024 case brought by X—Musk’s attempt to punish businesses for no longer buying ads on his platform—he declined to do so in the Media Matters case.

The new X terms of service specifically require that all cases involving the company be filed in the Fort Worth division of the Northern District of Texas. There are just three judges assigned to that division, including O’Connor. Because one is a senior-status judge with a reduced caseload, the odds of any case filed in that division being assigned to O’Connor are greater than one in three.

If you care about democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, come be a part of our growing community—sign up for Bulwark+ today:Subscribed

Media Matters has been fighting Musk’s maneuver to get the suit in front of O’Connor. In response to X’s lawsuit, they argued that, by suing in Texas, X had violated its own terms of service—which stipulated at the time that all disputes involving X be brought “solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County” and under California law. Media Matters made the same claim in a countersuit filed against X in California. (In October 2024, Musk belatedly updated X’s terms of service to require all future litigation involving the company to be brought in North Texas.)

But a new change in X’s terms of service, announced last month and effective as of tomorrow, seems designed specifically to undercut Media Matters’ venue argument. Now, in addition to insisting that all new federal disputes be held in Judge O’Connor’s district, X is also attempting to bind its users to an agreement that all pre-existing U.S. disputes be litigated there as well. Here’s the relevant passage (emphasis added):

The choice of law and forum selection provisions of this paragraph shall apply to pending and future disputes and shall apply to your dispute regardless of when the conduct relating to the dispute arose or occurred.

Ongoing use of X requires ongoing assent to the company’s terms of service. In Media Matters’ case, that would mean providing Musk with a weapon to deploy against them in court. As a result, when the new terms go into effect tonight, Media Matters will stop all publishing on the platform. Their accounts won’t be deleted—Media Matters says it doesn’t want to free up the handles for impersonators or trolls—but there will be no further engagement on the platform from the nonprofit or its employees, according to a person familiar with the group’s thinking. Media Matters’ official account has nearly 415,000 followers on X; some of the organization’s most well-known personalities, like senior fellow Matthew Gertz, have hundreds of thousands.

Unsavory terms of service agreements are hardly unique to X. Most users breeze through such agreements without taking in a word; courts, on the other hand, have typically treated them as binding legal contracts. And tech companies habitually take full advantage, slipping in all sorts of self-dealing legal goodies: venue stipulations, caps on damages they can be sued for, requirements to solve disputes through arbitration rather than lawsuits, bans on class-action suits, and so on.

“This has been going on for like twenty years—not with X in particular, but with data privacy in general,” said Nancy Kim, a law professor and expert on contract law at Illinois Tech’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. “We’re just getting our rights slowly eroded, and these platforms are just increasingly getting more and more powerful, and they’re doing this through terms of service.”

But X’s conduct stands out for a few reasons. For one, there’s the obviously personal nature of the proposed changes. The lawsuit against Media Matters is a personal hobbyhorse of Musk’s, who has repeatedly described the organization as “pure evil,” “evil incarnate,” “evil to its core,” a “scam,” and “a radical left propaganda machine.” Compared to the practices of other businesses, it’s significantly outside the norm for Musk—especially after having already made it harder for any future litigants to win in court against X—to further tinker with the terms of service to bolster his side in one particular set of ongoing lawsuits.

Then there’s the fact that X—for better or worse—still functions, in many respects, as a digital public square. Discourse there still sets the table for much of the political conversation in the rest of the country. Media Matters’ decision to stop posting means X will lose a significant voice pushing back on the monsoon of fact-agnostic MAGA infotainment that’s become ubiquitous on the platform.

As Musk’s endless campaign against Media Matters continues to show, the openness of that discourse rests on the whims of one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire, whose devotion to the ideals of free and open communication tends to shrivel up quickly when it comes into tension with his various political campaigns, ideological beliefs, or personal vendettas. If Musk is willing to repeatedly revise X’s terms of service just to make it easier to punish Media Matters, what else might he do to restrict what was once regarded as a national, or even global, public square? And to what extent are other users who remain on the platform¹ enabling him to do so—and exposing themselves, perhaps, to liability of their own—by continuing to use it? 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: MAGA’S Young, Dumb Future, Andrew Egger, Jan. 14, 2026. The mayhem in Minnesota is partially the fault of one pup “reporter” chasing clicks.

The wilder the situation grows in Minneapolis—ICE growing openly brutal against protesters and observers, career prosecutors resigning in protest over the slanted investigation of the death of Renee Good, Stephen Miller proclaiming to ICE that “you have immunity to perform your duties” and that “no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist” can stand in their way—the more remarkable it is that the whole situation really got going thanks to one smooth-brained 23-year-old YouTuber.

Minnesota’s public-services fraud and its connections to Minneapolis’s Somali population had been an ongoing scandal for years, and were already a large and growing story on the right before Nick Shirley headed there with a camera crew late last month. But Shirley’s highly misleading gonzo video confronting employees of Somali-run daycares and health care centers and claiming to have discovered $110 million in fraud went ultra-viral, racking up hundreds of millions of views and turning the scandal into the story of the moment for the MAGA right. Within days, the White House was surging immigration enforcement to Minneapolis; Vice President JD Vance said Shirley had “done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes.”

If this sort of person doing this sort of work can be so richly rewarded on the right right now, it’s safe to say both that Shirley will be a major fixture of the online right for a while, and that many others will try to follow in his footsteps. But if he’s the future of right-wing journalism, the future is very bleak indeed.

Gaping holes quickly appeared in Shirley’s viral video, and exposés of the ludicrously propagandistic nature of his earlier work quickly followed. But it wasn’t until Shirley sat for a trainwreck interview with fellow YouTuber Andrew Callaghan this week that the broader picture came into focus: Sorry to say it, but the kid just ain’t that bright. When Callaghan asked him who he thought were America’s “three most benevolent billionaires,” Shirley was stumped: “What do you mean by the word ‘bellevolent’?”2

Here’s the thing that gets me, though. It’s not a crime to be young and dumb in America. It’s not even a career-ending offense to be young and dumb in journalism. As ludicrous as Shirley’s current output is, he’s plainly got a certain aptitude for video reporting. In a different world—one set up to restrain his worst and dumbest instincts rather than to reward them—a guy like him could turn out to be a solid reporter.

When we talk about the disintegration of the political right, I don’t think we talk enough about the collapse of its institutions. It’s been almost a decade since I started my first journalism job as a kid reporter at the Weekly Standard. The web editor there was one Jonathan V. Last, and I still remember one of the first things he ever told me: Part of his job as an editor of early-career writers was to keep them from popping off with insane hot-take stuff that would ruin their credibility before they’d accumulated any in the first place.3 At the time, he was contrasting the Standard’s approach with that of other right-wing outlets that used young writers as “commentary” cannon fodder for clicks, asking them to churn out three or four barely-edited “takes” a day to keep traffic numbers high.

A decade on, though, the situation is far worse even than that. Much of the old press model has collapsed entirely, especially on the right. Guys like Nick Shirley aren’t trying to join a publication, they’re picking up a camera and trying to go viral on their own. They have no safety net, no sounding board, no mentorship, no way to grow beyond what they’re doing this minute. All they have is the zero-sum game of the algorithm: Get noticed or die. Of course they’re going to do what the algorithm demands—which, on today’s right, means snappy, confrontational, fact-agnostic propaganda for the regime. That’s what the ecosystem rewards, so we’re going to get more and more of it. If you think that’s grim today, wait till you see the future.

Jan. 13 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The truth about being a white man in America, Judd Legum, right, Jan. 13, 2026. In an interview last week with reporters from the New York Times, President Trump claimed that the civil rights movement resulted in discrimination against white men. According to Trump, white men have been “very badly treated,” “not invited” to attend college, and excluded from jobs:

New York Times: So, do you believe, sir, that the civil rights protections that Americans had, starting in the 1960s and so forth, resulted ultimately in the discrimination against white men?

Trump: Well, I think that a lot of people were very badly treated. White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases. I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.

This isn’t just Trump speaking off the top of his head. The idea that white men are the primary victims of discrimination in the United States is driving administration policy.

Last month, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Chair Andrea Lucas posted on X and encouraged white men who have experienced discrimination at work to file a complaint with the agency. Lucas said she was focused on eliminating discrimination “against white male employees and applicants.”

Trump is taking a more aggressive stance on alleged discrimination against white men in his second term. In August 2018, during Trump’s first term, Darren J. Beattie was fired as a White House speech writer after it was revealed “he spoke at a white nationalist conference in 2016.”

In February 2025, Beattie was hired by the new Trump administration as the top public diplomacy official at the State Department. He was brought on a couple of months after posting that “[c]ompetent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” Beattie, mirroring Trump’s claim, argued that white men were being excluded from positions of power to protect “the feelings of women and minorities.”

America is a big place and there are undoubtedly some instances of “reverse discrimination” against white men in the country. But Trump’s claim that, as a group, white men are discriminated against in higher education and the job market is flatly false.

The myth of anti-white bias in higher education

Trump claimed that white men who “did extremely well” in high school are “not invited to go into a university or a college.” The opposite is true. Being a white man is a significant advantage when applying to colleges.

As a whole, white people are overrepresented among admitted and enrolled students, according to data analyzed by researchers from the Urban Institute and the University of Southern California. In 2024, the data shows, white people represented 40.7% of the applicants but 53% of the enrolled students. In contrast, Black applicants accounted for 8.7% of the applicant pool but just 5.8% of enrolled students. Hispanic applicants accounted for 17.4% of applicants and 17.1% of enrolled students.

Male students receive additional advantages. Most college applicants are female, so many institutions admit a higher percentage of men to ensure their student population is more evenly divided by gender. For example, in 2023, Brown University’s acceptance rate was 6.9% for male applicants and 4.2% for female applicants. That means men were “64% more likely to get into Brown” than women.

White men have an even larger leg up at selective institutions that practice “legacy“ admissions — giving preference to the children of graduates. Between 2014 and 2019 at Harvard, “the acceptance rate for legacy applicants was 33.6 percent, dwarfing the school’s overall acceptance rate of just six percent.” Over this time period, 69.3% of legacy applicants at Harvard were white.

Overall, 43% of white admits to Harvard were athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, or children of faculty and staff (ALDC) — all groups that get an advantage in the admission process. Among African American, Asian American, and Hispanic Harvard admits, less than 16% are ALDC. A study by three academic researchers found “roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs.”The myth of anti-white bias in the workplace

It is easier to get a job in America if the employer thinks you are white. Researchers applied for jobs at 100 of the largest companies using made-up resumes with equivalent qualifications. They changed some of the names, however, to suggest they were white or Black — submitting similar resumes for “Lamar” and “Adam,” for example. The study found that “employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.”

At every education level, white unemployment is significantly lower than Black unemployment. According to 2022 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the Black rate is twice, or close to two times, the White rate in all cases except for individuals with advanced degrees.”

That same data shows that the “overall Black unemployment rate is regularly higher than the unemployment rate just for White high school dropouts.”

Among Americans who have a job, white men are paid more. In the third quarter of 2025, white men had average weekly earnings of $1,362, dwarfing white women ($1,103), Black men ($1,032), Black women ($927), Latino men ($994), and Latina women ($890).

White men continue to dominate the top of the employment food chain. In companies in the S&P 100, white men constitute about one-third of the workforce. However, they hold 46% of executive positions and 37% of management positions. According to a 2024 McKinsey study of corporate America, it will take 22 years for white women and 48 years for women of color to attain the same level of representation in senior leadership roles as they have in the general population.

The Contrarian, Opinion: The Contrarian’s 1st Anniversary, Jennifer Rubin, right, Jan. 13, 2026. Forging community, defending democracy.On the launch of The Contrarian, one year ago today, I wrote: “The Contrarian will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.” We also pledged:

• · We would not normalize Donald Trump, engage in false equivalence or excuse enablers in the media, government, or business
• · We would not only call out vile, dangerous, and unconstitutional actions but put them in the context of American history and international authoritarian movements with the help of experts from a wide array of fields
• · We would call on opponents of authoritarianism from all walks of life—the media, the arts, government, academia, business, sports, culture, labor and civil society—to join a grand coalition for freedom, decency, democracy, justice, self-determination, and diversity
• · We would provide a platform with multi-generational, fresh, and diverse voices

So, how did we do?

We have never excused Trump’s cruelty, lawlessness, and madness nor pulled punches about legacy media, be it CBS or the Washington Post or any other enabler of Trump including law firms and universities. When feckless Democrats have not held the line (as in the shutdown cave), we have denounced them too.

In interviews and written pieces and at special events, we have engaged historians such as Heather Cox Richardson, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Jonathan Alter to explain the authoritarian threat. We have informed the discussion about democracy with experts in fields from civil rights (e.g., Sherrilyn Ifill, Juan Proaño, Maya Wiley), economics (e.g., Paul Krugman, Jared Bernstein, Justin Wolfers), foreign policy (e.g., Steve Cook, Susan Rice, Brian O’Neill, Jeremy Ben Ami, Tim Mak), political reform (e.g., Norm Ornstein), public health (e.g., Jeff Nesbit, Dara Kass, Neera Tanden), women’s rights (e.g., Jennifer Weiss-Wolf), labor (e.g., Liz Schuler, Michael Podhorzer), and violent extremism (PERIL). And we have brought you the very best legal scholars, practitioners, and litigators, including—of course—our publisher Norm Eisen, as well as experts like Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Mike Zamore, Mimi Rocah, Steve Vladeck, Asha Rangappa, Harry Litman, and Joyce Vance to break down lawsuits and court decisions, explain Trump’s constitutional vandalism, and navigate through the harrowing collapse of the rule of law.

We brought into The Contrarian family our magnificent culture editor Meredith Blake, who has written on film, theater, music, fashion, and more. The brilliant White House correspondent April Ryan also joined The Contrarian and hosts spectacular guests on her weekly show, “The Tea.” Carron J. Phillips, Shalise Manza Young, Pablo Torre, and others have analyzed the intersection of sports, democracy, and race. Fresh voices ranging from Carlos Eduardo Espina to Eliza Orlins to Azza Cohen to Ben Sheehan have found a home with us. And we have drawn on contributors from every part of the country.

Crucially, we have become a news coverage operation. We have covered Resistance events (most recently this weekend), major Supreme Court cases, the ICE assaults on Portland, D.C., and Chicago, and the responses to the Trump regime’s violence. We gave ample attention to the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Supreme Court races; special elections; and the November 2025 blue wave. Hopefully you agree that we have made a good start in our goal to be the place for Resistance coverage.

Thanks to Contrarians’ generosity, we were also able to send proceeds back into the hands of litigators to bring hundreds of cases against Trump and MAGA lawbreakers. That unprecedented synergy between independent media in the court of public opinion and litigation in the court of law has proved wildly successful, producing not only a record of success in court but a vibrant independent media community.

Friends, we vow to continue these efforts, keeping the spotlight on regime enablers in government and civil society. We will remain unrelenting in our defense of democracy. But there is much more work to do—and we would like to share our plans.

In 2026 we will:

• Provide more regional reporting (with senior political writer Tim Dickinson in Portland, Katie Phang in Miami, The Barbed Wire in Texas, and Lynn Sweet in Chicago)
• Increase the diversity of our authors, content creators, experts, and interviewees
• Bring on-the-ground coverage of key gubernatorial, House, Senate, and local races
• Provide weekly Contrarian Calls to Action geared to news developments (starting this Thursday)
• Appear at in-person events (mark your calendars: Norm and I will appear on Feb. 5 at Princeton University!)
• Expand our economics and foreign policy coverage as Trump continues to wreak havoc with Americans’ livelihoods and the international world order
• Offer more opportunities for subscribers to interact with Norm and me

We recognize that Trump has done far more damage far faster than many of us expected. Rogue, masked and unaccountable federal agents have gunned down innocent, unarmed Americans. Thousands upon thousands of our neighbors have been “disappeared,” abused, killed in custody, or deported. Trump and his lackeys have muzzled and corrupted media outlets, intimidated colleges, bullied law firms, concocted a massive disinformation machine, suppressed First Amendment Rights, and started an unconstitutional war (as well as engaged in extrajudicial killings on the high seas).

Millions will lose healthcare and SNAP benefits, while others are getting crushed under the weight of high prices from unilaterally illegal tariffs. The federal government and workforce has been hobbled. Meanwhile, the MAGA hacks on the Supreme Court have given up any pretense of impartial, nonpartisan justice. Some weeks, including last week (with the killing of Renee Nicole Good and shooting of two Portland residents) have been heartbreaking.Subscribed

But with all of you, we have also experienced moments of triumph, vindication, and satisfaction; the feeling of empowerment that comes from moral clarity, communal action, engaged democratic activism, and political organization. Trump has suffered more setbacks, seen more defections, lost more ground in the polls, and suffered from more self-imposed catastrophes than we imagined, despite his flunkies’ majorities in Congress and on the Supreme Court.

We feel privileged to bring you independent, fierce, and insightful coverage every day. Most of all, we relish this community we have formed and continue to expand. We ask for your help in continuing to expand our reach with new subscribers.

To be alive at a time when we can get up every morning to fight for the principles we hold dear and the country we love is an unbelievable gift.

Humbled by the support you have given us, we look forward to the years ahead as we fight to recover pluralistic democracy, reclaim truth, 

Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: No Kings, No Fear: The Math of Protest in Trump’s America, Kristoffer Ealy, right, Jan. 13, 2026. The Trump administration wants you to believe that dissent is dangerous in the wake of Renée Good's murder. But silence isn't a safety plan—it’s a surrender packaged as self-care.

No Kings, No Fear: The Math of Protest in Trump’s AmericaThe Trump administration wants you to believe that dissent is dangerous in the wake of Renée Good's murder. But silence isn't a safety plan—it’s a surrender packaged as self-care.

One of the most common questions people ask me—whether I’m standing in front of a classroom, arguing with a relative at a cookout, or out in the world trying to pretend I’m not the kind of person who will turn a casual comment into a seminar—is: does protesting actually make a difference?

And I always have to ask a followup, because “protesting” can mean ten different things depending on who’s talking. (Yes, I know. I have a penchant for being technical and precise with my words. It’s either a personality trait or a cry for help. Take your pick.) The word protest has multiple definitions, but the general idea is simple: expressing an objection to what someone has said or done.

So in that sense, “protest” can be posting a status on Facebook or Bluesky that says, “This is disgusting.” It can be writing a song, singing a song, making art, refusing to follow an order, boycotting, withholding labor, or building a mutual aid network that quietly says, “We’re not waiting for permission to care about each other.” But when most people say “protest,” they mean the term of the day: peacefully protest. Hit the streets. Bring signs. March. Chant. Organize. Do it legally. Do it peacefully.

And you can’t throw a rock on the internet without hitting someone telling you to hit the streets. People like Malcolm Nance have been adamant about it, and so have plenty of other voices with big platforms.

But now we arrive at the question underneath the question: is it even safe to protest in 2026—in Trump’s America? Because that is not a paranoid question. That is a practical one. And it’s a question that got shoved into the center of the country’s throat after the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Here’s what makes this moment so radioactive: it’s actually debatable whether Renée Good was even “protesting” when she was killed. She was shot by an ICE officer during a DHS operation in Minneapolis. The federal government has leaned hard into a self-defense narrative, while state and local officials have publicly disputed that account after reviewing video, and the case has sparked mass protests and a political tug-of-war over evidence and who gets to investigate whom. That’s not just a tragedy. That’s a formula. It’s the kind of incident that becomes a nationwide Rorschach test inside a week—because in this America, even the act of mourning has to fight through an obstacle course of labels.

And those labels matter, because labels aren’t just descriptive anymore. They’re weapons. “Citizen” can become “threat.” “Mother” can become “menace.” “Grief” can become “riot.” If you control the label, you control whether the public is allowed to empathize. And if you control empathy, you control how much force the state can deploy before people start calling it what it is.

Now, let me be clear about something: I’ve heard plenty of credible Black television and radio personalities tell people it isn’t safe to protest. I’ve heard credible journalists say Black people shouldn’t be the ones in the streets—leave that to white people—because the risk calculus isn’t the same. I’ve heard others argue nobody should protest at all. And the people saying this aren’t bad-faith actors. They’re not trying to demobilize the public to help Trump. They’re expressing real concern, because they’ve watched how quickly “peaceful protest” can be translated by the state into “permission to crack down.”

But there’s also a psychology to how that fear spreads—and how it can be engineered, or at least exploited.

One piece is the availability heuristic: when something vivid and horrifying is repeated, replayed, clipped, memed, and shoved into your eyeballs until it lives in your brain rent-free, your mind starts to treat it as the default outcome. Not because you’re stupid. Because your brain is doing what brains do: estimating risk based on what’s easiest to recall. And when the most “available” story is a person getting brutalized, your nervous system starts acting like the brutality is inevitable.

The other piece is fear appeals—messages designed to influence behavior by stoking fear. In other words: “If you do X, something terrible will happen.” There’s an entire research tradition on how fear messaging works and how it backfires when it produces panic instead of action, but the core idea is simple: fear can be a motivator, and it can also be a leash. Fear appeals don’t just warn; they shape what people think is “worth it.” They can push people into action—or they can shrink people into silence.

And this is where my political read comes in: I think one of the prevailing messages Trump and his goon squad are trying to send is deterrence-by-terror. The message isn’t merely “we’re enforcing immigration law.” The message is: if you go out and protest, you might get hurt. If you make yourself visible, you might get singled out. If you show up, you might not go home the same way you arrived.

That’s the message people are reacting to. And it’s why some credible voices are advising caution, or even advising against marching.

But then you have to confront the darker reality that complicates this entire conversation: ICE and DHS have shown time and time again that you don’t have to be protesting to be on the receiving end of force, intimidation, or violence.

This is the part where the “just don’t protest” advice runs into a wall—because what happens when the state is willing to escalate even when you’re not marching? What happens when “avoid the streets” isn’t a safety plan so much as a hope? What happens when the show of force isn’t a response to protest but part of the governing style?

Look at what has happened around the Renée Good case itself. Reporting has described DHS framing her death as justified while Minnesota officials dispute that framing after reviewing video, and DHS has responded to the backlash not with transparency, but with more muscle—announcing the deployment of hundreds more federal officers to Minnesota as protests spread. That’s not de-escalation. That’s a flex. That’s governance by intimidation. Reuters and AP have both reported on the scale of federal operations and the resulting tensions on the ground.

And it’s not just Minnesota. The “you don’t need protesters” point matters because we’ve watched the second Trump administration normalize the domestic use of militarized posture—troops, tactical gear, federalized muscle—like it’s just another Tuesday.

Here’s a rhetorical question that answers itself: How many No Kings protests did you actually have to see before Trump sent troops into cities? Because the point isn’t that protests didn’t exist. The point is how low the bar is for escalation—and how quickly the administration reaches for the optics of force. In Los Angeles, National Guard deployments became part of the protest landscape, and a federal judge later ruled Trump overstepped his authority in taking control of California National Guard units and deploying them, rejecting the idea that the protests amounted to a “rebellion” that legally justified that move. Reuters laid it out plainly: the legal justification wasn’t there. The political desire to project power was.

And that’s the point: MAGA does not need protesters in order to harass people. Protest is not always the cause. Protest is often the excuse. If the administration wants a police-state vibe in a city—if it wants the visuals of armed bodies outside federal buildings, the symbolism of “we control this space,” the message of “try it if you want”—it doesn’t take a million people marching to get there. Sometimes it takes an enforcement operation and a camera. Sometimes it takes a single incident and a narrative.

Now, before anybody tries to twist what I’m saying into a permission slip for paralysis, let me say it clearly: I think hitting the streets and protesting is essential. Full stop. The point isn’t “don’t march.” The point is: be honest about the risks, understand what intimidation is designed to do, and build movements that don’t depend on hero fantasies.

This is where political science has something genuinely useful to offer—something that cuts through the emotional whiplash and gives people a concrete framework to think with. It’s called the rule of 3.5 percent, associated most famously with political scientist Erica Chenoweth and the research on civil resistance. The basic idea—popularized in mainstream conversation precisely because it’s so simple—is that sustained, nonviolent movements that mobilize a relatively small but committed percentage of a population have historically been extraordinarily hard to defeat.

I’ve heard Rachel Maddow bring it up on her show, framing it as an organizing threshold: not “everyone must do the same thing,” but “enough people have to participate that power can’t pretend you’re a fringe complaint.”

Now, let me add a personal note here, because I’m not interested in performing purity politics for anyone. In my younger days, I was an avid protester. I didn’t just attend protests—I helped lead several. I was out there with the megaphone energy, the logistical chaos, the “who has water” texts, and the sudden realization that you can plan a march down to the minute and still get thrown into improvisation because somebody’s cousin brought an entire drumline.

These days, I do most of my protesting in front of the classroom or behind the keyboard. Which is a very professor way of saying: I still believe in the fight, I just don’t always express it by trying to walk twelve miles with my knees pretending they’re made of concrete. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped showing up. My wife and I participated in a few No Kings Day protests last year, and we’ll do more in the future. But I don’t lead them anymore, and I don’t go to every single one.

Let's hold the corrupt, the bullies, and the lawless autocrats accountable, and do the hard work of striving toward that more perfect nation.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. 

Jan. 12 

Three New York Times reporters interview President Trump in the White House Oval Office (New York Times  photo by Doug Mills).

Lance's Substack, Commentary and Opinion: A Short Pedagogical On Translating “Trumpese,” And How The New York Times Is Enabling His Fascist Insanity, Lance Rosen,right, Jan. 12, 2026. Trump just announced his plans to seize voting machines and cancel Democratic votes in midterms, but the NYT won't say it out loud.

In an interview this week, a New York Times reporter asked Trump directly about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They made a specific query in regard to whether reports were accurate that Trump seriously considered having the military seize the voting machines in various states in order to change the outcome.

Of course as Trump is presenting dementia symptoms which are progressing, he has lost the cognitive function of “filtering” his comments. He now believes his own lies as fully as would someone having a psychotic episode in recapping events both past and present. When he speaks now, it is similar to a person who had just awakened after having a very realistic dream and recounts it to others as if it happened in real life.

That is not to say he lies unconsciously or uncontrollably all of the time, much of it is still calculated. It is just that he has lost his grip on reality in the present, and won’t even recognize the truth of facts and events which conflict with his own hallucinatory obsessions.

So, we have a few excerpts of the following interchange in his interview with the New York Times, as reported by today’s “Guardian” coverage.

[”Donald Trump has said he regrets not getting the US national guard to seize voting machines after his 2020 election defeat ended his first presidency, as he continues to falsely claim that he won the race. But he has also questioned whether national guard troops would be “sophisticated enough” to pull something like that off.

Trump made those remarks in an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday. The outlet had questioned him about a plan reportedly floated in late 2020, after he lost that year’s presidential election to Joe Biden, to seize voting machines in several key swing states in an effort to search for evidence of fraud.

The Times reported that the idea was discussed during a December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, where several of Trump’s advisers, including lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, reportedly urged him to use the military or federal authorities to seize Dominion voting machines in states where Trump baselessly claimed that voter fraud had occurred, with the aim of conducting a recount.”

And....

“You once threatened, I think, during the 2020 election, to use the national guard to seize election boxes,” the reporter said. “You may remember that. You didn’t, in the end, do it.”

“Well, I should have,” Trump replied.

“Would that have been – would that be an option?” the reporter asked.

Referring to the national guard, Trump replied: “I don’t know that they are sophisticated enough. You know, they’re good warriors. I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”

During the interview, Trump also repeated his unfounded claims that the 2020 election results were fraudulent and that he won. “I won three times,” he boasted.”]

So, here is the Rosen translation from Trumpese to modern English for reasonably literate Americans.

NYT: so, you tried to steal the 2020 election. We hear you wanted to declare martial law in order to have the military alter the result. Why didn’t you?

DJT: Because I made the mistake of listening to my woke Generals and treasonous Attorney General, but I should have.

But this time, I might just cancel the elections, or I might have my people seize the machines to cancel the Democratic vote. I can do anything I want now, since the Supreme Court gave me unlimited powers and I recognize no laws, domestic or international, as constraining me at all.

So yeah, I should’ve done it in 2020 but didn’t, but I won’t make that mistake this time. The Democrats are domestic terrorists and traitors, and I hate them. They are bringing criminal immigrants to the polls. Their votes shouldn’t count.”

NYT: (crickets)

So, two points to be made here. In admitting that he wanted to do it in 2020 and regrets not doing it, only for the reason that he didn’t trust the Army to do it right or to obediently follow his orders, he is announcing his intent to do it this time to prevent a Democratic sweep of the midterms. He has said he’d be impeached if the Dems take both Houses.

Why else would he have even responded to the question if not to float the idea that any Democratic victory anywhere is a result of election fraud? Because what little guardedness or stealth he might have employed in the past when planning something illegal, is now gone, washed away by his flush of Testosterone after his Venezuela operation, combined with his neurological impairment. He is, in effect, letting it all hang out and daring anyone to try and stop him. But more important is the factor of dishonesty, deception, and craven bootlicking cowardice by the New York Times editorial staff, writers, and ownership, which they mask under the cover of “objectivity.”

They asked this question about 2020, but it appears they refused to follow up with the most obvious question in the world.

“What about 2026, if the result goes against you, will you consider seizing the machines again and go through with it, possibly using ICE to do it instead of the National Guard because ICE is manned by your most loyal supporters?”

Is there anyone here reading this that would not have asked that question in response and demanded a straight answer?

Well, maybe the NYT interviewer DID ASK, and the editors took out Trump’s answer, or acted as though the question was never asked to begin with in order to appease him.

Either way, like all criminal minds and authoritarian cult leaders whose personal survival is primary, when they are asked about their past illegal or immoral actions, their response is always a statement of their intentions to continue doing the same, even letting on in advance just how they are planning to do it. Even those with a filter will reveal their cards in advance through some kind of a “tell.”

So, I see this as a good example of how the media lies, and how we were fooled for so long about so many things. We were the victims of disinformation, manipulation, and lies, not just by being deluged with false information and propaganda, but through journalistic malpractice and editorial “news management” in the form of psychological profiling, by media which has mastered the black art of lying by omission.

It’s the questions never asked, the facts never made public, the secret agreements to which we are not privvy, that are as equally destructive as the overtly false statements and unverified facts which they do present.

So, with this interview, Trump made clear his intention to not allow a free and fair election. Period. No brainer. And the New York Times, by refusing to ask him directly about it or confront him publicly, have shown themselves once again to be his “both-sides” enablers and apologists.

The issue for us is that most of us recognized the NYT as the liberal establishment official newspaper of record for the US for decades, as our media watchdogs for democracy. Same with the Washington Post. But this is what the “Times” has been doing all along, and most of their readers didn’t want to see it.

They haven’t “changed,” this is what they’ve always been.

So, that is our lesson for the day, class is over. Do your homework.

 

U.S. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, left, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (Democrat from Arizona), center and President Trump (File photos).

New York Times, Kelly Sues Pentagon Over Threats of Punishment From Hegseth, Megan Mineiro, Jan. 12, 2026. Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from disciplining him for a video warning about illegal military orders.

Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, on Monday sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon over a move to punish him for a video he released with other lawmakers reminding military members that they must not follow illegal orders.

The Defense Department said last week that it was taking administrative action against Mr. Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut who is serving his first full term in the Senate, that could reduce his retirement rank and military pension.

Mr. Hegseth has accused the senator, who is regarded as a potential 2028 presidential contender, of sedition and treason for posting a video along with five other Democratic lawmakers in which he did not name any specific order but said: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

The lawsuit filed in Washington asked a federal judge to block the Pentagon’s efforts to punish Mr. Kelly and find them “unlawful and unconstitutional.”

“The First Amendment forbids the government and its officials from punishing disfavored expression or retaliating against protected speech,” the complaint stated. “That prohibition applies with particular force to legislators speaking on matters of public policy.”

The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a “formal letter of censure” that Mr. Hegseth released last week, he accused the senator of characterizing lawful military operations as “illegal” in a “sustained pattern” that began in June 2025.

The letter cited the senator criticizing Mr. Hegseth for firing generals and admirals and saying that the defense secretary had surrounded himself with “yes men.”

“That’s my job,” Mr. Kelly said on the Senate floor on Monday. “I have every right to say these things as an American, as a retired service member and as a U.S. senator.”

Mr. Hegseth wrote on social media last week that Mr. Kelly’s status as a sitting senator “does not exempt him from accountability, and further violations could result in further action.” The defense secretary indicated that a decision on whether to reduce the senator’s rank and pension would be made by mid-February.

But the lawsuit argued that Mr. Kelly’s public statements about policy and personnel were lawful under a section of the Constitution known as the “speech or debate” clause.

That section has long been interpreted to protect members of Congress from executive or judicial discipline for not only their speech but also their legislative work broadly.

Mr. Kelly argued in his lawsuit that as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he has a role to provide congressional oversight over Mr. Hegseth’s actions.

Failure to block any disciplinary action against the senator “would invert the constitutional structure by subordinating the legislative branch to executive discipline and chilling congressional oversight of the armed forces,” the complaint stated.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice still applies to Mr. Kelly as a retired naval officer. The administration could recall him to active duty and discipline him, unless the court were to block such action.

His fellow Democratic lawmakers in the video released last year did not serve long enough to retire and receive a pension, and are not subject to military law.  

 Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: One nation under pedophiles, Wayne Madsen, left, Jan. 12, 2026. Trump and Musk ready sanctions against countries trying to protect themselves from Musk's Grok A.I.-generated child porn

Several governments, including some of America’s closest allies, are now taking direct regulatory action to protect their citizens from Grok‑generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM). As the Trump administration digs in its heels to illegally withhold from public release over 5 million government files related to Donald Trump’s close friend Jeffrey Epstein’s global trafficking of minors and women, Trump officials are threatening punishing sanctions against countries attempting to enforce laws and regulations against the production of computer-generated child and sexual abuse pornography.

Grok, Musk’s X’s A.I. (xAI) engine, is using actual photographs of children and women to generate naked photos of them. In some cases, the subjects are engaged in sexual activities. Musk has pushed back against countries trying to enforce current laws against the creation and propagation of such content by accusing them of “censorship.” The Trump administration is supporting Musk by threatening countries with punishing sanctions.

The following nations are in the target sights of Musk’s and the Trump administration’s retaliatory actions:

Malaysia blocked Grok entirely after repeated misuse to generate explicit deepfakes of women and minors. The government has said Grok lacked “effective controls” and posed a serious risk to safety and dignity. Malaysia has stated that Grok will remain banned until xAI implements strong safeguards.

Indonesia temporarily blocked access to Grok nationwide. Officials said Grok violated privacy and image rights of Indonesian citizens. The government framed non‑consensual deepfakes as a human‑rights violation, not just a tech issue.

India’s IT Ministry issued a legal directive ordering X to remove all obscene and unlawful Grok‑generated content immediately. X is being required to submit a detailed Action Taken Report explaining technical safeguards, oversight mechanisms, enforcement actions, and compliance with mandatory reporting laws. India has warned that failure to comply could remove X’s legal protections under the IT Act.

UK regulator Ofcom (Office of Communications) has opened a formal investigation into X. The probe is examining whether X prevents users from seeing illegal content, removes CSAM quickly, has “highly effective age assurance” for minors, and conducted required risk assessments. The easy answer to these questions is that Musk and X has done nothing for what Ofcom is seeking answers. Ofcom can impose fines up to 10% of global revenue if X is found non‑compliant. That amounts to some $2.9 billion for 2025.

French regulators are investigating Grok as part of a broader European crackdown on AI‑generated CSAM. France is coordinating with EU partners on deepfake and CSAM enforcement.

Germany is also among the nations scrutinizing Grok for generating sexualized images of minors and women. German regulators, like their colleagues in France, are pushing for EU‑level penalties and mandatory AI safety standards.

Canada is pledging to change domestic laws to make publishing “deepfake sexual abuse” illegal. The government wants to “hold abusers accountable” for creating or sharing AI‑generated sexualized images of women and children. More generally, Grok is already under investigation for a potential previous breach of Canadians’ privacy.

Currently, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner can legally compel platforms—including X—to remove child sexual abuse material, prevent the creation or distribution of synthetic CSAM, demonstrate effective safety systems, and pay large fines for non‑compliance. Australia has already used these powers against X in other contexts, which puts Musk on notice. If Grok‑generated CSAM spreads in Australia, the Commissioner can issue removal notices, service‑provider notices, fines up to millions of dollars, and court‑enforced penalties. Australia’s relatively aggressive Online Safety Act of 2021 requires platforms like X to prevent the distribution of CSAM, remove harmful content quickly, implement “reasonable safety measures,” protect minors from exposure to sexual content, and cooperate with investigations. If X fails to prevent Grok from generating sexualized images of minors, it could be found in breach of the Act.

New Zealand’s Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act makes it a crime to create, possess, or distribute any sexualized depiction of a minor — including synthetic or AI‑generated images. That means Grok‑generated CSAM is already illegal, even if no real child exists. New Zealand is expanding the Harmful Digital Communications Act by updating child‑safety provisions to explicitly cover AI‑generated sexual imagery and strengthening penalties for platforms like X that fail to remove harmful content.

Musk’s country of origin, South Africa, with which he has tangled in the past, could be the first to hit him with severe sanctions over his platform’s distribution of CSAM. Under the Films and Publications Act (FPA) and its 2019 amendments, South Africa treats any depiction of a minor in a sexual context as illegal, even if the child is fictional, the image is AI‑generated, or no real child was harmed. This means Grok‑generated CSAM is automatically illegal in South Africa. Platforms like X found to be distributing CSAM can be prosecuted.

The generation of CSAM, including that which is AI-generated, deepfakes, digitally altered, or of synthetic minors is currently illegal under national law and the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in France, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Ireland (where X’s European headquarters in Dublin is located), Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Italy, Czechia, Poland, Malta, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, and Cyprus.

EU‑aligned digital‑safety and anti-CSAM laws and regulations, which are generally in compliance with the EU’s restrictions on online CSAM and in accordance with the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Committee Implementation Report and the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, have been enacted by Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein as members of the European Economic Area (EEA). The EU and EEA countries are also supporters of the International Association of Internet Hotlines (INHOPE), which enables fast cross‑border takedowns of CSAM on the Internet. EU- and Council of Europe-style laws and regulations have also been implemented by Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Similar laws addressing online CSAM, whether generated by AI or not, exist in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (the strongest in Asia), and Philippines.

Strict criminal laws against online dissemination of AI-generated CSAM material have also been enacted by Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Gibraltar.

In December 2025, the EU imposed a €120 million fine on Musk’s X for violations of the DSA’s content moderation requirements. It was the EU’s first fine imposed pursuant to the DSA. In addition to Musk and Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr cried “censorship,” placing themselves in the same arena as creators and distributors of AI-created and other forms of CSAM, as well as other content advancing anti-Semitic, racist, and other hate material and messaging. Rubio declared the DSA fine levied on X was “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments. The days of censoring Americans online are over.” Rubio had nothing to say about the child porn and neo-Nazi content that the DSA was designed to combat.

Democratic U.S. Senators U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ed Markey, and Ben Ray Luján have asked Apple and Google to remove X and Grok from app stores due to “mass generation of non‑consensual sexualized images of women and children.”

No Republicans in either house of Congress has joined in the Democratic effort. Musk and the Trump administration are facing a major legal hurdle in May of this year. The Take It Down Act will require platforms to remove non‑consensual intimate imagery within 48 hours. Enforcement of the act is another matter. The Take It Down Act requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a toothless regulatory agency under Trump, to enforce its provisions.

In failing to restrict CSAM and hate content from on-line platforms, the Trump administration has placed itself in line with Russia and Belarus as a notorious outlier. These countries do not meaningfully cooperate with international child‑protection systems, and their “hate content” enforcement is aimed primarily at political dissent, not genuine online safety. 

Lincoln Square Media, Winners & Losers Commentary: Atrocity & Profanity, Sam Osterhout, Jan. 12, 2026. Losers punch down. Winners punch up.  

Last week’s news cycle began with American-inflicted violence in Venezuela and ended with American-inflicted violence in Minneapolis.

Around the world, people are leaving the comfort of their homes and hitting the streets — from Minneapolis, where thousands have marched to honor the memory of Renee Good and protest ICE in their community, to the streets of Iran, where runaway inflation and decades of violent oppression have taken their toll.

Stop Trump's unchecked war powers

Someday, I’ll load all of these columns into an AI and ask how many of them claimed the week in which they were published represented a sea change.

It’s true, when something big happens and we’re all outraged, we often say that it feels like something has changed. But I would argue it’s almost always true, at least over the last year.

Our world — our country, our communities, our neighbors, our economy — it’s all simply changing. We are in the middle of it. So, in fact, this week, we changed. Again. The big question we need to ask is how the left — or the pro-democracy side, anyway — will respond to the change.

Hearing the roar of protestors literally risking their lives to be in the streets of Tehran is heartening, but it’s also frustrating to turn on social media and see that our own streets aren’t quite as full. They should be. We should be shutting this country down.

This week, my Winner comes out of Minneapolis, and my Loser is a familiar face who will undoubtedly be featured here again in the future.

I could have picked the agent who killed Good to be the Loser this week. But I have a policy against picking on middle management. That is to say, the people who are taking orders are off-limits to me.

There’s a case to be made that the agent is a murderer. I know. And he filmed himself calling Good a fucking bitch AFTER he killed her. He is clearly not a good person. Or, to be as generous as possible, he’s a hurt person with incapacitating fear and anxiety that he spills out into the world around him. He’s damaged, perhaps beyond repair.

Tell Congress: Impeach Kristi Noem

But. BUT. You have to imagine the monster who sees a man like this and says, Yes. He is just the right kind of broken. We can use his pain to punish blue cities and terrorize Americans we don’t like.

That’s Kristi Noem, left. She’s been in this column before, as you know. She has become a cartoon character version of herself that will say or do anything it takes to sound tough, mean, and Mar-a-Lago-y.

Last week, after the shooting in Minneapolis, she called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Noem’s rhetoric was so appalling that it even turned off some inside the administration, who thought going so hard at a woman killed by a federal agent would turn public opinion against ICE.

You think?

You could argue that Noem is also a sort of middle-manager. She is clearly enacting the dreams of people above her like Stephen Miller and, yes, Trump. But she is also in a leadership position. The only thing that kept us from being murdered in the street in Trump’s first administration were people in positions of leadership who pushed back. In the second term, we have … her.

Whether she is a true believer or a social climber or some combination of the two, she has accepted the responsibility of her role, and if there is any justice, she will be held accountable for her actions.

All of the Losers surrounding Trump right now — not the Voughts, the Stephen Millers, the Federalist Society types who are true believers and who, by some counts, are pulling the levers, but the Halligans and Noems and Bondis and Hegseths and Bonginos, who just want to be MAGA stars, who just want to be loved by the wrong people — they need to know that their poor decision making has consequences.

Noem is empty. She is a Loser. And we’re all going to suffer for it.

NOEM: “We can’t trust the government anymore.”

DANA BASH (CNN): “You are the government.”

NOEM: “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

 

BIG, Monopoly Round-Up: Why Did Trump Just Attack the Fed and Corporate America? Matt Stoller, right, Jan. 12, 2026. Donald Trump pledged to crack down on Wall Street ownership of housing, credit card giants, and defense contractors. And he attacked the Fed. It's the year of affordability. But is the agenda real?

Lots of monopoly related news, as usual. Google is now emailing children to tell them how to avoid parental controls, a price war brought down the price of weight loss drugs, there’s cool innovation by Lego toys, and the Trump administration actually blocked a merger!

The Real Michael Cohen, Opinion: ICE Barbie's Interview Meltdown, Michael Cohen, right, Jan. 12, 2026. Five days of cable-news foreplay ended in a masterclass of lies, deflection, and authoritarian spin; where a dead woman met oatmeal answers, locked doors, and bulletproof bullshit.

For five straight days, CNN treated the Jake Tapper–Kristi Noem interview like it was the Super Bowl of accountability.

A flashing chyron. A dramatic tease. A breathless promise that this, finally, would be the moment we learned something meaningful about the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Jan. 11

 

 

A photograph of President Trump on a gallery wall beneath the words “America’s Presidents.”An earlier photograph of President Trump that hung at the National Portrait Gallery included lengthy wall text. (Photo via Allison Dinner/EPA, via Shutterstock). 

New York Times, Smithsonian Removes Label Noting Trump Impeachments, Graham Bowley, Robin Pogrebin and Derrick Bryson Taylor, Jan. 11, 2026 (print ed.). When the National Portrait Gallery replaced a portrait of President Trump this week, it took down a biography of his first term.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery removed wall text that referred to President Trump’s two impeachments — language that had upset the White House — when the museum recently replaced a portrait of him in its “America’s Presidents” exhibition.

The wall text described some of Mr. Trump’s political accomplishments, including his appointment of three Supreme Court justices, his promotion of the development of Covid-19 vaccines and his “historic comeback in the 2024 election” after he lost the previous election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

It also included: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.”

That sentence had long bothered the Trump administration.

After Mr. Trump announced last year that he was firing Kim Sajet, who was then the National Portrait Gallery’s director, the White House compiled a list of grievances about her, outlining what it called evidence of partisanship and bias. Among these points, which were supplied to The New York Times, was the sentence about the impeachments that has now been taken down.

The new image, a black-and-white portrait taken by the White House photographer Daniel Torok, shows the president in the Oval Office, staring directly into the camera with his fists on the Resolute Desk. When Mr. Trump posted the image on social media in October, he wrote, “In the Oval Office, getting ready to leave our imprint on the World. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In a statement on Saturday, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said that it was an “iconic photo” of the president and that “his unmatched aura will be seen and felt throughout the halls of the National Portrait Gallery.”

The National Portrait Gallery said in a statement that it had hung a new photograph of Mr. Trump on Thursday and was beginning a planned update of the “America’s Presidents” exhibition.

“For some new exhibitions and displays, the museum has been exploring quotes or tombstone labels, which provide only general information, such as the artist’s name,” the statement said. “The history of presidential impeachments continues to be represented in our museums.”

The new wall text simply identifies Mr. Trump as the 45th and 47th president, saying he was born in 1946. According to the National Portrait Gallery’s website, the wall text accompanying President Bill Clinton’s official portrait notes he was impeached for “lying while under oath about a sexual relationship he had with a White House intern.”

In late November, a mental health leader at a major VA medical center learned about a directive issued to the 18 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) regional offices, known as VISNs (Veterans Integrated Service Networks). Department of Veterans Affairs’ leaders in Washington were imposing lower caps on employee positions nationwide. Directors of local VA medical centers and clinics had a month to decide which vacant positions to eliminate, and which job offers to rescind. None of these identified positions would be filled because they would be swept from organizational charts entirely. At his facility, 60 percent of the unfilled positions would be lost, including 23 in mental health.

“The past nine months have been very challenging,” the mental health leader told the Prospect. “But this is really going to impact patient care.” He also worried about the effect of cuts on the VA’s critical teaching mission. “The VA trains 50 percent of psychologists in the country,” he said. “Now, we may not have enough staff to supervise trainees.” In the midst of a national mental health professional shortage, reducing VA training capacity ultimately impacts access to mental health care for both veterans and nonveterans alike.

Again, Donald Trump is taking services away from veterans, and then hiring them to invade blue cities as if they were Fallujah.

For the past year, the Smithsonian Institution has been under pressure from the Trump administration to present a primarily positive view of America. In March, Mr. Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that instructed officials to scrutinize the museum complex for “improper ideology.”

The Smithsonian, which has long been regarded as independent from the executive branch, has produced only part of a lengthy list of documents the White House has requested as it carries out a review of its current and planned exhibitions. It now faces a new ultimatum to hand over all of the requested materials by Tuesday or risk potential cuts to its $1 billion budget, which is largely dependent on federal funds.

The White House’s interest in the National Portrait Gallery was fueled in part by Ms. Sajet’s refusal to exhibit a triumphant portrait of Mr. Trump — it showed the president next to a rising sun with a bald eagle — during his first inauguration.

The Smithsonian did not follow through on Mr. Trump’s announcement that he was firing Ms. Sajet, publicly insisting it held the reins on personnel matters. But she resigned on her own, saying the decision was in the best interests of the institution. (The museum’s acting director is Elliot Gruber.)

The recent changes at the National Portrait Gallery were earlier reported by The Washington Post. The museum typically rotates photographs of the president until unveiling an official painting once the person has left office. The latest portrait replaced a color photograph by The Post’s Matt McClain that showed Mr. Trump wearing a red tie against a black background.

Last year, another Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of American History, changed the language describing Mr. Trump’s impeachments in an exhibition about the American presidency.

In a description of Mr. Trump’s second impeachment that says he was charged with “incitement of insurrection,” the Smithsonian removed two phrases: one describing “repeated ‘false statements’ challenging the 2020 election results,” and another about a speech by the president that it said “encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”

The history museum also added the word “alleged” to a description of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment: “The charges focused on the president’s alleged solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election and defiance of Congressional subpoenas.”

The Smithsonian said then that it had “a steadfast commitment to scholarship, rigorous research and the accurate, factual presentation of history.” The exhibition on the American presidency includes information about the impeachments of former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. 

Jan. 10

 

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, DC.

New York Times, Washington National Opera Is Leaving the Kennedy Center, Adam Nagourney, Jan. 10, 2026 (print ed.). The opera, which has performed at the arts center since 1971, was concerned by declines in attendance and donations during President Trump’s second term.

The Washington National Opera decided on Friday to move its performances out of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, abandoning the hall where it has played since 1971 in perhaps the largest artistic rebuke yet to President Trump’s campaign to remake the Kennedy Center in his image.

The opera company is seeking to sever its ties with the Kennedy Center after a tumultuous year in which both groups have faced cancellations by artists, empty seats and the retrenchment of donors protesting Mr. Trump’s intervention. Within weeks of beginning his second term, the president named himself chairman of the center and installed a political ally, Richard Grenell, as its executive director, while filling its board with supporters.

A resolution to leave was approved by the Washington National Opera’s board of trustees on Friday, according to a statement the opera provided to The New York Times.

“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the statement said.

The resolution calls for the opera to move its performances out of the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House as soon as possible and to reduce the number of performances as a cost-saving measure. Opera officials said that new sites in Washington have been lined up but that no leases have been signed. They declined to name those venues.

The officials said that details about the new schedule would be announced shortly. The Kennedy Center’s website currently lists the opera’s lineup of spring performances, including Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” and “West Side Story” as well as its upcoming gala, but a separate website is being set up.

The resolution also calls for the Washington National Opera to begin negotiations with Mr. Grenell and the Kennedy Center about ending an affiliation agreement that has bound the cultural institutions since it was signed in 2011, when the opera was facing financial challenges.

The opera declined to release a copy of the resolution, which was being negotiated until shortly before it was approved by the 37-member board during a virtual meeting on Friday. But details of its contents were provided to The Times by officials involved in the deliberations.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately offer a response to the opera’s decision to leave when reached for comment.

The opera’s impending departure is the latest sign of resistance to Mr. Trump’s effort to drastically change an institution that was created in 1971 in tribute to John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated eight years earlier.

Opera leaders said the decision to leave was in response to a drop in attendance and a decline in donor contributions during the president’s second term, as well as an escalating number of artists who have refused to appear at the Kennedy Center since Mr. Trump’s name was added to the building last month. The authority of the board to overrule Congress and rename the center is disputed, and The Times has continued to refer to its legal name.

“I am deeply saddened to leave the Kennedy Center,” Francesca Zambello, who has been the opera’s artistic director for 14 years, said in a statement to The Times. “I have been proud to be affiliated with a national monument to the human spirit, a place that has long served as an inviting home for our ever-growing family of artists and opera lovers.”

Any negotiation over the affiliation agreement promises to be fraught: It was first negotiated when Barack Obama was president, setting a framework for the organizations to work cooperatively in hiring the opera company’s general director (currently Timothy O’Leary) and artistic director, as well as to make decisions on its programming. The Kennedy Center also leases space to the opera company for storage, offices and rehearsals.

Among the most difficult issues that need to be resolved is the future of the opera’s $30 million endowment, which has already become a matter of dispute. The opera contends that the affiliation agreement makes clear that both entities control the fund, the result of a history of donations from opera supporters in Washington.

Officials with the opera said they would move all performances out of the center, regardless of whether a deal to end its formal ties is struck. They asserted that taking their shows to other venues would free the company of the management entanglements with the Kennedy Center — in particular, programming and the selection of top opera personnel — that are addressed in the affiliation agreement.ImageA limousine outside a marble building. On its facade are the words “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

The Washington National Opera was established in 1957, with an inaugural performance of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” at George Washington University. With a few exceptions — it performed at Constitution Hall while its home on the Potomac was being renovated — it has been performing at the Kennedy Center since the building opened.

The opera was founded by Day Thorpe, the music critic of The Washington Star, and has provided a stage to some of the most prominent performers of the generation, including Plácido Domingo (who also served as its artistic director), Anna Netrebko, Denyce Graves and Renée Fleming. It has staged warhorses like “Carmen” and a new production of the “Ring” cycle in 2016, which was directed by Ms. Zambello. It also created the American Opera Initiative to showcase young composers.

“The Washington National Opera is one of our most prominent companies,” said Marc A. Scorca, the president emeritus of Opera America, a service organization for opera companies. “It has presented a mix of work from our inherited repertoire and new works from a wonderful young artists program.

“To have a major opera company produce such a mix of repertoire is very important,” he said.

Since early in his second term, Mr. Trump has sought to put his imprint on traditionally nonpartisan Washington institutions like the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center. His appointment of Mr. Grenell came with a clear message from Mr. Trump that he wanted changes in the way things were done at the Kennedy Center.

“Ric shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture, and will be overseeing the daily operations of the Center. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” the president said then in a post on social media.

Before long, the center ordered the National Symphony Orchestra to open all concerts with the national anthem (Mr. Grenell took the baton and conducted one of them) and hired a dance director who had complained to Mr. Grenell about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet.”

Officials with the Washington National Opera noted that operas often advance strong political and moral points of views — whether they were written two centuries or two years ago — and that they were worried they would be blocked from performing operas that did not follow Mr. Grenell’s edicts. Among its programming this season is Robert Ward’s “The Crucible,” based on the Arthur Miller play that explored the waves of paranoia overtaking a small town during the Salem witch trials of the 17th century.

In addition, Mr. Grenell said he wanted all productions at the Kennedy Center to be revenue neutral, taking in as much money in ticket sales and contributions as they cost to mount. Operas are expensive to produce and are typically not revenue neutral.

Ms. Zambello publicly raised the possibility of leaving the Kennedy Center in an interview with The Guardian in November, saying that the Trump administration’s policies had “shattered” the confidence of donors and resulted in a 40 percent drop in ticket revenues. “If we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options,” she said at the time.

After her remarks produced an uproar, Ms. Zambello and other leaders of the opera reaffirmed their intention to stay. But since then, she and other opera officials said, the situation has only grown worse.

The Contrarian, Publisher's Roundup and Commentary: A Year of Fighting for Democracy–in Print and in Court, Norman Eisen, right,  Jan. 10, 2026. Exactly one year ago today, Jen Rubin and I and a small band of colleagues were furiously working to launch a new publication dedicated to the idea of honest but unabashed defense of democracy.

We were just three days from the January 13 birth of The Contrarian. Too many mainstream outlets and powerful people and institutions were bowing down to the incoming would-be autocrat. We didn’t know whether our new publication would be a success, but we knew we would fight authoritarianism with every ounce of our and The Contrarian’s being.

What a difference a year makes! Yes, the devastation, destruction, and even death Donald Trump has wrought have been vast. But we and the entire democracy movement have again and again frustrated his efforts to impose dictatorship. You have helped make that possible, dear Contrarians, through your paid subscriptions that not only fund our coverage but also my and my colleagues’ pro-democracy litigation. As I like to say, we have met Trump’s flood-the-zone autocratic approach with rule-of-law shock and awe.Subscribed

Trump initially pursued his authoritarian aspirations using the traditional tools of the presidency. That included, for example, the power of the pen, surging an unprecedented number of illegal executive orders, such as those purporting to end birthright citizenship or asserting control of American elections.

We covered all of that here at The Contrarian–unabashedly, as promised. And you Contrarians also supported me and the coalition of democracy, civil rights, and other nonprofit groups to push back in one of the most extraordinary litigation campaigns in American history. In about 200 cases in this and parallel areas (including his abuse of spending authority and firing authority), federal judges again and again stopped Trump from capturing the dictator flag. (Yes, he fared better at the Supreme Court, but it takes only a small fraction of the cases.)

Those birthright citizenship and elections EOs were among the many that my colleagues and I and our wonderful partners and clients went to court to help stop. We also blocked the firing of tens of thousands of government employees and kept multiple government agencies open, all fueled by your paid subscriptions. Because we at The Contrarian are a not-for-profit, all proceeds go to support our scintillating coverage and this kind of pro-democracy advocacy.

All of that losing was very frustrating for Trump, so he looked to other outlets for his dictatorial energies. Having confronted failure again and again in civil litigation, he turned to exercise his criminal-justice powers, where an administration typically has broader leeway. The old saying goes that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and Trump deployed hand-picked cronies, including his former defense lawyer Alina Habba, to occupy once-distinguished federal prosecutorial offices.

Here, too, Trump met failure. Charges against two principal adversaries, Letitia James and Jim Comey, were tossed out because another one of those hand-picked cronies, Lindsay Halligan, was illegally installed by Trump. Contrarians, you were again a part of that. My litigation colleagues and I helped secure the very first precedent that these appointments were illegal. Then we filed a brief in support of Comey and James that helped their wonderful counsel get those cases dismissed.Subscribed

Then there was a third area of Trump flexing and ultimate frustration: deployment of the National Guard. For all of the other disappointments at the Supreme Court (extensively covered here at The Contrarian), it finally did the right thing at the end of the year when it ruled that he had overreached his powers in Chicago. Trump was forced to admit defeat and pull back the Guard from multiple big cities, including Los Angeles—which my litigation colleagues and I are proud to represent pro bono, again made possible by your paid subscriptions.

As presidents often do when they’re facing domestic defeat, Trump has turned his autocratic attention abroad. This week, I wrote for The Contrarian with colleagues about the illegality of his Venezuela campaign and broke the news of our legal campaign to push back on it. Judging from the chaos surrounding Venezuela and the unpopularity of the invasion in the United States, Trump has another flop on his hands. That includes this week’s War Powers resolution, which passed the Senate with members of his own party breaking off to oppose him.

And that’s just a few of the examples of our coverage and legal pushback on all this and so much more, made possible by you. It has been the privilege of a lifetime to share the journalistic and litigation fight of the past year with over half a million Contrarians. Yes, as you will see from this week’s Contrarian roundup below, Trump is as dangerous as ever, but he’s much less powerful. That is thanks in no small part to each of you. Happy anniversary Contrarians! 

New York Times, 220,000 Fewer Workers: How Trump’s Cuts Affected Every Federal Agency, Emily Badger, Francesca Paris and Alicia Parlapiano, Jan. 10, 2026 (print ed.). The Trump administration shrank the federal work force by about 220,000 workers through November, representing about a 10 percent cut, according to new data that offers the first clear view of the president’s blitz to remake the government’s labor force.

This decline, which also accounts for limited new hiring, has reversed the last decade of growth for America’s largest employer, returning the federal work force to roughly the size it was when President Trump took office the first time.

But the cuts went far deeper for some agencies and offices: They have had the effect of hollowing out decades-old functions of the federal government. Employees in …

Selected offices with steep cuts Nov.2024 Nov.2025 Change:

U.S. Agency for International Development 4,845 378 –92%Institute of Education Sciences 191 25 –87%National Endowment for the Humanities 216 58 –73%Agency for Health Care Research and Quality 297 108 –64%Institute of Museum and Library Services 98 40 –59%Federal Student Aid 1,450 780 –46%Office of Elementary and Secondary Education 315 185 –41%Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 932 574 –38%Rural Development 4,981 3,141 –37%Food and Nutrition Service 1,830 1,231 –33%

In many cases, the departures have whittled down agencies that hadn’t grown in years or benefited from the expansion of the federal work force over the last two decades. Most of that expansion has been driven by just one agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs. In other words, Mr. Trump’s cuts — some carried out haphazardly, then reversed — aren’t a simple rollback of recent government bloat, but a more fundamental change to what the government does.

 

Renee Nicole Gold, a U.S. citizen and mother executed by ICE during Minneapolis protest on Jan. 7, 2026 (Collage  immediately above, commentary and early reporting identifying names by the Wayne Madsen Report via Tik-Tok). 

The Parnas Perspective, Trump Administration Blocks Minnesota Investigators to Key Physical Evidence as Mass Protests Break Out, Aaron Parnas, right, Jan. 10, 2026 (Afternoon edition). We have major breaking news right now. I just spoke with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and he confirmed a critical development in the investigation into the deadly ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

State investigators are being barred from accessing key evidence, including ballistic evidence, Good’s car, and other materials, by federal authorities, with the FBI now handling the investigation and limiting state access. This means Minnesota officials do not currently have custody of the car, the gun, or the shell casings from the bullets fired by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, even as protests and outragecontinueto grow nationwide.

Ellison also made clear that Minnesota believes it has jurisdiction to pursue charges and that there is no statute of limitations on murder, meaning this case can and will be pursued long after any single administration is gone.

Here’s what else you missed:

Donald Trump declared a national emergency to block private creditors from seizing roughly $2.5 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue held in U.S. Treasury accounts, arguing that maintaining control of the funds is vital to U.S. national security, regional stability, and efforts to stabilize Venezuela, curb illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking, and counter actors like Hezbollah and Iran.

An investigation by The Washington Post found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has transformed its public affairs operation during Donald Trump’s second term into a White House–aligned, influencer-style media machine, aggressively producing viral videos of immigration raids and arrests—often using inflammatory language, misleading framing, and copyrighted music without permission—to “flood the airwaves,” promote mass deportation narratives like targeting the “worst of the worst,” and satisfy political pressure despite internal concerns over safety, ethics, and legal risks within the Department of Homeland Security.

More than 1,000 protests, vigils, and rallies were planned nationwide after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot three people—killing Renee Nicole Good—in incidents in Minneapolis and Portland, with demonstrations organized by Indivisible and allies calling for ICE to leave communities, accountability for the shootings, and action from elected leaders amid escalating tensions over federal immigration enforcement.

The Trump administration suspended $129 million in federal benefit payments to Minnesota, citing alleged widespread fraud by local nonprofits and businesses, prompting Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison to push back and threaten legal action, while critics argue the move unfairly targets the state and its Somali American community amid broader political tensions with Donald Trump.

Three Minnesota Democrats—Reps. Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, right, and Kelly Morrison—said they were denied oversight access to a Minneapolis Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center amid protests following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, escalating tensions as the Department of Homeland Security defends the denial on procedural grounds and lawmakers challenge the agency’s conduct during a large-scale immigration crackdown ordered by Donald Trump.

The U.S. carried out “large-scale strikes” against ISIS targets across Syria as part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, with U.S. Central Command confirming more than 35 targets hit using over 90 precision munitions and 20+ aircraft; the operation was ordered by Donald Trump after a December ambush near Palmyra killed two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the strikes signal continued retaliation and a commitment to prevent future attacks on U.S. forces.

The U.S. State Department issued a security alert urging U.S. citizens in Venezuela to leave immediately as international flights resume, warning that armed militia groups known as “colectivos” are setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for signs of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States, and emphasizing that Venezuelan conditions—including violence, civil unrest, and the inability of U.S. diplomats to provide emergency assistance—make the situation highly dangerous.

Donald Trump said the U.S. is ready to help protesters in Iran achieve freedom, signaling potential U.S. intervention—including military action short of “boots on the ground”—if the regime escalates violence, as nationwide protests expand to hundreds of cities amid internet shutdowns and warnings from Iranian authorities that the unrest crosses a “red line.”

More On Minneapolis ICE Fatal Shooting

 

Former Minnesota Gov. and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, shown in a file photo with comments about President Trump and his avoidance of military service excerpted from an interview Ventura gave as he left his high school reunion in Minneapolis this week. Ventura was wearing a SEAL hat during the interview. He served in the military unit the pre-dated the creation of SEAL commando units and is entitled therefore to wear such a hat, according to military experts.

New York Times, News Analysis: F.B.I.’s Inquiry Into ICE Shooting Faces Doubts After White House’s Remarks, Glenn Thrush, Jan. 10, 2026. Ex-law enforcement officials said the administration’s declarations that the killing was justified elicited questions about the F.B.I.’s willingness to scrutinize the agent who fatally shot an unarmed activist.

The Trump administration blocked Minnesota officials from investigating the death of the woman shot on Wednesday by a federal agent, then quietly offered this explanation: Local investigators simply could not be trusted to conduct a fair inquiry.

The investigation into the killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37, right, federal officials said, would be the exclusive province of the F.B.I., which is overseen by a director, Kash Patel, who has described President Trump as an unerring boss, and even a king.

Mr. Trump had already declared the shooting justified. Vice President JD Vance has asserted that federal agents had “absolute immunity” from prosecution. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, has spoken about the incident as if it were a closed case: Ms. Good had “weaponized” her S.U.V. to kill agents, she said, even though video analysis by The New York Times suggested it was more likely that she was turning her car away from officers.

The extraordinary volley of public statements stood in striking contrast to the far more restrained approach to high-profile incidents taken by other presidents, who have typically called for calm pending the results of investigations. The all-hands effort to define Ms. Good as the only person who did anything wrong has cast serious doubt on the F.B.I.’s willingness to scrutinize the actions of the agent who killed the unarmed activist, according to former law enforcement officials who were once responsible for investigating comparable tragedies.

“It’s hard to have any trust in the federal investigation given the White House’s immediate public effort to drive an outcome,” said Vanita Gupta, a former top Justice Department official in the Biden administration who oversaw the department’s response to incidents of police violence, including the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“Are the feds conducting any real investigation of the agent’s actions, or instead focused on trying to justify what happened by tarring the victim as a domestic terrorist?” Ms. Gupta added.

The details and direction of the F.B.I.’s investigation remain unclear. A spokesman for Mr. Patel did not respond to requests for comment.

Todd Blanche, left, the deputy attorney general who oversees the bureau, said in a statement on Thursday that the F.B.I. would follow “standard protocols” to “ensure that evidence is collected and preserved.” His remarks also defended the right of officers to use deadly force when they believed their lives were in danger.

Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, struck a more circumspect and conventional tone, telling CBS News he would not draw any conclusions by watching video on social media.

“Let the investigation play out,” Mr. Homan said, “and hold people accountable based on the investigation.”

It was against this backdrop that the White House, Justice Department and F.B.I. excluded the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, an investigative division of the state attorney general’s office that often collaborates with federal law enforcement, from sharing evidence.

On Thursday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis abruptly “reversed course” by informing state investigators that initial plans to coordinate efforts had been scrapped, according to Drew Evans, the state bureau’s superintendent.

 

A senior federal law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that the remarks of the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, above, blaming the shooting on immigration operations the White House had ordered in his city, prompted the move.

The administration likened Mr. Frey’s finger-pointing to ordaining a predetermined outcome, even though his statements were comparable in tone to, if opposite in substance from, the Trump administration’s torrent of talk.

Mr. Trump and the team he installed at the Justice Department have repurposed the statement that Biden-era officials have used to justify the prosecutions of Mr. Trump — “no one is above the law” — to defend prosecutions of his perceived foes.

In a broader sense, they have also used the phrase to redefine justice according to his personal judgment of guilt and innocence. Over the past year, the president has granted clemency to hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and other political allies. He has scuttled prosecutions of those he favored, like Eric Adams, the former mayor of New York.

During his first term, Mr. Trump’s demands were subject to internal pushback or slow-walked by department officials who were still able to maintain a measure of autonomy.

But over the past year, Mr. Trump’s commands have been dutifully executed by loyalists he views less as appointees than employees. When he talks, they listen.

Ms. Good “was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media hours after the killing.

“We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!” he added.

Leaders in Minnesota suggested on Friday that any investigation by the F.B.I. without their involvement would be tilted toward reinforcing Mr. Trump’s conclusions.

“Our ask is to embrace the truth,” Mr. Frey, left, a Democrat, said at a news conference at the end of the week. “We in Minneapolis want a fair investigation.”

Mr. Frey’s tone in the immediate aftermath of the shooting was more emotional. He called Mr. Trump’s claims that the agent acted in self-defense “bullshit,” and slammed the administration for what he argued was a decision to descend on Minneapolis to provoke a violent confrontation.

“This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed,” he said. The White House and Justice Department seized on that statement to justify the decision to cut off cooperation, saying that Mr. Frey’s remarks had made it clear that local officials had no intention of conducting an investigation in good faith, according to people familiar with the situation.

“That’s bullshit,” Mr. Frey replied through his spokeswoman.

State and city officials have said they would collect evidence independently, and have urged witnesses to come forward with information. The state could, potentially, file charges against ICE officials. But in the past, federal prosecutors have successfully petitioned to have such cases transferred to federal courts, citing the supremacy clause of the Constitution, with the purpose of dismissing them.

Jurisdictional conflicts between the F.B.I. and local enforcement agencies are hardly unusual, especially those involving high-stakes investigations into the conduct of federal law enforcement officials.

The Trump administration’s decision to cut off cooperation with local law enforcement in Minnesota does not necessarily mean the investigation, run out of the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office, will be tainted by political interference, former agents said.

It is less certain what action will be taken by federal prosecutors. They could file a range of charges against the agent who killed Ms. Good, if they determine he acted with reckless disregard for her safety or violated her civil rights as defined under federal law.

But Ms. Gupta and other former officials said they believed the administration’s public statements suggested that the F.B.I.’s investigation was just as likely to focus on Ms. Good’s actions than on the response by the agent who fired at close range.

It was not clear if any bureau officials were present during the confrontation in Minneapolis. But over the last year, the administration has had law enforcement agencies focus on immigration, and Mr. Patel has diverted thousands of F.B.I. employees from other duties to support ICE officials.

Michael Feinberg, a veteran F.B.I. agent who was forced to retire last year, said that many of his most experienced colleagues had warned against participating, given the possibility that the bureau could be called upon to investigate incidents like the killing of Ms. Good.

“One of the major concerns many of us had when the F.B.I. was ordered to join in on these immigration operations was that it would create an implicit conflict of interest if we ever had to conduct a use-of-force or civil rights investigation of the other involved agencies,” said Mr. Feinberg, who now writes for Lawfare, a nonpartisan news site that covers legal and national security issues.

“It’s difficult to see how the F.B.I. can be a neutral arbiter,” he added.

Renee Nicole Gold, a U.S. citizen living in Minneapolis and a mother of three shortly before a federal agent fatally agent fatally shot in her the head three times while recording the slaying from which this photo was taken on his hand-held cellphone. Scenes from the shooting, including the positioning of the shooter at the side of the vehicle not in front, are shown below. The federal agent, identiified as Jonathan Ross, is shown below also. A recording capturied his words about the victim just after shooting her: "Fucking bitch."

 

New York Times, New Cellphone Video Shows ICE Agent’s Perspective Before Minneapolis Shooting, Mitch Smith, Hamed Aleaziz and Julie Bosman, Jan. 10, 2026 (print ed.). The Department of Homeland Security posted a clip of the video on social media and said it was taken by the agent, who killed a 37-year-old woman in the shooting

A cellphone video made public on Friday appears to show the moments leading up to the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis from the perspective of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed her.

The footage, published by Alpha News, a conservative news outlet, appears to come from a cellphone held by the agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on a snowy residential street on Wednesday morning. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the video was taken by the agent and posted the clip from Alpha News on X.

The 47-second video shows the agent getting out of a vehicle and approaching the S.U.V. that Ms. Good is driving, which is partly blocking the street. A black dog sits in the rear seat of Ms. Good’s Honda, its head sticking out of the window.

The agent walks around the hood of Ms. Good’s vehicle, and the car begins to move slowly in reverse. Ms. Good, wearing a knit cap and a plaid jacket over a sweatshirt, is heard saying, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad,” though it is not clear from the footage whom she is addressing or to what she might be responding. She continues talking, but her words become less clear as the agent moves toward the vehicle’s rear.

The footage pauses when the agent reaches the back of the S.U.V., which is adorned with several travel bumper stickers and a Missouri license plate. The agent’s reflection can be seen briefly in the footage. He appears to be holding a cellphone, and his face is partly covered.

The Parnas Perspective, Trump Freezes Food Stamp Assistance to Minnesota as Greenland Unites Against America, Aaron Parnas, right, Jan. 10, 2026 (Morning Edition). It is already an extraordinarily busy and consequential news morning.

I am tracking several major developments, including President Trump freezing all food stamp assistance to Minnesota, escalating threats to take Greenland as Greenland’s political leaders unite in opposition to the United States, and reports that ICE agents were directed to capture arrest content on personal cellphones for social media distribution.

All of this is unfolding as legacy media continues to shrink. Overnight, we learned that PBS News Weekend will air its final episode this Sunday following federal funding cuts.

Independent media has never been more critical than it is right now. As public funding is slashed and essential news outlets disappear, access to honest, timely reporting is at risk. That is why I am independent. I rely on your subscriptions, not federal funding. If you are able, please subscribe today and help ensure that Americans continue to have access to news that is clear, accountable, and truthful.Subscribed

Here’s what you missed:

PBS News Weekend will air its final episode this Sunday after federal funding cuts eliminated support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, forcing producer WETA to end the show, prompting anchor John Yang’s departure and leaving PBS to restructure programming and staffing.

A new investigation from the Washington Post revealed how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and public affairs staff were repeatedly instructed by leadership, under pressure from the White House, to actively capture content during raids and arrests—shadowing operations day and night, flagging “cinematic” moments, prioritizing “high-profile” takedowns, and rapidly filming with professional cameras or phones so videos could be quickly edited and pushed online to showcase enforcement intensity rather than routine law-enforcement work.

The Trump administration froze $129 million in Minnesota food stamp and hunger-relief funding, with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins citing fraud investigations and demanding new justifications from Gov. Tim Walz, even as a federal judge blocked broader attempts to halt social-services funding to Democratic-led states, signaling a narrower pressure campaign focused on Minnesota.

The Hill confirmed that Donald Trump placed a profanity-laced phone call to Susan Collins (R-Maine), left, after she voted for a Democratic-led war powers resolution to block potential U.S. military action in Venezuela, angrily accusing her of undermining his authority as commander in chief, publicly urging that she and four other Republican supporters of the measure never be reelected, and deepening intraparty tensions as Collins faces a competitive reelection race in Maine.

Washington National Opera announced it will leave its longtime home at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after the center ended their relationship, a dramatic break that follows declining ticket sales and institutional turmoil since Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, marking a major shift for the 70-year-old company and Washington’s cultural landscape.

According to NBC News, three Democratic senators urged Apple and Google to remove X and its AI tool Grok from their app stores, arguing that Elon Musk’s platforms enabled widespread creation of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children, violating app store rules, despite X partially limiting the feature after public backlash.

Security forces in Iran launched a violent nationwide crackdown as mass protests escalated into one of the biggest challenges to the Islamic Republic in decades, with rights groups reporting dozens killed, internet blackouts imposed, and Donald Trump warning Tehran that the United States would intervene if protesters were shot, a stance echoed by Marco Rubio and condemned by European leaders urging restraint.

Jan. 9

 

 

President Trump interviewed in White House Oval Office by four New York Times reporters on Jan. 7, 2026 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills)

Emptywheel, Analysis: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump's Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Jan. 9, 2026. The NYT committed literal sanewashing in the latest of its series of stories bragging that four journalists got to watch Trump ramble for two hours: It described Trump's pathological need to possess things as instead a vision of leadership.

Remember the term “sanewashing,” which Parker Malloy used to describe how the press minimizes Trump’s ramblings to describe them as something reasonable to people who don’t see them personally?

Four years ago, in an article for Media Matters for America, I warned that journalists were sanitizing Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings to make them more palatable for the average voter. The general practice went like this: The press would take something Trump said or did—for instance, using a visit to the Centers for Disease Control to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult then–Washington Governor Jay Inslee, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, and downplay the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S.—and write them up as The New York Times did: “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.” This had the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible for the vast majority of Americans who didn’t happen to watch his rant live.

[snip]

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.

These three paragraphs [are] about why Donald Trump wants to take over Greenland when the US already has a base there, the rights to establish more bases, the ability to mine its minerals really exist in NYT’s third milking of their interview with Donald Trump:

• “Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.
• When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
• The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.

First of all, NYT interjected that “real estate mogul’s” comment; I assure you, Trump is not going to start building hotels in Greenland.

But more … uh … insane still, after Trump describes contemplating blowing up the alliance that has been the centerpiece of American national security since World War II out of a psychological need to own other people and other countries, nothing more, the NYT describes it to be a comment about Trump’s imagination that he is “the protector of the West.”

You’re both fucking insane!

Donald Trump, for contemplating making the US and Europe less safe because of his own psychological inadequacies that drive him to covet big empty spaces on a map, and the NYT for describing it as the exact opposite of what it is, not Donald Trump needing to tend to Donald Trump’s increasing fragile psyche, but instead as something that protects the West rather than destroys the very concept of it.

This is how access journalism works. You give an outlet that spent the entirety of the Biden Administration bitching that they didn’t get any sitdown interviews with the President two hours to watch the President ramble incoherently, and in return for that access — the latest of a series of stories screaming, look at us!! Donald Trump takes our calls and tells us nothing!! — you describe the most dangerous kind of malignant Narcissism as the opposite of what it is. 

 

 

President Trump interviewed in White House Oval Office by four New York Times reporters on Jan. 7, 2026 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills)

Emptywheel, Analysis: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump's Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Jan. 9, 2026. The NYT committed literal sanewashing in the latest of its series of stories bragging that four journalists got to watch Trump ramble for two hours: It described Trump's pathological need to possess things as instead a vision of leadership.

Remember the term “sanewashing,” which Parker Malloy used to describe how the press minimizes Trump’s ramblings to describe them as something reasonable to people who don’t see them personally?

Four years ago, in an article for Media Matters for America, I warned that journalists were sanitizing Donald Trump’s incoherent ramblings to make them more palatable for the average voter. The general practice went like this: The press would take something Trump said or did—for instance, using a visit to the Centers for Disease Control to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult then–Washington Governor Jay Inslee, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, and downplay the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S.—and write them up as The New York Times did: “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.” This had the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible for the vast majority of Americans who didn’t happen to watch his rant live.

[snip]

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.

These three paragraphs about why Donald Trump wants to take over Greenland when the US already has a base there, the rights to establish more bases, the ability to mine its minerals really exist in NYT’s third milking of their interview with Donald Trump:

“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.

First of all, NYT interjected that “real estate mogul’s” comment; I assure you, Trump is not going to start building hotels in Greenland.

But more … uh … insane still, after Trump describes contemplating blowing up the alliance that has been the centerpiece of American national security since World War II out of a psychological need to own other people and other countries, nothing more, the NYT describes it to be a comment about Trump’s imagination that he is “the protector of the West.”

You’re both fucking insane! Donald Trump, for contemplating making the US and Europe less safe because of his own psychological inadequacies that drive him to covet big empty spaces on a map, and the NYT for describing it as the exact opposite of what it is, not Donald Trump needing to tend to Donald Trump’s increasing fragile psyche, but instead as something that protects the West rather than destroys the very concept of it.

This is how access journalism works. You give an outlet that spent the entirety of the Biden Administration bitching that they didn’t get any sitdown interviews with the President two hours to watch the President ramble incoherently, and in return for that access — the latest of a series of stories screaming, look at us!! Donald Trump takes our calls and tells us nothing!! — you describe the most dangerous kind of malignant Narcissism as the opposite of what it is. 

Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: What  lies? This is how they keep Donny stupid and happy, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Jan. 9, 2026.

Tell me, is it a bad thing when the leader of your country is a demented old ....._ whose flunkies feed him a steady diet of disinformation in order to manipulate him into doing their bidding — and also to keep him dumb and complacent?

It’s a legit question to ask, because it sure ....seems like that’s what’s going on right now in the Oval Bordello.

The New York Times actually committed a splendid bit of journalism yesterday. During an interview with The New York Times, President Trump said that a woman who was shot by federal agents in Minnesota “behaved horribly” and ran an agent over.

Analysis by The New York Times showed the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire [New York Times photo by Doug Mills].

As you know, Donny’s been blithering nonstop about how he’s actually seen video of Renee Good — the Minneapolis mom murdered by masked ICE thugs — running over and hospitalizing the goon who shot her three times in the face.

Donny’s claim, of course, [is] complete fever-swamp hallucinatory bullshit. it’s a thing that never happened the most. The video clearly shows Good turning the wheel of her car away from the trigger-happy ICE thug.

Nonetheless, here’s what Donny told the reporters from the Times:

“She behaved horribly,” Mr. Trump said. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”

What the Times did in response was to sit Donny down and make him watch that video again — in their presence — and they were all ‘Come on, bro — show us on the doll where Renee Good drove over the ICE goon.’

Mr. Trump’s aide Natalie Harp brought a laptop over to the Resolute Desk to show us what he said would be evidence of the woman’s wrongdoing.

As a slow-motion surveillance video of the shooting played on the laptop, we told him that this angle did not appear to show that an ICE officer had been run over.

During a White House interview of President Trump with four New York Times reporters, presidential aide Natalie Harp shows a video of the fatal shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Goldoval on a Minneapolis street (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

All Donny could do was sputter incoherently.

“Well,” Mr. Trump said. “I — the way I look at it … ”

Could the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press please do this more often — force Donny to account for his own lies? We might actually stop calling you worthless scribblers if you do.

But let’s back the f___ up there a minute. Who was it who brought the laptop to the Resolute Desk and played the video?

Natalie Harp?

That’s — um, how diplomatically can I put this? — interesting.

I’d forgotten all about Natalie Harp, and I’ll bet you had, too. There are just too many weirdos and found objects orbiting the Donnyverse, and it’s damn near impossible to keep them all in your mind. So let’s do a quick refresher.

Back in April 2024, when Donny was on trial, reporters noticed a woman — carrying a portable printer — who was following Donny around.

That, my friends, was our first introduction to Natalie Harp.

Her name is Natalie Harp, a former One America News anchor who joined Trump’s communications team in March 2022. According to reporting that year by the Washington Post, Harp would even accompany the former reality TV host on golf trips in a cart “equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts, or other materials.”

So, that’s a perfectly normal thing, right? ....This big, strong woman, tears in her eyes, actually travels with Donny while he’s cheating at golf, and goes 'Sir! Sir! Look at the nice thing Catturd said about you on Twitter! Sir!’

Now let’s skip ahead six months, to November, 2024. Dear Leader is now preznit-elect. Natalie’s still part of his inner circle, and is headed to the White House — and she’s filling Donny’s rapidly-dementing ear with so much conspiratorial nonsense that even his Confederacy of Sewer Clowns is concerned about the unfettered access she has.

But Ms. Harp also established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump. This has generated concern among other aides who feel she has been far too willing to serve as a funnel for conspiratorial information at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him. One of her go-to news sources, people who have observed her say, is the website Gateway Pundit, which frequently disseminates conspiracy theories embraced by the far right.

Trigger warning: make sure your barf-bag is within arm’s reach, because —

Mr. Trump has dismissed concerns about Ms. Harp, whom he calls “sweetie” and treats like a daughter, according to people close to him.

First of all, ew.

And second of all, ewwwwwww.

Does ‘treats like a daughter’ mean that Donny wants to, quote-unquote, ‘date’ her — if that’s what we’re charitably calling it — and is constantly trying to grope her?

Now get ready to crank the ‘ewww’ dial so far past 11 that it snaps off in your hand — because honestly, Natalie sounds like a creepy ..... stalker.

In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.

“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

Move over, Kim Jong-un, you’re not the only person writing gooey love letters to Donny.

Here’s another fun thing about Natalie: she claims Dear Leader cured her cancer.

This is the weirdo who has access to Donny’s laptop, and plays videos for him. Why does Donny allow this? Because she reminds him of Ivanka.

 

Think of all the people around Donny who have been lying to him in order to get him to do their bidding.

The Space Nazi (above) filled Donny’s ears with so much nonsense about the imaginary ‘white genocide’ supposedly going on in South Africa, that he made a fool of himself while meeting withSouth Africa’s President Ramaphosa.

And god only knows what lies Putin’s been feeding Donny about Ukraine.

And now we have this conspiracy-soaked woman, Natalie Harp, who is obviously head-over-heels smitten with Donny, apparently has access to his laptop, and feeds Dear Leader a steady diet of whatever conforms to her whacked out worldview.

Is Natalie Harp the reason Donny imagines he saw Renee Good running over one of his beloved masked ICE thugs?

None of this is normal, and none of this is good for a healthy democracy.

Let’s go out with a bang. Here’s your hero of the day: former wrestler (and former Governor of Minnesota) Jesse Ventura.

A reporter caught up with Jessein his home town of Minneapolis yesterday and asked him if he had any message for Donny. Let’s sit back and enjoy what comes next.

“Who is that? You mean the draft-dodging coward? I don’t call him by name. He’s the draft dodging coward who, when it was his time to serve his country, he did what all rich white boys did. I wasn’t a rich white boy. I grew up in South Minneapolis, me and all my friends are Vietnam veterans. We had to go. But the rich white boys never had to go, did they? And he didn’t have to go, did he? And yet, he’s gonna tell me what courage is?”

Pour one out for MAGA — they’re going through some things right now.

 

New York Times, Google Guys Say Bye to California, Ryan Mac,Theodore Schleifer and Heather Knight, Jan. 9, 2026. Sergey Brin is joining his Google co-founder, Larry Page, in reducing ties to the state where they built their fortunes.

For nearly three decades, Google has been steeped in the lore of Silicon Valley.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University graduate students, created the search engine in 1998 and built the start-up out of a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, Calif. Over time, Google became a nearly $4 trillion juggernaut, helping to cement the Northern California region as the global epicenter of the internet industry.

Now, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page are cutting some ties with the state where they made their fortunes.

In the 10 days before Christmas, an entity connected to Mr. Brin, 52, terminated or moved 15 California limited liability companies that oversee some of his business interests and investments out of the state, according to documents seen by The New York Times. Seven of the companies — including those that appear to manage one of Mr. Brin’s superyachts and his interest in a private air terminal at San Jose’s international airport — were converted into Nevada entities.

Mr. Brin is joining Mr. Page, 52, in reducing his California presence. More than 45 California limited liability companies associated with Mr. Page filed documents last month to either become inactive or move out of the state, according to state records. A trust with ties to Mr. Page also purchased a $71.9 million mansion in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood this week, according to a deed seen by The Times.

Another entity jointly managed by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page moved out of California and to Nevada on Christmas Eve, according to a filing seen by The Times.

The Google founders’ shrinking connections to California underscore the impact of a potential ballot measure that would affect the state’s wealthiest residents. Proposed by a health care union, the measure calls for Californians worth more than $1 billion to pay a one-time tax that would be equivalent of 5 percent of their assets. If the measure gains enough signatures to reach the state ballot in November and wins approval, it would retroactively apply to anyone who lived in the state as of Jan. 1 and they would have five years to pay it.

The potential wealth tax has already caused some California billionaires to establish more ties outside the state. Last month, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel announced that he opened an office for his family investment firm in Miami. David Sacks, the tech investor and White House adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, unveiled a new office for his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, in Austin, Texas.

But the actions of Mr. Brin and Mr. Page stand out because of their wealth — their combined net worths total more than $518 billion, as estimated by Forbes — and how closely identified they are with California. While both stepped down from day-to-day management of Google and its parent, Alphabet, in 2019, they remain on the board of the company and Mr. Brin has recently become more active in Google’s A.I. efforts.

Mr. Brin and Mr. Page still have connections to California, including homes across the state. It’s unclear how much time they will be spending in the state this year.

A representative for Mr. Brin declined to comment. Google and representatives for Mr. Page did not respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on Mr. Page’s Miami home purchase and Business Insider reported on some details of the shifting of Mr. Page and Mr. Brin’s companies. 

Drop Site News, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to Shutter After Workers Held Longest Strike in the History of U.S. Newspapers, Kim Kelly, Jan. 9, 2026. 

News broke late last year that striking workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette were headed back to the office after more than three years since they first walked out of the newsroom in 2022. Members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh-CWA returned to work in November as victors in a grueling multi-year struggle with Block Communications—the longest strike in the history of U.S. newspapers and of any Pittsburgh industry. The U.S. Court of Appeals had ordered the company to resume bargaining a new union contract allowing workers and management to move forward with a clean slate.

The family-owned Block Communications has now blocked the possibility. Mere hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s request to stay the November ruling, the owners of the nearly 240-year-old newspaper announced on Wednesday that they would be shutting it down entirely come May. The company claimed in a statement that financial pressures facing local journalism make “continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.” When reached for comment, Block Communications forwarded the previously released statement but declined to comment further.

Block Communications—a regional media conglomerate that also operates The Toledo Blade out of Ohio—is run by the monied Allen and John Block twins, with the latter serving as the Post-Gazette’s publisher. The Block brothers’ pro-Trump political leanings, petty demands, and legal squabbles had caused friction within the newsroom long before anyone made it to the bargaining table. The Post-Gazette workers were informed of the paper’s closure via a pre-recorded Zoom video, which was promptly leaked to a local radio station by the company’s director of operations.

Vice President of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh Erin Hebert worked as an editor at the Post-Gazette since 2016 and contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life shooting. Hebert told Drop Site, “When the Supreme Court told them that they were wrong, they showed us a two-and-a-half minute video over Zoom. I think that’s shameful.” She wondered if Allen Block “just threw a tantrum, called somebody, and said, ‘Hey, play this to everybody right now.’” She added, “It’s devastating that something that old and integral to the fabric of our community would be going away because this family broke the law so flagrantly and refused to ever do the right thing.”

Block Communications violated a previous union contract in 2020 by unilaterally imposing changes to the workplace that forced workers onto a pricier healthcare plan, which ultimately set off the years-long strike, workers say. The Third District Court had ordered them to restore the expired 2017 union contract and resume bargaining for a new one, as well as paying back the workers for any harms or expenses incurred due to the company’s illegal actions, such as increased healthcare costs or lost earnings during bad faith bargaining sessions.

The Blocks will still be liable for those costs should the newspaper shut down this spring, but the damage of the closure will be done to Pittsburgh and local journalism. “Journalists also are the public’s watchdogs. When local news outlets disappear, people have far less information about what’s happening in their community…expertly reported news stories hold both powerful organizations and people accountable to the public,” Post-Gazette editor Jessica Sinichak wrote in her epitaph for the paper.

Eight days prior to the Post-Gazette announcement, the Blocks publicized their decision to shutter the Pittsburgh City Paper, an alternative weekly bought during the strike. “There are a lot of people in the city that have a hunger for something that is not run by the Block family, who just showed that they have the power to shut down two legacy publications within eight days of each other, which should not be allowed in any market—let alone one as small as Pittsburgh,” Hebert said.

Pennsylvania Congresswoman Summer Lee, whose district encompasses Pittsburgh, agreed in a public statement posted to X, saying “Block Communications has failed our region.” Lee said in her statement, “This is a huge loss for the workers who have stood up for their colleagues, their craft, and their community, and for the readers who relied on these trusted sources for critical information.”

“Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists and the city of Pittsburgh,” said Andrew Goldstein, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. In his statement, he added that “Post-Gazette journalists have done award-winning work for decades, and we’re going to pursue all options to make sure that Pittsburgh continues to have the caliber of journalism it deserves.”

With the potential demise of their storied newspaper looming over the city, the Post-Gazette workers are mulling their next move. When they weren’t on the picket line, the workers kept busy publishing their own strike paper, The Pittsburgh Union Progress (PUP), with some residents pledging to support Pittsburgh’s journalists through the closure and beyond.

Hebert said that she’s heard from people who want to support PUP or to start something new. “If anything really cool and new and innovative for some sort of sustainable model of local journalism is going to happen, it would happen in a place like Pittsburgh,” she said. “If this continues, there is going to be a vacuum, and who’s going to be the one to fill it? I would hope it would be the journalists who just went on strike for three years to make sure that we are treated fairly.” she added.

“I believe that good journalism comes from people who are investing in their communities and places that they live. I don’t want to be a person who has a remote journalism job running a desk in another state. I want to be able to walk down the street and cover my local borough council.”Upgrade to paid

 

Media Matters, Research roundup 1/5/26 - 1/9/25: Right-wing media push Trump administration spin after Minneapolis ICE shooting, praise U.S. actions in Venezuela, and more, Lexi Ginsberg, Jan. 9, 2026. 

What to know: On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an immigration crackdown on the city. After the incident, administration officials attempted to justify the shooting and claimed Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Those comments have been contested by video analysis of the event, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and other witnesses.

What Media Matters is saying:

Media Matters put together a timeline of Fox’s coverage of the Minneapolis shooting, which shows how the network largely advanced the administration’s spin despite objections from state and local officials. Fox figures dubiously claimed that Good was using a car as a “deadly weapon” in an “act of domestic terrorism” against ICE officers.

What right-wing media is saying:

MAGA troll Jack Posobiec said Renee Good's wife is “complicit in the killing” and “should be brought up on federal charges.”

Fox News host Will Cain accused Tim Walz of “seditious language” and “walking the line” of “insurrection,” comparing him to 1960s officials who tried to prevent school integration.

Newsmax host Carl Higbie on ICE shooting: “I don't lose any sleep for this woman because she seemed crazy”

Dig deeper:

Fox aired clips and read quotes from statements made by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at least 17 times during its January 7 coverage.

Right-wing media praise the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela

What to know: Right-wing media are praising the Trump administration’s January 3 strikes on Venezuela and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who now face drug charges in New York.

What Media Matters is saying:

Media Matters highlighted how Trump delivered on right-wing media’s desire for regime change in Venezuela over oil, despite some energy companies reportedly remaining hesitant about getting involved in the region’s oil industry.

Media Matters wrote about how Fox figures have celebrated Trump’s seizure of Venezuela’s oil as an economic boon despite previously criticizing the Biden administration for expanding access to it in 2022.

Media Matters detailed how right-wing media figures are pushing for the Trump administration to target other countries, including Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico, and even to take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally.

Media Matters reported that Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado appeared on Fox News to make her case to lead Venezuela post-Maduro, offering to give Trump her Nobel Peace Prize in an effort to sway him.

Media Matters explained how MAGA influencers are linking Trump’s overthrow of Maduro to 2020 election conspiracies, falsely suggesting Venezuela rigged the 2020 U.S. election against Trump.

Media Matters outlined how right-wing media spent months echoing administration claims that Maduro was the head of a drug trafficking organization known as the “Cartel de los Soles,” but the Department of Justice has now tacitly admitted that the group doesn’t exist in any formal way.

Media Matters highlighted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly criticizing the network’s praise for the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela and saying its coverage was akin to “watching Russian propaganda.”

What right-wing media is saying:

Fox host Jesse Watters: “Cuba could be next” and “Denmark better wise up” regarding Greenland.

Fox News host Will Cain: “There's no such thing as international law. There is only such thing as conquest.” MAGA influencer Benny Johnson: “Nicolás Maduro might be Trump's final revenge for the election theft of 2020.”

The Bulwark, New Footage in Minneapolis Killing, Tim Miller, Jan. 9, 2025 (15:18 min. video).

Jan. 7

 

New York Times, Warner Bros. Board Rebuffs Paramount’s Latest Buyout Offer,  Lauren Hirsch, Jan. 7, 2026. The board said the blockbuster deal it reached with Netflix last month posed less risk.

Warner Bros. Discovery advised its shareholders on Wednesday to reject Paramount’s latest takeover offer, arguing that even a personal commitment from one of the world’s richest men is not enough to make up for the deal’s complex financing.

The announcement raises another roadblock in the aggressive, monthslong effort by Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, and his billionaire father, Larry, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery to better compete with streaming giants like Netflix, Disney and Amazon.

Warner Bros. Discovery announced a deal in December to sell much of its business to Netflix for $83 billion, shocking much of the entertainment industry. Warner said Netflix’s offer, for its TV and movie studios, was a better deal than Paramount’s proposal to acquire the full company.

Paramount has since made a hostile bid, taking its case to shareholders. It has also proposed a deal for which Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, has personally guaranteed $40 billion in equity.

Paramount must now choose whether to raise its offer or continue to argue to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders that its deal is better than Netflix’s.

The Netflix deal would reshape Hollywood, giving the country’s largest subscription streaming service the HBO Max streaming service and the Warner Bros. movie and TV studio. But hanging over any deal for Warner Bros. is the question of how federal regulators, who must sign off, will respond. President Trump has said he plans to play a role in any decision.

The Warner board said Wednesday that it had lingering concerns about Paramount’s bid. Paramount, which has a market capitalization of around $13 billion, has said it plans to use about $54 billion in debt for the deal. It has also corralled billions from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Paramount has a credit rating a notch above junk level, whereas Netflix’s is investment grade.

Poynter Center, Florida billionaire takes control of Lee Enterprises, easing debt and reshaping its leadership, Angela Fu, Jan. 7, 2026. The deal cuts millions in annual interest payments, but what it means for the chain’s local papers remains uncertain.

Lee Enterprises — the newspaper chain holding storied dailies like The Buffalo News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch — announced last week that billionaire investor David Hoffmann had acquired a majority stake in the company.

Hoffmann, who is personally committing $35 million, will serve as the chair of Lee’s board of directors. Other investors are contributing $15 million to the deal, which Lee says will give it a much-needed boost and allow it to reduce its annual interest rate, saving the company millions of dollars. Kevin Mowbray, the company’s longtime president and CEO, has stepped down, and the board is looking for his replacement.

In the interim, chief operating officer Nathan Bekke will fill the CEO position, which under Mowbray had “direct responsibility for all aspects of the company’s operations, with special focus on digital growth, revenue expansion and business transformation.” As board chair, Hoffmann would have substantial power in shaping the company’s direction.

“This transaction strengthens the Company’s balance sheet and reflects the Board’s determination to take decisive action,” Hoffmann said in a Dec. 30 press release. “With improved financial stability and a clear governance framework in place, the focus can now be on disciplined execution and long-term value creation.”

Hoffmann, a Florida billionaire who founded executive search firm DHR Global, had been eyeing Lee for some time. In September 2024, he acquired several Lee papers, including the Napa Valley Register. The next month, he told The New York Times that he wanted a controlling stake in the company.

Hoffmann’s initial attempts at fulfilling that goal failed as Lee enacted a “poison pill” plan in March to prevent a takeover. (It used a similar measure in 2021 when notorious investment firm Alden Global Capital attempted to acquire the company.)

Lee’s ultimate decision to strike a deal with Hoffmann likely came about because it “had no real choice,” said media analyst and A Media Operator founder Jacob Cohen Donnelly. The company’s finances had been struggling for years, burdened by debt from a 2020 deal with billionaire Warren Buffett’s BH Media Group, as well as industry-level declines in print revenue. Lee ended the last fiscal year with a $36 million loss, and its last profitable quarter was the one ending December 2023.

“Business is contracting. It’s not expanding,” said Donnelly. As a result, Lee has spent the past few years making cuts. But the problem with making cuts, Donnelly said, is that “as you make cuts, the business becomes less compelling because you’re putting out a worse product, which means the audience is less satisfied with the product. And so it just becomes a spiral.”

When Lee acquired BH Media Group’s newspapers in 2020, it also took on $576 million in debt at 9% interest. More than five years later, Lee still owed $455 million.

Lee’s lender, BH Finance, offered last year to reduce its annual interest rate to 5% for the next five years if the company could raise $50 million. The deal with Hoffmann will thus allow Lee to save more than $18 million a year in debt payments.

It is not immediately clear what Hoffmann’s deal will mean for Lee’s local papers, which stretch across 72 markets. For years, many of them have suffered furloughs and layoffs. Last year, the company made $50 million in cuts.

Lee Enterprises spokesperson Tracy Rouch declined to comment.

Hoffmann did not respond to a request for comment, but he has spoken publicly about his interest in preserving local journalism, especially high school sports coverage. He told The Seattle Times in April 2025 that he wants to become the country’s largest newspaper publisher. In that interview, he called himself a “big believer in journalistic integrity and journalistic independence.” He also said that of the 21 newspapers he had bought at that point, he had not laid anyone off and that if he acquired Lee’s papers, he would be open to investing in them.

“I think that if you want to have a good newspaper you’ve got to have good reporters and journalists,” Hoffmann said at the time. “And so, yeah we do that, and we take a hard look at that, but we’re not fearful of investing in individuals and talent to make that happen. We don’t hesitate to do that.”

Dean Ridings — CEO and president of trade association America’s Newspapers, which counts Hoffmann’s papers among its members — said he was “delighted” when he heard about Hoffmann’s deal with Lee. Ridings said he interviewed Hoffmann during a panel at a conference in November, and Hoffmann told him that he still strongly believes in newspapers at a time when media owners are trying to offload their papers.

“David has made it clear that he values local newspapers and what they can do,” Ridings said. “He has made some acquisitions, including his hometown paper in Missouri, just because he believes that they are very important in the fabric of the community.”

The billionaire ownership model has proven to be a mixed bag in recent years, thanks to controversial, rightward swings at outlets like The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun. At the same time, other outlets have benefited from the stability and resources that such owners can bring.

Jan. 6

 

Fox News, Workers install Donald J. Trump above the current signage on the Kennedy Center in Washington, Dec. 19, 2025. (Associated Press photo by Jacquelyn Martin).

Fox News, Trump rallies House GOP at Kennedy Center days after Maduro capture, Elizabeth Elkind, Jan. 6, 2026. Sources said they expect Trump to focus heavily on Venezuela Tuesday morning. Trump threatens second strike if Venezuela 'doesn't behave.'

President Donald Trump is set to huddle with House Republicans on Tuesday morning, days after the U.S. government executed strikes in Venezuela and captured the country's leader Nicolás Maduro.

Trump will address GOP lawmakers at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, multiple sources told Fox News Digital.

A White House schedule released late on Monday said Trump will speak around 10 a.m., and that his remarks will be streamed live.

House Republicans will be at the Trump Kennedy Center for an all-day policy forum Tuesday aimed at discussing their agenda for 2026, according to an email obtained by Fox News Digital.

 

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the official name enacted by Congress to memorialize the legacy of the assassinated president.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases? It will always be The Kennedy Center, Jennifer Rubin, right, Jan. 6, 2026.

Donald Trump’s pathetic and grammatically flawed attempt to affix his name to The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for The Performing Arts (“The Donald J. Trump and The…”) is emblematic of his narcissism and compulsive reliance on the authoritarian playbook—not to mention his blithering stupidity in attaching his name to a memorial, which pays tribute to the deceased.

His latest cultural abomination should surprise no one. “The tightening control over artistic freedoms and content is common under autocratic regimes and aspiring authoritarian leaders, given that art and culture often allow opposition through political commentary,” the Brookings’ Institution’s Jonathan Katz and Samara Angel wrote. “Overreach of government powers to control boards and positions on cultural institutions is not a new tactic.”

Despots historically have recognized that monopolizing culture is essential to dictatorial control. As Katz and Angel explained, Goebbels’s Reich Chamber of Culture in the 1930’s sought to ban “degenerate art” and purged “a variety of cultural spaces, including theatrical and visual arts but also… the press, film, and broadcast media.” Viktor Orban’s 2019 Culture Law “censored art and free expression [and] made funding of cultural institutions conditional on the government having a say in appointments to senior positions.” Likewise, after the 1976 military coup, “the Argentine Public Information Secretary (SIP) issued directives aimed at the ‘reconstruction of the national being’ through films, theater, and other artistic productions. Specific plays were prohibited, and many artists were individually targeted.”

As much as fascists despise “cultural elites,” they crave the prestige and relevance the arts can bestow on its patrons. Moreover, they fear the arts community as a hotbed of irreverence, dissent, and nonconformism. (“Authoritarians have always tried to control the creative community and ruthlessly stamp out art contrary to their ideology,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, now the target of Trump repression, explained in July. “The symbolism of a culture the administration disdains, combined with the power of art to penetrate popular culture and influence opinion, threatens Trump.”)

Trump’s ham-handed effort to commandeer a beloved institution has backfired, drawing near universal condemnation. Only 18% of Americans approve of the renaming stunt, according to a recent YouGov poll. Board member Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) (represented by Norm Eisen and the Washington Litigation Group) sued to prohibit the maneuver. The Kennedy family issued furious rebukes. And the American public has snubbed Trump with record-low viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Performers also defied Trump, forcing The Kennedy Center to cancel its’ Christmas Eve program with Chuck Redd. So far, far, three other groups (the jazz group the Cookers set for two New Year’s Eve performances, New York City-based Doug Varone and Dancers, and folk singer-songwriter Kristy Lee) have bailed, despite threats of litigation. Stephen Schwartz, composer of the hit musical “Wicked,” backed out of hosting a gala. Earlier last year, “Hamilton” cancelled its run. The refusal to perform at the mad king’s behest powerfully reaffirms that the cultural community will not accept his defacement of an arts institution.

Delightfully, South Park alum writer Toby Morton grabbed the TrumpKennedyCenter.org URL to launch a laugh-out-loud parody site. (“Here, tradition is preserved, narratives are curated, and performances are elevated beyond mere art. What is remembered matters. What is omitted matters more,” Morton deadpans. “We invite you to experience culture as authority, pageantry as truth, and excellence as defined by those in power.”) Taunting the autocrat on the very ground he claims exemplifies why humorless despots like Trump fear an independent arts community. “We exist to preserve what must endure, to honor what must not be questioned, and to gather those who understand that greatness is not chosen, it is recognized,” Morton dryly intones.Subscribed

On a personal note, since this arts lover could never enter a building defaced by Trump’s name, I recently demanded and received a full refund for remaining tickets I held for a venue called “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for The Performing Arts.” After all, I never purchased anything for something bearing the name of an authoritarian, lawless, cruel, and racist (not to mention tasteless) wannabe dictator. I can attest that after the Trump takeover but prior to the faux renaming, well over half of the seats were empty for National Symphony concerts.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the venue under Trump’s reign attests to his regime’s utter incompetence in managing any institution it gets its mitts on. The New York Times reported in November (before the attempted name change):

Audiences are staying away. Internal sales figures obtained by The New York Times showed ticket sales down by about 50 percent from the same period last year during one typical week in October. Dozens of employees, many with decades of experience, have been fired or quit. Outsiders with few obvious qualifications aside from party loyalty were handed top jobs. The center’s head of human resources estimated that staffing was down 30 percent from before Mr. Trump took over. Others call that a conservative estimate.

Fortunately, most legacy media outlets recognize that Congress legally established the venue’s original name and, therefore, they refuse to refer to it as anything other than The Kennedy Center. (The media’s resistance to equally ludicrous attempts at renaming the Gulf of Mexico and the Defense Department has been uneven.) Trump can call it whatever he pleases, the rest of us can refuse to play along.

In short, only in Trump’s demented mind is the venue called anything but The Kennedy Center. Whatever compound name he puts on the building is illegitimate and should be disclaimed by anyone who’s not captive in the cult of personality. The cultural bellyflop is significant—and encouraging—for multiple reasons.

First, this serves as another example of the power of popular boycotts (e.g., Disney-ABC in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel; Target). Refusal to offer homage or dollars to Trump-deformed institutions denies him control over critical aspects of our lives. Those who comply with his edicts, be it CBS News or The Kennedy Center, cannot command our patronage. They thereby lose legitimacy. No one can force viewers to watch Bari Weiss’s laughable propaganda outfit, nor step foot in a building Trump has vandalized.

Second, refusal to knuckle under to Trump’s cultural assaults puts the spotlight back on spineless institutions (e.g., the Paul Weiss law firm, Columbia University, the Washington Post) that have self-censored. Cultural defiance reaffirms that universities, media outlets, and cultural venues can be authentic only if they maintain independence. That provides a brake on a regime trying to dominate every corner of our lives.

Third, Trump’s tone deaf and tasteless efforts at self-glorification (e.g., tearing down the East Wing, turning the Oval Office into an ungapatchka eye-sore) break through the noise in a way that political minutiae cannot. Trump winds up making himself the butt of jokes and inspiring Americans, as Kerry Kennedy put it, to “grab a pickax” to remove all vestiges of Trump from America. Now, that’s a 2026 resolution we can all adopt.

Jan. 5

The Guardian, Venezuela detains journalists and seizes communication devices after Maduro’s removal, Sibylla Brodzinsky, Jan. 5, 2026. Thirteen of those detained were released according to the country’s National Union of Press Workers

At least 14 journalists and media employees, including 13 members of international media organisations, were detained in Caracas on Monday, according to the union representing Venezuelan reporters.

Thirteen of those detained were later released, one of whom was deported. One journalist remained in the custody of intelligence services, the National Union of Press Workers (SNTP) said in a post on X. Independent reporting inside Venezuela is severely restricted and authorities have declined visas for foreign journalists to enter the country.

The detentions come three days after a pre-dawn raid by US troops in Caracas captured the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. Both are facing multiple criminal charges in a federal court in New York.a court room sketch showing two defendants, a man and a woman, in court with their lawyers‘Soy inocente’: Maduro defiant in surreal New York courtroom spectacleRead more

Five of the detained journalists had been covering the opening session of the National Assembly, where they were banned from recording, transmitting the event live, or taking photos.

Others were detained by military intelligence officers and taken to the National Guard command post in the Assembly building, according to the union. Their phones were confiscated and thoroughly searched, the union said, including contacts, conversations, voice notes, Instagram accounts, emails, and documents.

“This type of action not only threatens the privacy and the security of sources but also is a pattern of criminalisation of journalism,” the union said.

The SNTP did not identify the detained journalists representing international outlets. It did name Daniel Álvarez, a reporter with the Venezuelan television station Televen, who was among those released.

On the border between Venezuela and Colombia, Univision journalist Juan Carlos Vélez said that he and his television crew were briefly detained by the Venezuelan National Guard just over the international bridge between the two countries. Vélez, a Colombian national, said the guardsmen seized their cameras and erased some videos. Two other Colombian news teams were also briefly detained at the border. It was unclear if any had valid journalist visas.

On Sunday, a Guardian journalist had her notes taken and was ordered to leave Venezuelan soil.

The National Association of Journalists recorded the arrests of 21 Venezuelan reporters in the first 11 months of 2025. Most face charges of “terrorism,” “conspiracy,” “incitement to hatred,” and “the dissemination of false information.”

Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom group, has said that those charges are routinely used to persecute news coverage, critical opinions and reporting on crime or protests. In a recent report, the organisation said that short- and medium-term forced disappearances “have become an established tactic to facilitate the crackdown on Venezuela’s free press.”

Status, MAGA Media Goes to War, Natalie Korach, Jan. 4-5, 2026. Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation, and his open discussion of oil as a motivation, has become a stress test for MAGA Media and the movement’s long-standing rejection of foreign intervention.

This weekend, following Donald Trump’s surprise military operation in Venezuela, some of the loudest voices in MAGA media backtracked on years of railing against U.S. intervention abroad, tying themselves into knots to defend—or at least avoid directly criticizing—Trump’s unilateral action.

Laura Loomer, the far-right "proud Islamophobe" who generally raises fierce objections to foreign intervention, praised the “genius” of Trump’s “geopolitical synchronicity,” framing it as a necessary counterterrorism strike, and repeatedly citing the alleged presence of Hezbollah inside Venezuela as an extension of Iran’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Within MAGA Media circles, there was little public reflection as to how the legally questionable operation to remove dictator Nicolás Maduro that left several American soldiers injured, contradicts its longstanding anti-war posture.

Rather than condemning the intervention outright, Loomer focused instead on procedural grievances, questioning why Maduro was indicted in New York, “a liberal hell hole,” and not Florida.

Roger Stone chimed in to agree, writing, “Why Maduro was not charged in Miami is a mystery.” Despite the knee-jerk reaction by many in the MAGA media ecosystem to support Trump without reservation, the news served as a litmus test, forcing some of the movement’s biggest boosters to question what Trump’s promise of “America First” foreign policy actually looks like in practice.

Extremist Candace Owens rejected the intervention, declaring that Venezuela had been “liberated” in the same way Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq were. Casting the operation as another CIA-backed regime change, Owens denounced it as a “hostile takeover” driven by globalist interests, something that would inherently contradict an “America First” agenda.

Overall, though, there was little immediate pushback, or acknowledgement of the dissonance—and hypocrisy—at work. Those contortions underscored a broader MAGA media dilemma: How to reconcile Trump’s long-standing “America First” rhetoric with a military action that looks strikingly similar to the kind the base has spent years attacking. S

ome elected officials on the right were more direct than the pro-Trump mouthpieces. Rep. Thomas Massie warned that the intervention risked American lives not for national security, but to benefit oil companies. “It’s not American oil. It’s Venezuelan oil,” Massie wrote in a social media post, arguing that U.S. soldiers were being put in harm’s way to make private companies more profitable. The weekend’s events could also add another layer to the ongoing civil war ushered in by Charlie Kirk’s death and U.S. support of Israel that has already fractured the base.

Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of the far-right The National Pulse, argued to Status that Trump’s openness about his economic goals in Venezuela does not undermine “America First,” but rather enhances it. Unlike the Bush-era interventions that cloaked Middle East wars in moral language to avoid public backlash, Trump dispensed with the pretense. Kassam contended that the majority of the MAGA base will view the intervention as a foreign offensive undertaken in their best interests. “The American public have now repeatedly elected a businessman,” he said. “And they’re getting what they voted for.”

But that interpretation was far from universal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has distanced herself from MAGA over, among other things, foreign policy—a rift that saw her resign from Congress—framed the operation as a further betrayal of the movement’s core promise. “Americans' disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it,” she wrote in a lengthy X post. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” Greene argued, adding, “Boy were we wrong.”

Even Steve Bannon, the Trump loyalist who praised the operation itself as “bold and brilliant,” raised alarms about what comes next. On his “War Room” podcast, Bannon questioned whether the administration had adequately considered the consequences of extracting Maduro without dismantling the rest of his regime, warning of potential civil conflict and regional instability. “So is this part of overall Hemispheric Defense, and we're going to clean up this mess in Latin America? Or is this just the neocons talking him into it?" Bannon wondered aloud on his show. That unease underscored how Trump’s escalation in Venezuela left even the architects of MAGA struggling to reconcile what appears to be an impressive military feat with potential uncertainty ahead.

Notably silent during the initial debate was Tucker Carlson, who has spent years positioning himself as an anti-interventionist MAGA warrior, repeatedly warning against regime change conflict. In October, Carlson argued that Maduro’s Venezuela was “one of the most conservative countries” in the Western Hemisphere, which he said should be a factor in whether intervention is necessary. Carlson couldn’t be reached Sunday.

As some within MAGA Media circles noted, even those who oppose Trump’s policies and actions have been reluctant to criticize him, fearing a backlash from the faithful who have steadfastly stuck with him through past controversies.

In that sense, commentators are likely hedging their bets out of reluctance to potentially alienate their most engaged listeners and viewers, anticipating the power vacuum Trump will leave after his second term. “There’s this horrible fissure, and nobody can figure out which way the movement is going,” one MAGA Media figure told Status. “All these guys are just flapping around trying to capture an audience.”

But regardless of the motivation, a divide within the base is starting to emerge, and legitimate questions about the defining characteristics of Trumpism are taking hold. With Trump’s Venezuela move, it appears his application of “America First” functions less as a restraint on U.S. military action than a justification for wielding it for financial gain—pledging to dispatch oil companies to “start making money for the country”—a dynamic, as Democrats were quick to assert, which seems fraught with potential for corruption.

Whether MAGA Media can reconcile that distinction remains an open question, but Trump, for his part, appears uninterested in waiting for consensus.

The NYT and The WaPo both learned in advance about the U.S. raid in Venezuela, but they held off on publishing stories to avoid endangering military personnel, Max Tani and Shelby Talcott reported. [Semafor]  Marco Rubio praised the outlets that held the sensitive information until after the raid, saying, “We thank them for doing that or lives could have been lost.” [Mediaite] 

The WaPo Editorial Board raised some eyebrows by endorsing the military operation, calling it a “major victory for American interests.” That stood in stark contrast to The NYT Editorial Board calling the attack “illegal and unwise.” The NYT detailed how plans came together to scrap the planned front page on Saturday to feature coverage of the Venezuela operation. Reporter Tyler Pager also explained how he got Trump on the phone just moments after the U.S. captured Maduro.

Bret Baier disclosed that he was in the middle of booking an interview with Nicolás Maduro when U.S. forces moved in.

[Mediaite] CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupi, right,l said in a social media video that the network’s pivot to cover the U.S. invasion of Venezuela—as opposed to aplanned 10-city tour—was “a better launch than anything else we could have come up with.”

Dokoupil devoted much of Saturday’s introductory broadcast to an interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, without dissenting voices from outside the administration. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that Hegseth was “booked by Bari Weiss personally.” [Reliable] Weiss, the new CBS News editor-in-chief, had chartered a private plane to facilitate Dokoupil’s rollout “Live From America” tour, Justin Baragona reported. [The Independent] Dokoupil engaged critics on social media over the weekend, which included a vow that he would be “more transparent than [Walter] Cronkite or any one else of his era.” That prompted additional criticism, with veteran media reporter and critic Bill Carter calling it “a truly foolish thing to say.” 

 

French President Emmanuel Macron, his wife Brigitte Macron, at left, walk with U.S. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden to commemorate the World War II invasion of Normady to defeat Nazis (New York Times photo by Evan Vucci June 6, 2024).

New York Times, France’s Political Turmoil: 10 Are Convicted of Cyberbullying France’s First Lady, Ségolène Le Stradic, Jan. 5, 2026. The defendants made false claims about Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron of France. The Macrons have often been the subject of misinformation since Mr. Macron successfully ran for the presidency in 2017.

Ten people who falsely claimed that Brigitte Macron, below, France’s first lady, was born male were found guilty on Monday of online harassment.

The eight men and two women — three of whom were tried in absentia — were given a range of sentences. One received a six-month jail sentence. Other punishments stretched from mandatory online harassment awareness training to an eight-month suspended jail sentence.

The court also fined each 600 euros and ordered them to contribute to a total of 10,000 euros — about $12,000 — in compensation to Ms. Macron.

Five of those convicted were also barred from using the social media platform involved in the case, X, for six months.

They were tried after posting messages and photos on social media that wrongly suggested that Ms. Macron — the wife of President Emmanuel Macron, right, of France — was born a boy called Jean-Michel Trogneux, the name of her older brother. The seven defendants tried in person denied wrongdoing, variously saying their posts were either meant in jest or constituted legitimate debate. Only one apologized.

The case was seen as a symptom of a toxic online culture in which growing numbers of internet users, driven by resentment of mainstream leaders and distrust in mainstream news media, are increasingly drawn to conspiracy theories and false information. Mr. Macron has cited the case to amplify a broader campaign against misinformation, which includes a contentious proposal to issue certifications that differentiate professional news networks from other websites.

The Macrons have often been the subject of such misinformation since Mr. Macron successfully ran for president in 2017, in part because of their 24-year age gap. Ms. Macron, 72, met her husband when he was 15 and she was his 39-year-old drama teacher, married with three children. She later divorced her first husband and married Mr. Macron in 2007.

The claims, once a feature of fringe discourse, received global prominence last year after being circulated by an American right-wing podcaster, Candace Owens. Her posts were among those shared by the people convicted on Monday. Ms. Owens, who has repeatedly stood by her claims, is not a party to the French proceedings.

The Macrons are separately suing Ms. Owens, right, for slander in the United States, in the second of five lawsuits that the couple or their relatives have filed against people who have spread rumors about their family.

The 10 people convicted at the Paris trial were aged 41 to 65, according to evidence read out in court during the trial. Some of their comments suggested that the Macrons’ relationship amounted to “pedophilia,” prosecutors said before the trial.

Three of the defendants had been identified by prosecutors as the main instigators because of their large social media followings. Delphine Jégousse, 51, who was also sued for slander by Ms. Macron and her brother in a separate case, received a six-month suspended sentence, as did Bertrand Scholler, 56, the owner of an art gallery in Paris. Aurélien Poirson-Atlan, 41, a former publicist turned novelist who had tens of thousands of followers before his account was disabled, was given an eight-month suspended sentence. All three were also ordered to undergo online harassment awareness training and were barred from using X for six months.

During the trial, most of the defendants said they had no idea that what they considered lighthearted banter about the presidential couple could land them in court. They insisted that the debate over Ms. Macron’s identity and the nature of the couple’s relationship was legitimate.

Ms. Macron did not appear during the trial. In an interview with the police in 2024, read out in court, she spoke of the negative impact that the bullying had on her and her relatives, and said that she felt the claims were intended to hurt the president.

Her daughter Tiphaine Auzière said during the trial that the bullying had seriously affected her mother. “Not a week goes without someone talking to her about it,” Ms. Auzière said. “That means she can’t ignore what people say about her, not even for a day.”

Speaking in November, Mr. Macron said he and his wife had felt “helpless” when targeted by cyberbullies. “It goes on and on, people see it, there are fools who think it’s true, and then it wears you down,” he said.

HuffPo, Corporation For Public Broadcasting Is Dissolved After 58 Years Of Service, Jennifer Bendery, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was dissolved Monday by its board of directors, ending its 58 years as the primary funder for PBS, NPR and local TV and radio stations.

The board of CPB, which was created by Congress to oversee the federal government’s investments in public broadcasting, didn’t have much choice. Trump and Republicans in Congress last year stripped the organization of its $1.1 billion in federal funding, which represented the full amount it was set to receive over two years.

Trump’s White House claimed NPR and PBS shouldn’t get federal money because they produce “woke propaganda.” But both are reputable news sources, and the reality is Trump simply wants to shut them down because they don’t report on him in flattering ways. Public radio stations are also a lifeline to rural communities, where plenty of Trump’s supporters are now being hurt by the loss in services.

The effort to defund CPB was led by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, right,  who has been downright gleeful about haphazardly slashing billions from federal programs.

In a statement, CPB board members said the combination of lost federal funding and sustained political attacks “made it impossible” for it to continue operating.

“What has happened to public media is devastating,” said Ruby Calvert, chair of CPB’s Board of Directors. “After nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the Board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it.”

Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of CPB, said public media still remains “essential” to a healthy democracy.

“Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans,” she said.

The Wrap, Versant Stock Plunges 13% in Nasdaq Debut, Lucas Manfredi, Jan, 5, 2026. The company, which houses USA Network, MS NOW, CNBC and more, completed its spinoff from Comcast on Friday.

Shares of Versant fell more than 13% during its first day of “regular way” trading on Monday, closing at $40.57 apiece after opening at $45.17. 

The company, which houses cable networks USA Network, CNBC, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel, as well as digital assets Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and SportsEngine, trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol VSNT.

“Today marks a defining moment as Versant becomes an independent, publicly traded media company,” Versant CEO Mark Lazarus said in a statement. “As a standalone company, we enter the market with the scale, strategy and leadership to grow and evolve our business model.”

“This milestone reflects the financial strength and readiness of Versant as a standalone public company,” chief operating and financial officer Anand Kini added. “With a strong balance sheet, substantial cash flow, and clear capital allocation framework, we are well positioned to execute with discipline to drive long-term value.”

In 2025, Versant expects to generate $6.7 billion in revenue, with 62% coming from linear distribution, 23% from advertising, 13% from its digital platforms and 3% from content licensing & other. It also expects $2.3 billion in EBITDA and $1.5 billion in free cash flow in 2025. It will debut with $3 billion in gross debt, $750 million in cash on hand and 1.5 billion in total liquidity.

Looking ahead, the company expects 2026 revenue of $6.15 billion to $6.4 billion, a 3% to 7% decline and EBITDA of $1.85 billion to $2 billion, a 7% to 14% decline. It also plans to allocate 20% of its free cash flow for a dividend payment and seek board authorization for an up to $1 billion share repurchase.

Over the next several years, half of Versant’s revenue is expected to come from its new growth areas, while the other half will come from the pay TV business. Over half of the company’s pay TV subscriber base are covered by distribution agreements through 2028 and beyond. 

New York Times, At Middlebury, She Hoped to Start Fresh. In Trump’s America, It Seemed Impossible, Juliet Macur, Jan. 5, 2026. Lia Smith was a senior at Middlebury College, a transgender woman and, for a time, an athlete on the school’s diving team. But she struggled to feel accepted, and in October, she took her own life.

For several days, including overnight when the vast sky in rural Vermont turned black hole dark, hundreds of people searched the campus of Middlebury College, walking atop fallen leaves the color of cranberries and pumpkins, desperately examining every inch of ground.Listen to this article with reporter commentary

They combed through classrooms, dormitories and the athletic center. And then doubled back to them, again and again.

Fellow students. Close friends. Townsfolk. The police. All looking for a missing senior, Lia Smith.

She was a college diver who sang as she flipped and twisted before hitting the water, a friend who showed up with a traveling tea set, someone whose laugh reverberated down campus hallways.

And one Friday night in mid-October, without leaving any clues, she disappeared.

“Lia are you alright?” texted Julia Nerenberg, a friend who graduated from Middlebury in 2025. “Idk if something’s wrong but whatever is happening i will do anything i can to help you through it.”

The police found Lia’s body six days later. They ruled her death a suicide.

She did not leave a note.

An Unsettling Year

Lia, a transgender woman who was 21 when she died, struggled to feel comfortable in her body and in the world, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who knew her, though no one knows exactly why she killed herself. The reasons for suicide are complex, and multiple factors — including mental disorders, brain chemistry and destabilizing life events — almost always play a role.

s a trans woman on a women’s team, she was a target from several directions. Looming over her was an ongoing, intense debate about the fairness of trans women participating in women’s competitions. In some cases, people consider it unsafe.

In this case, her friends said, Lia believed that someone at school had fed the site her information. She felt betrayed. And despite the social media post’s assertion, Lia had not returned to competing on the diving team, her coach said and records show. It had been three years since she last dove for Middlebury.

A selfie of Lia Smith in a black long-sleeve T-shirt.Lia Smith, in a selfie.

Lia had, however, just finished a season of only practicing with the team, and her teammates knew she was transgender.

Less than a week later, on the day Mr. Trump returned to office, he issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, determined at conception and unchangeable.

A subsequent order barred trans women from women’s sports at federally funded institutions, with the N.C.A.A. announcing the very next day, in February, that it would follow the president’s lead.

The online criticisms of Lia were becoming so brutal that Middlebury removed Lia’s bio from its athletics website. Through it all, she began losing focus in her classes, even failing one, said her father, Greg Smith. She had been a straight-A student the semester before.

“One of the concerns she shared with me was that, because of her identity as a trans person, people just didn’t want her to exist,” said Edy Cruz, Lia’s housemate and a senior at Middlebury.

‘I Think I’m a Girl’

Lia’s childhood bedroom remains as she left it. Plaques from diving. Trophies from soccer and Little League Baseball. A book from the Japanese young adult series, “The Mimosa Confessions,” about a trans girl searching for love and acceptance.

Not long ago, Mr. Smith walked through their house outside of San Francisco with tears in his eyes, stopping by family photos — Lia hugging him, Lia at their vacation home in Mexico, Lia posing next to Middlebury’s panther mascot. When she died, he had to endure merciless online comments, including one on his Facebook page saying that her death was no loss. But he thought she was perfect, he said, adding that she just couldn’t handle all the hate in the world.

Jan. 3

The Independent, Private jets, armed security and ‘Bari pitches’ including jet-skiing with DJ Khaled: Inside Weiss’ chaotic ‘CBS Evening News’ reboot, Justin Baragona, Jan. 3, 2026. The new CBS News editor-in-chief has chartered private flights for her armed security detail, made last-minute logistical changes and fired off ‘Bari Pitches.’ Weiss is once again accused of creating behind-the-scenes turmoil with her decision-making ahead of CBS Evening News’ latest reboot. 

As part of a promotional rollout ahead of taking up the legendary CBS Evening News anchor chair, Tony Dokoupil posted a video message this week where he claimed that legacy media has ignored the views of the “average American.”

Meanwhile, CBS News’ editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is scoping out a private jet and a troop of armed guards to facilitate her participation in a multi-million dollar tour of the country.

The co-host of CBS Mornings since 2019, Dokoupil was officially named the new face of CBS Evening News last month, replacing the short-lived co-anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. His tenure is set to begin Monday. Dokoupil’s promotion came after Weiss failed to poach a big name from another network to headline the ratings-challenged nightly news program.

In an effort to make a splash and gain some publicity for his debut, the network is sending Dokoupil out on a 10-city “Live From America” cross-country kickoff tour during his first two weeks in the chair. Throughout his swing through the nation, CBS Evening News will broadcast from cities such as Miami, Dallas, Detroit, Cincinnati before wrapping things up in Pittsburgh.

According to three sources with knowledge of the matter, Weiss is planning on chartering a private plane to fly to each location for the “Live From America” tour this month. Besides taking Dokoupil and CBS Evening News executive producer Kim Harvey on the flights, Weiss’ personal security detail of five armed bodyguards will also be on board.

The increased involvement from Weiss on the CBS Evening News reboot in recent days has raised eyebrows over her desire to be on location for each telecast.Sources told The Independent that Bari Weiss is planning to charter private flights to fly her, Tony Dokoupil and her security detail to CBS Evening News’ “Live From America” tourSources told The Independent that Bari Weiss is planning to charter private flights to fly her, Tony Dokoupil and her security detail to CBS Evening News’ “Live From America” tour (Getty)

That potential additional expense comes after the news network laid off roughly 100 employees and is preparing for more crippling cost cuts from owner David Ellison and Paramount. It also seems to fly in the face of Dokoupil’s anti-elite mission statement for the show, according to sources who spoke to The Independent.

“Nothing says ‘meeting Americans where they are’ by flying around the country on a private jet costing millions of dollars,” one network staffer said.

“And if her security detail is such a huge concern, why is she going? She could watch from the control room or on an actual TV like everyone else,” the source added. “Instead CBS News has to foot the bill for her five security guards, private jet, and more guards with heavy weapons. Does she not understand how much journalism could be made with the money we’re instead spending on perks for her?”

As Weiss has continued to propose last-minute changes to the logistics for the “Live From America” tour for the show, which has included her own pitches and demands for location changes, staffers on the show have grown increasingly concerned that the relaunch will be a “car crash.” The plummeting morale on the show, according to sources, has landed at the feet of Harvey.

“She is a yes person that is not just drinking the Bari Kool-Aid, but like injecting it in her veins, because that's how she survives,” one network insider noted.

The potential booking of expensive charters for the 10-day tour of American cities - which sources said could cost as much as $2 million in total - comes as Weiss has caused behind-the-scenes turmoil at the show with last-minute logistical changes for the tour. This has included requests to switch some of the outdoor locations to indoors for her own personal safety.

This latest flareup within CBS News comes less than two weeks after Weiss came under fire for the 11th-hour spike of a 60 Minutes story that was critical of President Donald Trump’s administration, sparking a possible “revolt” among the show’s staff.

Since her arrival at the network three months ago, the self-described “radical centrist” - with minimal broadcast news experience - Weiss has drawn criticism from staff and media observers alike over many of her editorial decisions, which many have claimed is part of the new corporate ownership’s efforts to push CBS News in a “MAGA-friendly” direction.

According to CBS News insiders, who spoke to The Independent, Weiss – who is currently planning to be on location for each broadcast of the CBS Evening News relaunch tour – has requested additional security for the telecasts, including heavily-armed guards.

A veteran media executive explained to The Independent that it would not appear to be uncommon for a broadcast network to charter a private plane for one of its primetime news anchors and upper-end management to fly to a news broadcast, especially as part of a promotional tour that involves a number of different cities across the country in a short period of time. In fact, many news organizations have rules in place dictating which talent and leadership figures are entitled to chartered flights or first-class accommodations.

At the same time, production staffers on the show have had to scramble over the holidays to book different locations for the 10-city tour while network producers are being tasked with hand-selecting audience members to be in attendance.

Amid the rush to finalize the new logistics, sources said, Weiss came back on Christmas Eve and “blew it up” by adding specific locations for individual cities that she wanted to film at – which apparently includes places that aren’t fully associated with the areas they are hoping to represent. According to network sources, some of the locations Weiss has requested include restaurants that appeal to tourists and upscale private schools.

Representatives for CBS News and Weiss did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Network staffers told The Independent that “morale is really bad” at CBS Evening News and was made worse by a production meeting on December 30, where Harvey made it clear to the show’s staff that “this is all about Tony and Bari.”

“This really feels like the end of CBS Evening News,” one network staffer said. ”Honestly, it’s so depressing.”

On a CBS Evening News production call sheet, shared with The Independent, the segments pitched for Dokoupil’s first stop in Miami this Monday, January 5, include a discussion with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the state’s school phone ban, a piece on the “loss of trust” in the media, and why Miami’s Venezuelan population has turned on Trump amid the administration’s mass deportations.

The show is also planning on light and fun segments known as “bon bons” that will be spotlighted on social media. In a dizzying array of options, Dokoupil will either play soccer with Inter Miami CF co-owner David Beckham; ask locals if they call it the “Gulf of America” or “Gulf of Mexico,” after the Trump administration’s name change; party at one of the city’s exclusive nightclubs (either Club Space or LIV) or join a boat party that will see the anchor jet skiing with rapper DJ Khaled.

The editorial plans for Miami and the other cities are still in flux and certain planned segments could still change or be removed altogether.

The production sheet also lists planned segments for Minneapolis on January 13, and specifically outlines “Bari Pitches,” which would spotlight “characters” such as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, former Democratic Sen. Al Franken and ex-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, as well as stories on health care and the Mayo Clinic.

As of publication, the “Minnesota episode”/Jan. 13 show will have a lead segment on the “Minnesota Fraud Scandal,” which centers on the yearslong Justice Department investigation of multimillion dollar fraud schemes targeting federal assistance programs. The story has blown up in conservative media in recent days due to the number of Somali Americans charged in the probe and a right-wing YouTuber’s viral video of daycare centers that made unverified claims of fraud.

It is also planned to ask Frey “why doesn’t rent control work,” referring to the Democratic mayor’s longstanding opposition to rent control policies while twin city St. Paul has enacted a rent stabilization ordinance, and a segment on political violence focusing on the recent assassinations of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman.

In a January 14 broadcast from Chicago, according to the call sheet, the main focus is planned to be on a “Bari Pitch” to bring on former President Barack Obama and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on to discuss “how the Dems lost touch and how to regain the working class trust.”

The other story ideas include Dokoupil riding the L Train with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and asking him about the racial life expectancy gap in Chicago; a piece on crime rates falling in the Second City “but do residents feel safer,” and another “Bari Pitch” on the city’s “abysmal schools.”

Network staffers have also questioned the marketing and promotional strategy ahead of Dokoupil’s Monday debut. This past Wednesday, the network posted a video on its social media accounts of the anchor approaching random travelers at Grand Central Station in New York and asking if they knew how to pronounce his last name.

“Quite the humiliating ritual,” one CBS News employee said. “This is just embarrassing. Bari went from wanting Anderson Cooper to sending her handpicked Evening News anchor -- who has no name recognition -- to do man-on-the-street interviews about the fact that he has no name recognition? Make it make sense.”

Jan. 2

Steady, Political Commentary: It’s Been a Long Time Coming, Dan Rather, Jan. 2, 2026. Jack Smith finally talked...and he had a lot to say.

It may be the biggest irony in the history of American politics – if not the history of our country — that if Donald Trump wasn’t elected to a second term, he probably would be serving time in prison right now.

Instead, the president flat out got away with it. And now he will never face federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election or removing highly classified documents from the White House and hiding them at his Palm Beach resort.

We’ve waited a long time for former special counsel Jack Smith to tell us what evidence he amassed against Trump. And now we know at least part of that picture. His recent matter-of-fact recounting of his comprehensive investigations only whets the appetite for the whole story.

The famously tight-lipped Smith, who led two investigations into Trump and secured two indictments, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17. Surprise!

Smith’s deposition, a robust defense of his investigations, was reported in the media. But The New York Times, for example, ran its piece on page A19 of the print edition of the paper, because the closed-door hearing was free of reporters and no video recording or transcript of the exhaustive eight-hour testimony was made available. Until December 31.

After ignoring calls from Smith’s lawyers to release the transcript, Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the committee, decided to dump the 255-page transcript after everyone had gone home for the New Year.

Smith, who was subpoenaed to appear, asked for a public hearing. Surprisingly, so did the president. “I’d rather see him testify publicly, because there’s no way he can answer the questions.” Actually, he did – at least all the questions he was not barred by a Trump-appointed judge from answering.

The reason for the closed session was that Republicans were concerned Smith would use the hearing as a platform to divulge heretofore unreleased information.

Smith withstood a barrage of questions from both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans, doing Trump’s bidding to go after those who went after him, tried to trip him up. Democrats hoped to bait him into revealing details of his investigations. Neither side succeeded, though that doesn’t mean the testimony was without revelations.

Smith, a career prosecutor, who served under Democrats and Republicans, spoke with confidence and candor.

“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” he said in his opening statement.

He went on to explain what he and his team discovered about Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

And Trump’s mishandling of classified documents:

“Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents… then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

Smith revealed that he planned to rely on Trump allies as witnesses, saying he thought they would be more credible than partisan ones.

“We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win,’” Smith testified. “Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.”

When asked if Trump ever admitted that he knew he lost the election, Smith answered yes. He went on to say the president made statements about it to several people.

“One is that, ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still fight like hell.’ And then the other was, ‘Can you believe I lost to this f’ing guy?’ referring to Joe Biden.”

Smith laid out his evidence like, well, a prosecutor.

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

As Trump is trying to downplay and distort what happened at the Capitol on January 6, Smith did not whitewash the violence perpetrated by the rioters. “Cracked ribs, traumatic brain injuries, smashed spinal disks and heart attacks as rioters used bats, poles, chemical sprays, stolen police shields and batons.”

That violence, Smith said, was “foreseeable” to the president and Trump exploited it.

When Republican committee members suggested Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were protected speech, Smith pushed back, hard. “Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Smith had far less to say about the classified documents case because Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who slow-walked the original case and then tossed it, is now deciding if Smith’s report of the investigation will ever be released. She blocked the release for more than a year, though ruled last week she would lift the order on February 24, if Trump doesn’t challenge the ruling. What are the odds?

In the meantime Smith is barred from speaking about it, including to the House Judiciary Committee.

When asked if he could draw any conclusions about Trump’s refusal to return the classified documents despite being given multiple opportunities, Smith responded, “I don’t think I can answer that question because it may involve nonpublic facts that are a part of the final report that is currently under an injunction.”

He gave a similar answer to most questions posed about the documents.

In Trumpworld, Jack Smith is Public Enemy No. 1. There is no doubt Trump’s allies in the House were hoping Smith’s testimony would give the president some viable legal avenue to use against him. Though he didn’t give them one, Smith is not naive about his future.

He said he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump directs the Department of Justice to indict him. “I believe that President Trump wants to seek retribution against me because of my role as special counsel.”

Which brings us to another great irony: The man who the government believed committed one of the greatest crimes in our nation’s history now has the ability to seek revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable.

Steady is free, but to support my team’s efforts to protect our democracy through the power of independent journalism, we’d appreciate it if you 

No matter how you subscribe, I thank you for reading.

Stay Steady, Dan

New York Times, Stephen Schwartz Criticizes Kennedy Center, Saying He Won’t Host Gala, Matt Stevens and Adam Nagourney, Jan. 2, 2026. The Washington National Opera said the “Wicked” composer was scheduled to host its annual event at the center this spring. “There’s no way I would set foot in it now,” Stephen Schwartz said of the Kennedy Center, which has seen many changes during the second Trump administration.

Stephen Schwartz, the composer of “Wicked,” said on Friday that he would no longer host a gala at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, becoming one of the most high-profile artists to criticize changes at the arts center under the Trump administration.

In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Schwartz cited his long history collaborating with the Kennedy Center, saying that it “was founded to be an apolitical home for free artistic expression for artists of all nationalities and ideologies.”

“It is no longer apolitical and appearing there has now become an ideological statement,” he said. “As long as that remains the case, I will not appear there.”

Mr. Schwartz, who also composed the Broadway musicals “Godspell” and “Pippin,” said that at the end of 2024, he had been asked by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, to participate in an event at the Kennedy Center this May.

He said he had agreed, but added that he had last communicated with the opera about the event almost a year ago, in February 2025. That month, President Trump purged and replaced members of the Kennedy Center’s board, which has since voted to add Mr. Trump’s name to the building.

Ms. Zambello confirmed in a brief interview on Friday that Mr. Schwartz had long been scheduled to be a host of the opera’s gala on May 16. She declined further comment.

Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president for public relations, said in a statement that “Stephen Schwartz was never discussed nor confirmed and never had a contract by current Trump Kennedy Center leadership.”

Richard Grenell, the president of the Kennedy Center, wrote on social media that “the Stephen Schwartz reports are totally bogus,” saying that the composer “was never signed and I’ve never had a single conversation on him since arriving.”

The Kennedy Center had promoted Mr. Schwartz’s involvement in the gala on its website since last spring, but his name was no longer included on Friday evening. A brochure advertising Washington National Opera events for the 2025-26 season said Mr. Schwartz would curate and host the gala.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Latest Letter to CBS, Ben Meiselas, right, Jan. 2, 2026.

Dear CBS News Editor Bari Weiss,

This is the second letter I am writing you and the third letter I have sent CBS warning about the dire consequences of the actions being taken. We previously wrote when Stephen Colbert’s contract was not renewed and when you killed the 60 Minutes episode on Trump torturing people in CECOT in El Salvador. I am writing again based on the recent videos and posts made by CBS announcing that the “new CBS” is launching in 2026.Subscribed

According to the recent videos and posts, the new CBS will not focus on experts, scholars, scientists, and facts, but will instead be driven by the voices of its perceived audience. You have previously described the voices of your audience as resembling Trump’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. That is very odd and dangerous, in my opinion.

The recent posts announcing the “relaunch” of CBS have been widely mocked. Your viewership appears to be down massively. In record time, you’ve destroyed the legacy of a great news institution that I admired my entire life until recently. This is all the more ironic, given that you built a successful Substack before others joined this platform, only to cause serious harm to your Substack community and destroy a legacy media brand like CBS.

Your loss is our gain. Your “relaunch of CBS” is only leading to more people subscribing to this MeidasTouch Substack. If you want to know where your audience is going, Bari, they are coming here to the MeidasTouch Substack and to our YouTube channel.

Although your failures and destruction of CBS have resulted in further accelerating the growth of MeidasTouch, I still hate to see CBS fall this badly. I still hope one day that it can be restored to operating with integrity and not whatever it’s doing now.

As 2026 kicks off, it is a responsibility I take seriously that the MeidasTouch Network is now watched significantly more than CBS. We have a bigger audience because our reporting is fact-based and we are not afraid of this regime. Whereas CBS has bent the knee, MeidasTouch will report fearlessly in 2026. I guess we will see you on the other side of this, CBS. You do you, and Meidas will keep on growing.

New York Times, Tech Giants Are Racing to Embed A.I. in Schools Around the Globe, Natasha Singer, Jan. 2, 2026. More governments are rolling out chatbots in schools. Some experts warn the tools could erode teaching and learning.

In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.

Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan.

Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an A.I. tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than a million students in thousands of schools there.

Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities.

Some U.S. tech leaders say A.I. chatbots — which can generate humanlike emails, create class quizzes, analyze data and produce computer code — can be a boon for learning. The tools, they argue, can save teachers time, customize student learning and help prepare young people for an “A.I.-driven” economy.

But the rapid spread of the new A.I. products could also pose risks to young people’s development and well-being, some children’s and health groups warn.

A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular A.I. chatbots may diminish critical thinking. A.I. bots can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, and some teachers are grappling with widespread A.I.-assisted student cheating.

Silicon Valley for years has pushed tech tools like laptops and learning apps into classrooms, with promises of improving education access and revolutionizing learning.

Still, a global effort to expand school computer access — a program known as “One Laptop per Child” — did not improve students’ cognitive skills or academic outcomes, according to studies by professors and economists of hundreds of schools in Peru. Now, as some tech boosters make similar education access and fairness arguments for A.I., children’s agencies like UNICEF are urging caution and calling for more guidance for schools.

New York Times, In China, A.I. Is Finding Deadly Tumors That Doctors Might Miss, Vivian Wang, Photographs by Andrea Verdelli, Jan. 2, 2026. A tool for spotting pancreatic cancer in routine CT scans has had promising results, one example of how China is racing to apply A.I. to medicine’s tough problems.

Three days after Qiu Sijun, a retired bricklayer in eastern China, went for a routine diabetes checkup, he received a call from a doctor he hadn’t met before. The doctor, the head of the hospital’s pancreatic department, wanted him to come in for a follow-up.

“I knew it couldn’t be anything good,” Mr. Qiu, 57, recalled.

He was partly right. The bad news was that Mr. Qiu had pancreatic cancer. But there was good news, too: The tumor had been detected early. The doctor, Zhu Kelei, was able to remove it.

This was possible only because of a new artificial-intelligence-powered tool that the hospital was testing, which had flagged Mr. Qiu’s routine CT scan before he had any symptoms. The tool is one example of how Chinese tech companies and hospitals are racing to apply A.I. to some of medicine’s most stubborn problems.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with a five-year survival rate of around 10 percent, largely because early detection is so hard. Symptoms often do not appear until the cancer has advanced.

Jan. 1

 

Status with Oliver Darcy, 26 Questions for 2026, Oliver Darcy, right, Jan. 1, 2026. From Donald Trump’s continued assault on the press to the open war for Warner Bros. Discovery—and A.I.’s disruption of everything—these are the big questions hanging over media in 2026.

How will Donald Trump continue to use the powers of government to attack the Fourth Estate? And what will media executives and press advocates do to combat the assault on their newsrooms? Will the parent companies of news giants have the backbone to stand up to Trump in a major way—or will most continue to look for ways to appease him?

What lies ahead for Warner Bros. Discovery? Will David Ellison succeed in his hostile bid to take over the company? Or will the deal that David Zaslav and the board struck with Netflix hold? And regardless of who prevails, what will regulators say?

What does the future hold for CNN? Will the Mark Thompson-led network be spun off this year and fall under notorious cost-cutter Gunnar Wiedenfels’ purview? Or will it prepare to slide under Ellison’s control?

How will CBS News fare under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, left, and Ellison’s ownership? Will staffers revolt against her meddling? Will any of the famed “60 Minutes” correspondents exit in protest? Will the network continue drifting into more Trump-friendly waters? Will Gayle King remain at “CBS Mornings”? And will Weiss’ programming changes hurt or help ratings that have been mired in third place for years?

How many more major journalists will choose to leave legacy newsrooms and go independent? And at what point does the newsletter/subscription market become oversaturated?

What is the fate of Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News? Will the right-wing network settle, or will the case barrel toward trial—potentially as soon as this year?

Will the MAGA Media civil war come to an end or get even uglier? Will major figures like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Megyn Kelly find a way to make peace, or will they keep feuding?

What happens to Trump’s growing slate of lawsuits against news organizations? He is currently suing The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Will he file additional suits—and how might the WSJ litigation affect his relationship with Rupert Murdoch?

How will MS NOW and CNBC fare after being cleaved off Comcast and placed under the leadership of Versant chief Mark Lazarus? Will the newsrooms be able to chart a successful path forward to succeed not only on linear, but in the evolving digital landscape?

How will Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis attempt to turn around The Washington Post’s fortunes? Do they have a meaningful vision. If so, what exactly is it and when will it bear fruit?

What lies ahead for the Los Angeles Times under red-pilled owner Patrick Soon-Shiong? Will the paper continue to decline and cut costs? And will Soon-Shiong proceed with preparations for a 2027 IPO?

How will TikTok’s divestment of its U.S. entity unfold? Will the short-form app’s fortunes fade amid competition from Instagram and YouTube?

Will Elon Musk announce any surprises or make any changes at X? Or will he continue serving as the platform’s shitposter-in-chief?

Will Google surpass OpenAI in the A.I. race? And how will Sam Altman’s behemoth fend off its well-equipped rival?

Will the A.I. boom continue, or will the bubble pop? How will we see the technology further integrated into our daily lives—for better or worse?

 

Tony Dokoupil (Screen grab via CBS News).

Tony Dokoupil recorded a message as he prepares to take over the "CBS Evening News," telling viewers that they are his priority: "You come first. Not advertisers. Not politicians. Not corporate interests. And, yes, that does include the corporate owners of CBS. I report for you.” [Deadline]

Dokoupil, however, made some comments in the remarks that are sure to please David Ellison & Co. The anchor weighed in on legacy media losing the trust of audiences and panned outlets for having put too much focus on "academics" and "elites." 

Megyn Kelly, who has been feuding with CBS News boss Bari Weiss, weighed in on the changing of the guard: “Nothing will happen at CBS. Nothing. Legacy media is dead and evening news has been totally irrelevant for a long time. CBS has not had evening viewers in any competitive way in more than a decade. It’s not reversible.” [Mediaite]

Making TV is hard: CBS’ New Year’s Eve special was knocked off the air for nearly an hour after the network suffered tech issues. [Deadline]

The New York Post received a wave of criticism on social media after publishing paparazzi images of a “distraught” Jack Schlossberg entering his sister’s residence after her tragic deathThe WSJ published a story on Donald Trump's health, reporting that he "is showing signs of aging in public and private." The piece, of course, comes after the Emma Tucker-led paper received criticism for questioning Joe Biden's health, but largely not subjecting Trump to the same treatment. [WSJ]

Charlie Sykes said he asked MS NOW to let him out of the final year of his contributor contract so that he can double down on his newsletter and YouTube channel. [To the Contrary]

MAGA civil war continues: Candace Owens closed out 2025 appearing to take jabs at Erika Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, and more. [Mediaite]

George Clooney responded after Trump targeted him in one of his unhinged Truth Social posts. The actor said in a statement, “I totally agree with the current president,” Clooney said. “We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.” [THR]

"Avatar: Fire and Ash" continued to inch closer to $1 billion at the box office, which it is expected to cross this weekend. The James Cameron picture has now printed more than $250 million at the domestic box office, and more than $600 million internationally, totaling about $860 million. [Box Office Mojo]

The 2025 box office ended with $8.9 billion in domestic ticket sales, a 1.5% increase from 2024. [Variety].

BIG, Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly, Tom Blakely, right,Dec. 31, 2025-Jan. 1, 2026. Ever since a spate of mergers in the 1990s, Westlaw and LexisNexis have dominated legal research. And that might be why searching legal cases is so costly, even in the age of AI. 

Introduction

Hi there! My name is Tom Blakely, I’m a federal judicial law clerk and attorney. I previously worked in big law and the United States Department of Justice. You might remember me from last year, when I wrote about the US v. Google ad tech antitrust trial at Big Tech on Trial. I’m excited to be writing a guest piece for BIG, this time on a particular competition problem I (and nearly every lawyer) deals with on a daily basis: the Lexis/Westlaw duopoly.

The law in America does not belong to lawyers, it belongs to all of us. As citizens, we must be able to read the law, understand it, obey it, and bring complaints against those who wrong us. That is the basis for a coherent political order, and why the rule of law is such a foundational aspect of a democratic system. Moreover, it would be hard to find a technological era more suited to the democratization of law than the one we’re in today. The computer lets anyone query instantly, the internet lets anyone do it from anywhere, and generative artificial intelligence can decipher and explain complex legal questions if it has access to credible databases.

And yet, today, two powerful companies dominate and restrain access to key aspects of our legal order, from case opinions to legislative history. To give you a sense of what I mean, Lexis, left,  one of two dominant legal research platforms, charges up to $469 for a single search. That’s the equivalent of a Google query, for almost $500. Moreover, beyond LexisNexis and its rival Westlaw, right, the Federal judiciary itself has used its privileged position to charge high fees for court records that should be available to all. Today, the law is hidden behind paywalls.

But it wasn’t always this way.

In this piece, I’m going to explain how and why America keeps the law from its citizens, and what we can do about it.

The Origins of Legal Research

The stereotype of a lawyer’s office was traditionally that of a well-manicured desk, with ornate and intimidating shelves of books somewhere in the background. And there’s a reason for the imagined massive quantity of books. The practice of law in the United States relies on them.

We use a system that came from England, called the common law tradition. In that system, there is the legal rule that is written down, known as statute. But then there is also a lot of interpretation of that statute, through cases. And those interpretations are often binding. To know what the law is beyond what statutes say, you must research the case law.

U.S. federal courts publish cases in “Federal Reporters” and each case is identified by a case cite. An example of what this looks like would be “United States v. Alcoa, 148 F.2d 416 (2d Cir. 1945).” Prior to today’s day and age, to read this case, you would have to physically go to a law library, find the 148th print volume of the 2nd Series of the Federal Reporter (what the “148 F.2d” stands for) on the shelf, and turn to the 416th page to read the 1945 opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America (Alcoa).

It is a cumbersome if necessary system, and the early companies in the space made it easier to manage. In the late 1800s, the West Publishing Company was founded to meet the pressing need in the American legal profession for timely and accessible print compilations of the latest court decisions.

Over time, West developed two complementary systems that would become the foundation of the legal information industry for the next century: the National Reporter System and the Key Number system.

But throughout most of the 1900s, West was not the only participant in the market for legal information.

The Computer Age Changes the Game

In 1977, there were about 23 legal publishers of considerable size, each separately owned.

In the 1970s, universities, the government, and large organizations were beginning to use computers more widely. Law libraries were becoming burdened with cumbersome case texts that rapidly became obsolete with the passage of time, as new case law was created and old case law was overturned or supplanted.

West’s Page Number Monopoly Erodes and an M&A Spree Begins

Lexis and Westlaw came into legal conflict in the 1980s—over Lexis’ appropriation of West’s vaunted page number system. Page numbers are the heart and soul of legal citation, and up until the end of the 20th century, comprised much of the engine of West’s business model. While court cases are technically in the public domain, by presiding over the National Reporter System and its proprietary page numbers, in an industry that runs on precise citation to authority, West had effectively built a moat around itself.

While theoretically anyone could mass publish court opinions, without West’s authoritative page numbers, any such reporter would be mostly useless.

Prior to 1991, U.S. copyright law actually held that West’s business of putting page numbers over compendiums of public domain court cases was eligible for copyright protection, and that Lexis, by using West’s page numbers, had committed copyright infringement. It seems strange today to think that merely adding page numbers and minor edits to public records was sufficient to create a work eligible for copyright protection, but this was the law of the land at the time.

Pagination presented an enormous source of leverage for West. Because the Bluebook (the citation stylebook for lawyers), court rules, and nearly all fora of legal writing require keyed pinpoint citations to page numbers in official reporters (in other words, West’s reporters), West had the market cornered.

But after the Supreme Court’s decision in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., in 1991, which found that merely publishing compilations of non-original records (in that case phone books but in West’s case, court cases) is not protected by copyright, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York would later hold, applying Feist, that the changes West made to the cases it compiled were “trivial” under the Feist standard, and therefore no longer subject to copyright protection.

This is key for many reasons. As the quasi-official publisher of American judicial opinions, West’s page numbering, at least to a certain extent, was as much of its business as the ho-hum task of compiling and printing the decisions themselves. If competitors could reference West’s page numbers, it represented a substantial loss of a main proprietary component of West’s business model. It is also key as the timing of the Feist decision coincided with the commencement of, as detailed below, a decade of mergers and acquisitions that, by the 2000s, would leave two main market participants left standing—Westlaw and Lexis. The 1991 Feist ruling was the starting gun.

The Thomson-West Acquisition is Allowed Under a Cloud of Corruption and the Lexis-West Duopoly is Born

These facts are primarily reported in (and adapted below from) the 2009 book Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive by Gary Reback, a famed antitrust litigator well known for his role in spearheading the efforts that lead to the antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s, and who also represented Lexis at the time.

Thomson’s proposed acquisition of West prompted outrage, with state bar associations, news outlets, law librarians, and public interest groups sounding the alarm on how the inevitable and astronomical increase in legal research fees that would ensue would raise the cost of legal services.

Despite the antitrust problem of one company buying its only significant publishing competitor, and despite Reback’s zealous advocacy on behalf of Lexis, the deal somehow sailed through the Justice Department without challenge.

Reback explains in his book that using nearly any approach to analyze the anticompetitive effects of the proposed Thomson/West acquisition that was allowed by the then current DOJ/FTC merger guidelines would have condemned the tie up. In other words, on the merits, there is simply no way this merger should have gone through.

Reback details receiving a call one morning from a CNN reporter, seeking his comment on a story they were working on, that the former owner of West pledged more than $150,000 in campaign contributions to Democrats while the Thomson deal was pending approval from Bill Clinton’s Justice Department.

One does not need to be much of a cynic to connect the dots between these backroom political dealings on the one hand, and how the merger seemed to glide through regulators—against the balance of the law—on the other.

Higher Costs and a Dearth of Innovation Follows in the Decades Since

In the 30 years since, while Lexis and Westlaw might have glossier looking websites and the internet might load faster than it did back then, the market for legal research services is not much different than the one Reback and others warned about in the 1990s.

The lack of competition facing the Lexis/Westlaw duopoly has removed pressure for these firms to innovate their product offerings or prices.

To simply search for cases (which are public records), a small law firm with only 10 attorneys can expect to pay around $2,100 per month for Westlaw. Lexis meanwhile charges $1163 per month for just 3 attorneys for its “Professional” plan. Organizations of larger size (so most organizations) must individually contact the sales departments of these companies for black box pricing which is orders of magnitude higher. Indeed, trying to reconcile any kind of “ballpark” number for what using these services ultimately cost in the course of legal practice is all but impossible. Certain kinds of searches and documents present a broad array of hidden upcharges and widely varying fees. As I noted above, Lexis charges up to $469 for a single search.

Lexis also publishes discount rates for monthly search bills of up to $180,000. We’re talking about bills of nearly $200k per month (!) just for searching public domain court cases.

There are also quality issues. Lexis and Westlaw still require wonky and outdated search operators that were last in regular use by search engines at the time of these services’ inception, are not nearly as intelligent or predictive as other search services, and no serious competitor has ever emerged.

And what of generative AI? These companies only recently rolled out rudimentary AI tools. On this count, I have used both ChatGPT and Lexis’ AI tool. They are mediocre for legal research at best. For one, ChatGPT does not have access (by design) to Lexis and West’s ocean of case law straight from the courts. Lacking access to legal cases that are putatively considered to be in the public domain, but in reality are locked firmly behind Lexis and West’s paid research systems, Large Language Models cannot discover them the way they do with other information, and AI frequently “hallucinates”—plugging the gaps with made up cases that do not exist—to disastrous results. Even Lexis and West’s own AI tools struggle to make more-than-basic levels of inferences about whether or not a case helps answer your question, beyond the fact it includes relevant keywords.

PACER—the Federal Government’s Docket Monopoly Is a Problem, Too

This brings me to my last point: the government’s role. As a law clerk to a federal judge, I have access to the full suite of not only research services, but powerful tools the federal courts use to manage cases.

As my colleague Lee Hepner has pointed out, the government’s own case tools, chiefly PACER (standing for “Public Access to Court Electronic Records”) have long been sclerotic, antiquated, and overpriced.

PACER is used to access full case dockets (to view motions, orders, and filings, not just the judicial opinions you find on Westlaw and Lexis.) CM/ECF (standing for Case Management/Electronic Case Files) is similar to PACER but is used by attorneys to file materials with courts.

The U.S. government—specifically the federal judiciary, manages PACER and CM/ECF.

In addition to PACER’s ancient interface (here is the link to see the D.C. District Court’s PACER page for yourself) it has security problems, which were highlighted recently when it was apparently hacked by Russia, compromising sealed documents. Its costs are also outrageous.

PACER is a somewhat rare example of a government monopoly—where instead of a sole private corporation controlling a market to ill effects, the government does. Usually, that makes sense after all. The government has a monopoly per se on many things, like criminal prosecution, military forces, road improvement, etc.

But what’s unique in this case is the federal government is using its position as a monopolist over access to dockets to extract monopoly rents.

The fees the federal government charges for court documents are significant. PACER charges users $0.10 for every page users search and access, and $30 per name or item searched plus $0.10 per page per document per month, albeit with a max of $3 per individual document.

While to some, these might not seem like large numbers, consider the fact filings are hundreds of pages long, there can be numerous documents per ECF docket entry, hundreds of entries per docket, and infinite dockets to browse. If you do not know exactly what ECF number and case you are looking for, and you need to browse more than a handful of pages, these fees add up quickly every month, particularly for those not at big law firms with large corporate clients who can foot the bill.

Conclusion

Unlike most competition problems, this one is unique in that the government is in fact the source of the goods in the market (i.e. courts produce the opinions and orders that are then given to Lexis and Westlaw to publish). As such, the government has tremendous leverage over the companies and the ability to fix the problem, much like the Justice Department once tried to do with its JURIS service before shuttering it in the 1990s in favor of a contract with West.

By making case law freely accessible to anyone, insurmountable barriers to entry would be removed, and new market entrants could create far more cost effective and innovative solutions than what Lexis and Westlaw offer.

So beyond the obvious dump trucks of lobbying cash Lexis and Westlaw would throw at preventing any such solution, in a similar way to how tax prep companies lobby against a free online IRS tax prep tool for the public, what are the obstacles?

Well for one, this issue is just not attractive to elected officials. It’s boring, non-ideological, won’t grab many headlines in mainstream media, and it doesn’t affect those outside the relatively narrow legal industry in the way another competition problem, like Live Nation/Ticketmaster does for example.

But what if it has a bigger impact than we realize? By inflating research costs (a significant source of overhead) for lawyers, legal services cost the public more money. Those who can’t afford big legal bills are forced to either forgo access to justice (along with their rights) or go with lower caliber legal services.

Moreover, transparency is reduced, as while trials and the records they produce are putatively considered open to the public, if you don’t have monopoly money to pay to access them, they simply are not.

Opening case records to the public domain for free—like the vast majority of public government records—would allow new competitors to Lexis and Westlaw to create innovation and lower costs. This, in turn, would reduce expenses for legal organizations (significantly helping public interest and legal aid groups), improve access to justice and transparency, and allow for a better-functioning legal system—with higher-quality legal representation for all.

At least in theory, this is the case. But like solving nearly any antitrust problem, the market cannot be fixed overnight. While the competition problem in this market is undeniable, it would take time for the competitive landscape, innovation, and prices to improve. Taking a crowbar to the Lexis/Westlaw duopoly however, is the first step, and an important one.

Tom Blakely, right, is a federal judicial law clerk who served in the United States Department of Justice, practiced at an international law firm and is a contributor at Young Voices. Tom writes about issues of constitutional law, technology & competition and antitrust & regulation, including the book "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy."  Tom serves on the board of Boston College Law School where he hosted the Just Law Podcast.