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This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital Game), let’s take a moment to run through the honorable mentions that we included in every category this year.

First up, the honorable mention for Best Remix went to Eleanor by Micah McFarland. This short piece of Twine interactive fiction artfully combines public domain artworks by more than a dozen artists, each one carefully chosen to illustrate a scene in the story. There’s some great succinct writing, multiple endings, and some hidden narrative mechanics under the hood.

Next, the honorable mention for Best Deep Cut went to The Last Tower by Zee Ham, a tabletop dungeon crawl game based on the 1929 architectural floorplans for the Chrysler Building. Using the plans as a skeleton, the game builds out a fun environment full of puzzles and encounters, as well as rich environmental storytelling woven through the details of the various rooms.

The honorable mention for Best Visuals went to Benten Pond by cutegamesclub, a simple sidescroller game based on a 1929 wood block painting. Though the gameplay is a bit frustrating, the visuals shine: the painting has been carefully and lovingly recreated as layered pixel art with parallax scrolling that takes full advantage of the original composition’s sense of depth and distance.

For Best Adaptation, the honorable mention went to DIY Dalí by haunted-jug, a meditative little game about remixing the iconic imagery from Salvador Dali’s paintings. It’s simple and engaging, and it puts the focus squarely on the source material — plus, it kicks off with a fun little animated flourish that perfectly sets the tone.

On to the two categories for which we haven’t yet had the main spotlight winner spotlight posts (those will wrap things up on the next two Saturdays).

For Best Digital Game, the honorable mention went to Thrall by Kanderwund, another piece of Twine interactive fiction, and one with an incredible sense of style. The prose is pretty stylish by itself, but the real eye-catcher is the presentation: full of lively lo-fi video backgrounds and set to moody atmospheric music, it’s an incredibly polished product for a game jam entry.

Finally, the honorable mention for Best Analog Game went to Red Harvest by fuzztech, a compact and well-designed mystery TTRPG for a game master and one or more players who roleplay as private investigators. It’s based on the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, but with a twist inspired by that name: it transports the story from a mining town in Montana to a mining town on Mars.

And that’s that for the honorable mentions! Congratulations to everyone whose game was chosen. We’ll be back next week with the next in our series of winner spotlights, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1930.

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The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump’s detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that began earlier this year continues to grow, Kennedy is busying himself going on talk shows to promise to end chemtrails or else claiming he’ll have the origins of autism solved in a few months. Musk’s DOGE, meanwhile, has produced a 1/8th cut of HHS’ workforce and slashed its funding while this is all going on. Thanks to DOGE and an obedient Kennedy, HHS has less capability to keep us healthy than it did before.

The health of a nation isn’t some joke. The people in charge of it should be more qualified to run it than simply having a famous last name and a penchant for spouting conspiracy theories about health concerns. And when the latest nominee for Surgeon General is best described as Kennedy’s favorite “wellness influencer,” well, we have a problem.

Dr. Casey Means is the nominee and, to be fair to her, she has a medical degree from Stanford and has done medical research work for the government and several prominent universities in the past. The previous nominee, Janette Nesheiwat, just withdrew without much explanation. Reports seem to indicate that this resulted from harsh pushback from alt-right gremlin Laura Loomer.

Means has no experience in government administration, however, and dropped her residency some time ago. Now she runs a tech company and hocks health supplements.

Casey Means has no government experience and dropped out of her surgical residency program, saying she became disillusioned with traditional medicine. She founded a health tech company, Levels, that helps users track blood sugar and other metrics. She also makes money from dietary supplements, creams, teas and other products sponsored on her social media accounts.

Means has mostly steered clear of Kennedy’s controversial and debunked views on vaccines. But on her website, she has called for more investigation into their safety and recommends making it easier for patients to sue drugmakers in the event of vaccine injuries. Since the late 1980s, federal law has shielded those companies from legal liability to encourage development of vaccines without the threat of costly personal injury lawsuits.

And this is going to be America’s doctor. Someone who is at least lightly skeptical of vaccines and who’s main qualification for the job appears to be that she supported Kennedy and he likes her.

Apparently other supporters, such as Kennedy’s running mate in his failed presidential bid, are quite skeptical of the nomination.

“Yes, it’s very strange. Doesn’t make any sense,” philanthropist Nicole Shanahan said in a post on X, responding to a separate post that was criticizing Trump’s decision to select Means. Means is primarily known as a wellness influencer.

“I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be),” Shanahan continued, referring to Means and her brother, Calley Means. “I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump).”

You can also add the previously mentioned Laura Loomer to Means’ detractors as well.

I agree with them, though I’m sure on vastly different grounds. Trump’s desire for media-first personalities within government positions is nothing knew, of course, but dipping so low as to put an “influencer” in as the nation’s top doctor is plainly absurd. To do it at the moment when there is a measles outbreak occurring is all the more so.

The need to remove Kennedy from his post is only becoming all the more clear.

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Gavin Newsom’s rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality.

Newsom appears to have convinced himself that the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding “common ground” with an administration actively dismantling constitutional governance. This calculation rests on a dangerous conflation of popularity with principle—the belief that because Trump won an election, his approach must be what “middle America” wants and therefore what Democrats should emulate.

This logic fails on multiple levels. First, it fundamentally misunderstands why many Americans voted for Trump. They didn’t necessarily embrace constitutional violations, the weaponization of government against critics, or the abandonment of democratic norms—though many have come to excuse them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be moved by moral clarity when it’s offered without condescension. Many voted based on specific economic anxieties, cultural concerns, or—crucially—because they believed demonstrable falsehoods about both Trump and his opponents. Winning their support doesn’t require adopting Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but addressing their legitimate concerns while providing a clear alternative to his approach to governance.

Second, Newsom’s strategy assumes that political victory is worth any moral cost. That defending constitutional principles, standing for truth, and maintaining democratic norms are luxuries that can be sacrificed for electoral advantage. This isn’t just cynical—it’s self-defeating. If Democrats adopt Trump’s rhetoric, accept his constitutional violations as mere“distractions,” and seek partnership with his administration, what alternative do they actually offer? They become not an opposition but an echo. Not a choice, but a counterfeit.

American voters are not looking for Democratic candidates who behave like junior varsity Trumpists. They’re looking for clarity. For conviction. When Democrats blur that contrast, they don’t win converts—they confirm Trump’s dominance of the political terrain. Voters can smell incoherence and opportunism from miles away. When leaders abandon their principles for perceived political advantage, they don’t gain credibility—they lose the very foundation of trust upon which political leadership must stand.

What Newsom fails to grasp is that the most powerful response to Trumpism isn’t accommodation but clear moral contrast. Not moving toward Trump but standing firmly on democratic principles. Not adopting his language but offering an alternative vision of governance based on truth, constitutional fidelity, and democratic values. The voters who might be swayed by a genuine alternative won’t be impressed by Democratic leaders who seem willing to abandon their principles for political advantage.

Perhaps most disturbing is how Newsom’s approach reveals a fundamental lack of faith in Americans’ capacity for democratic citizenship. It assumes citizens cannot be persuaded by truth, cannot be moved by appeals to democratic principles, cannot recognize the difference between governance and demagoguery. It treats voters not as citizens capable of democratic judgment but as consumers to be won through marketing and positioning—giving them what polling suggests they want rather than what democratic governance requires.

This approach directly contributes to the crisis of meaning I’ve documented throughout Notes From The Circus. When political leaders on both sides treat truth as optional, principles as negotiable, and constitutional violations as mere tactical concerns, they reinforce the nihilistic view that nothing is real, nothing matters, and power is the only currency worth pursuing. They don’t just fail to counter Trumpism; they actively strengthen its foundations.

Political leaders who convince themselves that accommodating authoritarianism is the path to defeating it have already surrendered the moral ground from which effective resistance must operate. They haven’t found a clever strategy; they’ve abandoned the very principles they claim to defend.

The center must be held—not by moving rightward in pursuit of imagined political advantage, but by standing firmly on the constitutional principles and democratic values that make legitimate political competition possible at all. Not by treating truth as optional but by insisting on its centrality to democratic governance. Not by dismissing constitutional violations as distractions but by recognizing them as fundamental threats requiring clear moral response.

The ground approaches. And those who respond by triangulating, accommodating, and seeking “partnership” with the forces undermining democratic governance may find they’ve not only failed to defeat Trumpism but actively enabled its transformation from political movement to governing regime.

At this point, Newsom isn’t just forgetting what’s real—he’s surrendering the very possibility of its defense.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Balwin

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

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There have been so many absolutely crazy stories in the first few months of the second Trump administration, but the story of federal agents kidnapping Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk entirely over a fairly boring op-ed she co-authored criticizing the Tufts administration still stands out for its utter pointlessness. It is extreme even when compared to the many other extreme and horrific immigration efforts engaged in by this administration.

Get this, though: it turns out that kidnapping celebrated foreign PhD students in broad daylight for writing mild criticism of their own university is not even remotely constitutional or reasonable.

Thankfully, a judge has now freed her and made it quite clear that nothing the government is weakly arguing in this case makes any sense at all.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions, who is presiding over the case, said at the conclusion of Friday’s bail hearing that Ozturk raised “very substantial” and “very significant” claims that her First Amendment and due process rights were violated when she was taken into custody following the revocation of her student visa in March.

“Her continued detention cannot stand,” he said.

Not that it should matter — because it doesn’t — but at least with many of the other people the administration has targeted, they could craft some sort of (absurd) rationale for why they did what they did. Here there was none. Just that she once co-authored a fairly benign op-ed.

Let’s be clear about what happened here: A Fulbright scholar wrote something that made someone in the administration sad, and their response was to send masked men to make her disappear. Cool system we’ve got! Very normal democracy stuff. America. Land of the free.

Everything about how they treated her was cruel and unusual. Obviously, punishing her for her speech is a blatant First Amendment violation. But even if the government wanted to argue that she was no longer welcome in this country (which is absurd, given that she’s a Fulbright scholar doing really useful child development work, including how to make sure kids have more prosocial uses of the internet and technology), they could have alerted her that her student visa was being revoked, and given her a time period in which she’d need to leave the country.

They didn’t do that. They just sent masked, non-uniformed people to kidnap her off the street. Then they quickly moved her out of Massachusetts to Vermont, and then from Vermont to Louisiana. Then, while detained in Louisiana, they refused to give her the asthma medication she relied on, and it was reported that the stress was causing regular and dangerous asthma attacks.

Just to recap: Write op-ed → get black-bagged by unidentified agents → get shuffled across multiple states → be denied life-saving medication. Is this the “efficient government processing” DOGE has been promising?

Earlier today, federal district court Judge William Sessions ruled that she was unlawfully detained and needed to be released immediately on her own recognizance. On top of that, Judge Sessions rejected the government’s demand that her travel be restricted if she was released.

During the hearing today, Ozturk testified remotely (via Zoom) and told her story, which revealed that she seems like exactly the kind of serious, thoughtful, caring student the US should want more of here. After she was done testifying, when another witness was testifying, Ozturk had to be excused as she was hit with another asthma attack.

The US government barely put up a fight. It was almost as if the DOJ lawyers knew they fucked up badly in this case. They didn’t admit to fucking up, but they did little to present a case. No witnesses. Barely any questioning of the other side. When they presented their side, they basically presented silly technical legal arguments that the Vermont court doesn’t have jurisdiction over Ozturk.

Nothing says “we’re on solid legal ground” quite like arguing that the court can’t determine whether your kidnapping was legal because you cleverly moved your victim to a different state. Checkmate, due process!

The judge then ruled from the bench that even though there’s a very high bar with a “difficult burden” to reach to have her ordered released, in Ozturk’s case she cleared that high bar. He directly called out that, despite having the opportunity to present more evidence, the DOJ only had the co-authored op-ed, which raised serious First Amendment issues, saying that it appears that Ozturk was detained for her protected expression.

He also called out the due process issues with her kidnapping appearing to be punitive, rather than for any legitimate reason. Add to that the asthma attacks and the horrific and cruel conditions in which she has been kept (which would continue to damage her health if unchanged) and he ordered her released immediately.

On top of that, as mentioned, the court rejected the DOJ’s request for travel restrictions, noting that it presented no evidence that Ozturk was a “flight risk,” while Ozturk and her lawyers presented plenty of evidence that she’s a part of the Tufts community and eagerly hoping to finish her PhD there. The judge also noted that, as a PhD student, she likely needs to be able to travel to attend conferences and such.

There are some minor conditions around checking in with the Burlington Center for Justice, which will “supervise” her release and provide reports to the US government.

There will be more in this case later, but this was a complete and total win for Ozturk, who has had to suffer for no good reason for the past six weeks after being kidnapped off the street by the US government for obviously protected speech.

This is a good result in a terrible and shameful event from the current administration.

Not surprisingly, the administration appears to want to continue to be fucking obnoxious about this:

In a statement to NPR, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said having a visa to live and study in the U.S. “is a privilege not a right.”

“Today’s ruling does not prevent the continued detention of Ms. Ozturk, and we will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said.

Seriously: what the fuck? Ozturk was here legally. She had every right to be here and was doing valuable and important work. This kind of defiant response is yet another example of the Trump administration’s constant and willfully obnoxious defiance of the Constitution. Hell, it’s a defiance of just being a good, moral person.

Also, did the DHS spokesperson really just openly defy a federal judge with “today’s ruling does not prevent continued detention”? Because that’s not how this is supposed to work.

And, on that note, I will again highlight that almost none of the usual voices who spent the last decade plus screaming about “free speech on campus” said anything about Ozturk being literally kidnapped by the federal government over her speech on campus. Bari Weiss’s publication put out an unsigned editorial piece complaining that there wasn’t enough public evidence in the case (though suggesting they wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Ozturk “coordinated their activism with Hamas, or encouraged or participated in riots”) but still claiming that Marco Rubio’s statement about taking away visas for op-eds was “common sense.”

Ah yes, “common sense” — that thing where the government can kidnap you for writing an op-ed. Just like the Founding Fathers intended.

Weiss was even able to interview Rubio just a few weeks later, and did ask him a softball question about the deportations (in general) with no follow up:

WEISS:  One of the things the President and you have done in the past 90-something days – it feels like it’s been a lot longer than that – (laughter) – has been to successfully – I cannot even imagine how long it’s felt for you – has been to successfully close the southern border.  And yet, that story has been just totally overtaken with the story of some of these individual deportations that have captured the national conversation and that many people, even people that voted for Trump, are opposed to.

And so I want to just ask you a bigger question, which is:  What message is the President trying to send with these deportations?  There’s – is it about deterring people from coming?  Or is it about terrifying people that have been here for years, that have paid taxes for many, many years, and might even have American children?  Should they be scared of deportation?  Like what is the message that the President and the State Department is trying to send?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, so two things.  The State Department isn’t involved necessarily in the issue of migratory enforcement.  We’re involved in making sure that foreign countries take back the citizens that are in our country illegally of their countries.  So I would say two things.

Number one, mass migration is almost entirely based on an incentive system.  People were coming to this country under Joe Biden because they knew if they got to the border and claimed asylum, said these magic words, they would be allowed to come in and they would be allowed to stay – almost 90 percent success rate if you said the magic words, so people were coming.

Now they know that if they come they won’t get to stay, and they’ve stopped coming, which is why it’s the most secure border we’ve had in modern history.  And in fact, we’ve seen a new phenomenon, which is people that were on their way here sort of do a U-turn and go back.  We’ve seen that play out.  And that’s an enormous achievement, because it stops the problem.

That still leaves us with a fundamental challenge, and that is that we have in this country millions of people – some who have been here many years, some who have been here for a year and a half or two – who are unlawfully in the United States.  And it’s this simple:  If you say the speed zone is 70 miles an hour, but people know they’re not going to get a ticket unless they go 90 miles an hour, no one’s going to drive under the speed limit.  You have to have laws, and laws have to be enforced.  If you don’t enforce your laws, then your laws become meaningless.  And that’s what’s happened in this country over the last 20 years.  We were not enforcing our immigration laws, and now we are.

Obviously, they’re going to prioritize the most dangerous people, dangerous criminals.  If you look at the manifest of these flights of people that are being deported, these are some of the most vile human beings imaginable that we’re getting out of our country – sex offenders, rapists, killers.  That’s who we’re prioritizing being sent out.

But let there be no doubt we have immigration laws, and if you are in violation of those immigration laws, you have no right to be in the country.  Now, some will choose to leave voluntarily; others may get caught up and be forced to leave.  But we are – they are prioritizing the most dangerous.

But that said, you have to have – there’s no point in having immigration laws if you have no intent to enforce them.

WEISS:  Okay, let’s talk about Iran.

Yeah, top-notch journalism there. You ask a general question that lets him dance around. He even claims (falsely) that the US wasn’t enforcing immigration laws before, and also that they’re prioritizing “the most vile human beings imaginable.” That’s a perfect opening to ask about cases like Ozturk. Who is not vile. Is not a criminal. Was here legally. And was kidnapped for her speech.

But, no, “let’s talk about Iran.”

The hypocrisy is blindingly obvious. The same people who built careers defending the right of provocateurs to speak on campus are suddenly silent when a student is literally disappeared by the government for co-writing a mild op-ed. Their selective outrage reveals that for many self-proclaimed “free speech warriors,” the principle was never about free expression — it was about protecting specific political viewpoints.

How about we talk about the person who was here entirely legally, who did nothing wrong, was a Fulbright scholar studying how to make kids use the internet better, and who co-authored a single op-ed gently criticizing the Tufts administration (not the US government) and was kidnapped by masked federal officials (not in uniform) in broad daylight, and then renditioned across the country, then treated cruelly and inhumanely, putting her own health at risk.

Thankfully, Ozturk should now be free, but it was not with any help from some of the people who built their careers claiming to support free speech on campus.

The Ozturk case may be just one example of many, but it was an important test case for whether this administration could get away with explicitly punishing even the most mild speech it doesn’t like through extrajudicial means. Today, at least, the answer was no — but the fact that they’ve been doing this to hundreds of people should terrify everyone who claims to care about constitutional rights.

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In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent the IRS from unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information for immigration enforcement purposes. Weaponizing government data vital to the functioning and funding of public goods and services by repurposing it for law enforcement and surveillance is an affront to a democratic society. In addition to the human rights abuses this data-sharing agreement empowers, this move threatens to erode trust in public institutions in ways that could bear consequences for decades.

Specifically, the government justifies the MOU by citing Executive Order 14161, which was issued on January 20, 2025. The Executive Order directs the heads of several agencies, including DHS, to identify and remove individuals unlawfully present in the country. Making several leaps, the MOU states that DHS has identified “numerous” individuals who are unlawfully present and have final orders of removal, and that each of these individuals is “under criminal investigation” for violation of federal law—namely, “failure to depart” the country under 8 U.S.C. § 1253(a)(1). The MOU uses this basis for the IRS disclosing to ICE taxpayer information that is otherwise confidential under the tax code.

In practice, this new data-sharing process works like this: ICE makes a request for an individual’s name and address, taxable periods for which the return information pertains, the federal criminal statute being investigated, and reasons why disclosure of this information is relevant to the criminal investigation. Once the IRS receives this request from ICE, the agency reviews it to determine whether it falls under an exception to the statutory authority requiring confidentiality and provides an explanation if the request cannot be processed.

But there are two big reasons why this MOU fails to pass muster.

First, as the NYU Tax Law Center identified:

“While the MOU references criminal investigations, DHS recently reportedly told IRS officials that ‘they would hope to use tax information to help deport as many as seven million people.’ That is far more people than the government could plausibly investigate, or who are plausibly subject to criminal immigration penalties, and suggests DHS’s actual reason for pursuing the tax data is to locate people for civil deportation, making any ‘criminal investigation’ a false pretext to get around the law.”

Second, it’s unclear how the IRS would verify the accuracy of ICE’s requests. Recent events have demonstrated that ICE’s deportation mandate trumps all else—with ICE obfuscating, ignoring, or outright lying about how they conduct their operations and who they target. While ICE has fueled narratives about deporting “criminals” to a notorious El Salvador prison, reports have repeatedly shown that most of those deported had no criminal histories. ICE has even arrested U.S. citizens based on erroneous information and blatant racial profiling. But ICE’s lack of accuracy isn’t new—in fact, a recent settlement in the case Gonzalez v. ICE bars ICE from relying on its network of erroneous databases to issue detainer requests. In that case, EFF filed an amicus brief identifying the dizzying array of ICE’s interconnected databases, many of which were out of date and incomplete and yet were still relied upon to deprive people of their liberty.

In the wake of the MOU’s signing, several top IRS officials have resigned. For decades, the agency expressed interest in only collecting tax revenue and promised to keep that information confidential. Undocumented immigrants were encouraged to file taxes, despite being unable to reap benefits like Social Security because of their status. Many did, often because any promise of a future pathway to legalizing their immigration status hinged on having fulfilled their tax obligations. Others did because as part of mixed-status families, they were able to claim certain tax benefits for their U.S. citizen children. The MOU weaponizes that trust and puts immigrants in an impossible situation—either fail to comply with tax law or risk facing deportation if their tax data ends up in ICE’s clutches.

This MOU is also sure to have a financial impact. In 2023, it was estimated that undocumented immigrants contributed $66 billion in federal and payroll taxes alone. Experts anticipate that due to the data-sharing agreement, fewer undocumented immigrants will file taxes, resulting in over $313 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years.

This move by the federal government not only betrays taxpayers and erodes vital trust in necessary civic institutions—it also reminds us of how little we have learned from U.S. history. After all, it was a piece of legislation passed in a time of emergency, the Second War Powers Act, that included the provision that allowed once-protected census data to assist in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. As the White House wrote in a report on big data in 2014, “At its core, public-sector use of big data heightens concerns about the balance of power between government and the individual. Once information about citizens is compiled for a defined purpose, the temptation to use it for other purposes can be considerable.” Rather than heeding this caution, this data-sharing agreement seeks to exploit it. This is yet another attempt by the current administration to sweep up and disclose large amounts of sensitive and confidential data. Courts must put a stop to these efforts to destroy data privacy, especially for vulnerable groups.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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Oh, so we’re still doing this, huh. Despite pretty much every effort of this type being rejected by courts as, shall we say, constitutionally-improbable, legislators continue to believe that cops should be protected from the people they serve by laws that allow them to violate the rights of the people they serve.

Here’s the latest effort. Fortunately, even if passed, its effect is limited to residents of Long Island, who are probably used to this sort of marginalization.

Nassau County lawmakers want to make it illegal to stand within 15 feet of cops and other emergency workers — but critics say the “buffer zone” would be unconstitutional.

Civilians who enter the “zone” for police, firefighters and other first responders during an emergency would be slapped with a misdemeanor and a $1,000 fine — with the possibility of up to a year behind bars, according to a new bill introduced by Republicans in the county Board of Legislators.

I appreciate this depth of reporting from the New York Post, the cop-friendliest publication in the city. It went so far as to note the bill was introduced by Republicans, which is helpful, if unnecessary. Of course it was introduced by Republicans. This is the sort of thing they do when they can’t get a book ban bill into committee.

It’s a hobby. It’s fun for hobbyists and annoying for everyone else. I may enjoy the sound of piercing guitar feedback in my music but I’m not asking for a minimum feedback-per-minute rate over government-funded airwaves. Nassau County Republicans may desire to free cops from the constant menace of being recorded while engaged in their public service efforts, but that’s the sort of kink that should stay within the walls of their domiciles, rather than splattered across the legislative docket like it’s actually a serious bit of lawmaking.

Supporters of the bill claim this will protect “emergency responders” from threats, harassment, and interference. And yet, supporters can’t explain why it’s always cops complaining about this sort of thing while their “emergency responder” brethren are always given the time, space, and opportunity to render their public services.

Three guesses and two of them wrong will lead you to the only conclusion: the cops like to work in the shadows where they can do they stuff they want to do without worrying about being caught doing it. The other responders actually just want to help people.

Besides, there’s already a law on the books that does what this law does — one that covers cops, even when they’re pretending to be “first responders.”

State law already punishes people who interfere with first responders with up to a year in jail, three years of probation, or a $1,000 fine.

So, despite the misuse of the phrase “emergency responder,” this bill is all about cops. It only wants cops to have a moving 15-foot halo in which to do their cop business, which generally isn’t being the first wave of emergency response. And because it’s a moving halo, all a cop has to do to generate a violation is move closer to the person they want to arrest for violating the law.

It’s a garbage proposal and hopefully it will die a quick death when offered up for a vote. But we know how politicians love cops, even when their love has been proven irrational time and time again. This is a special right just for law enforcement officers that’s had the usual “first responder” gloss applied to it. This sort of thing has rarely fooled courts. If it’s signed into law, there’s little chance this one will be the one that finally convinces a court cops should be considered more equal than others.

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By now most sentient people realize Trump’s tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that’s going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There’s bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump administration to go fuck itself.

But amusingly (?), the Trump administration still seems to think it can leverage the threat of tariffs to try and force companies into using Elon Musk’s Starlink service, according to the Washington Post:

“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.”

When asked by WAPO, the State Department just insisted they were being patriotic:

“Starlink is an American-made product that has been game-changing in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity. Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.”

A growing number of countries are trying to move away from Starlink because of Musk’s unhinged support of racism and conspiratorial fascism, and the fact they’re not sure they can trust Musk to be objective or reliable when it comes to military and political communications.

Germany and Ukraine, for example, are starting to more heavily use France’s Eutelsat fledgling low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite services after Musk restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by a fascist).

The U.S. certainly has a long history of promoting U.S. corporate interests globally. But even this level of naked cronyism is an extreme outlier. Everywhere you look, the Trump administration is looking to coddle Trump’s rich benefactor, who donated $277 million to ensure Trump’s election victory.

They’ve duct-taped Starlink terminals to the White House roof, creating all sorts of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities by bypassing government security protocols. They’ve installed Starlink at the FAA, in a bid to oust Verizon out of a $2 billion agency telecom contract. They’re rewriting the infrastructure bill grant program to drive as much taxpayer money as possible to Elon Musk.

The head of the Trump FCC, Brendan Carr, has been going around acting like a used car salesmen, telling countries that refuse to sign up for Starlink service that they’re effectively aiding communism. Carr’s been falsely claiming that countries either have the choice of Starlink or compromised Chinese satellite service, ignoring a growing array of looming French, European, Canadian, and Jeff Bezos’ alternatives.

This is, of course, just transparently corrupt effort to reward the authoritarian administration’s top donor. And while Starlink certainly has its uses (disasters, war, or the middle of nowhere rural America–assuming you can afford it), it’s ill-suited for this sort of “use everywhere, for everything” approach.

The technology has been criticized for harming astronomy research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics, launch logistics, and capacity constraints means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable and will get worse, and making it scale to meet real-world demand is many years away. There are real questions about whether the network is even permanently sustainable.

It’s not an improved solution for White House broadband access (unless you’re trying to hide administration communications from transparency requirements). It’s not a good upgrade over Verizon fiber or 5G at the FAA. And it’s a very problematic a downgrade from the kind of high-capacity, future-proof fiber deployments the infrastructure bill was funding.

This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink is being run by an overt white supremacist openly embracing authoritarianism, who is actively decimating the country’s science, arts, consumer protection, and public safety infrastructure for his own amusement. Musk may be enjoying the fruits of his investments into Trump now, but the longer-term stain and stink on his brands may prove difficult to wash off as the full scope of the administration’s damage begins to penetrate thicker electorate skulls.

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I’ve ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I’m confident you all don’t need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we’re probably going to lose our measles elimination status under Kennedy’s watch, Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer no matter how much he attempts to state otherwise, his advice for alternative therapies and/or that everyone should just get measles are bullshit, and he has a habit of victim-blaming those who get measles to boot.

It’s that last bit that’s most important here. The post I linked to is one in which Kennedy claims that malnutrition is to blame for serious outcomes from measles infections. But he’s said so much more on the topic, including in a March interview on Fox News.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy falsely said during a March Fox Nation interview.“We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regime.” Coupled with his disturbing statements on autism and long-standing belief that vaccinations cause the condition, Kennedy is circling a dark idea: that the value of one’s life can be tabulated in accordance with diagnoses and preexisting conditions. Since his appointment as secretary of health and human services (HHS), he has pursued a brutal vision of American health that several experts liken to a sort of eugenics. Kennedy has made it clear that certain deaths are acceptable or even preferable to a world where every child is vaccinated.

“There’s a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But these viruses can kill anybody, so that’s just wrong.” In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported. Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.

Now, here’s where I have to be very careful about stating that this is an opinion piece in which I will draw conclusions based on Kennedy’s words and actions, along with the analysis in that post from The Verge. Why? Because of this following statement.

Alluding to survival of the fittest on its own is already a problematic stance to take when we’re talking about a disease that has already resulted in two tiny little coffins made to fit for children. It’s already problematic because it’s also just fucking wrong; otherwise fit people have gotten severely sick and died from this outbreak. But if you couple the “survival of the fittest” stance with the “everyone should just get infected to gain immunity stance,” what you have is a combined policy that is tolerant of many unnecessary deaths and major illness in people whom Kennedy says are deficient in some way, and that is damned close to a policy of eugenics.

The underlying message of Kennedy’s campaign is that measles deaths are expected and admissible, because the people who don’t survive the disease were flawed anyway, says Laura Appleman, a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. Kennedy has talked up the “measles parties” of past decades — discounting that sometimes those parties proved deadly. “I think there’s a real subtext here saying that, ‘no, that’s ok, because in the old days the ones who survived were the strong ones,’” she adds.

Appleman has studied and written about the history of eugenics in the U.S., in the context of the criminal justice system, as well as that of public health and the covid-19 pandemic. The current rhetoric coming from Kennedy is an amplification of what’s long persisted in American culture and politics, she says. “I talk a lot about the long tail of eugenics [in the US]. And I think certainly, lately, the tail is not so hidden anymore.”

“He’s pretty much coming out and saying these things,” Appleman says. “Who deserves to live and who is it okay to not mourn? And this is from someone who runs the HHS. This is profoundly disturbing.”

And if you think that is a bridge too far, couple it further with Kennedy’s absolutely ignorant comments on autism, which he has falsely linked historically to vaccinations, particularly the MMR vaccine.

During the press conference, Kennedy asserted that autism “destroys” families and children. He said that children with autism, “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

“It doesn’t get much closer, that I can imagine, to ‘useless eaters’ than that,” says David Gorski, a surgeon and oncologist at Wayne State University and prolific health blogger, who cofounded the website Science-Based Medicine. “Useless eaters” was a phrase coined by German eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in a 1920 book that advocated for culling people with disabilities — which the Nazi regime would later use to justify mass murder.

This isn’t to suggest that Kennedy himself is a Nazi or is sympathetic to Nazi ideology, to be clear. But he’s adopting a position that is at least similar to the one the Nazis used to eliminate all kinds of people they claimed were poisoning the gene pool. And when you package all of this in with the current administration’s work to defund or otherwise deprioritize all kinds of research, help, and government programs for certain classes of people, well, the comparison begins to get unavoidable.

Additionally proposed and already enacted cuts within HHS include eliminating the national suicide hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth, ending programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, eliminating domestic HIV prevention efforts and research, and scrapping multiple measures for treating drug addiction and opioid overdoses, including grants for supplying emergency responders with Narcan.

Altogether, the changes fit cleanly with the idea that certain lives aren’t worth investing in or protecting, Fox says. “All of these things could be explained through that lens,” she notes — the lens of acceptable death. Refracted through the looking glass, “a lot of things come into focus,” and the road to an America made “healthy again” looks treacherous.

A healthcare policy in which death is an acceptable outcome. Might as well make that HHS’s motto.

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

Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation’s consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning — and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, according to a person familiar with the warning.

But days later, court records show, Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old software engineer who has been detailed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since early March, went ahead and participated in mass layoffs at the agency anyway, including the firings of the ethics lawyers who had warned him.

Experts said that Kliger’s actions, which ProPublica first reported on last week, constitute a conflict of interest that could violate federal criminal ethics laws. Such measures are designed to ensure that federal employees serve the public interest and don’t use their government power to enrich themselves. At the CFPB, which regulates companies that provide financial services, there are strict prohibitions on the investments that employees can maintain.

As ProPublica previously reported, Kliger owns as much as $365,000 worth of shares in Apple Inc., Tesla Inc. and two cryptocurrencies, according to his public financial report. Investments in those businesses are off limits to employees since the bureau can regulate them. A further review now shows that he’s invested in even more companies that are on the agency’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Kliger also disclosed owning as much as $350,000 worth of stock in Google parent Alphabet Inc., Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.

That means, at a maximum, Kliger could own as much as $715,000 of investments in seven barred companies, the records show.

Experts said a defanged and downsized consumer watchdog is unlikely to aggressively regulate those and other companies, freeing them of compliance costs and the risk associated with examinations and enforcement actions. That in turn could boost their stock prices and benefit investors like Kliger.

Don Fox, a former general counsel of the independent federal agency that advises executive branch workers on their ethical obligations, said that “this looks like a pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Richard Briffault, a government ethics expert at Columbia Law School, said the fact that Kliger was warned not to take any actions that could benefit him personally showed that “he’s on notice that this is a problem, as opposed to doing this by accident, or unintentionally.”

But Briffault said there would likely be no recourse for Kliger’s actions given that the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.” The New York Times reported last week that the section handling such cases is down to just a handful of lawyers.

From the outset, the Trump administration has been dogged by ethics controversies, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both the head of DOGE and a major federal contractor. Kliger’s case is “a nice illustration of how even on this micro level, they are violating the law, acting in ways that positively should cause people to not trust what they’re doing because there is no question that these corporations will benefit,” said Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kliger hasn’t returned a phone call or email seeking comment. The CFPB didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The White House didn’t answer questions about the warning, whether Kliger had sought ethics waivers or if he was in the process of divesting. Instead, a spokesperson provided ProPublica the same statement it previously had, writing that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson said that Kliger had until May 8 to divest.

The April 10 ethics warning came amid a heated legal battle over the future of the CFPB.

The following day, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., allowed the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, to implement mass firings after a lower court judge had stayed them. The court instructed Vought to conduct a “particularized assessment” of the bureau and to lay off only those employees who were deemed to be “unnecessary” to perform the agency’s statutorily required duties. In court filings, the government has said that review was done by the bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, and two other attorneys. In court papers, Paoletta has said the cuts are designed to achieve a “streamlined and right-sized Bureau.”

On April 13, Kliger was among a small team of DOGE and agency officials who received an email from Vought about the coming layoffs with the subject line “CFPB RIF Work” — government parlance for reduction in force, according to emails produced in court records. Vought’s email is redacted in the filing, but hours after he sent it, records show the bureau’s chief information officer wrote to Kliger and another DOGE aide regarding a “follow-up on Russ’s note below” and advised Kliger that he’d been granted access to agency computer systems that “should allow you to do what you need to do,” according to the email.

Layoff notices to more than 1,400 bureau employees went out on April 17.

In the preceding 36 hours, “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” to get the notices out and “calling them incompetent,” a federal employee on the layoff team using the pseudonym Alex Doe wrote in sworn declaration filed by lawyers for unionized employees trying to stop the administration from dismantling the bureau.

Among those laid off were the agency’s ethics officer and their “entire team” of lawyers, according to court records.

Those are the very employees who’d twice notified Kliger that he was required to identify any investments in companies on the bureau’s Prohibited Holdings list. The warning last month explicitly instructed him not to participate in any bureau activity that could benefit the businesses whose stocks he owned, said the person familiar with the notice, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity.

Last week, the appeals court reversed course and temporarily stopped the firings at the CFPB amid a flurry of legal challenges. Agency officials then notified the more than 1,400 fired employees who’d been told they were being let go that the pink slips were being rescinded.

The court battle over the CFPB’s future is ongoing, though, with oral arguments before appellate judges in Washington, D.C., scheduled for later this month.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move to bring a VPN operator to heel:

Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.

The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.

The issue here is that the Greek authorities chose to prosecute Windscribe’s founder, Yegor Sak, rather than making an official request to the company for information about the alleged breach of the Greek system by a Windscribe user. That approach not only ignored established procedures for investigating such cases, it put a great deal of pressure on Sak — doubtless intentionally — in an attempt to force him to hand over information. Fortunately, the charges against Sak were dismissed last month, as the Greek court “did not find sufficient evidence to implicate Sak or Windscribe in any wrongdoing” according to Hackread.

If Greece had made VPN owners personally responsible for everything their users did online it would have set a terrible precedent, even if it would not have been legally binding elsewhere. In the face of such risks, some VPNs would doubtless have shut down, while others would have been forced to monitor closely what their users were up to. The Greek case was particularly important, because it involved a VPN provider that does not log user activity, and was therefore incapable of providing any information about the alleged abuse, even if ordered to do so.

It’s great news that the charges against Sak were dropped, albeit after a two-year legal battle, probably thanks in part to Windscribe’s no-logging policy. But the fear has to be that more governments will bring in laws that compel VPN services to keep logs in order to allow their users to be tracked and later identified. This is already the case in countries with repressive Internet laws, for example Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, as that article on Comparitech notes, even in countries that nominally protect privacy, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, there are laws that could be used to force VPN services to log users or build in backdoors. It’s another reason why VPNs, useful as they are, should not be regarded as cast-iron protection against surreptitious surveillance by governments and others.

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The Intelligence Community just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly how badly Donald Trump and his ODNI chief Tulsi Gabbard misrepresented the laughable supposed “invasion” of the US by Venezuelan gangs. And they did it by responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in what may be record time — just six business days.

For context: FOIA requests typically languish for months or years. I’ve personally had requests sit for so long that agencies eventually asked if I still wanted the information. Year-long waits are standard operating procedure, despite the law requiring responses within 20 days.

So it’s notable the Office of the Director of National Intelligence somehow responded to a FOIA request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation in record time earlier this week. The request was sent on April 25th, and the response was delivered on May 5th.

The issue: the Intelligence Community’s report on whether or not (in this case, not) the Maduro government in Venezuela was directing Tren de Aragua actions in the US. As you’ll recall, part of Donald Trump’s “invocation” of the Alien Enemies Act, in order to rendition random Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp, he had to declare that Venezuela had “invaded” the US. This was obvious nonsense, but here’s what he claimed:

TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.

TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus.

In order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, he had to show that a foreign nation had invaded the US. It’s ridiculous on its own to claim that the Venezuelan gang has done much of anything, let alone “invade” the US. Indeed, it’s been shown that the narrative around TdA is mostly a fabrication from NYC Mayor Eric Adams who needed a scapegoat.

But, even if the gang were “invading” (which it is not), that’s still not a foreign nation. So Trump had to claim that Maduro was somehow controlling TdA. Yet, as the Washington Post revealed towards the end of April, there was an assessment by the intelligence community saying that was total bullshit, and there was no clear connection between Maduro and TdA.

This has been obvious all along, and even Trump-appointed judges are calling bullshit on the AEA invocation.

But hearing that the intel community had also rejected this notion was a big deal. Especially since the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, insisted the exact opposite, as pointed out by Marcy Wheeler. After the initial Washington Post report, Tulsi Gabbard put out a tweet screeching about the “illegal leak” that she claimed was “twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite” while simultaneously claiming that the ODNI “fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”

So, that leads us to the FOIA request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The standard would be to slow walk this reply. Such a request would normally take a year or so. And yet this response took… six business days. And revealed that contrary to Trump and Gabbard’s claims, the Intel Community could find no real evidence supporting Maduro controlling TdA.

The Intelligence Community’s assessment demolishes Trump’s invasion claims. The key findings:

While Venezuela creates a “permissive environment” for TdA operations and some low-level officials likely profit from its activities, the Maduro regime “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”The IC’s evidence shows Venezuela actually treats TdA as a threat, with law enforcement actively working against the gang. The report notes TdA’s “decentralized makeup” would make any coordinated relationship with the regime “logistically challenging.”Most damning: “most of the IC judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible.”

The FBI offers one minor caveat: some Venezuelan officials may help TdA members migrate and use them as proxies to “destabilize governments” in several countries. But even this assessment, based on earlier reporting, falls far short of Trump’s claims of state-directed invasion.

As the NY Times notes, this totally undermines the already flimsy claims that Trump had used to make his proclamation in order to rendition people without due process.

The lightning-fast FOIA response speaks volumes about the Intelligence Community’s stance. It’s almost as if they’re not really thrilled with Gabbard and Trump lying about all this. And, as Wheeler separately notes, this also undermines Gabbard’s separate hysterical claims about the supposed “damage” of these “leaks.”

And at a time when Trump’s Administration is falling further behind on FOIA requests, FOPF got near immediate response for its FOIA showing that even if any material in the NYT and WaPo stories was classified, it has since been publicly released. That kind of response only happens when people within an agency want something to be released. And in this case, it means that Tulsi has not sufficiently commandeered ODNI to prevent FOIA professionals to carry out a classification review and release information publicly.

It likely means that the people who leaked these debunkings in the first place have found a way to undercut claims that they committed a crime by doing so. At the very least that will make it hard for the FBI to argue this leak is of sufficient seriousness to obtain warrants and subpoenas targeting journalists. It may even make it impossible for the FBI to claim a crime was committed in the first place, because the FBI will have to prove that the NYT and WaPo stories relied on more than made it into this memo.

While Gabbard will likely try to prevent such rapid responses in the future, this instance shows that at least some parts of the intelligence apparatus are still capable of using transparency to fight disinformation – even when it comes from their own leadership.

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Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself.

Now that he’s back in office, he’s back to pretending he cares about law and order. His recent executive order echoes one issued during his first term: one that demands people start respecting cops (even if he and his followers won’t during insurrections) and suggests there’s a police state ahead of us because they nation can’t be saved without trampling all of our rights.

But it’s not just about cops or law and order demagoguery. What Trump really wants is zero accountability across the board. That’s why his DOJ has revamped its Civil Rights division to protect only the rights Trump actually cares about. Say goodbye to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Say hello to protecting the Second Amendment and shutting down anything the administration thinks might protect the rights of anyone but the whitest, male-est US citizens.

The Marshall Project has published a round-up of the DOJ’s actions during Trump’s ignominious return to the ultimate position of power: Leader of the Free World. To be sure, Trump doesn’t actually want a “free world” any more than he wants free and fair elections. What he does want is the erasure of everything he doesn’t like, even if it means doing considerable amount of damage to the country he claims to be making great again.

The good news is… well, I guess there’s not really any of that.

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi cancelled hundreds of Department of Justice grants centered on crime prevention to shift its focus toward illegal drug enforcement and the eradication of DEI policies. On Monday, the president signed executive orders to limit police reform and rescind consent decrees that hold police agencies accountable. And recent reporting details how the department’s Office of Civil Rights is transitioning from enforcing civil rights laws to bringing cases against universities and cities passing liberal policies, leading hundreds of attorneys to resign in protest and effectively gutting the division.

If Trump were an unknown quantity, one might suspect he was trying to get fired or, possibly, take down the government from the inside. But Trump loves Big Government architecture and its insular qualities. That’s why he’s converted its sharper edges to weapons to be deployed against all the stuff he hates.

His blind thrashing at anything “woke” is just brain stem responses to stimuli, at least as far as Trump himself is concerned. The bigger problem is that blindly lashing out has resulted in the erasure of American history, at least in terms of women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ citizens. This is by design, but probably not because Trump is such a savvy operator. It’s collateral damage, but damage his supporters are not only willing to embrace, but leverage.

The first line of the quoted paragraph, however, highlights the hypocrisy that the Trump Administration seems to believe is one of its virtues. This president has spent a considerable amount of time claiming this country is constantly under attack by violent criminals. Yet, when given the chance, he has chosen to strip funds from crime prevention programs. Worse, he stripped federal funds meant to help crime victims, as well as police personnel actively engaged in providing this assistance.

The U.S. Justice Department is terminating $811 million in grants, including some impacting victim service programs ranging from trauma centers and sign language interpretation for domestic violence victims to police training, according to internal documents and two sources.

Every cut is designed to favor cops, eliminate accountability, eradicate transparency, and allow people with access to power to abuse it.

Say goodbye to prison rape reporting efforts because Trump doesn’t care about incarcerated people and data shows a sizable percentage of this rape is committed by prison staffers. Funding for gun violence studies has also been cut off.

And, while demanding the DOJ do better at tracking national crime rates, the administration has decided criminals who happen to wear cop uniforms shouldn’t be subject to the same sort of background checks regular people endure pretty much any time they go looking for a new job.

In 2022, the Biden administration created the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a central place for police departments to search for information about federal law enforcement officers with criminal convictions and misconduct violations. Trump decommissioned the database on his first day in office.

What’s truly insane is that this wasn’t even a public-facing database, so it wasn’t as though journalists and activists were using this to propel an anti-cop narrative. This was solely for use by federal and local law enforcement agencies to ensure they weren’t just hiring troublemakers who’d already been shit-canned for violating rights or engaging in egregious misconduct. Now, these agencies are going into the hiring process blind. And while many might be fine with that, this gives the worst agencies that are willing to hire the worst ex-cops all the plausible deniability they’ll need to respond to criticism of their hiring processes.

This is the America Trump wants and one his fans are willing to support, right up until they feel the need to bash a cop’s head in with a fire extinguisher or whatever. And while it may work for them (until it doesn’t), the rest of us are going to be forced to live with it and its consequences for years, if not decades, to come.

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We’ve documented for decades how U.S. telecom is an uncompetitive mess dominated by politically powerful telecom monopolies that see no competition and effectively own Congress. As a result, the U.S. telecom and broadband market is an uncompetitive mess, with Americans still seeing higher prices, slower speeds, spottier access, and worse customer service than in many developed nations.

Generally, U.S. regulators are too captured to even acknowledge there’s a problem. When they do propose a solution, it either involves throwing money at the problem, or developing performative half-measures that don’t take aim at the real problem: monopoly power and the corruption that protects it.

With the Trump administration butchering whatever’s left of federal consumer protection and telecom oversight, states are taking a bigger role in telecom policy. That includes New York State, which, during peak COVID, passed a law mandating that big telecom companies provide low-income state residents with affordable broadband (25 Mbps broadband for $15 a month, or 200 Mbps for $25 a month).

That’s not a huge ask for regional telecom giants that routinely overbill for service.

Telecom giants didn’t much like that, though their legal efforts to kill the law fell short recently when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge. Now California is exploring its own, similar, law (AB353), which would require giant telecoms like Comcast and AT&T provide low-income state residents 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up broadband for $15 a month.

“Broadband affordability is not an urban versus rural issue, nor does it have to be a partisan issue. We all should agree that broadband is an essential service that must be affordable for all,” California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner said of the law.

The proposal comes after Republicans killed a federal FCC program that provided a $30 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans. The Republicans in question claimed they killed the popular program to save money, but a follow up study showed that the program more than paid for itself (by a factor of four) because it helped expand access to remote healthcare, employment, and education.

This is, to be clear, a nightmare if you’re a lumbering giant like AT&T and Comcast, which have carved out lucrative regional monopolies, then glommed onto the federal tit as unaccountable domestic surveillance buddies. They’ve long insisted that any oversight of their business practices is “radical extremism,” and I suspect their lobbyists are extremely hard at work trying to scuttle California’s plan.

But this is, again, a byproduct of these companies’ own making. They’ve worked relentlessly for decades to not only crush regional broadband competition, but to lobotomize federal government oversight. They’re finally on the cusp of achieving this generational victory thanks to Donald Trump, whose government believes that affordable, equitably-deployed fiber optic broadband is “woke.”

Now the only thing that stands between them and unchecked broadband price gouging and predation are a handful of states that occasionally try (with various degrees of success) to do the right thing. And the hundreds of local municipalities that are building their own (usually better, faster, and cheaper) community-owned fiber networks.

I think you’ll find this theme of localism becoming a steady constant drumbeat in the months and years to come. As the corrupt federal kakistocracy fails around us, state and local fights become exponentially more important and heated.

California, despite its well documented flaws on policy, has actually been doing a lot of interesting stuff on broadband. Like using billions in ARPA (COVID relief) bill funding to effectively build a massive new middle-mile fiber network, and fuel a whole bunch of new fiber broadband deployments to neighborhoods long neglected by shitty regional monopolies.

They’re actually targeting the real problem: consolidated monopoly power. That’s being layered with AB353, which just passed the state’s Assembly Communications and Conveyance Committee by a vote of 7 to 2. Combined with a huge looming infusion of federal infrastructure bill broadband grants (assuming they don’t all get siphoned off by Elon Musk, AT&T, and Comcast), and there’s some actual potential for reform here, despite the insanity and ignorance going on at the federal level.

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It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it’s simply a fact that there is a massive and historical headwind they’re facing. For a long, long time these companies essentially zeroed out any concern about preserving their work in favor of copyright enforcement coupled with a disinterest in their side of the copyright equation.

We’ve already seen how the ability to legitimately buy some games, such as No One Lives Forever, has been blocked for over a decade over a jumble of potential intellectual property concerns. But the story of the source code for two absolute classic games, Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and how it almost became completely lost in the ether is a great example of the interest deficit in preservation going back years.

In April, Fallout creator Tim Cain explained that when he left Interplay in 1998 he was ordered to destroy any game assets or code he was holding onto that didn’t belong to him. This included the source code for the OG Fallout. Cain complied, which made it awkward when Interplay called a few years later asking if he had Fallout’s source code still. He thought it was a trap; turns out, Interplay had actually lost the code for it and Fallout 2. And Cain had assumed that due to Interplay’s “destroy it all” policy, the source code for the old RPGs were lost and destroyed. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

On May 5, Videogamer reported that it had heard from Interplay founder and game designer Rebecca Heineman that she had the source code for both Fallout and its sequel, as well as many other Interplay classics. She started preserving every Interplay game after working on the studio’s 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection and realizing how poorly the company’s past work was being saved for the future.

As Kotaku goes on to note, Heineman received the same order to destroy any copies of any source code she may have made or face litigation as well. She simply chose to ignore that demand. No lawsuit was ever filed and Heineman has indicated she kept her copies because she believed any lawsuit from Interplay would be doomed to fail.

And it’s a damned good thing she did. It appears hers is the only copy of the source code for both of these games. And it should cause all of us who care about game preservation to shiver to our spine that the same company that demanded all copies of source code by deleted couldn’t be bothered to secure the master copy itself. What if Heineman had followed orders like a good soldier? The code would simply be lost to the world, gone forever.

And before anyone thinks otherwise, no, Heineman isn’t some bad actor simply looking to defy all the rules without any deference to corporate interests.

As for why Heineman hasn’t released the code to the internet, she says that could only happen with permission from Bethesda (now the owners of Fallout) as they are still selling Fallout and Fallout 2 today.

“I need expressed permission to release, despite the source code being pretty much obsolete,” said Heineman. “I [haven’t] gotten around to asking them. They are on my list.” She is a busy woman, working on bringing back MacPlay and porting more games to Mac. But hopefully, when she does ask, Bethesda is cool with her sharing these important pieces of game history online.

Yes, hopefully. Otherwise we may be back at this all over again in the future.

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Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.

At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.

A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the $7-$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists have a hard time getting their heads around).

When the program was killed, 23 million Americans suddenly faced significantly higher broadband bills. In some states, community broadband networks have been filling the void. Like in Longmont, Colorado, where the local community-owned Nextlight broadband network has been offering low-income families dirt cheap broadband access.

Because it’s actually interested in serving the community instead of exploiting it, Nextlight’s broadband speeds and pricing are already much cheaper than you’d see from a regional monopoly like Comcast or AT&T. But their low-income plans are even cheaper, with the town offering symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband for $15 a month, and symmetrical gigabit broadband for $45 a month:

According to Longmont officials, the low-income discounts applied to their community-owned broadband network (which just reached 28,000 users total) now reach 14 percent more low-income locals than the FCC’s ACP did:

“The IAP provides qualified households a $25 a month discount. 906 NextLight customers received the federal discount before the ACP ran out of funds. There are currently 1,034 customers taking advantage of the IAP discount.”

That a town built its own broadband network and offers most residents super fast, very cheap fiber access is a pretty cool thing that simply… doesn’t get the kind of policy or press attention it deserves. It’s an interesting example of broadband being treated as an important utility and not exclusively a profit-seeking business, and it’s an example of government directly and efficiently working for the people. And a bipartisan coalition of people being supportive and generally happy about it!

I think it’s also a useful example of the potential, highly localized future we could build if the federal government is going to continue to be too insane, incompetent, and corrupt to function.

When Republicans killed the program the press had a hard time actively blaming Republicans. Most articles just blamed a vague “congressional refusal to fund the program.” It’s part of a toxic, propaganda-laden modern media environment where modern Republicans rarely have agency or are required to take real ownership of their own unpopular policies that harm very real people.

It’s worth remembering that Republicans also tried to ban community broadband during the height of COVID, just when these networks were demonstrating their effectiveness. They didn’t do this out of any functional value system; they did it to protect shitty regional telecom monopolies from better, cheaper, faster service with better, more local customer support.

It’s not a panacea (building these kinds of networks can be complicated, expensive, and tricky to manage), but this model of locally-owned fiber networks (especially when they’re open access) often genuinely works to boost broadband quality and lower prices. It’s the kind of government-driven “abundance” guys like Ezra Klein claim to be clamoring for, yet the efforts still aren’t getting the attention they deserve in press and policy circles.

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Once again, the Texas legislature is coming after the most common method of safe and effective abortion today—medication abortion.

Senate Bill (S.B.) 2880* seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills—but it doesn’t stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill tries to keep people from learning about abortion drugs, or even knowing that they exist.

If passed, S.B. 2880 would make it illegal to “provide information” on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug. If you exchange e-mails or have an online chat about seeking an abortion, you could violate the bill. If you create a website that shares information about legal abortion services in other states, you could violate the bill. Even your social media posts could put you at risk.

On top of going after online speakers who create and post content themselves, the bill also targets social media platforms, websites, email services, messaging apps, and any other “interactive computer service” simply for hosting or making that content available.

In other words, Texas legislators not only want to make sure no one can start a discussion on these topics, they also want to make sure no one can find one. The goal is to wipe this information from the internet altogether. That creates glaring free-speech issues with this bill and, if passed, the consequences would be dire.

The bill is carefully designed to scare people into silence.

First, S.B. 2880 empowers average citizens to sue anyone that violates the law. An “interactive computer service” can also be sued if it “allows residents of [Texas] to access information or material that aids, abets, assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.”

So, similar to Texas Senate Bill 8, the bill encourages anyone to file lawsuits against those who merely speak about or provide access to certain information. This is intended to, and will, chill free speech. The looming threat of litigation can be used to silence those who seek to give women truthful information about their reproductive options—potentially putting their health or lives in danger.

Second, S.B. 2880 encourages online intermediaries to take down abortion-related content. For example, if sued under the law, a defendant platform can escape liability by showing that, once discovered, they promptly “block[ed] access to any information . . . that assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.”

The bill also grants them “absolute and nonwaivable immunity” against claims arising from takedowns, denials of service, or any other “action taken to restrict access to or availability of [this] information.” In other words, if someone sues a social media platform or internet service provider for censorship, they are well-shielded from facing consequences. This further tips the scales in favor of blocking more websites, posts, and users.

In three different provisions of the 43-page bill, the drafters go out of their way to assure us that S.B. 2880 should not be construed to prohibit speech or conduct that’s protected by the First Amendment. But simply stating that the law does not restrict free speech does not make it so. The obvious goal of this bill is to restrict access to information about abortion medications online. It’s hard to imagine what claims could be brought under such a bill that don’t implicate our free speech rights.

The bill’s imposition of civil and criminal liability also conflicts with a federal law that protects online intermediaries’ ability to host user-generated speech, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), including speech about abortion medication. Although the bill explicitly states that it does not conflict with Section 230, that assurance remains meaningful only so long as Section 230’s protections remain robust. But Congress is currently considering revisions—or even a full repeal of Section 230. Any weakening of Section 230 will create more space for those empowered by this bill to use the courts to pressure intermediaries/platforms to remove information about abortion medication.

Whenever the government tries to restrict our ability to access information, our First Amendment rights are threatened. This is exactly what Texas lawmakers are trying to do with S.B. 2880. Anyone who cares about free speech—regardless of how they feel about reproductive care—should urge lawmakers to oppose this bill and others like it.

*H.B. 5510is the identical House version of S.B. 2880.

Originally published to the EFF Deeplinks blog.

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Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party’s Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach — proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless.

Funny thing about that: it turned out the IRS was actually investigating both conservative AND progressive groups equally. But never mind that — the principle was clear. Using the IRS to target organizations based on their viewpoints was an unconscionable abuse of power that undermined the very foundations of our system.

It should never, ever be allowed to happen.

Unless, apparently, you’re Donald Trump and you just… declare you’re going to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. Because you feel like it.

There’s some history here: if you want to set up a non-profit to help sick puppies, you set up a 501(c)(3) and you need to file detailed public reports and reveal all your donors. But if you want to set up a “social welfare” group that funnels unlimited dark money into political campaigns? Well, that’s what 501(c)(4)s are for. Sure, there are theoretical limits on their political activities. But in practice, after Citizens United, these groups became a favorite tool for moving vast sums of money through the political system while keeping donors anonymous. This isn’t all (c)(4)s, mind you, but after Citizens United, the market got flooded with new (c)(4)s whose purpose was almost certainly dark money laundering.

Thus, the IRS had a legitimate question on its hands: were these actually “social welfare” organizations, or just vehicles for campaign finance?

They began investigating whether or not they violated the laws that required them to (1) be for “social welfare” and (2) not engaged in excessive political activity. In dealing with the flood of new applications, some lower level employees started looking for keywords in reviewing applications. Some of those keywords were certainly coded to be about right-leaning organizations.

In the end, though, a non-partisan investigation found that the IRS equally targeted conservative and progressive startup non-profits during this time. It’s just that the GOP (as it’s been known to do) only talked about and focused on the searches that impacted conservative groups. There was a criminal investigation by the DOJ into Lerner, which closed with no charges being filed.

You would think that the Republicans who raised such a shitstorm about all that for years on end might have something to say about Donald Trump doing the same thing but actually doing it, and doing it out loud while making it entirely clear that it’s to punish organizations that are pushing back on his dictatorial authoritarianism?

And it’s not just Harvard: he’s repeatedly suggested that he’s going to remove the tax-exempt status of other groups that oppose him as well.

President Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up his threats to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of groups and colleges he disagrees with, calling out a prominent organization that’s fighting some of his actions in court.

Trump told reporters “we’re looking at” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit watchdog group that has launched litigation against his executive actions and conducted investigations into what it alleges are his conflicts of interest.

“The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things,” Trump said.

Again, federal law prohibits this (in theory). 26 USC 7217 says that the executive branch cannot influence IRS investigations. One problem, though, is that thanks to the Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling in Trump v. United States, that law does not apply to Donald Trump as President, so long as he can make some claim to having done these things as part of his official responsibilities. It might not protect others within the administration, though.

Let’s parse this carefully:

The IRS under Obama looked for keywords to identify potentially illegal political activityRepublicans called this an unprecedented abuse of powerTrump is now explicitly saying he’ll strip tax-exempt status from groups that criticize him (not for actually violating the law)And thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, the law prohibiting presidential interference with the IRS doesn’t even apply to him

So to recap: What the GOP spent years claiming Obama did (but didn’t actually do) is exactly what Trump is proudly announcing he’ll do. Except, unlike in the Obama administration which was cleared of any wrong doing, Trump appears to be actually quite directly violating the law. But, also unlike Obama, Trump actually has legal cover to do it thanks to John Roberts.

The truly wild thing here isn’t just the hypocrisy — though that’s breathtaking enough. It’s the complete inversion of reality: Some questionable keyword filtering by low-level IRS employees (applied to both conservative and progressive groups) triggered years of congressional investigations and demands for criminal prosecution. But when Trump explicitly announces plans to weaponize the IRS against his critics? Just another Thursday.

We’ve moved beyond simple double standards into a world where the same people who claimed that imperfect bureaucratic procedures were an existential threat to democracy are now actively cheering as their leader promises to do what they falsely accused Obama’s IRS of doing — but this time with explicit political targeting and presidential blessing.

Yes, that’s true of so much these days, but we should at least document these examples, for when this fog of bullshit and nonsense finally lifts and people ask “how did we get here?”

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This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine “if it bleeds, it leads” media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of “others.”

Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for US citizens. And it makes sense. Any criminal act committed by a migrant — even one here legally — can provide grounds for deportation. US citizens, however, don’t need to worry about that. All they have to worry about is this Leader of the Free World’s ranking on the incarcerations-per-capita leader boards — one that puts a whole lot of autocratic nations to shame.

Sure, other nations might use homosexuality, being female, blasphemy, or simply adhering to the “wrong” religion as an excuse to lock up people en masse. Our kink happens to be drugs, which doesn’t make us any better than our rivals. In fact, it might make us worse because we’re not comfortable openly proclaiming we’re locking up minorities just because they’re minorities.

Anyway, back to the bullshit about immigrants being innately criminal. It’s never been true. And it’s still just as false, even if the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been amplified considerably during the Trump years. Ilya Somin directs us to the latest report on migrant crime rates compiled by the Cato Institute. What the report [PDF] says will come as no surprise to anyone — not even those who continue to deliberately ignore this evidence.

Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….

Here’s more of the data, which the Cato Institute agrees is somewhat stymied by the fact that the government generally doesn’t do much to track the residency status of arrestees unless it serves their political purpose. For most of the last decade, though, pushing the “immigrants are criminals” narrative has been at the forefront of immigration discussions, so it makes sense there might be more of this specific data recently. Even so, the data contradicts the narrative.

An estimated 1,617,197 native-born Americans, 67,813 illegal immigrants, and 58,515 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2023. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,221 per 100,000; 613 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants; and 319 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2022. […] If native-born Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as illegal immigrants, about 806,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated. Conversely, if natives were incarcerated at the same rate as legal immigrants, about 1.2 million fewer native-born Americans would be incarcerated.

Look at that! A solution to jail overcrowding. Just allow more immigration! And if you think crime rates are still too high, this will do the trick as well, as Somin notes in his post:

In sum, immigration – including the illegal kind – is actually reducing our crime rate, not raising it.

Cato even has an answer for the racists who continue to believe the only reason US citizens commit more crimes than immigrants is because the US is home to a lot of Black people. Please read through this entire quote because the last sentence is worth the wait.

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….

Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

LOL. It’s truly a pleasure to watch bigots be informed that compounding their bigotry doesn’t suddenly make them right. It only makes them as wrong as they’ve always been, give or take a few percentage points.

Not that this matters to the bigots. They’ll continue to insist the facts aren’t the facts and their gut feelings about immigrants and non-white US citizens are what really matters. And they definitely love a government similarly compelled by ignorance but with the power to make their delusions a reality.

For the rest of us, this simply says what we’ve always known. Immigrants are a positive addition to this nation and have always been. That they’ve managed to survive wave after wave of hatred and government infliction of misery shows how much they’re willing to sacrifice just to give their offspring a better shot at living a meaningful life.

Those of us born in the US are just lucky to be here. We didn’t have to do anything and we’re still treated like we’ve done the most to secure what is now considered to be an exalted status. It’s not that the immigrants are trying to steal a nation from us. It’s that we’re too complacent to fully appreciate the freedoms we have. And under this administration, complacency is going to result in a nation that doesn’t provide hope for anyone, no matter where they’re from.

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This is it: we’re about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven’t yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as you want. If you’re already a backer, you can fill out this form to let us know you want additional copies. Either way, today is the last day that we’re accepting orders, so if you want to guarantee that you’ll get the game, this is your last chance.

We have no plans to produce more copies of the game after this. There’s a small chance that we’ll have some leftovers after fulfilling everyone’s orders, in which case we might make them available at some point, but we can’t make any promises.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this Kickstarter a success. We’re confident this is a game you’re going to love playing, and we can’t wait to get it into your hands. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates for more information as production proceeds, and for now here’s one more sneak peek at some cards from our sample copy:

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As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don’t like public broadcasting. Because they don’t like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck!

That’s at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on public broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being undermined. But it’s a major ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots all the same.

Clearly incapable of getting the votes needed to take action in Congress, Trump signed an executive order on May 1 calling for an end of taxpayer funding of U.S. public broadcasting. The claim is that both PBS and NPR exhibit a “left wing bias”:

“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.  The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

Except the “maximum extend allowed by law” isn’t very much. NPR and PBS are funded by CPB through 2027, and it requires an act of Congress to change that. So the EO tries to tap dance around the law by demanding the CPB rewrite grant eligibility rules by June 30 to ban funding for either NPR or PBS. This is, CPB President Patricia Harrison tells Ars Technica, very clearly illegal:

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Not only is the U.S. right wing starving public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.

Trump’s efforts to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media haven’t fared particularly well in the courts, and it’s likely courts will intervene here as well.

This is all an extension of decades of right wing claims that any criticism of right wing ideology has a “left wing bias” and is to be immediately discredited. One irony is that NPR’s coverage (like CBS, WAPO, the LA Times, and countless others) has folded to this bullying by being friendlier to Republicans than ever, which actively helped normalize authoritarianism this last election season. And they are still being bullied.

The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. So even calling this “public funding” is generous (especially in comparison to public media funding in Europe), and yet they’re still being bullied.

That’s because this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled mush terrified of having too pointed a relationship with the truth.

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You may have heard a mantra that is becoming more popular these days thanks to a certain presidential administration operating as a language-destroyer. It goes: “Every accusation is a confession.” The idea behind it is that when someone goes all firebrand accusing others of a thing, you often find the firebrand guilty of that very same thing. Think about all the family values politicians who end up being accused of all manner of infidelity, for example.

You find this in aggressors around intellectual property as well, with some of the most staunch defenders of their own IP rights being accused and/or guilty of violating the IP rights of others. You may recall how Crumbl, a national chain of cookie shops, aggressively sued another cookie shop over unprotectable trademark elements, such as how snugly the cookies fit in a box, or the fact that there were “whimsical drawings” on the packaging. That suit ended in a settlement with Crumbl getting some of the packaging changes it wanted, among other things. Crumbl was a bigger entity with a larger legal war chest to wield, so the trademark bullying worked.

But now the trademark bully has found itself in an eight-figure copyright lawsuit as a result of having used copyrighted music in all kinds of social media promotions.

Warner Music Group, which includes record labels like Atlantic Records and Bad Boy Records, is suing the cookie giant for copyright.

As obtained byVital Law, the complaint says that the cookie brand “has achieved its success by infringing Plaintiffs’ (Warner Music Group, etc.) copyrighted sound recordings and musical compositions on a massive scale in promotional content posted on social media platforms.”

The suit says that Crumbl used at least 159 popular songs from artists represented by Warner Music Group, including Taylor Swift, BTS, Beyoncé, and Ariana Grande. According to the complaint, Warner Music Group is asking for “$150,000 with respect to each work infringed,” which brings the total request to nearly $24 million.

You can read the complaint for yourself below, but the allegations within it are detailed, the complaint includes specific screenshot examples, and it even goes into details as to how these videos came to be. Aggressive copyright enforcement, rather than companies like WMG seeing the value to their own catalogue that this sort of thing represents, is not something I’m in favor of. However, this complaint reads very, very solid from the standpoint of the law.

Importantly, not all, or perhaps not even most, of the infringing videos were directly created by Crumbl staff. Instead, the suit details out how Crumbl engaged in a partnership campaign with social media influencers to create those videos, curated them, and then reposted or otherwise promoted the videos that included the infringing music.

Crumbl creates and posts its own promotional content on social media. It also partners with “influencers”—third parties to whom Crumbl provides “perks and rewards,”3 including the prospect of “paid initiatives,”4 in exchange for promoting Crumbl. By working with popular influencers, Crumbl draws each of these influencers’ followers to Crumbl’s social media pages and to the Crumbl Videos. Crumbl recruits these individuals—including, upon information and belief, those featured in the Crumbl Videos—to “collaborate” with Crumbl, whereby participants are rewarded for promoting Crumbl products. See https://crumblcookies.com/collaborate. Upon information and belief, Crumbl actively reviews, selects, reproduces and reposts selected influencer videos on Crumbl’s own social media pages.

There are all kinds of other problems with these influencer videos, including some of them denoting the copyrighted music as “original sounds/recordings”, as well as at least some instances of those influencers not disclosing, as required, that there is a paid relationship between them and Crumbl. But for the purposes of this suit, the main point here is that, unless rebutted by Crumbl, the company takes an active role in the curation and approval of these videos that supposedly include copyright-covered works, rather than a purely passive intermediary. And that matters under copyright law.

This one seems pretty cut and dry. Either WMG has its facts wrong in a massive, massive way, or the claim of copyright infringement is legit.

What’s most interesting is how, yet again, we have the IP bully ending up as the IP infringer.

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There will never be enough casual evil with this administration. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the extrajudicial renditioning of Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in [checks notes] El Salvador.

Claiming that the mere presence of foreign gang members is an act of war has allowed the DHS, CBP, and ICE to immediately purge people from the United States, even if some of those expelled are actual US citizens. Upgrading his pretend border “crisis” to a “war” has opened up the Trump playbook. While courts try in vain to keep up with daily developments, the administration continues to eject people from this country at an alarming pace.

The latest twist is declaring parts of the homeland to be “military zones.” Last month, the Overton Window was opened, with the Trump Administration declaring a 60-foot wide strip of land on the New Mexico-Mexico border to be a “military zone.”

When that resulted in minimal comment/lawsuits/national outrage, the Administration decided to go large, as Uriel Garcia reports for The Texas Tribune:

The Pentagon has created a second military zone in the El Paso area that U.S. soldiers will patrol as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on people crossing the southern border illegally, even as crossings are at a historic low.

In a statement Thursday, the military’s Northern Command said the latest military zone will be part of the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that the area stretches about 53 miles east to the border community of Fort Hancock, according to Maj. Geoffrey Carmichael, spokesman for the Joint Task Force – Southern Border.

So, what does this declaration mean? First, it adds US military personnel to the force policing the southern border in this area, which is definitely a police state-ish move — which also happens to be not only the sort of thing Trump likes, but something he’s openly advocating for.

Second, it means that anyone — US citizens included — are subject to criminal charges if they enter this “military zone.” That’s something that’s impossible to avoid doing, since it covers border crossings (where legal border crossings take place) as well as areas US citizens have historically been allowed to access.

Broad claims about “border invasions” and lies about Venezeulan government-backed gang activity are the only things offered in support of these military zones and Trump’s Alien Enemies Act abuses. However, there’s no “invasion” at the border, as anyone willing to merely look at the data can attest:

In March, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported encountering 1,627 migrants in the El Paso sector, which includes all of New Mexico’s border as well as El Paso and Hudspeth counties in West Texas. That’s an 87% decrease from August 2024, when the downward trend began.

There’s nothing happening here, which makes the administration’s claims even more specious than they always have been. And remember what I said about this law forbidding US citizens from entering the recently declared “military zones?” Don’t worry too much about that, white folks. Trump never meant for it to be used against you.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico says a total of 82 people have been charged through Thursday for unauthorized entry into the military’s new buffer zone along the border with Mexico.

[…]

Migrants have been arrested on charges of unlawful entry of military property since at least April 24 – though technically anyone, including U.S. citizens, could face sanctions.

It’s all about the hate. It has nothing to do with national security, border security, invasions, acts of war, or even just bigots being bigots. This is performance art from a guy who can’t handle finger paints who has decided being a bully with the world’s largest bullhorn is what will finally force even those who hate him to bend a knee. The shift towards a police state continues. And at some point, it will no longer just be minorities who need to fear what this country is becoming.

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If you feel this nation is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men, you probably should be scared shitless that the clowns are running the circus. Of course, those backing Trump aren’t truly concerned about any of this, not even those running his agencies and/or repeating the lie that the mere existence of foreign people on our soil is an act of war.

Area drunk/The War Room Is Now The Green Room Defense Department head Pete Hegseth is probably the tip of the iceberg, but his DM indiscretions are not solely his own. When a journalist got added to a war plans Signal chatroom, there was cause to be concerned, especially once one was done laughing. When Hegseth was so desperate for personal interaction, he decided to share war plans with his wife and members of his family, there was even more reason to be concerned, especially when the Trump Administration decided to stand by its man, even when that man routinely appeared to be incapable of standing on his own.

America is feeling less like a nation and more like a frat house whose occupants are so self-deluded they think they’re capable of handling anything more than tapping a fresh keg. Perhaps that’s why we’re being subjected to nationwide hazing, which appears to take the form of being shipped off to a foreign maximum security prison for the rest of whatever.

The fun never stops. Top level NATSEC folks are being stupid and not very secure on main, exposing a bunch of stuff to journalists these department heads are fully aware are present. Here’s some more stupidity from a Trump official, which 404Media’s Joseph Cox has the kindness to say was an accidental revelation:

Mike Waltz, who was until Thursday U.S. National Security Advisor, has inadvertently revealed he is using an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages, raising questions about what classification of information officials are discussing on the app and how that data is being secured, 404 Media has found.

On Thursday Reuters published a photograph of Waltz checking his mobile phone during a cabinet meeting held by Donald Trump. The screen appears to show messages from various top level government officials, including JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Marco Rubio.

“Inadvertently” might be true, but “stupidly” is far more accurate. I mean, we all had a good laugh when Kanye West scored an audience with Trump during his last presidential term and revealed his device security habits were just as solid as his personal judgment skills.

For what it’s worth, Waltz is no longer the nation’s national security advisor. Instead, he being turfed to UN Ambassador duty, which pretty much just means running interference for whatever new war-like expansionist plan Trump happens to announce during upcoming press conferences and media appearances.

Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet, though. It appears the remarkably under-qualified Marco Rubio will not only be failing to competently run the State Department, but he’ll also be required to collect and collate national security briefings the president will never read.

Say what you will about Signal, but this isn’t a Signal problem. It’s a Hegseth-Trump-Waltz-etc. problem. Signal is secure. But that security means nothing when deployed by extremely stupid people. Former NSC advisor Waltz is stupider than most, not only for logging in while in camera range of journalists, but for using a third-party app that deliberately undermines the privacy protections offered to users by Signal.

The Reuters photo shows Waltz’s phone asking him to input his “TM SGNL” pin. This is not part of Signal’s software. It’s a third-party app that offers functions Signal decidedly does not.

TM SGNL appears to refer to a piece of software from a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them. A page on TeleMessage’s website tells users how to install “TM SGNL.” On that page, it describes how the tool can “capture” Signal messages on iOS, Android, and desktop.

Even if others in war plans chatrooms might have taken the precaution of utilizing the auto-delete function, TeleMessage allows users to undercut that privacy/security function. On top of that, it makes it clear top officials using products like these do have the capability of preserving official government communications even while using Signal, which means they shouldn’t be allowed to claim otherwise when responding to lawsuits, public records requests, or public records request lawsuits.

But, of course, using TeleMessage presents its own security issues. It’s certainly not an officially supported offering by Signal, which makes it a target for hackers, and hackers have descended. On Monday it was reported that the app has been hacked:

A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.

The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.

So even if you believe that using Signal was safe because of its end-to-end encryption, the fact that they were using TeleMessage basically meant that they put a man-in-the-middle attack into their own Signal chats, making it that much more insecure. So insecure that it was hacked.

In other words, the one single redeeming quality of them using Signal (“well, at least it uses end-to-end encryption”) was done away with via their own actions.

And then, after the hack was revealed, TeleMessage announced that it was… shutting down the service at least for the time being.

TeleMessage, the app that President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, appeared to use to archive his group chats, has suspended all services after hackers claimed to have stolen files from it.

A spokesperson for Smarsh, the company that owns TeleMessage, said Monday that the company “is investigating a potential security incident. Upon detection, we acted quickly to contain it and engaged an external cybersecurity firm to support our investigation.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, all TeleMessage services have been temporarily suspended,” the spokesperson said.

Normally, if the government is using a system for important classified information sharing it would be thoroughly tested and carefully vetted. Here, it appears that none of that was done. Beyond the texting of war plans to a journalist, outside the texting of war plans to family members, here we have these officials using a sketchy third party app that obliterates the value of end-to-end encryption by mirroring the conversations to an insecure third party Israeli company, who was quickly hacked.

And, it appears, the hackers were able to obtain fairly real time messages:

One hacked message was sent to a group chat apparently associated with the crypto firm Galaxy Digital. One message said, “need 7 dems to get to 60.. would be very close” to the “GD Macro” group. Another message said, “Just spoke to a D staffer on the senate side – 2 cosponsors (Alsobrooks and gillibrand) did not sign the opposition letter so they think the bill still has a good chance of passage the senate with 5 more Ds supporting it.”

This means a hacker was able to steal what appears to be active, timely discussion about the efforts behind passing a hugely important and controversial cryptocurrency bill; Saturday, Democratic lawmakers published a letter explaining they would oppose it. Bill cosponsors Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand did not sign that letter.

This is base-level dumb. We expect better from our government officials, even if they’ve decided to be just another yes man trapped in Trump’s orbit. This casual stupidity isn’t limited to the moments captured by visiting journalists. It infects everything in the nation at this point because if there’s anything the Trump Administration values more than cruelty, it’s blind loyalty. And no one anywhere has ever considered those traits to be indicative of intelligence. But, for now, those are the traits that get you closest to the power, so that’s what we’re stuck with.

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Harvard University took the extraordinary step of suing the Trump administration on April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

“Defendants’ actions are unlawful,” Harvard’s lawsuit states. “The First Amendment does not permit the Government to ‘interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.’”

Yet in his first term, President Donald J. Trump declared that free speech mattered.

Trump issued the “Executive Order Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” on March 21, 2019. In it, he expressed the importance of free inquiry and open debate to education and directed federal officials to use the federal government’s funding of higher education to ensure that universities promote free inquiry.

Channeling free-speech champions Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Trump wrote that “free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation’s democracy.”

As a professor of constitutional, criminal and comparative law, and as a citizen who enjoys his liberty, I agree.

Free speech is fundamental to human progress. Scientific, medical, technological and social advancements all rely on the free flow of information. Robust discussion and disagreement are equally important to maintaining a healthy constitutional republic.

In the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The First Amendment’s free speech and press clauses protect all forms of expression – oral, print, digital and artistic – from governmental interference or punishment.

Of the many types of speech, political speech is the most protected.

On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued another free speech executive order. It affirms the administration’s commitment to free speech, directs that tax money is not used to abridge free speech and instructs federal employees to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

In a vacuum, Trump’s orders appear to bode well for free speech.

But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand?

The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump’s White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.

Repression and retaliation

Attempts to silence the president’s adversaries are developing as a pattern.

Law firms and attorneys who have sued or prosecuted Trump, or represented his adversaries, have been targeted for retribution and concessions. It began with an executive order on March 6, 2025, directed at the U.S.-based global law firm Perkins Coie, which had once represented Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. A second order was issued on March 14, 2025, against Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison because it once employed an attorney who investigated Trump. Subsequently, at least six other prominent law firms were also targeted.

Several law firms acceded to the president’s demands, agreeing to accept clients without regard to political beliefs, to eliminate DEI practices, and to perform pro bono work valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars for causes Trump supports.

The firms that didn’t accede to the president’s demands had their security clearances removed, access to federal buildings restricted, and were banned from working for federal agencies. A few of the firms that didn’t relent have won temporary injunctions barring the administration’s actions against them.

The nonpartisan free speech advocacy organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression decried the orders as threatening the foundations of justice and free speech. In one of several challenges to these orders, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote on March 12, 2025, that Trump’s order appeared motivated by “retaliatory animus” and concluded that it “runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections.” Two other federal courts reached similar conclusions.

In the first three months of his second term, Trump withdrew Secret Service protection of several prominent critics who are former federal government officials, including John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his top aide, Brian Hook, and former high-level health official Anthony Fauci also lost their security protection.

It is hard to imagine that these decisions won’t have a profoundly chilling effect on potential critics of the president, especially since the revocations were publicly announced and each individual has been the subject of credible threats resulting from their governmental service.

Targeting the press

A similar pattern exists for journalists, where Trump is using his power to punish organizations whose reporting he doesn’t like.

AP journalists were banned from the White House and Air Force One on Feb. 11, 2025, for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the new name Trump had ordered for the body of water. On April 9, 2025, this ban was found to violate the First Amendment by a judge nominated by Trump during his first term.

Denouncing CNN and MSNBC as “illegal” and claiming they are paid political operatives, Trump suggested they should be investigated during a speech at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump effectively closed Voice of America, after 83 years of continuous broadcasting, for being “anti-Trump” and radical in its views. By charter, the broadcaster represents “America, not any single segment of American society,” with “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” news and “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions” through television, radio, internet, social media and satellite broadcasts to peoples around the world.

The Federal Communications Commission has initiated regulatory actions against the licenses of several television stations for broadcasts that have been accused by the President of being anti-Trump or biased in favor of Kamala Harris. Early in the process, the outcomes of these actions are to be determined.

Pressuring universities and students

Other administration actions, I believe, raise serious free speech issues.

Harvard isn’t the only university feeling pressure.

The administration is threatening to withhold federal money from universities as a way to coerce many of them to comply with administration policies in ways that implicate free speech and in some instances violate legal processes for the withholding of federal support.

Some of the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement efforts have targeted international students who are in the U.S. lawfully but who participated in Palestinian rights protests and disagreed with  Israel’s actions during the war in Gaza.

The administration claims that some students whose visas have been revoked were either Hamas supporters or violated criminal laws. The administration has also said that many students are being deported under broad authority the secretary of state has to deport those deemed a danger to national security.

Democracy and free speech

In the past decade, the U.S. has fallen in press freedom, rule of law and democratic governance, resulting in the classification of a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a democratic watchdog. Unsurprisingly, there has been a simultaneous rise in public support for authoritarianism. These changes make support for free speech increasingly important.

On March 4, 2025, Trump declared in a speech before a joint session of Congress that he “stopped all government censorship and brought free speech back to America.”

The record doesn’t support this claim.

Daniel Hall is Professor of Justice and Community Studies & Political Science, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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