Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with […]
Tuesday, Republicans got crushed in elections across New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. Not close races. Not razor-thin margins. Massive defeats in states they’d convinced themselves were winnable after Trump’s 2024 victory. Bret Baier—on Fox News, to Fox & Friends—had to explain to his audience how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the […]
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Nothing survives a purge. Especially not the truth. The DOJ secured a conviction for Washington state resident Taylor Taranto. According to the DOJ’s May 21, 2025 press release, Taranto had committed several federal crimes, including carrying two guns without a license and engaging in “false information and hoaxes.” Here are the details: On June 28, […]
U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child […]
Well, this is actually pretty fascinating. We’ve been discussing the somewhat bizzare patent lawsuit Nintendo is waging against PocketPair in Japan for some time now. PocketPair is the company behind the hit game Palworld, which has obviously drawn inspiration from the Pokémon franchise, without doing any direct copying. Powering this attack were several held or […]
We’ve long established that modern “smart” devices aren’t always all that smart. Whether it’s “smart” door locks that are easily hacked to gain entry, “smart” refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials, or “smart” vehicles that sell data to insurance companies without your permission, the act of modernizing something with internet access and a CPU isn’t […]
We’ve always been wary of putting cops in schools. Putting cops in schools just means administrative issues (i.e., student discipline) get the law enforcement treatment, which turns misbehavior into criminal acts and generates exactly the sort of school cop overreactions you’d expect. Adding AI-assisted tech was never going to improve anything. Administrators were certainly told […]
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over […]
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The FBI is currently flying at half-staff. A bunch of its field agents are now just immigration officers, thanks to this administration’s desire to eject as many brown people from countries south of our border from the US as possible. But there are enough people left in the FBI to go after the brown people […]
As we’ve documented, Trump’s right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn’t really subtle: Rich right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda […]
If I had to pick one iconic line spoken by Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, it would be this one. The confident evil of a villain who calmly acknowledges that the deal struck with him is changing and there is nothing that can be done about it strikes a chord. What’s odd is […]
Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is accessed—or outright suppressed. In the digital age, the […]
Support us on Patreon » For two decades, the landscape of social media has been constantly changing, and the discourse about “free speech” has been changing alongside it. This week, we’ve got a bit of an open-ended discussion with TechFreedom‘s Corbin Barthold, host of the Tech Policy Podcast, about social media’s history and future, and the […]
Another “fuck you” has been delivered to federal courts by the Trump administration. This time, the extended middle finger is embodied by (extremely recently now-former) US Attorney Bill Essayli. Essayli has made headlines here before, mainly for yelling ineffectively at prosecutors who were unable to convert bullshit cases against anti-ICE protesters into federal indictments. Essayli […]
Fox News has a problem: when you build your entire editorial model around feeding your audience’s biases, you stop asking whether the stories feeding those biases are actually true. Case in point: last week, they published—and then quietly rewrote—a story about SNAP recipients threatening to “ransack stores,” based entirely on AI-generated videos that never happened. […]
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CBP commander Gregory Bovino has been given a temporary free pass by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court to continue violating a court order he’s been violating since the lower court first issued it. So, that’s how things continue to go in terms of checks and balances here in the United States. You know, poorly. Not […]
The Trump administration is promising to block billions in already-awarded infrastructure bill broadband grants to any states that enforce net neutrality or try to impose any sort of meaningful oversight on the country’s unpopular, predatory broadband monopolies. That was the promise of Commerce Department official Arielle Roth, a former Ted Cruz staffer now in charge […]
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