A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.

The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to address understandable concerns about generative AI-created “replicas” by creating a broad new intellectual property right. That approach was the first mistake: rather than giving people targeted tools to protect against harmful misrepresentations—balanced against the need to protect legitimate speech such as parodies and satires—the original NO FAKES just federalized an image-licensing system.

The updated bill doubles down on that initial mistaken approach by mandating a whole new censorship infrastructure for that system, encompassing not just images but the products and services used to create them, with few safeguards against abuse.

The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters;  c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”

This bill would be a disaster for internet speech and innovation.

Targeting Tools

The first version of NO FAKES focused on digital replicas. The new version goes further, targeting tools that can be used to produce images that aren’t authorized by the individual, anyone who owns the rights in that individual’s image, or the law. Anyone who makes, markets, or hosts such tools is on the hook. There are some limits—the tools must be primarily designed for, or have only limited commercial uses other than making unauthorized images—but those limits will offer cold comfort to developers given that they can be targeted based on nothing more than a bare allegation. These provisions effectively give rights-holders the veto power on innovation they’ve long sought in the copyright wars, based on the same tech panics. 

Takedown Notices and Filter Mandate

The first version of NO FAKES set up a notice and takedown system patterned on the DMCA, with even fewer safeguards. NO FAKES expands it to cover more service providers and require those providers to not only take down targeted materials (or tools) but keep them from being uploaded in the future.  In other words, adopt broad filters or lose the safe harbor.

Filters are already a huge problem when it comes to copyright, and at least in that instance all it should be doing is flagging for human review if an upload appears to be a whole copy of a work. The reality is that these systems often flag things that are similar but not the same (like two different people playing the same piece of public domain music). They also flag things for infringement based on mere seconds of a match, and they frequently do not take into account context that would make the use authorized by law.

But copyright filters are not yet required by law. NO FAKES would create a legal mandate that will inevitably lead to hecklers’ vetoes and other forms of over-censorship.

The bill does contain carve outs for parody, satire, and commentary, but those will also be cold comfort for those who cannot afford to litigate the question.

Threats to Anonymous Speech

As currently written, NO FAKES also allows anyone to get a subpoena from a court clerk—not a judge, and without any form of proof—forcing a service to hand over identifying information about a user.

We’ve already seen abuse of a similar system in action. In copyright cases, those unhappy with the criticisms being made against them get such subpoenas to silence critics. Often that the criticism includes the complainant’s own words as proof of the criticism, an ur-example of fair use. But the subpoena is issued anyway and, unless the service is incredibly on the ball, the user can be unmasked.

Not only does this chill further speech, the unmasking itself can cause harm to users. Either reputationally or in their personal life.

Threats to Innovation

Most of us are very unhappy with the state of Big Tech. It seems like not only are we increasingly forced to use the tech giants, but that the quality of their services is actively degrading. By increasing the sheer amount of infrastructure a new service would need to comply with the law, NO FAKES makes it harder for any new service to challenge Big Tech. It is probably not a coincidence that some of these very giants are okay with this new version of NO FAKES.

Requiring removal of tools, apps, and services could likewise stymie innovation. For one, it would harm people using such services for otherwise lawful creativity.  For another, it would discourage innovators from developing new tools. Who wants to invest in a tool or service that can be forced offline by nothing more than an allegation?

This bill is a solution in search of a problem. Just a few months ago, Congress passed Take It Down, which targeted images involving intimate or sexual content. That deeply flawed bill pressures platforms to actively monitor online speech, including speech that is presently encrypted. But if Congress is really worried about privacy harms, it should at least wait to see the effects of the last piece of internet regulation before going further into a new one. Its failure to do so makes clear that this is not about protecting victims of harmful digital replicas.

NO FAKES is designed to consolidate control over the commercial exploitation of digital images, not prevent it. Along the way, it will cause collateral damage to all of us.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog, with a link to EFF’s Take Action page on the NO FAKES bill, which helps you tell your elected officials not to support this bill.

According to the latest data on robocalls from the YouMail Robocall Index, the scale of the U.S. robocall problem has grown by another eleven percent year over year. U.S. consumers received just over 4.8 billion robocalls in May. We’ve normalized ceding our primary voice communications platforms to corporations, debt collectors, and scammers, and there’s every indication it’s going to get worse under Donald Trump.

While the federal government had been making some progress in getting wireless companies to belatedly adopt anti-spoofing technology, the Trump administration’s decision to lobotomize whatever was left of U.S. regulatory independence and consumer protection will indisputably leave regulators flat-footed in the ongoing battle to reclaim U.S. voice networks from scumbags.

The FCC still technically exists, but under Trump it’s become a weird and pointless grievance machine run by zealots. Its primary function during Trump’s term so far has been to harass companies for not being sexist or racist enough, or threaten media companies that dare do journalism critical of King Dingus.

Consumer groups like the National Consumer Law Center have repeatedly warned Congress that the key reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the “legit” companies like debt collectors that use the same tactics and routinely undermine reform and enforcement efforts.

YouGov’s latest study found that “just” 14 percent of May’s robocall total was from “scammers.”

Even before Trump, a corrupted court system had consistently limited the FCC’s authority to combat robocalls. Corrupt lawmakers and regulators, cowed into blind obedience by a massive, generational, cross-industry-lobbying campaign, like to keep the focus on scammers, when many “legit” companies, again, leverage the exact same tactics as scammers.

As a result, federal regulators refuse to hold large phone companies accountable for their lagging efforts to combat fraud and spam. Case in point: Truecaller’s U.S. Spam and Scam Report found that half of all major U.S. phone companies earned a D or F in their efforts to combat annoying robocalls and scams. Functional, developed countries (even many less developed ones) don’t have these problems.

So while the FCC is supposed to enforce robocall offenses and levy fines, terrible court rulings mean they aren’t allowed to collect fines. That’s left to the DOJ, which routinely just… doesn’t bother. As a result a comically small volume of the overall fines levied are ever actually collected. For example between 2015 and 2019 the FCC issued $208.4 million in robocall fines, but collected just $6,790.

And again, this is all before Trump 2.0. And before largely unregulated AI.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been promising to take a hatchet to whatever is left of U.S. corporate oversight as part of his “delete, delete, delete” deregulatory initiative. Big telecoms and robocallers have been making it very clear they’re very excited about it. Debt collectors in particular are very eager to roll back already flimsy rules governing how badly they can harass people they already know can’t pay.

Like so many systemic U.S. problems, the robocall menace isn’t something that gets fixed without first embracing much broader corruption, campaign finance, lobbying, and legal reforms. That is, obviously and indisputably, not something that’s happening under Trump and his sycophantic regulators and telecom industry-coddling courts.

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they’re doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups.

Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ordered his release, noting that the Justice Department appeared to have leaned on actual criminals to fabricate evidence against him. Now the Washington Post has the full story, and it’s even more damning: The Trump admin is literally freeing a repeat violent offender in exchange for testimony against Abrego—a man with no criminal history who was working and raising a family.

The Trump administration has agreed to release from prison a three-time felon who drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community and spare him from deportation in exchange for his cooperation in the federal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego García, according to a review of court records and official testimony.

Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, has been convicted of smuggling migrants and illegally reentering the United States after having been deported. He also pleaded guilty to “deadly conduct” in the Texas incident, and is now the government’s star witness in its case against Abrego.

Let that sink in: They’re freeing someone, who drunkenly fired shots in a community, to help them prosecute someone whose only “crime” was being the victim of the government’s own illegal deportation, making the Trump administration look totally incompetent in the process.

Remember, the Trump regime insisted that it was focused on going after the worst of the worst, the most hardened criminals of all. Yet, over and over again we’re finding out that they can’t actually find all those criminals they insisted were out there, so they’re randomly grabbing anyone they can find. In the case of Abrego, that meant taking a man who had no criminal history, and appeared to be gainfully employed, and raising a family, and shipping him to the one place an immigration court had forbidden the US to send him.

That set the DOJ off on a wild goose chase to try to justify their own massive fuckup, leading to these questionable criminal charges against him, which they used to try to distract from the fact that they accidentally sent a man to a foreign concentration camp after being forbidden from doing so.

But to make that work, apparently it involves freeing the actual hardened, dangerous criminal, in hopes that he’ll testify against Abrego.

Hernandez is among a handful of cooperating witnesses who could help the Trump administration achieve its goal of never letting Abrego walk free in the United States again. In exchange, he has already been released early from federal prison to a halfway house and has been given permission to stay in the U.S. for at least a year.

“Otherwise he would be deported,” Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, testified at Abrego’s criminal hearing June 13. The government is also likely to give him a work permit, the agent told the court.

There’s no way to look at this other than “we’ll release a hardened criminal who is here illegally, and who has already been deported multiple times, including letting him stay in the US with working apers, so long as he concocts a story that lets DHS and the DOJ save face after we fucked up royally in renditioning a man illegally.”

That should be an embarrassment to the Trump regime, but it will barely get any attention.

It Gets Worse: Trump Is Also Freeing MS-13 Leaders

But the Abrego case isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a pattern. At the same time Trump is manufacturing criminal cases against innocent people, he’s also cutting deals to free actual MS-13 gang leaders.

The NY Times has reported that for all of Trump’s promises to destroy the MS-13 gang, he’s cut a deal with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele to let actual top MS-13 gang leaders go free:

Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say.

Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.

His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.

But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.

The report details how these actual MS-13 leaders have evidence of Bukele’s corruption, and Bukele asked for them back, rather than letting them tell their stories to American courts:

But the Trump administration has not acknowledged another reason Mr. Bukele would want them back: U.S. prosecutors have amassed substantial evidence of a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who they say agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail, a New York Times investigation found.

The deal with El Salvador heralded by Mr. Trump as a crackdown on crime is actually undermining a longstanding U.S. inquiry into the gang, according to multiple people with knowledge of the initiative. Two major ongoing cases against some of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders could be badly damaged, and other defendants could be less likely to cooperate or testify in court, they said.

The Pattern Is Clear

So let’s be clear about what’s happening here:

• Innocent people like Abrego: Prosecuted with manufactured evidence from criminals who get released in exchange for their testimony
• Actual violent criminals: Released early from prison and given work permits if they’ll help prosecute innocent people
• MS-13 gang leaders: Handed over to a foreign dictator to protect that dictator from corruption charges, undermining ongoing DOJ investigations

This isn’t “tough on crime”—it’s the opposite. It’s law enforcement theater that makes everyone less safe while covering up the administration’s own legal violations.

All that seems really bad! It’s almost as if the Trump regime is much more focused on public relations claims than actually helping to stop gang activity.

Meanwhile, the judge in his criminal case has agreed that even though they’ve ruled that he should be released, Abrego is probably safer in federal prison, because were he released, ICE would likely ship him halfway around the world to some dangerous war zone.

Think about that: A federal judge is keeping someone in prison not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re safer there than in the hands of immigration enforcement. That’s where we are now—federal prison as sanctuary from ICE’s lawlessness.

This is what happens when immigration enforcement becomes completely divorced from actual public safety and becomes, instead, a machine for generating propaganda victories, no matter how many innocent people get ground up in the process.

The DHS finally decided to provide the underlying stats for its exponentially increasing claims of sky-high numbers of assaults on ICE officers.

Earlier this year, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted assaults were up 413%, which was parroted by acting ICE direction Todd Lyons in his whiny response to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump’s questioning of ICE officer tactics: namely, the unmarked vehicles, the refusal to identify themselves, and the fact that pretty much every person on a deportation task force seems incapable of doing the job without being dressed in camo and covering everything but their eyes with a mask.

According to Lyons and McLaughlin, the masks and lack of identification were essential to protecting ICE officers from the public, what with this massive spike in assaults on officers. Lyons’ response to Philip Bump cited McLaughlin’s public statements. The DHS’s public statements cited… absolutely nothing.

Since ICE refuses to release stats on assaults on officers, Philip Bump went digging into CBP stats to see if they were also increasing. They weren’t. In fact, assaults on CBP officers have been trending downward since 2022 and, if the rate remains consistent, there will be fewer assaults this year than last year.

ICE and the DHS doubled down when questioned, claiming a few days later the increase in the number of assaults was now 500%. To support this claim, the DHS’s official government website linked to… an article on right-wing rag Breitbart, I shit you not. And this article didn’t contain any stats. All it contained was a direct quote from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin about the 500% increase.

So far, all the DHS has given the public is statements that are closed loops. DHS says assaults are up 500%! Here’s a link to the DHS saying assaults are up 500%.

Maybe the DHS should have just continued doing that. At least that would have looked slightly less stupid than the actual truth. Bill Melugin (of all people), a Fox News correspondent, managed to secure the official stats from the DHS. And, as Jessice Pishko noted on Bluesky, the total number of assaults is laughably low.

If you can’t read/see the post, this is what Pishko said about the assault claims:

That 700% number — from 10 to 79. Considering there have been thousands more encounters this is uniquely unimpressive. (Also, I would like to see each of these 79 reports bc I have a guess who started it.)

The screenshot of Melugin’s tweet has the receipts:

I asked DHS for the underlying raw data:

1/21/2024 – 6/30/24 10 assaults
1/21/2025 – 6/30/2025 79 assaults

That’s it. Less than 70 more assaults year-over-year. And that’s an insanely small increase, given the massive increase in ICE activity, which includes daily raids of large businesses and densely populated areas.

More than 97,000 people have been detained over Mr. Trump’s first five months in office, CBS News’ analysis found, while ICE arrests, which do not always result in detentions, topped 100,000 earlier this month.

A record 59,000 people were currently being held in ICE detention as of June 23 — nearly half of them with no criminal record, CBS News reported last week. 

Even if you choose to believe every assault reported here is actually an “assault” (rather than someone inadvertently bumping an officer, standing too close to an officer, “contempt of cop,” swearing at an officer, throwing a snowball at an officer, etc.), the government action far outpaces the corresponding increase in assaults. Those are rookie numbers, what with the number of officers involved in domestic terrorism mass deportation efforts.

So, now that we know the truth, we’re back where we started: DHS and ICE look absolutely ridiculous claiming immigration enforcement work is so dangerous every officer needs to hide their face and drive around in unmarked vehicles like the kidnappers they are. The next time administration officials claim there’s been another spike in assaults, remember it only takes ten assault allegations from officers to add another 100% to the total.

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After Donald Trump won the election, he was still so full of hatred, bile, and spite, that he sued the pollster Ann Selzer as well as the Des Moines Register. Selzer, who has been one of the most trusted names in polling, released a poll slightly before the election that predicted a somewhat shocking victory of Kamala Harris in Iowa. It (obviously) turned out to be very wrong, but making a wrong prediction does not violate the law.

What’s happened since reveals something more concerning: a systematic approach to gaming the legal system that goes beyond typical SLAPP suit tactics. Trump’s lawyers aren’t just trying to win—they’re trying to exploit procedural gaps to avoid accountability mechanisms specifically designed to stop this kind of litigation abuse.

The entire intent of the lawsuit was to chill speech and punish those who don’t tell Trump what he wants to hear at every moment.

Not surprisingly, the lawsuit is not going well. It was initially filed in a local state court in Polk County, Iowa, but the defendants had it removed to federal court, where the standards are even higher, and where Trump would have a much more difficult time. Generally speaking, defendants in cases like this want them in federal courts where the judges are more likely to understand the underlying issues (especially around gamesmanship by plaintiffs). In this case, it was removed to federal court on diversity grounds, which is typical when the plaintiff is from out of state.

Selzer and the Register sought to dismiss the complaint, while Trump sought to have the case sent back to the state court. He did so by (1) adding two more plaintiffs (random other politicians who live in Iowa so there was no longer diversity), and (2) making some weird procedural argument that the method of removal went against Congress’s intent. On May 23rd, the court denied Trump’s attempt to move the case back to state court, noting that the procedural argument was nonsense. And it found that Trump’s attempt to add Iowa plaintiffs to the case was a pretty transparent attempt to try to get around diversity rules to force the case back to the state court.

Trump appealed that ruling to the Eighth Circuit, but something important had happened earlier in May which it appears Trump’s lawyers only realized belatedly. On May 20th, Iowa’s governor signed the state’s first anti-SLAPP bill into law. Now, it doesn’t apply to cases filed before the law goes into effect (July 1st), but it does mean that if Trump were to, say, file a brand new lawsuit now, it would be subject to anti-SLAPP rules. This would (1) make it even easier for the case to be dismissed, while (2) likely make it so Trump would have to pay Selzer and the Register’s legal bills.

So, his lawyers are trying some more gamesmanship. Even though they’ve already appealed the district court’s ruling, and that appeal is moving forward, they have tried to voluntarily dismiss the district court case, while filing a brand new state court case with the same random extra Iowa politician plaintiffs… the day before the new anti-SLAPP law goes into effect.

Basically, they’re trying to get a do over. The district court said they couldn’t add those extra plaintiffs to avoid diversity, and even though they appealed that ruling, they still want to refile the case (with the added plaintiffs) in state court. But they had to do it before July 1st. But they had already appealed the district court’s denial of the request to remand the case back to state court, so this all appears to be pure gamesmanship.

In response, Selzer and the Des Moines Register are asking the district court to deny Trump’s attempted dismissal, noting that it’s obviously playing games to try to get around the earlier ruling rejecting the attempt to send the case back to state court, and even calling out how it’s doing this to avoid the new anti-SLAPP law.

The defendants note that once Trump filed his appeal, the district court no longer controls the case:

However, the case cannot be dismissed at the district court while appellate proceedings are ongoing. This is because “the district court is divested of jurisdiction over matters on appeal” upon the initiation of that appeal. State ex rel. Nixon v. Coeur D’Alene Tribe, 164 F.3d 1102, 1106 (8th Cir. 1999); Ahlberg v. Chrysler Corp., 481 F.3d 630, 638 (8th Cir. 2007) (finding that orders pertaining to matters pending on appeal have “no effect”).

And then, they describe how Trump is playing games to avoid the new anti-SLAPP law:

Lastly, President Trump’s Notice must be evaluated in the light of long-standing Eighth Circuit law holding that “[a] party may not dismiss simply to avoid an adverse decision or seek a more favorable forum.” Cahalan v. Rohan, 423 F.3d 815, 818 (8th Cir. 2005) (citing Hamm v. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Pharm., Inc., 187 F.3d 941, 950 (8th Cir. 1999))

Before this Court, President Trump has lost his motion for remand, (ECF No. 65), lost his motion to stay the case, (ECF No. 70), and has a pending deadline to file a revised Amended Complaint. (Id.) And fulsome Motions to Dismiss warranting dismissal of the case in full and with prejudice are currently pending before this Court with substantial briefing. (ECF Nos. 24, 28, 33, 35, 51, 52, 57, 61.)

Furthermore, in conjunction with his improper Notice of Voluntary Dismissal, President Trump newly filed a lawsuit in the Iowa District Court for Polk County today; however, the new Petition is substantively unchanged from the President Trump’s First Amended Complaint in the present case. (See Ex. C: Petition (June 30, 2025).) The timing of this filing is significant: it is one day before Iowa’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (commonly known as an “antiSLAPP law”) goes into effect. See House File 472, available at https://www.legis.iowa.gov/legislation/BillBook?ga=91&ba=HF472 (Governor’s approval of House File 472, Uniform Public Expression Protection Act on May 19, 2025), codified at Iowa Code § 652.1, et seq.; see also Iowa Code § 3.7(1) (stating that all acts “passed at regular sessions of the general assembly shall take effect on the first day of July following their passage). This new legislation would apply to President Trump’s lawsuit; therefore, President Trump’s present Notice of Voluntary Removal would effectively escape the jurisdiction of the federal courts in time to restate his claims in Iowa’s state court without being subject to Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law.

In these circumstances, this Court should rightly find that President Trump’s Notice of Voluntary Dismissal improperly seeks “to avoid [the] adverse decision[s]” of this Court—both past and future—and “a more favorable forum” in Iowa’s pre-anti-SLAPP courts. Cahalan, 423 F.3d at 818.

The timing here is almost comically transparent. Trump’s lawyers clearly realized they had a problem if they planned to file a new lawsuit once Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law was about to take effect. Their solution was to try to dismiss the federal case they’d been fighting to get back to state court, refile the exact same claims in state court, all on the last day before the new protections kicked in.

It’s a perfect illustration of how Trump approaches litigation: not as a search for justice, but as a game to be manipulated. When the rules change in ways that might hold him accountable, he doesn’t accept the new reality—he tries to find procedural workarounds to avoid them entirely.

The federal judge has already seen through one round of Trump’s transparent gamesmanship. Whether she’ll allow this latest attempt to dodge accountability will likely determine whether Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register can finally put this vindictive lawsuit behind them, or whether they’ll be dragged through state court proceedings that should never have been allowed in the first place.

While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn’t quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states that attempt any oversight of AI.

The proposal was one of several cut to try and get the hugely unpopular GOP bill across the finish line. As it turns out, Cruz had a tough time getting enough support for his ignorant plan, and ultimately joined 98 other Senators in a 99-1 vote shooting down the amendment (Sen. Thom Tillis was the one dissenting vote):

“Facing overwhelming opposition from both Democrats and Republicans, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accepted defeat and joined a 99-1 vote against his own plan to punish states that regulate artificial intelligence.”

States are poised to get more than $42.5 billion dollars in broadband deployment subsidies as part of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD), a key component of the bill, had taken years of collaborative work between state and federal governments. In part because we needed to remap broadband access across every county in the United States.

A lot of this money is poised (as usual) to get dumped in the laps of telecom giants, which is a major reason Cruz’s gambit failed (AT&T drove heavy opposition by longtime AT&T ally Marsha Blackburn, who initially worked with Cruz on a “compromise” offering, before that collapsed entirely). But much of this money is also poised to go to really useful fiber upgrade proposals via efforts like regional cooperatives or community-owned broadband networks.

If the bill had passed states would have been faced with choosing between funding rural broadband, or avoiding oversight of increasingly reckless AI giants keen on ignoring what’s left of U.S. labor and environmental standards. They would have definitely taken the broadband money.

Cruz and the GOP have also been busy “helping” American broadband connectivity in other ways, like his recent successful effort to kill an FCC program that helped give poor rural schoolkids access to free Wi-Fi. As well as killing a program that made broadband more affordable for low-income Americans. And the illegal dismantling of the Digital Equity Act and its protections against broadband discrimination.

So while it’s nice Ted Cruz’s latest dumb effort failed, it’s hard to be celebratory. Republicans have been taking an absolute hatchet to every last federal effort to ensure our monopoly-dominated broadband networks are affordable. They’ve also effectively killed all federal consumer protection; policies that will reverberate in negative ways for decades to come.

The budget battle followed the fairly typical Republican playbook: make your initial offer so extremist and awful that any concessions are disguised to feel like a victory. But the final GOP budget bill remains a giant and unpopular piece of shit, and one of the most corrupt and disgusting attacks on vulnerable Americans in the history of modern politics.

When it comes to the anti-piracy efforts taken by some of the more aggressive companies out there, such as Nintendo, the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me is just how completely short-sighted those efforts tend to be. Take Nintendo’s updated EULA for its Switch consoles, for example. The updated agreement makes several changes from its previous iteration, but the most notable is that Nintendo says that if it thinks you’re doing the piracy for any reason, it can suspend all kinds of services on your console, up to and including bricking it completely. And, while the company has yet to go the bricking route so far, it has already begun suspending all online services on consoles for the use of MIG Switches, cards for Switch devices on which you can load legitimately extracted ROMs from purchased games, or pirated versions of the same.

Now, the first layer of how this is short-sighted is easy enough to see. In order to engage in copyright protectionism, Nintendo is risking long-term reputational damage by functionally ruining the consoles of customers for actions that aren’t illegal, or even immoral. Short term protection, longer term risk of everyone thinking you don’t care about your own customers.

But there’s another layer to this, as a result of these service suspensions being tied directly to the device rather than the person. And that is what this protectionism means for the secondary market for Nintendo Switches.

As spotted by Android Authority, a Reddit poster bought themselves a pre-owned Switch 2 from a Walmart store, only to find it had been previously incapacitated by Nintendo.

“I was driving between work sites and stopped at two different Walmarts,” says user Bimmytung. “At the second one I find a Mario Kart edition sitting in the case and couldn’t believe my luck.” They were informed by the Walmart staff that it was an “open box return,” so it was removed from the box to be checked over, and all looked well. The code for the packaged Mario Kart World had been scratched off already, so Walmart knocked another $50 off the price, and it all seemed like a good deal. Until they got home.

Finally after work I get a chance to set it up. Quickly realize I need the super special micro SD card and none of the ~half dozen in the house would work. Drive ten minutes to Target and get one there and pick up a few other accessories as well. Get home and go to finish the setup—quickly get Error Code 2124-4508. A quick Google search shows me I’m screwed. FML.”

Now, there are several layers of shame here to go around. Shame on Walmart for selling a device without ensuring it would work for the buyer the way it is intended to work. And shame on Nintendo for creating an anti-piracy program such that the punishments meted out are linked to hardware rather than the supposed bad-actor it seeks to punish.

But all of that aside, it should also be true that this sort of thing drives the value of a Nintendo Switch console lower than it would be otherwise. Part of the value you gain when you buy a physical thing is the ability to eventually put it on the secondary market at some point. Because of the actions that Nintendo is taking in disabling and/or bricking its own consoles, that injects a great deal of risk into the prospect of buying one on the secondary market. The value of the hardware is, by at least some measure, diminished.

But because Nintendo seems to only think about these things in the short term, the company probably doesn’t much care.

However, the more immediate issue is for those looking to pick up a Switch 2 from a reseller or previous owner, given their current scarcity at first-party sellers. There’s really no way of knowing at all if a console has been bricked when buying the device online, and this could make the resale market a complete shambles for the whole life cycle of the console. And, grimly, that’s not exactly a priority for Nintendo, given that reselling, either in store or online, gains the company nothing, and some would argue actually costs the company a sale—it’s not like it’ll be in a rush to address the problem.

Which is why I won’t be in a rush to buy a Switch 2 anytime soon. And I’m certainly in their target market, having two young children who desperately want one. Instead of the console, however, they will be getting a lesson in making smart buying decisions as a consumer.

I need to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: your refusal to call fascism “fascism” is not sophistication—it’s complicity.

When Donald Trump posts explicit orders for “REMIGRATION” and “Mass Deportation Operations” targeting American cities because they are “the core of the Democrat Power Center,” that’s not “controversial immigration policy.” That’s mass deportation directed against political opponents. When federal troops deploy against American civilians exercising constitutional rights, that’s not “enhanced law enforcement.” That’s military occupation. When the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions gets described as “political polarization,” that’s not nuanced analysis—it’s linguistic evasion that enables the very thing it refuses to name.

The sophisticates hate this clarity. They prefer the safety of euphemism, the comfort of complexity that never quite arrives at moral judgment. They speak of “concerning developments” and “troubling trends” while democracy burns around them. They perform nuanced understanding while fascism consolidates power through their very refusal to name it.

But here’s what they don’t understand: authoritarianism thrives in ambiguity. It requires linguistic fog to operate. It depends on our unwillingness to call things by their proper names. Every euphemism is a small surrender. Every hedge is a tiny collaboration. Every refusal to speak plainly is a gift to those who profit from confusion.

Language Shapes Reality

Language shapes consciousness. When we refuse to name what we see clearly, we don’t just fail to communicate—we erode our collective capacity to think clearly, to feel appropriately, to respond effectively. We make ourselves complicit in our own moral disorientation.

George Orwell understood this when he wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” But he was describing propaganda techniques used by totalitarian regimes. What we face now is worse: the voluntary adoption of euphemistic language by people who should know better, who pride themselves on seeing clearly, who claim to defend democratic values.

We are doing the propagandists’ work for them.

Consider how this linguistic distortion operates in practice. When mass deportation operations targeting millions of people get called “immigration enforcement,” we’re not being diplomatic—we’re making state violence psychologically easier to accept. When systematic attacks on democratic institutions get labeled “political disagreements,” we’re not showing balance—we’re normalizing authoritarianism. When obvious lies get treated as “alternative perspectives,” we’re not being fair—we’re weaponizing false equivalence against truth itself.

The euphemism isn’t just descriptive failure—it’s moral failure. It changes how people process information, how they make decisions, how they understand their own moral obligations. When you call fascism “populism,” you’re not just using imprecise language. You’re making it easier for people to support fascism without confronting what they’re supporting.

Arendt’s Warning

Hannah Arendt spent her life studying how ordinary people enable extraordinary evil, and she identified linguistic evasion as one of the primary mechanisms. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she showed how bureaucratic language—“evacuation,” “resettlement,” “special treatment”—allowed participants in genocide to avoid confronting the reality of what they were doing. They weren’t murdering children; they were “processing population transfers.” They weren’t operating death camps; they were managing “facilities for the final solution.”

The language didn’t just hide the reality from others—it hid it from themselves. It allowed them to participate in evil while maintaining their self-image as decent, law-abiding citizens following proper procedures.

Arendt’s insight was that evil becomes possible not primarily through active malice but through the refusal of ordinary people to see and name what’s in front of them. The “banality of evil” is fundamentally about linguistic evasion enabling moral evasion. When we stop calling violence violence, we make violence easier to commit.

This is what we’re witnessing now. The systematic training of a population to see clearly but speak obliquely, to understand precisely but describe vaguely, to recognize authoritarianism but call it something else. We have become a society of people who know exactly what’s happening but lack the linguistic courage to say so.

The Practice of Plain Naming

Consider how this evasion plays out in our current discourse:

We don’t say “Trump is implementing fascist policies.” We say “Trump’s approach raises concerns about democratic norms.”

We don’t say “Republicans are supporting mass deportation operations.” We say “There are disagreements about immigration enforcement strategies.”

We don’t say “Conservative media spreads lies designed to enable authoritarianism.” We say “Different sources present different perspectives on complex issues.”

We don’t say “MAGA supporters have chosen to enable fascism.” We say “There are legitimate grievances driving political polarization.”

Each euphemism makes the reality a little less clear, a little less urgent, a little less morally demanding. Each hedge creates space for people to avoid confronting what they’re witnessing or participating in. Each refusal to name plainly is a small act of collaboration with the forces that depend on confusion to operate.

When Trump orders ICE to conduct “Mass Deportation Operations” in cities he identifies as “the core of the Democrat Power Center,” that’s not immigration policy—it’s the use of state violence against political opponents. When he calls for “REMIGRATION” of millions of people, that’s not border security—it’s forced population transfer. When federal agents separate families and detain children, that’s not law enforcement—it’s state-sanctioned cruelty.

The defenders will say “the law is the law”—as if legality were equivalent to morality. But slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. Japanese internment was legal. Every authoritarian regime in history has operated through law, not despite it. “The law is the law” is not a moral position—it’s moral abdication disguised as principled governance.

Law without moral foundation is just organized violence. Rules without ethical grounding are just systematized cruelty. When your only defense of a policy is that it’s technically legal, you’ve already admitted it’s morally indefensible.

The Sophisticates’ Resistance

The sophisticates will tell you that such plain language is “inflammatory,” “divisive,” “unhelpful to productive dialogue.” They’ll suggest that calling fascism “fascism” alienates potential allies, shuts down conversation, makes compromise impossible.

But here’s what they’re really saying: they prefer the comfort of ambiguity to the responsibility that comes with clarity. They’d rather maintain the illusion of reasoned discourse than confront the reality that one side has abandoned reason entirely. They want to keep playing by rules that the other side has explicitly rejected.

This isn’t sophistication—it’s cowardice. It’s the intellectual’s version of appeasing authoritarianism through linguistic accommodation. It’s the belief that if we just find the right words, the right tone, the right approach, we can somehow reason with people who have chosen unreason as their governing principle.

But you cannot have productive dialogue with fascists about the merits of fascism. You cannot find common ground with people who reject the premise of shared reality. You cannot compromise with those who view compromise as weakness and good faith as stupidity.

What you can do is name what they are doing clearly enough that people understand what’s at stake and what choice they face.

The Power of Clarity

The power of plain naming is that it forces moral confrontation. It makes people choose sides. It strips away the comfortable distance that euphemism provides. It demands that people acknowledge what they’re actually supporting rather than hiding behind sanitized language.

This is why authoritarians work so hard to control language. They understand that linguistic precision is the enemy of moral confusion. That clear naming makes their projects harder to defend. That euphemism is their friend and clarity is their enemy.

They want us to call their fascism “nationalism.” Their lies “alternative facts.” Their cruelty “tough love.” Their mass deportations “border security.” Their authoritarianism “law and order.”

Every time we adopt their language, we do their work. Every time we refuse to name their actions plainly, we make those actions easier to defend, easier to rationalize, easier to continue.

When we refuse to call fascism “fascism”, we don’t make fascism less dangerous. We make ourselves less capable of recognizing and resisting it. We participate in our own disorientation. We become accomplices to our own confusion.

The Courage to Act

The courage to name things plainly is not the courage to be harsh or inflammatory. It’s the courage to accept the responsibility that comes with seeing clearly. It’s the courage to abandon the comfortable illusion of neutrality and acknowledge that some things cannot be straddled, some positions cannot be hedged, some realities cannot be euphemized away.

To say that systematic deployment of federal troops against American cities constitutes military occupation is not inflammatory—it’s accurate. To say that mass deportation operations targeting political opponents constitute fascist policy is not hyperbolic—it’s precise. To say that obvious lies designed to enable authoritarianism are lies is not divisive—it’s necessary.

The alternative to plain naming is not diplomatic nuance—it’s moral blindness. It’s the systematic erosion of our capacity to recognize authoritarianism when it appears in familiar forms, speaking familiar languages, wearing familiar clothes.

Evil depends on our unwillingness to call it evil. Fascism depends on our refusal to call it fascism. Lies depend on our treatment of them as “alternative perspectives.” State violence depends on our description of it as “tough policy choices.”

The moment we name these things plainly, we restore the moral clarity that makes effective resistance possible. We acknowledge what we’re actually facing. We accept the responsibility that comes with seeing clearly. We choose truth over comfort, accuracy over diplomacy, moral clarity over intellectual sophistication.

This is not just a linguistic choice—it’s a moral one. Every time we speak plainly about what we’re witnessing, we strike a blow against the forces that depend on confusion to operate. Every time we call fascism “fascism”, we make fascism a little harder to defend. Every time we name state violence as state violence, we make such violence a little less acceptable.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And Trump’s mass deportation operations are fascistic displays of state violence targeting political enemies whether we have the courage to call them that or not.

The difference is not in the reality—the difference is in our capacity to respond to reality appropriately.

Name it plainly. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s true. Not because it’s comfortable, but because comfort in the face of authoritarianism is itself a form of collaboration. Not because it’s diplomatic, but because diplomacy with fascists is enabling fascism.

The revolution is linguistic honesty. The rebellion is calling things by their proper names. The resistance is refusing to participate in the euphemistic erosion of moral clarity.

Say what you see. Name what you know. Call fascism fascism.

Every minute of every day.

Remember what’s real. Because the alternative to naming fascism clearly isn’t moderation or diplomacy—it’s surrender.

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

Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.

There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.

But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.

The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.

This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.

These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”

For what it’s worth, Trump did little to dispel the notion that this is part of his new fascist campaign to imprison anyone who disagrees with him. During the tour, Trump and Noem talked about prosecuting CNN for their reporting and for releasing an app that alerts people to where ICE agents are located (both of which would violate the First Amendment, if it were still a thing anyone believed in).

Trump admitted that he had brought up this idea as a joke, but his idiot advisors ran with it:

“Is this a dream come true for you, sir” a reporter asks.

“It was meant more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it… they were actually crocodiles,” Trump said.

And, apparently, the plan is to build a lot more concentration camps, just like Nazi Germany had.

“We’d like to see them in many states. At some point, they might morph into a system,” Trump said on Tuesday.

A “system.” The word choice isn’t accidental. This is the language of industrial-scale human rights violations, spoken with the same casual tone you’d use to discuss a chain restaurant expansion.

In case you’re wondering how much it costs to go full Nazi, this one concentration camp will cost the American taxpayer nearly half a billion dollars a year. That money will come from FEMA, the organization that Trump (with an assist from former friend Elon Musk and DOGE) stripped budget from, meaning there will be even less to pay for actual emergencies, because all of that money will be used to jail people Trump doesn’t like in a swamp.

The Everglades facility will cost Florida some $450 million to run for one year, according to DHS, though much of that will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While the airstrip is owned by Miami-Dade County, where officials have viewed the plan with skepticism, DeSantis is using his emergency authority to proceed on a tight schedule.

We are watching the latest march forward of American fascism in real time, complete with branded merchandise and gleeful photo ops. The US government is building concentration camps and selling t-shirts about it. This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan hysteria. This is what’s actually happening.

Every day you don’t call this what it is—fascism—you become complicit in normalizing it. Every time you treat this as just another political story, you help them make it routine. They’re counting on your exhaustion, your normalization, your willingness to look away.

The survivors of the Holocaust warned us this could happen again. They’re mostly gone now, but their warnings echo: it starts with camps, it starts with dehumanization, and it starts with good people doing nothing while evil wraps itself in flags and sells t-shirts.

History is watching.

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Martial law? Police state? These are just things the alleged Leader of Free World wants, rather than things a nation founded on rejecting these options should be in the process of instituting. And yet, here we are, barely six months into Trump’s return to office, staring down the barrel of both of these related horrors.

If it looks like fascism, it’s probably not intentional. Trump simply isn’t smart enough to implement the real thing. But he does like authoritarianism, which looks a lot like fascism, because he’s always felt a president should be treated like a king — someone who answers to no one, not even his 340 million employers.

Trump tested the waters on martial law during his last term, threatening to send troops out to handle George Floyd protests. This time around, he’s amped everything up, openly hoping to turn every “Democrat” city into Kent State.

Legally, he’s not allowed to do this. But his administration is relying on some vagueness in the law to get around the long-standing prohibition of sending in the army (so to speak) to police the populace. So, we get the sort of thing we’ve seen recently, where a Los Angeles swap meet was treated like an open-air market in some Middle Eastern country we’re currently at (undeclared) war with.

The National Guard troops sent to Los Angeles are presumably still working without pay and/or beds, but that isn’t stopping them from blending in with federal law enforcement to aid and abet actual law enforcement work. First reported by CBS, a combined force of more than 500 federal officers and National Guard troops walked away from the ICE raids and the protection of federal property to perform a bog standard drug bust. Nicholas Slayton has more details for Task and Purpose, a military-oriented publication:

California National Guard soldiers operating under federal orders helped the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal personnel carry out a raid on a large marijuana growth operation in the eastern Coachella Valley last week, 130 miles from downtown Los Angeles. 

It’s unclear how many National Guard troops participated in the operation, but the force totalled roughly 500 people. According to the DEA, other agencies included Customs and Border Patrol, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Immigration and Custom Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

While this commandeering of California National Guard troops may have originally been for the unstated purpose of pushing back against anti-ICE protests, now that they’re here, the administration has decided to just use them for whatever. This raid of multiple marijuana farms occurred more than 100 miles away from the boundaries of Los Angeles County and even further away from the location these troops were originally sent: downtown Los Angeles.

According to Trump’s military, everything about this is good and fine and nothing to be concerned about. After all, the law says the military can help federal cops, even if it (supposedly) prevents them from doing actual cop work. That’s the Title 10 vagueness the military is relying on when it serves up statements like this”

“The catalyst of this order was related to events occurring in Los Angeles; however, the president’s order and NORTHCOM’s mission is not constrained by the geography of Southern California. Recently, Title 10 forces supported a Drug Enforcement Agency operation a few hours outside of Los Angeles. Title 10 forces protect federal personnel who are performing federal law enforcement functions…”

Hence the military-provided shots of alleged National Guard troops allegedly manning the perimeter of the places being raided. And, also hence, the narrative no one can definitively dispute because — despite the National Guard embedding with federal law enforcement agencies — no journalists are being allowed to embed with military-esque operations occurring within the borders of the United States.

Of course, we’ve already seen Marines detain people for the purpose of handing them over to law enforcement. And we’ve seen National Guard troops swarm a swap meet like they’re looking for terrorists in a foreign country, rather than just anyone looking kind of Hispanic who might not have the proper paperwork on them.

The more things like this occur, the more easily many people will just come to accept this is the way the United States operates now. Many of them will cheer on these efforts, failing to recognize the abuse of these powers may, at some point, target them. But for the rest of us, this shouldn’t be allowed to pass without notice. Trump may be a blowhard and an idiot, but he’s surrounded by people who truly desire an opportunity to perform a hard reset on democracy and its principles, replacing it with jackboot heels, racism, fascism, and — eventually — a return of the British Empire, this time wrapped in an American flag.