Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input.

Of course, it doesn’t really work that way: For years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and make shitty policy (giant mergers, mindless deregulation, the elimination of consumer protection) seem like it has broad public support (remember when dead people opposed net neutrality?).

Unsurprisingly the U.S. hasn’t done anything to seriously rein in this problem. And when officials do act, it tends to be largely toothless, resulting in the problem getting steadily worse.

And that was before AI made it significantly easier for bad actors to quickly automate this sort of gamesmanship. Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state.

Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich:

“Beyond those individual cases, organizers said they identified 37,824 additional opposition sign-ins generated through thousands of duplicate name submissions across House and Senate hearings combined. In more than 15,000 instances, they said, identical names were entered repeatedly — sometimes 50 to 100 times. Many of the submissions were filed late at night or in rapid succession.”

The state’s wealthy (and the lawmakers paid to love them) are still trying to claim that the flood of provably false opposition to the bill only supports their claims that nobody wants the state’s wealthiest to actually pay a little more for regional societal improvements:

“Opponents of the tax, including state Republican leaders and hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, have leaned on the wave of opposition sign-ins as proof the proposal lacks public support.

“More than 60,000 people signed in against SB 6346 when it received a rushed hearing in the Senate,” Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, said in a Feb. 16 statement. “That is so impressive that Democrats have tried to say bots are responsible, even though the Legislature blocks bots.”

(The legislature did not effectively block bots).

These are, it might go without saying, generally the same kinds of folks waging an all out war on U.S. journalism. More broadly this is a war on informed consensus, and it doesn’t take too much time looking around to see which side of this particular war is winning. Regardless of what policy you support, we’re supposed to, at the very least, be capable of a useful, honest conversation about policy.

But as we noted way back when the telecom industry was caught stuffing the FCC comment system with fake comments by fake and dead people opposing net neutrality (they even used my name, if you recall), you just know your position is a winner when you have to create entirely fake people to support it.

We’ve been covering Stephen Thaler’s quixotic quest to get copyright (and patent) protection for works generated entirely by his AI system “DABUS” for years now. If there’s one thing Thaler has proved beyond all reasonable doubt, it’s that you can be comprehensively, thoroughly, and repeatedly wrong at every level of the American legal system and still keep going. He loses everywhere, every time, at every level. The Copyright Office rejected him. A federal district court rejected him. The DC Circuit rejected him. The Patent Office rejected him. Courts rejected his parallel patent claims. Even the Trump administration—not exactly known for its nuanced intellectual property positions—told the Supreme Court not to bother hearing his appeal.

And now, the Supreme Court has declined to take up the case, putting the final period on what has been one of the most impressive losing streaks in recent IP law history.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.

That was always the fatal flaw with his argument. He wasn’t making the more nuanced claim that a human who uses AI as a tool should get some copyright protection. He was making the maximalist claim: the AI did it all by itself, and it (or rather, he, as the AI’s owner) should get the copyright anyway.

The image in question—”A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” of train tracks entering a portal surrounded by green and purple plant-like imagery—was, according to Thaler, created entirely by DABUS with no human creative input. Every single institution that looked at this said no.

A federal judge in Washington upheld the office’s decision in Thaler’s case in 2023, writing that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement of copyright.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2025.

Thaler’s lawyers, for their part, tried to argue that the stakes were too high for the Court to sit this one out:

With a refusal by the court to hear the appeal, Thaler’s lawyers said, “even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late. The Copyright Office will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years.”

That’s rich. The Copyright Office is already working through the genuinely harder questions in cases involving tools like Midjourney—cases where humans actually did have meaningful creative input. Those cases are moving through the system right now. The problem for Thaler is that he chose the worst possible vehicle to force a Supreme Court showdown: a case so maximalist in its claims (the AI did everything, humans did nothing, give us the copyright anyway) that courts could rule against him on the narrowest possible grounds without ever having to engage with the nuanced questions at all. His all-or-nothing bet made this an easy case.

Still, the question of what happens when a human uses AI as a creative tool—rather than letting the machine do everything—isn’t actually as novel or unsettled as many people seem to think.

Copyright law has required human creative choices since at least Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony all the way back in 1884 in a case about whether or not photographs get covered by copyright. And the wonderful Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service from 1991 (a case we cite often) hammered the point home by establishing that copyright demands original creative expression. Consider how this already works with photography. A photographer who frames a shot of a landscape gets copyright protection in the creative choices they made—the composition, the angle, the timing, the lighting. But the landscape itself? No human created that. It gets no copyright. The camera mechanically captured what was in front of it, but the human’s original creative decisions (and only those original creative decisions) are what copyright protects.

AI-generated works should work roughly the same way. If a human’s creative input—through a sufficiently specific and expressive prompt, through selection and arrangement, through iterative creative choices—meaningfully shapes the output, that human contribution can be protected. But the parts that the AI generated autonomously, without human creative direction? Those are “the landscape.” They’re the thing no human authored.

There will certainly be disputes at the margins about exactly how much human input is enough, and where the line sits between “I told the AI to make something cool” and genuine creative direction. But the fundamental framework for handling this already exists. We’ve been here before with every new creative tool, from cameras to Photoshop. The principle has always been the same: copyright protects human creativity, regardless of the tool used to express it.

Thaler chose to fight for the one position that had no support in law (or in common sense). His losing streak is now complete, and there’s nowhere left to appeal. But the legacy of his many, many losses is actually kind of useful: he has, through sheer persistence, generated an incredibly clear and consistent body of authority establishing that purely AI-generated works, with no human creative input, do not get copyright protection.

So, thanks for that, I guess. Oh, and I guess we can confidently post that “Recent Entrance to Paradise” image as it, like the monkey selfie before it, is officially in the public domain.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series’ prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, the boy developed a romantic connection with the chatbot. One night, he messaged the bot: “What if I told you I could come home right now?” The bot sent back, “[P]lease do, my sweet king.” Setzer was only fourteen years old when he died by suicide later that evening.

Setzer’s death is a tragedy. Like many parents in the wake of suicide, Seltzer’s mother is left searching for answers and accountability. Suicide often leaves behind a painful void, filled with questions that rarely yield satisfying explanations. 

In her search, Setzer’s mother sued the chatbot’s developer, Character Technologies, alleging that its chatbot caused her son’s death. The complaint describes the bot as a “defective” and “inherently dangerous” technology, and accuses the company of having “engineered Setzer’s harmful dependency on their products.” She is not alone. Three other families have brought similar suits against Character Technologies, and another has sued OpenAI, alleging the chatbots harmed their children.

Framing suicide and other harms as technology problems—as much of the current discourse around chatbots suggests—obscures underlying societal conditions and can undermine effective interventions. In effect, what are often described as “tech problems” are, more accurately, the result of human decisions, norms, and policies. They are, at their core, human problems. 

Historical Framing of Tech and Media in Creating and Sustaining Societal Problems

This is just the latest vintage whine, rebottled yet another time. Humanity has long sought to condemn new technologies and media for problems of the day. When the printing press made literature available to the masses, church and state condemned publications for causing immorality. Rock ‘n’ Roll and comic books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. Later, it was heavy metal and role-playing games. The advent of video games supposedly led to increased violence by adolescent boys.

The desire to hold technology companies responsible for human harms, however, has its immediate antecedent in social media. Over the past decade, users have sued social media platforms for offline violence committed by people they met online, failing to prevent cyberbullying, and hosting user-generated content that allegedly radicalized extremists. 

Like in Setzer’s case, parents have also sued social media companies after the deaths of their children, arguing that design choices, engagement mechanics, and algorithmic targeting played a role. Indeed, this is the central question at the heart of the current wave of “social media addiction” litigation that is currently being tried.

AI is just the latest technological scapegoat to which we seek to ascribe fault. It’s easier to hold technology responsible for our problems, especially when the technology is as uncanny as generative AI. We’re afraid of robots, perhaps not because of any harm they cause us, but because they show us how much we, as humanity, can harm ourselves. We would rather fault the technology du jour than confront the harder truths underneath. 

Death by Suicide as a Case Study

To put this into context, consider the allegations about the Character.AI chatbot and Setzer’s suicide. Suicide is a complex, deeply human problem. Among youth and young adults, it stands as the second leading cause of death. Suicide has no single cause. Public health experts have long recognized that risk emerges from a convergence of individual, relational, communal, and societal factors. These can include long-term effects of childhood trauma, substance abuse, social isolation, relationship loss, economic instability, and discrimination. On the surface, these may look like personal struggles, but they’re really the fallout of systemic failure. 

Access to lethal means compounds the risk of self-harm and suicide. In particular, the presence of firearms in the home has remained strongly associated with higher youth suicide rates. 

These systemic failures tend to hit teens the hardest. Studies consistently show that young people are facing rising rates of mental health challenges, especially due to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. This is compounded by chronically underfunded school counseling programs, inaccessible mental health care, and inconsistent support for youth in crisis. LGBTQ+ youth, in particular, bear the brunt, facing higher rates of bullying, depression, and suicidal ideation, all while increasingly being targeted by state policies that strip away protections and deny their identities. 

We don’t and can’t know for sure why Setzer or anyone else died by suicide. Tragically, teenage suicide is common. Indeed, it’s the subject of many songs. There’s no mechanism to definitively determine how Setzer and other victims felt when they started using Character.AI. However, as we likely all remember from our own lives, teenage years can be trying. As we mature physically and mentally, it can be difficult to express and accept ourselves. Other children can be cruel. Hormones can lead us to lash out in anger and withdraw into ourselves. 

In Setzer’s case, the complaint and public reporting indicate that he exhibited other signs and conditions commonly associated with elevated suicide risk, including anxiety and depression, withdrawal from teachers and peers, chronic lateness, significant sleep deprivation, and access to a firearm in the home. His interactions with fictional characters on the Character.AI service may suggest unmet emotional needs or a search for understanding and connection. At different points, he described a character as resembling a father figure and spoke about feelings of loneliness and a lack of romantic connection—experiences that are not uncommon for adolescents, particularly during periods of heightened vulnerability. According to the complaint, Setzer also raised the topic of suicide in earlier conversations with the chatbot, and those exchanges were promptly halted by the system. 

The uncomfortable truth about suicide is that it has existed as long as there have been people–sometimes for reasons we can understand, and often for reasons we never will. We are terrified that people die by suicide, not only because it is difficult to comprehend, but because the forces that drive someone there can feel disturbingly familiar.

Parents like Setzer’s can’t fix systemic governmental and societal failures. What feels more immediate and actionable is holding the technology companies accountable when their services appear to enable or amplify harm. It is far easier to fixate on the medium through which people express suicidal thoughts rather than ask where those thoughts came from or why they felt like the only option.

Legal Analysis of Faulting Tech

Legal doctrine appears to recognize that holding the technology responsible for these systemic failures is not viable. For example, because suicide is shaped by so many overlapping factors, tort claims against AI companies for causing a teen’s death—while understandable in their urgency—are, doctrinally speaking, a stretch. 

Under traditional tort principles, providers of generative AI systems and social media services are unlikely to bear legal responsibility in these cases. Claims based on intentional torts, such as battery, generally fail because providers of online services do not act with the intent to cause—or even to contribute to—physical harm. Therefore, Plaintiffs more commonly turn to negligence theories.

Negligence, however, requires more than just harm in fact. It demands both factual causation and proximate (i.e., legal) causation. In some situations, an online service or generative AI model might satisfy a but-for test because the harm would not have occurred without the service. But that is not sufficient. 

Proximate cause—what the law treats as a legally meaningful connection between conduct and injury—is where most of these claims falter. In many cases, particularly those involving such numerous and complex factors as suicide, the link between a provider’s conduct and the ultimate injury is typically too attenuated to meet this standard. 

Services such as social media and AI chatbots are typically designed as broad, general-purpose tools. The potentially implicatable content comes from other users’ behaviors, personalized interactions, or the user’s own actions. Even where excessive technology use—including social media—has been associated with elevated rates of suicidal ideation among youth and young adults, research has not established a direct causal link. As a result, courts are generally reluctant to find the technology service to be the legal cause of death. 

The Broader Ramifications of a Myopic Focus on Tech

Beyond legal error, focusing solely on technology obscures the path to real solutions. When we frame fundamentally human problems as technological ones, we deflect attention from the underlying conditions that lead to these tragedies and make it more likely they will recur. 

This framing guides policymakers and advocates toward seemingly easy, surface-level technological fixes such as imposing age-verification requirements, mandating disclosures about content moderation, or curbing algorithmic feeds. True, technology companies can—and should—consider how to help mitigate real-world harms. Yet these proposed interventions rest on the assumption that technology is the primary culprit, even though research increasingly shows that, in the right contexts, technology can actually help those in crisis. 

The appeal of reducing complex social issues to matters of redesigning or banning technology is understandable. Technology problems can feel tractable. They suggest clear targets and concrete fixes. 

What this logic ignores, however, is that the pre-technology status quo for many public health crises has long been dismal. The better question, then, isn’t whether technology causes harm, but whether it deepens an already broken baseline—or simply reflects it.

Technology, including generative AI, often acts less as a cause than a mirror. Our digital spaces often reflect the offline world, including its ills. 

Today, children face more pressure to excel at school and attend the best universities, even while job prospects stagnate and inflation soars. They have lost access to the kinds of public and community spaces that once offered structure, connection, and care. Libraries operate with reduced hours. Budget cuts have decimated after-school programs. Parks are monitored and restricted for loitering. Community centers that shuttered during the pandemic have never reopened. In many ways, technology—and social media in particular—has stepped in as a makeshift third space for teens. Yet rather than address the erosion of offline support, policymakers are now working to dismantle these digital communities too.

If human distress reflects deteriorating real-world social infrastructure, then optimizing digital services cannot restore stasis. Technological interventions address a symptom while the deeper human cancer persists.

A Pragmatic Path Forward

The path forward requires resisting the impulse to treat fundamentally human problems as technological ones. When new technologies appear alongside harm, the harder and more necessary questions are not simply how to regulate the tool, but what human choices produced the conditions in which harm emerged, which institutions failed or fell short, and what values should guide our response. These questions are more difficult—and often more uncomfortable—because they turn our attention inward, toward ourselves, rather than external and more convenient actors.

Instead of focusing our energies on systematically regulating platforms, we should direct our efforts toward these human problems. For suicide, public health experts point to a wide range of evidence-based strategies for preventing and mitigating risk factors. These include strengthening economic supports such as household financial stability and housing security; creating safer environments by reducing at-risk individuals’ access to lethal means; fostering healthy organizational policies and cultures; and improving access to healthcare by expanding insurance coverage for mental health services and increasing provider availability and remote access in underserved areas. Experts also emphasize the importance of promoting social connection and teaching problem-solving skills that can help individuals navigate periods of acute distress.

These and other socioeconomic reforms are not easy solutions. They aren’t just a matter of adjusting algorithms or restricting platform features. They demand uncomfortable conversations about how we structure work, education, and community life. They require sustained political commitment and resource allocation. Yet if we can achieve these results, we will create a better world than one derived from mere technological fixes.

In short, technology doesn’t cause suicide. It doesn’t cause a host of human problems for which it is often accused. Sadly, they have always been with us. 

But technology, used wisely, could help us mitigate these problems. For example, through processing massive amounts of data, AI can detect patterns that elude us humans. This alone could help reveal early warning signs or surface new protective factors. AI chatbots, for example, could help us identify teens who are at risk and create opportunities to intervene. 

But that kind of progress demands that we take responsibility for these problems. We must acknowledge that our governments, societies, communities, and even ourselves may have normalized and contributed to these harmful conditions. We may discover there’s no rhyme or reason to why teenagers commit suicide. But we may uncover that teen suicide isn’t random at all. It may stem from something we’ve unwittingly ignored, or perhaps built into the world. 

That possibility is far more unsettling than the idea of dangerous technology. It’s the idea that the danger might be us.

Kevin Frazier directs the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute. Brian L. Frye is a Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. Michael P. Goodyear is an Associate Professor at New York Law School. Jess Miers is an Assistant Professor of Law at The University of Akron School of Law

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I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I’m not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn’t worth celebrating.

Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in the foot by shooting a dog in her gravel pit and then telling the world about it in her incredibly premature memoirs. What was meant to be a self-congratulatory anecdote about doing what needs to be done was correctly read by pretty much everyone as little more than a person gloating about inflicting misery on animals and her own children.

Kristi Noem spent most of her time as the DHS Secretary making sure she showed up front and center in social media posts. She also was always the first to portray anyone killed or wounded by federal officers as “terrorists,” and refused to walk back those comments after the facts proved otherwise.

She gifted herself with an expensive private jet so she could arrive at the next photo op in style. She moved into an expensive taxpayer-funded residence despite already living in another expensive taxpayer-funded residence. She blew $220 million on an ad campaign featuring her blown-dry looks and vapid statements that apparently also funneled some of that windfall back into her own pockets.

She continued to stay the course even as the national winds shifted in response to oppressive, blue state-targeting “immigration enforcement” efforts. She stood idly by while her officers violated rights, physically assaulted peaceful protesters, and literally murdered two people in one US city alone.

Realizing this putsch was hurting him more than helping him, Trump first sent Nazi-cosplayer Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino back to the actual border, forcing him out of the spotlight and back into the necessary but not-at-all-glamorous job of actually securing the border.

Noem was next. In a somewhat surprising move, Trump booted a true MAGA believer into irrelevance, taking Noem from an “is” to a “was” while she was engaged in a press briefing. She’s now the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, which is exactly the sort of made-up position you’d shunt someone into if you didn’t want to be blamed for their hiring, but also didn’t want them to do any more damage to your administration.

Now that Noem’s been turfed, the knives are out. It’s not just leading GOP members now pretending she’s this administration’s Nikolai Yezhov. It’s also pro-Trump outlets like Fox News smelling the blood in the water but, of course, only speaking out now that the water’s more red than blue:

We can now openly admit what has been unfolding before our eyes for a year: that Kristi Noem was an utter, complete, total catastrophe, her tenure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) little more than a self-promoting crusade.

She was unqualified for the job from day one, and largely responsible for the awful excesses of ICE and the frustrating failures of FEMA. 

President Donald Trump’s decision to fire her, which took way too long, liberates many Republicans to acknowledge what many in the media, including me, along with Democrats and outside critics, have been saying all along: Noem was a slow-motion train wreck. 

Walk into the ocean, Howard Kurtz. You pretend like you’re a journalist and analyst and yet you state — openly! — that you weren’t willing to speak out against Kristi Noem (an apparent “utter, complete, total catastrophe”) until after Trump fired her. If you had any spine or ethics, you would have made your opinions known months ago and been hailed as a savvy insider. Now you just look like a practice squad Monday morning quarterback.

But enough about Kurtz. Here’s more about Noem, who was a spectacular failure on every level. Here’s another lowlight of Noem’s short federal career, as reported by The New Republic:

ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 vehicles custom-wrapped to say “ICE” on the side, three sources told the Washington Examiner. The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window.

The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But a fleet of ostentatious cars are useless to Trump’s masked militia, which typically disappears people using unmarked vehicles.

Noem stans might want to pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with her since it was a former deputy director handling this purchase. No dice, weirdos. Noem has made it clear since day one that she’s the only one who can approve spending like this, which is something she used to defend refusing to send FEMA aid to places that weren’t sufficiently Trumpish.

That’s on top of other things that may have forced Trump to dump a die-hard ally. The first was the $220 million-worth of masturbation Noem performed, which came in the form of Noem-focused DHS ads featuring her sitting on a horse in front of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Noem claimed the ad campaign was approved by Trump while testifying to Congress. Trump immediately said otherwise when questioned by reporters.

Then there were the three jets (two Gulfstreams and a remodeled 737) Noem wanted for her own personal use as DHS Secretary. On top of that, there were the rumors that Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski (another ridiculous MAGA asshat) were having an extramarital affair.

All of this was piled on top of a rapidly disintegrating “surge” in Minneapolis, which single-handedly managed to turn public opinion against Trump, at least in terms of immigration enforcement. Noem insisted on being the public face of this, competing with fellow sadists like the previously-mentioned (and similarly demoted) Gregory Bovino.

We should all dance on the professional grave of Kristi Noem, who sold out entirely to MAGA just to be stuck in a Special Envoy cubicle until she either gets demoted again or decides she’s better off back in South Dakota. Noem made her own bed. Now she gets to lay in it, along with her killed dog, which means she’s not only having to deal with her own shittily-made bed, but the fleas that come with it.

She couldn’t even make it 18 months. That’s heartening. That means a bunch more people who sold their souls for MAGA rock and roll are likely to find their loyalty repaid with GTFO orders from the boss man who won’t tolerate anything that doesn’t immediately look like a win. They deserve everything that’s coming to them, including the possibility of criminal or contempt charges for playing fast and loose with the laws and the US Constitution while holding, however briefly, their positions of power.

We won’t miss you, Kristi. You were the epitome of everything people hate about political appointees. The most you can hope for is that your swift defenestration will be somehow instructive for those following in your shady, subordinate footsteps. If not, you’ll be nothing more than a foul breeze, remembered only for the odor you created while passing through the political system. But you were exactly what Trump wanted, right up until he decided he didn’t.

You might recall that during the great mass TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2025, there was no limit of face fanning by Republicans like Brendan Carr about overseas involvement in social media. Carr was so particular on this subject, he scuttled an FCC program aimed at shoring up “smart” home device security standards because one of the testing labs (unsurprisingly) did business in China where this stuff is made.

Fast forward to this year, and Carr curiously has zero problems with significant Saudi and Chinese investments in Larry Ellison and Paramount’s efforts to acquire Warner Brothers. Though Carr’s actual regulatory oversight of the deal is limited given the lack of public broadcast licenses involved, he took to CNBC anyway to insist the massive $111 billion deal should likely fly through regulatory approval:

“If there’s any FCC role at all, it’ll be a pretty minimal role. And I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly,” Carr added.

Carr told CNBC that Netflix “would have a very difficult path” getting regulatory approval, adding that Paramount’s was “a lot cleaner, does not raise at all the same types of concerns.”

“I think there’s some real consumer benefits that can emerge from it,” he added.

Carr’s (and Republicans’ more generally) gushing excitement comes despite the fact that significant structural overlap between Paramount and Warner Brothers will mean significantly more layoffs than we would have seen during the originally proposed Netflix Warner Brothers tie up. Layoffs that will likely be much worse than past Warner deals due to the absolutely massive debt involved.

This is before you even get to Larry Ellison’s obvious quest to built autocratic-friendly state television, the likes of which coddles authoritarianism and, in countries like Russia and Hungary, ultimately led to the total decimation of serious truth-to-power journalism.

Then there’s the $24 billion in combined funding for the Paramount deal from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). As well as the recent announcement that Chinese company Tencent is weighing a significant investment. Before his deal was scuttled, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was pretty pointed about this being a problem:

“Before pulling out of the deal, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos – speaking to the BBC in London on the morning after the recent BAFTA Film Awards – called the Gulf sovereign funds backing Paramount’s bid a “bad idea,” noting that they are from “a part of the world that is not very big on the First Amendment.” 

“It seems very odd to me with the level of investment that we’re talking about that they’d have no influence or editorial control over media in another country,” Sarandos added.

If you recall the multi-year right wing hysteria campaign about TikTok, it was fixated on the idea that having any overseas involvement in U.S. media was a doomsday scenario (they were not subtle or flexible on this point). Of course Trumpism immediately proceeded (with bumbling Democrat help) to “fix” this problem by offloading the company to Trump’s technofascist friends, while still maintaining a significant investment presence by the Chinese.

When Netflix was planning to buy Warner Brothers, Republicans engaged in no limit of face-fanning, featuring threats of “investigations” by Republican Attorneys General, and a phony Trump DOJ “investigation” into the antitrust concerns raised by the deal. But when a technofascist ally oligarch wants to own a major media property, with Saudi and Chinese help, all of that mysteriously disappears.

It’s almost as if Trump Republicans have no coherent ideology beyond their own power and unchecked wealth accumulation, and all of their posturing on issues like antitrust and national security, routinely propped up by a lazy press, is as hollow as a Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.

There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously.

That this is said about the most powerful single individual on the planet is bonkers. This is typically how I’ve talked about my own kids when they were toddlers. Inevitably, one of my kids would be trying to say something entirely innocuous, only to have what came out of their mouth be some horrible word or swear or something. And I would hand-wave that away. C’mon, I’d tell people, you know that’s not what he meant to say.

Donald Trump is, unfortunately, the President of the United States of America. When he speaks, people listen. And a percentage of those listening will take him both literally and seriously. And when Donald Trump told American women last year to not take Tylenol, or give it to their young children, because it would give their kids autism, well, they listened.

Researchers found that in the wake of that batshit crazy announcement, use of Tylenol and its generic equivalents dropped significantly in use in emergency rooms and prescriptions written for children.

For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

The research suggested something like a 10% drop in measurable use of acetaminophen or paracetamol in the wake of Trump’s announcement. That doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, since so much of the use of Tylenol occurs through over the counter purchases at drug stores and the like. Based on market research, however, Tylenol specifically saw a nearly identical 11% or so drop in OTC sales as well back in November.

But that isn’t all. With all of this attention on a common drug supposedly giving children autism, parental anxiety about the condition has shot up as well. And, as a result, parents are turning toward experimental drugs for that that defy expert recommendations. That’s where leucovorin comes in.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

This may sound melodramatic, but there is real psychological harm being done to those just starting families in this country. For most parents, their children become their entire world. Their raison d’etre. And if you scare the shit out of them about Tylenol giving their kids a disorder, they’re going to stop taking the common drug and turn to any hair-brained lifeline they can find to try to keep their children from that disorder.

Does leucovorin do anything at all for anyone with autism? I don’t have the slightest clue. And neither does the Trump administration. I’m quite confident that there is no current reason to see Tylenol as a danger to the general populace, however, and that didn’t stop Trump from going on television and playing doctor.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The consequences of this sort of thing are going to span decades. Let that sink in.

On Wednesday of last week, I wrote a post about how the Trump administration had quietly given up defending its unconstitutional executive orders targeting law firms. The DOJ was dropping its appeals, the firms that fought had won, and the firms that capitulated—led by Paul Weiss and their nearly $1 billion in groveling pro bono commitments—were left holding a very expensive bag.

What I did not realize, because this administration launches new absurdities faster than any human being can reasonably track them, was that the day before I published that piece (but about the time I was writing it), the DOJ had already filed a motion to take back its voluntary dismissal. And then, by Friday, the DOJ had filed a full appellate brief seeking to overturn all four district court rulings that struck down the executive orders.

So, to recap the timeline here: On Monday, the DOJ told the DC Circuit it was voluntarily dropping its appeals. All four law firms agreed. Done deal. On Tuesday, the DOJ filed a motion to withdraw its own voluntary dismissal. On Wednesday, I published an article mocking the administration for giving up. On Friday, the DOJ filed a 97-page opening brief arguing that the executive orders were “well within the Presidential prerogative.”

My only defense for coming in a day late is that covering this administration in anything close to real time is effectively impossible.

Let’s start with the procedural absurdity before we get to the substance—because the procedural absurdity is really something.

The motion to withdraw the voluntary dismissal is a remarkable document, mostly for how little it says. The entire operative section is barely over a hundred words. After all parties had agreed to the dismissal, the DOJ simply asked to take it back, offering no explanation whatsoever. The law firms’ collective response, included in the filing itself, was about as polite as you’d expect:

“Plaintiffs-Appellees oppose the government’s unexplained request to withdraw yesterday’s voluntary dismissal, to which all parties had agreed. Under no circumstances should the government’s unexplained about-face provide a basis for an extension of its brief.”

“Unexplained.” That word does a lot of heavy lifting. The DOJ’s motion doesn’t even try to explain why it changed course. There’s no “upon further reflection” or “new developments have arisen.” Just: forget what we agreed to yesterday, the court hasn’t formally granted the dismissal yet, so we’d like to un-dismiss please.

As of this writing, the court hasn’t ruled on that motion. But the DOJ apparently decided not to wait around and went ahead and filed its full appellate brief on Friday anyway.

The opening paragraph of the DOJ’s appellate brief is genuinely one of the more audacious things I’ve read in a legal filing, and I say that as someone who reads a lot of legal filings:

Courts cannot tell the President what to say. Courts cannot tell the President what not to say. They cannot tell the President how to handle national security clearances. And they cannot interfere with Presidential directives instructing agencies to investigate racial discrimination that violates federal civil rights laws.

Let’s focus on those first two sentences, because they reveal something important about how the administration is framing this case—and how badly they’re getting the First Amendment backwards.

“Courts cannot tell the President what to say. Courts cannot tell the President what not to say.”

Well, sure. In the most general sense, that’s true. The president can stand at a podium and say whatever he wants. He can say mean things about law firms. He can call them names on social media. He can go on television and express his displeasure with their client choices. That’s all government speech, and it’s all fine.

But that’s… not what happened here. What happened here is that the president issued executive orders imposing concrete sanctions on specific law firms—revoking security clearances, directing the termination of government contracts, restricting access to federal buildings, banning the hiring of their employees—because those firms represented clients the president didn’t like and employed lawyers who had been involved in investigations the president found personally disagreeable.

The brief tries to frame the courts’ injunctions as an attempt to “silence” the president. But nobody is trying to silence the president. The president can talk about these law firms every day from now until the world ends. What the courts said—four separate times—is that the president cannot use the machinery of government to punish law firms for their constitutionally protected legal advocacy. There’s a rather fundamental difference between speech and sanctions, and pretending not to understand that difference is doing a lot of work in this brief.

This gets at something we talk about regularly here at Techdirt: the First Amendment is a restraint on government power. It prevents the government from using its authority to suppress or punish private speech. When the DOJ frames this as courts trying to control the president’s speech, they’ve got the vector of the First Amendment claim pointing in exactly the wrong direction. The law firms aren’t saying the president can’t talk. They’re saying the president can’t retaliate against them for their own protected speech and advocacy. Those are two wildly different things.

The brief actually cites NRA v. Vullo, the 2024 Supreme Court case that we’ve written about a few times. For those unfamiliar, that case involved New York’s former superintendent of financial services, who was accused of using her regulatory power to coerce financial institutions into cutting ties with the NRA because she disagreed with the NRA’s advocacy. The Supreme Court held—unanimously—that government officials using their regulatory authority to punish or suppress disfavored private speech can violate the First Amendment, even if the official frames their actions in terms of legitimate regulatory interests.

The DOJ cites Vullo in the context of arguing that the district courts went too far in enjoining “future actions” based on Section 1 of the executive orders, quoting the district court’s ruling in favor of one of the law firms (Jenner & Block) favorably:

Significantly, even the district court in Jenner recognized this. That court declined to “enjoin future actions taken pursuant to Section 1,” because “Section 1 does not direct any action.” JA2205–06. But “shorn of its enforcement mechanisms, Section 1 is nothing more than the Executive Branch ‘saying what it wishes.’” Id. (quoting Nat’l Rifle Ass’n of Am. v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 187 (2024)). “Jenner has no more right to silence the Executive Branch than the Executive Branch has to silence Jenner.” Id. That is because Section 1 is “government speech.” Id. Despite Jenner’s repeated request to enjoin Section 1 in the abstract, the district court correctly recognized that “[n]either standing doctrine nor equity generally permits such judicial prophylaxis.” JA2207. Thus, “[w]hether best viewed as a shortcoming of standing, ripeness, or” the lack of any basis in equity, “the guesswork entailed in enjoining all future uses of the sentiments expressed in Section 1 would exceed the Court’s proper role.”

The problem is that Vullo actually undercuts their entire argument. The point of the Vullo framework is that when government speech is coupled with government action designed to punish disfavored private expression, the combination can be unconstitutional coercion. The administration wants to unbundle its speech from its sanctions and defend each in isolation—”Section 1 is just government speech.” That’s precisely the move Vullo says you can’t get away with.

Meanwhile, I have to call out that the same people who argued in the Murthy v. Missouri case that any government speech criticizing private companies constituted a de facto First Amendment violation are now arguing “well, this paragraph was just speech, not retaliatory, so leave it alone.”

The brief also contains a line that should make Paul Weiss and others in the capitulation crowd feel especially great about their choices:

In recognition of those problems, many law firms agreed to address their practices and commit to providing pro bono work in the public interest.

The brief then helpfully lists them in a footnote in case anyone forgot which capitulating law firms to shun:

Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Cadwalader, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Milbank, Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher, Skadden, and Wilkie Farr & Gallagher.

The DOJ is literally using the capitulation of those firms as evidence that the executive orders were reasonable and justified. “See? These firms agreed with us!” The firms that folded bought themselves a supporting role in the government’s brief arguing for the constitutionality of retaliating against law firms. Congratulations! Great job lawyering, guys.

Meanwhile, the four firms named in the brief who fought—Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey—are named as parties who “instead filed suit.” See? Capitulating is the only proper move to this DOJ. Standing up for your own constitutional rights deserves punishment.

The heart of the filing is that opening framing. “Courts cannot tell the President what to say.” And the response to that is simple: nobody’s trying to. What courts can do—what they’re required to do under the First Amendment—is tell the president he cannot use executive power to punish private parties for their constitutionally protected advocacy. The fact that the DOJ appears unable or unwilling to understand this distinction tells you everything about the strength of their legal position.

As I noted last week, the administration’s decision to initially drop these appeals suggested that even a DOJ willing to argue almost anything looked at these cases and concluded it couldn’t win. The un-dropping and subsequent brief don’t change that calculus. While the DOJ offered no explanation for its reversal, the timing strongly suggests someone higher up didn’t like the press coverage of them folding and decided the political upside of continuing to threaten the legal profession outweighed the legal downside of losing again. Which, if you think about it, proves exactly what the law firms argued from the start: this was always about intimidation, never about law.

The firms that folded will keep being cited in government briefs as proof that the intimidation campaign was justified.

That’s the tax you pay for cowardice: your surrender becomes someone else’s evidence.

Should parents have a right to monitor and control which sites and apps their kids use? Today, parents do have that legal right under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The 1998 law requires verifiable parental consent before websites or apps can collect, use or share personal information from teens 13 or under. In practice, that means parents must consent for all social media apps. 

The original version of COPPA would have required parental notification whenever teens (ages 14-17) sign up for websites; parents would have had the right to access personal information shared with such sites. Those provisions were dropped after free speech advocates warned that these provisions could “chill protected First Amendment activities and undermine rather than enhance teenagers privacy,” especially when “teenagers may be divulging or seeking information they don’t want their parents to know about.” Thus, the Center for Democracy & Technology warned, while “parents have an important role in protecting their teenager’s privacy, however the bill’s emphasis on parental access may overlook older minors’ interests.”

Now, legislation is moving in Congress that would give parents the right to monitor and control the apps and platforms their teens use. Yesterday, in party-line votes, the House Energy & Commerce Committee sent two bills to the House floor. The “App Store Accountability Act” (ASAA) would require app stores to categorize users by age, associate the minors’ accounts with a parental account, and then obtain consent from the parental account when the minor user creates an account on the app store, or installs any app. This gives parents the right to monitor and control exactly which apps their kids are using. The Committee also approved the KIDS Act, which would require parental consent before any social media “platform” (website or app) could allow teens to use “any direct messaging feature.”

These bills would “make vulnerable kids less safe,” warned the committee’s Ranking Member, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), because they “threaten kids in unsupportive or even abusive households where they can be real-world harms from allowing parents complete access and control over their teens’ online existence.” This is essentially the same concern raised in 1998.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-TN) was more direct than most of her Republican colleagues, insisting that parents need the bills to protect kids “who have access to these online evils.” Which evils? “Kids should not be looking at pornography—this is just common sense, people,” she said. Perhaps so: last year, the Supreme Court upheld age verification mandates for pornography in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (2025). But Harshbarger went much further: “We’ve been hearing from a lot of folks who profit off doing harm to kids or have questionable ideological priorities.” 

Her fellow Tennessee Republican, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), has been clear about just which “ideologies” need to be stopped. Last year, she was recorded, in remarks to a private meeting of social conservatives, saying the quiet part out loud: Republicans’ top priority should be “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” Roughly half of American adults tell pollsters that trans people should be legally required to use public bathrooms that match their sex at birth, rather than the gender they identify with. Many of those parents doubtless think their teens need to be “protected” from sites and apps dedicated to helping LGBTQ teens who feel isolated and alone—apps like TrevorSpace and GiveUsTheFloor. 

These sites aren’t exploiting anyone for profit. They’re both non-profits dedicated to education and building communities of the kids most at risk for mental illness and suicide. Yet ASAA and the KIDS Act would require parents to approve teens’ access to both sites. This isn’t an accident: where COPPA applies only to sites that operate “in commerce” (i.e., for profit), neither bill contains any such limit, and thus both would apply even to pure non-profits. This problem could be fixed with a surgical amendment, but Republicans would surely object and Democrats failed to raise this issue at yesterday’s markup.

Even if this problem were fixed, the larger problem would remain: for-profit apps are overwhelmingly the ones that vulnerable teens use to access perspectives on the world their parents want to block and to find other teens they can relate to. Popular apps like Snapchat and TikTok are especially vital in regions where they face hostility or violence for expressing their sexuality or gender identity. Under ASAA and the KIDS Act, parents could block such apps to “protect” their teens from “online evils” like subversive ideas about gender, sexuality, contraception or religion.

Parents could, under ASAA, also block AI apps. At a Senate hearing last year on “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots,” one parent complained that a Character.AI chatbot had “turned [her son] against our church by convincing him that Christians are sexist and hypocritical and that God does not exist.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told her: “You didn’t know it at the time, but the chatbot was actively indoctrinating your son into questioning your beliefs as a family, your Biblical beliefs.” Questionable “ideological priorities,” indeed.

Both bills pay lip service to the First Amendment. The KIDS Act shall not be interpreted to “[a]llow a governmental entity to enforce this Act based on a viewpoint expressed by or through any speech, expression, or information protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Likewise, ASAA “shall not be construed … to affect or restrict the expression of political, religious, or other viewpoints.” These rules of construction might well help ensure that courts scrutinize selective enforcement of these bills aimed at suppressing disfavored speech. But these provisions won’t address the core problem with the bills: that parents will block viewpoints they don’t want their teens to access by controlling which apps and platforms they use.

“Constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority,” as the Supreme Court has noted. “[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection,” the Court has said, “and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.” 

The Court reiterated this point in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2010), which struck down age verification requirements for video games. Because virtual violence was not obscene to minors, the First Amendment applied—unlike Paxton, which upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for sites whose content was at least one third composed of pornography, which is obscene to minors. In Brown, California argued that its law was “justified in aid of parental authority: By requiring that the purchase of violent video games can be made only by adults, the Act ensures that parents can decide what games are appropriate.” The Supreme Court has long recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” But the Brown Court doubted “that punishing third parties for conveying protected speech to children just in case their parents disapprove of that speech is a proper governmental means of aiding parental authority.” Those “doubts” should apply even more strongly to ASAA and the KIDS Act.

Rep. Harshbarger claimed that the KIDS Act hews closely to Paxton. Another member referenced the Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision in CCIA & NetChoice v. Uthmeier, which allowed a Florida law that included an age verification mandate for social media to take effect pending a First Amendment challenge. The appeals court claimed that Paxton “recently clarified that age verification does not automatically trigger strict scrutiny because it does not constitute a ‘ban on speech to adults.’”

Both misread Paxton. Here’s what the Court actually said: “the First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ power to impose age limits on speech that is obscene to minors.” That’s irrelevant here. Like the age verification requirement for violent video games in Brown, the KIDS Act and ASAA both clearly require age verification for content that is not obscene to minors—and both bills clearly do burden the First Amendment speech of adults to access entirely lawful speech anonymously. True, ASAA tries to reduce this burden by applying the age verification mandate only to the category of users that are found likely to be minors (presumably excluding much older adults), but such a category will necessarily include many adults, who will have to identify themselves to exercise their First Amendment rights—exactly what made age verification unlawful in Brown. 

TechFreedom prebutted the Eleventh Circuit’s confusion in Uthmeier. As our amicus brief explained, Paxton essentially said two things. First, for content obscene to minors, age-verification laws are (now—due to Paxton’s contortions) akin to regulations on expressive conduct. When content obscene to minors is at issue, the state’s regulatory power “necessarily includes the power to require proof of age.” In the context of adult content (pornography), in other words, an age-verification “statute can readily be understood as an effort to restrict minors’ access” to speech unprotected as to them. In the context of social media, by contrast, no such assumption applies. Restrictions in that realm remain, as they have always been, presumptively unconstitutional direct regulations on speech—as Brown held. The Eleventh Circuit simply misunderstood this, and buried its misreading of Paxton in a flimsily reasoned footnote.

So, what can lawmakers do, consistent with the First Amendment? Congress might start by creating a more privacy-protective national standard for age verification for pornography. Notably, Texas’s law does nothing to address the data security concerns raised by collecting user information for age verification. 

For social media services, lawmakers should focus on what has always been the clearest harm: sexual exploitation by adults. Legislation could start by empowering parents to control who their teens can communicate with. In this sense, the KIDS Act is better than ASAA: it focuses on parents’ access to direct messaging controls rather than approving the installation of each app. Democrats’ alternative bill, the “Safe Messaging for Kids Act,” is still more focused: it would require only that platforms “shall provide a parental tool to allow a parent of a covered user to view the covered user’s direct messaging control settings.” But both bills would require some form of age verification for some adults for lawful content. Paxton doesn’t make that constitutional. 

But maybe that’s OK. Do parents really need the government to require platforms and app stores to age-verify users to determine who’s a minor? ASAA requires that a minor’s account “be affiliated with a parental account” but it doesn’t require any effort to prove that the parental account actually belongs to the minor’s parent, because there is no easy or reliable way of doing so. Instead, it’s enough that this account “be established by an individual who the app store provider has determined is an adult.” If we can reasonably assume that person is the parent, why can’t we trust parents to manage the settings on devices they purchase for their teens? After all, mobile carriers allow only adults to set up accounts. 

If the existing parental controls in operating systems and app stores are inadequate or too hard to use, that’s where regulation should focus. That would be “less restrictive” of speech, in First Amendment terms, than forcing adults to identify themselves. Perhaps parents do need better controls over direct messaging. Apple iOS currently allows parents to control direct messaging but only for built-in apps. But if any controls required by law should be content and viewpoint-neutral, which means that they should work across all apps, lest they become an indirect way for parents to veto teens’ use of particular apps, like TrevorSpace or GiveUsTheFloor.

Whatever the government might require, it has no business protecting teens from “questionable ideological priorities,” even through the indirect means of requiring parental controls. “Whatever the power of the state to control public dissemination of ideas inimical to the public morality, said the Supreme Court long ago, “it cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a person’s private thoughts.” That’s true even if that person is a teenager.

Berin Szóka is President of TechFreedom.

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Say what you will about cops — even the federal ones — but they have nothing on the people charged with guarding people who have been detained or imprisoned. The cruelty of cops is slightly tempered by the fact that anyone with a cell phone, dash cam, or doorbell surveillance device might catch them in the act. It’s not much a deterrent (and it’s a far better deterrent than police body cameras, ironically enough) but it’s better than the absolute nothing that’s in place in detainment centers, jails, and prisons.

Cops can control their own cameras. Prison guards can control an entire network of cameras. And they’re far more used to dehumanizing people than law enforcement officers on the outside.

So, it’s hardly surprising that the people keeping an eye on the thousands of migrants being imprisoned indefinitely by this administration would be the most inhumane. If citizens stuck in prisons are treated like (diseased) cattle at best, the people dumped into ICE detention centers are treated like something even worse: vermin. That’s a loaded term. And I’m using it correctly when speaking about this administration.

The Associated Press has obtained some evidence of the day-to-day oppressive indignities ICE detainees suffer through each day. And from an unlikely source: 911 calls placed by detainment center staff. Things have to be particularly horrific for guards to consider calling 911 for help.

And they are:

The calls to 911 poured in from staff at Camp East Montana in Texas, the nation’s largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, at a rate of nearly one a day for five months, each its own tale of pain and despair.

A man sobs after being assaulted by another detainee. Another bangs his head against the wall after expressing suicidal thoughts. A pregnant woman complained of severe back pain and also had coronavirus.

Even worse is what’s been said by the detainees. Welcome to the Trump’s brave new world, where bigoted anti-migrant enforcement is now coupled with the potentially deadly effects of this administration’s anti-vax healthcare stance:

The detainees describe a camp where an average of about 3,000 people have lived per day in loud and unsanitary quarters, diseases spread easily and sleep is a luxury. The center will be closed to visitors until at least March 19 because of a measles outbreak, according to U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar.

That’s mass inhumanity, aided and abetted by an administration that doesn’t care how many people die so long as it can claim some sort of revenge over COVID-19 policies put in place in the last year of Trump’s previous presidential term.

Here’s the more selective inhumanity, which isn’t any better:

At one point [detainee Owen Ramsingh] said he overheard a security guard talking about bets made among the staff over which detainee would be next to die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into a pool, with the total pot riding on the outcome. The talk was particularly jarring, he said, because he had contemplated suicide himself.

Some of you might be saying to yourselves “Well, that’s just something one guy said.” And that’s true, it’s just one guy saying this. But this is also just one guy saying this:

The DHS spokesperson said Ramsingh’s account was false, though provided no indication of how the agency had sought to verify that.

True or not, these are the facts on the ground in Camp East Montana:

Ramsingh said he heard of the betting pool after Jan. 3, when ICE said security guards responded after a 55-year-old Cuban man tried to harm himself and then used handcuffs and force to restrain him. A medical examiner ruled that Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death was a homicide caused by asphyxia.

On Jan. 14, staff reported that a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man died by suicide days after he was detained while working in Minnesota.

Given what we know about what’s happening in this detainment center, coupled with what we know about the historical sadism of “screws,” this doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Then there are the 911 calls — placed by the guards themselves — that made it clear at least six other detainees had attempted or considered attempting suicide during that same time period.

So, while it could just be some guy saying something, consider this: the DHS has more to gain from denying this than Ramsingh — who has already been deported — has to gain from making this allegation.

I don’t find this allegation unbelievable. It seems like exactly the sort of thing people trained and encouraged to treat detainees as less than human would do, especially when suicides and suicidal ideation are a daily occurrence. The government contractors employing them are profiting from human misery. Why shouldn’t they?

When companies sued to block Trump’s IEEPA tariffs last year, one of the key arguments they made was obvious: if these tariffs turn out to be illegal, we’ll never get our money back. We need an injunction now. The government had an equally confident response: relax, if the tariffs are struck down, we’ll just issue refunds. No big deal. No injunction needed.

Multiple courts bought it. And now, with the Supreme Court having ruled the tariffs unlawful and a judge ordering the refunds, CBP is telling the court that it actually can’t comply with the order. The promises that defeated all those injunctions? Turns out nobody bothered to check whether they were actually true.

Once again, courts trusted what the government told them. Once again, it turns out they were wrong.

Let’s rewind to see how we got here.

Back in April 2025, when importers like V.O.S. Selections were seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the tariffs from being collected, the Department of Justice told the Court of International Trade there was simply no need for such drastic relief. In its brief opposing the injunction, the DOJ was explicit:

And, even if future entries are liquidated, defendants do not intend to oppose the Court’s authority to order reliquidation of entries of merchandise subject to the challenged tariffs if the tariffs are found in a final and unappealable decision to have been unlawfully collected. Such reliquidation would result in a refund of all duties determined to be unlawfully assessed, with interest.

No injunction needed! Refunds would flow. With interest, even. The government repeated this refund promise in case after case after case. In the Learning Resources stay motion, the government told the D.C. district court that there was no risk at all that the government wouldn’t repay:

For any plaintiff who is an importer, even if a stay is entered and defendants do not prevail on appeal, plaintiffs will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest. “[T]here is virtually no risk” to any importer that they “would not be made whole” should they prevail on appeal. See Sunpreme v. United States, 2017 WL 65421, at *5 (Ct. Int’l Trade Jan. 5, 2017). The most “harm” that could incur would be a delay in collecting on deposits. This harm is, by definition, not irreparable.

In the Axle case, same thing.

In any event, were Axle to ultimately prevail, it could receive a refund of duties paid that would otherwise be eligible for duty-free treatment under the de minimis exemption on any unliquidated entries. 28 U.S.C. §§ 2643-44. To the extent any future entries are liquidated, the Court may order reliquidation of entries subject to the challenged de minimis exemption if the duties paid by Axle are, in a final and unappealable decision, found to have been unlawfully collected. Such reliquidation would result in a refund of all duties determined to be unlawfully assessed, with interest.

In the Princess Awesome joint stipulation, the government formally agreed that there was nothing to fear about getting repaid:

Defendants stipulate that they will not oppose the Court’s authority to order reliquidation of entries of merchandise subject to the challenged IEEPA duties and that they will refund any IEEPA duties found to have been unlawfully collected, after a final and unappealable decision has been issued finding the duties to have been unlawfully collected

And the courts relied on these representations. In December 2025, when AGS Company Automotive Solutions sought a preliminary injunction to stay the liquidation of its entries, the three-judge panel denied the motion specifically because of the government’s refund promises:

For the reasons stated above, we conclude that the Government has taken the “unequivocal position” that “liquidation will not affect the availability of refunds after a final decision” in V.O.S. Gov’t Resp. at 2–3. The Government would be judicially estopped from “assum[ing] a contrary position” in the future.

Note the court’s foresight here. The panel explicitly invoked judicial estoppel—basically saying “okay, now that you’ve said this to a court, you’re bound by it going forward.” You get the sense that the court had a sense of where all this was going.

Then the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the IEEPA tariffs were unlawful. Judge Eaton at the Court of International Trade—designated as the sole judge to handle IEEPA refund cases—last week ordered CBP basically pay back everyone who paid an IEEPA tariff. Everyone. Not just those who sued.

In court, when the DOJ pushed back a bit, Eaton was blunt:

“Customs knows how to do this,” Eaton said during a court hearing on Wednesday. “They do it every day. They liquidate entries and make refunds.”

Enter the declaration of Brandon Lord, CBP’s Executive Director of the Trade Programs Directorate, filed the day after Judge Eaton’s order. He points out that, actually, there are a TON of tariffs to repay.

As of March 4, 2026, over 330,000 importers have made a total of over 53 million entries in which they have deposited or paid duties imposed pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq. (the “subject entries”). As of March 4, 2026, the total amount of IEEPA duties and estimated duty deposits collected pursuant to IEEPA is approximately $166 billion. Approximately 20.1 million entries remain unliquidated as of March 4, 2026.

And, apparently, it turns out that CBP is not at all prepared to repay what it owes:

In light of the Court’s March 5, 2026 amended order, CBP is now facing an unprecedented volume of refunds. Its existing administrative procedures and technology are not well suited to a task of this scale and will require manual work that will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency’s trade enforcement mission. Personnel would be redirected from responsibilities that serve to mitigate imminent threats to national security and economic security.

Lord’s declaration lays out a big list of technical and logistical obstacles. CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

There’s also a mess involving different entry types and automatic liquidation timelines—Lord’s declaration goes into a bunch of technical details about “formal” vs. “informal” entries, claiming that 4 million entries will automatically process next week and “CBP does not have a process to prevent” it. Even if the legal details are deep in the weeds, the message is clear: even with the Supreme Court ruling in hand, CBP claims parts of this train are still moving and they can’t stop it.

CBP says it can build new ACE functionality in 45 days that would streamline the process. The proposed system actually sounds reasonable. Which makes it worse: if you spent the better part of a year telling every court that would listen that refunds were totally manageable, that there was “virtually no risk” importers wouldn’t be made whole, that “such reliquidation would result in a refund of all duties determined to be unlawfully assessed, with interest”—then maybe, just maybe, you should have spent some of that year building the system to actually do it? Send over a DOGE bro or two to vibe code up a solution?

The Supreme Court case wasn’t a surprise. The government was a party to it. They knew the ruling was coming. They knew that if they lost, refunds would be necessary on a massive scale. And even just based on how the oral arguments went, they should have known how this would turn out.

Instead, CBP appears to have done absolutely nothing to prepare. The government used the promise of easy refunds as a sword to defeat injunction after injunction, convincing courts that importers would suffer no irreparable harm because the money could always be returned. Having successfully avoided those injunctions—allowing the tariffs to keep being collected for months on end, swelling that $166 billion pot—the government now tells the court that returning the money is an operational nightmare that requires new technology it hasn’t built yet.

This is exactly the scenario the AGS panel warned about. And if the government tries to argue that it can’t provide refunds—rather than that it just needs more time—it will run headlong into the judicial estoppel doctrine that the court already set up like a tripwire. As the AGS panel put it, quoting the Supreme Court: “where a party assumes a certain position in a legal proceeding, and succeeds in maintaining that position, he may not thereafter, simply because his interests have changed, assume a contrary position.”

Every month the government successfully avoided an injunction was another month it kept collecting tariffs. That $166 billion didn’t accumulate by accident. The government had every incentive to promise easy refunds and zero incentive to actually prepare for them. The longer importers waited for relief, the bigger the pot grew.

And now, with the Supreme Court having ruled those tariffs illegal, and with courts having explicitly warned that the government would be judicially estopped from changing its position, CBP says it needs 45 days to build new software before it can start writing checks.

“Customs knows how to do this,” Judge Eaton said. “They do it every day.”

Maybe. But apparently nobody in the entire federal government thought to ask whether CBP could actually deliver on the promises DOJ was making to court after court after court. Either that, or they just didn’t care what the answer was.

I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize the AI tools you mocked just six months ago, aren’t the ones in use today:

“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”

While the post is interesting (with the understanding this is somebody making and selling automation software), you might notice something: absolutely nowhere in the blog post does he meaningfully acknowledge the widespread problems with existing AI use. Either because his financial self-interest doesn’t allow for honest acknowledgment of them, or because he simply doesn’t find those aspects all that interesting.

Maybe both.

There’s no mention of how these tools are causing corporations to blow past their already tepid climate goal; no mention of how the affluent, surveillance-obsessed exec dictating its trajectory enthusiastically cozied up to fascists; no mention of how Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s data centers are funneling pollution directly into black neighborhoods; zero mention of the technofascist plan to leverage AI to decimate unions; no mention of the weird and precarious financial shell games powering the sector.

This New York Times article from a couple weeks ago is probably a better example of this art form. It’s an article, ostensibly about why the public has been so hostile to AI, that takes until the THIRTY-EIGHTH paragraph to actually try and explain some of the reasons. And even then it’s kind of a throwaway paragraph that doesn’t wrestle seriously with any of the criticism:

“The tech executives who are betting their companies’ futures on the triumph of A.I. have many resources to make sure it happens. They can spend even more money to build even more data centers. On the other hand, data centers around the country are increasingly a target of opposition for local residents who dislike the noise, the disruption, the secrecy and the lack of community benefits like jobs.”

Distilling the animosity against AI as just some random grumbling about “noise” and ambiguous “disruption” is a very weird and conscious choice, and I’d argue that this minimization, a reflection of the establishment press’ need to appease and protect access to corporate power, is itself a major contributor to growing hostility toward AI.

The fact that much of the public animosity to AI may be linked to the fact that its salesmen have overtly and enthusiastically enabled fascism just isn’t mentioned. The Times doesn’t think that’s relevant.

The fact that many U.S. billionaires see AI largely as a way to lazily cut corners and obliterate unions (see: its rushed adoption in journalism outlets like the LA Times or Politico) isn’t mentioned either. That the goal for most AI executives is to power this latest technological revolution completely free of any corporate oversight whatsoever? Again, somehow not deemed relevant.

Stories like this cling to a narrative that vaguely imply people are generally angry about AI due to some ambiguous flaw in their “perception,” likely caused by the way AI is being portrayed to the public on the tee vee:

“The A.I. companies seem increasingly alert to a perception problem. This year’s Super Bowl featured A.I.-themed ads that were defensive or just odd. Amazon’s ad showed A.I. proposing ways to kill Chris Hemsworth. The twist at the end: A.I. disarms him with a promised massage.”

And while there certainly are people who are intractably hostile to all aspects of automation and simply refuse to engage with it on any level (including understanding it), a huge swath of the animosity is being driven by historic and justified anger at the extraction class.

That anger and energy is good, and just, and will likely serve us well in the months and years to come. I’d argue it deserves a wide berth; including by tech industry insiders and AI advocates who don’t want to live under permanent kakistocracy staffed by weird zealots who operate at a third-grade reading level, openly enthusiastic about their grand visions for a permanent mass-surveillance murder autocracy.

Stories like this Times piece will often fixate on the AI “doomer narrative” (SkyNet will kill us all), but downplay that this specific strain of doomerism (very often pushed by wealthy industry insiders), often exists to both misrepresent what LLMs are capable of, but also to direct attention away from more realism-based criticism the industry doesn’t really want to talk about.

That’s not to say people can’t or shouldn’t be excited by evolutions in automation. But it is to say if you’re an AI advocate and you’re not also talking seriously about the very valid reasons so many people are pissed off, you’re not really talking seriously about the subject at all. You’re in marketing.