The more things change, the more they remain the same. That could be said of anywhere in this country, now that the Trump administration is trying to turn the clock back to 1940, if not 1840.
But it’s especially true in Los Angeles, where law enforcement agencies have apparently learned nothing, despite being the ignition source of two riots. The 1965 Watts riot was provoked by racist, abusive actions of the LAPD. The 1992 riots were similarly provoked by the racist, abusive actions of the LAPD.
Before, between, and after, Los Angeles law enforcement agencies haven’t done much to improve. When not actively thwarting federal investigations and running illegal jailhouse informant programs, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has hosted any number of “gangs” composed of officers who are more willing than others to engage in violence and rights violations.
The LASD’s gangs have made headlines for most of the last decade, including stuff that would otherwise seem to be the broadest of satires:
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Allegedly Removed ‘Unauthorized” Sheriff’s Gang Tattoo With A Bullet
It’s admittedly hilarious, but only in the darkest sense. While absolutely absurd, it also indicates that LASD officers (especially those who are in LASD gangs) feel the solution to every problem — including tattoo removal — is to start blasting.
A handful of people who’ve run on “reformer” platforms have either failed to be elected, or have been elected only to renege on their reformation promises.
The LAPD covers less area and has fewer officers than the Sheriff’s Department. But it still has nearly 9,000 officers, which is only about a grand short of the LASD total (10,000 officers). If nothing else, basic mathematics would strongly suggest the LAPD would be just as receptive to internal gangs as the Sheriff’s Department.
The LAPD internal investigation leveled a troubling allegation: Officers in a specialized unit tasked with combating street gangs had themselves behaved like a gang.
In 2023, officers in the San Fernando Valley were accused of making dozens of improper traffic stops and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body cameras.
When confronted by Internal Affairs detectives, according to the findings of a months-long probe, officers in the Valley’s “gang enforcement detail” said they were engaged in a “gun hunting competition,” with each firearm-related arrest tracked on a whiteboard in their office. Cops with the most seizures would pose for pictures with pro-wrestling-style championship belt that had “Mission GED Pistoleros” emblazoned on the buckle.
And so it is. While this opening salvo of paragraphs merely suggest some members of the LAPD were more prone to doing bad stuff than others, the Internal Affairs report makes it more explicit.
The report said the Valley unit was a “law enforcement gang.”
That report was buried by the LAPD for almost three years. But that burial proved temporary. The report — which had previously only been seen by LAPD officials and some city lawmakers — prompted further inquiries. And those further inquiries generated answers that raised even more questions:
LAPD leaders said at the time that the problems were confined to that one division. But a new case involving similar allegations against anti-gang officers operating out of South L.A.’s 77th Street patrol area has reignited questions about whether there are deeper issues across the department.
Oh, the fucking irony. An anti-gang squad that behaves like a gang. Wow, imagine if we’d ever seen this anywhere else multiple times. I mean, say the first thing that comes to mind when I say “rampart.”
It’s tempting to simply say that no one cares. But I don’t think that’s true. I do think a lot of people care, including LA lawmakers who want to see real reform. The problem is that the people with the most power don’t care. That not only includes law enforcement unions, law enforcement officials, elected officials (including sheriffs), but also the handful of lawmakers who actually think law enforcement officers should be allowed to violate rights while performing their duties.
That’s the headwind reform efforts face. While thousands (or millions, in this case) may recognize the problem and want reform, it only takes a handful of powerful people to prevent their voices from being heard. And while it’s easy to tell people to vote their way back into power, we only need to look to the White House to see how facile and futile the “vote the bastards out” suggestion is. It’s something that should have been addressed years ago, because if you give the bastards an inch, they’ll entrench a mile. If Los Angeles is going to fix this, it will require the concerted efforts of people who are more motivated to protect their paychecks than serve the public. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put there by companies seeking to extract more and more from you. It’s a great read and here’s just a snippet:
The internet you grew up on is not gone.
Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends.
The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.
But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.
But, as Godier’s piece notes, protocols are… boring. They change slowly (for a good reason, because you need stability to build on). They tend to change by consensus, which is messy. And rather than having billion dollar companies throwing a whole massive engineering team at making everything work, in the protocol world, we rely on constant experimentation by anyone who wants to experiment.
Sometimes that produces silly things. Sometimes it produces things that only kinda work. And sometimes, it produces wonderful new things that would never have existed in a world of fully centralized services.
But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future. The important thing for people to understand, though, is that while the amazing new breakthroughs in the protocol world may not get giant headlines in the NY Times or flashy stories about trillion dollar IPOs, they are building real things for real people, in which the people are the most important part, rather than the bankers or the billionaire execs looking to get richer.
So I was excited recently to take part as a juror for the Open Social Awards, put on by New_Public and Public Spaces, reviewing a wide range of projects looking to build on open social protocols (mostly ATproto and ActivityPub). The energy among developers right now for what they can do on open social systems is real, and it’s building fast. Tim Trautmann recently wrote about this, saying “the nerds are building a new internet.” As he wrote:
The open web of the nineties didn’t win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it. Slowly, unglamorously, in rooms that looked a lot like this one.
Whether atproto ends up being the thing, or a stepping stone to the thing, I don’t know. Nobody in the room claimed to know. But the work is real, the apps are shipping, and the people building them are taking it seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination is rare, and historically, it’s the one that wins.
You can see that kind of excitement as well in this recent video of a bunch of developers doing an ATproto hackathon, where you see people realizing in real time how powerful ATproto is in allowing you to build a better internet:
It’s so easy these days to get down on the state of the larger internet, increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies trying to extract more and more from you. But if you look beneath all of that, genuinely interesting, important things are being built, some of which was celebrated at the Open Social Awards last week.
The grand prize winner was the Newsmast Foundation, which has been helping mission-driven organizations build their own social spaces online, using ActivityPub. They’ve been building some amazing community apps for news organizations, non-profits, and more. Enabling those organizations to have their own social spaces, but built on top of an open protocol.
The two “Excellence Award” winners were equally strong — there was a real argument that either of them could have taken the grand prize. First there’s Blacksky Algorithms, which has built out an entirely separate and differentiated ATproto experience, where thousands of users can have a social media experience interoperable with Bluesky and others on the network, but without ever touching Bluesky hardware or software. The company keeps doing really fascinating things as well, including its use of pol.is for community decision-making, and offering up its ability to build entirely independent ATproto powered communities to others via Acorn.
And there’s one of my personal favorites, Sill, which is a wonderful cross-protocol newsreader app. You login with your Atmosphere (ATproto) handle and/or your ActivityPub handle, and it will find the news that is being discussed among your followers and format it in a nice digest format. I use it as a daily review of what’s happening in the world that’s interesting to me.
And then all of the “honorable mentions” were doing interesting things as well, figuring out ways to make open social more useful: Bounce (a tool for migrating between AcitivtyPub and ATproto while bringing your community with you, from the team who also does BridgyFed, a tool for communicating across protocols). Dandelion, an events platform built on ATproto. Streamplace, which does video streaming on ATproto. Leaflet, which has become one of the go to places for long form blogging within the ATproto world, and Bonfire Networks, which is also working on helping communities build their own communities online.
There were many other entries as well, and the energy developers are bringing to open social projects right now is genuinely contagious. People are learning that they can just build stuff, and specifically the kind of stuff that you had to rely on the goodwill (or perhaps commercial agreements) of a large company to build.
Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.
We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future.
In the meantime, congrats to the winners (and all the entrants) of the first ever Open Social Awards.
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The Trump administration has thrown billions at purging non-white people from this country. Most of that has ended up in the hands of ICE, which has — in turn — thrown hundreds of millions at a number of private companies offering bespoke and/or off-the-shelf surveillance solutions.
The slide down the slippery slope began less than six months after Trump took office in 2025, with the DHS repurposing tech used at border crossings for deployment as far inland as ICE, CBP, etc. were willing to travel. The facial recognition app of choice is “Mobile Fortify,” which ties into the DHS’s pre-existing databases and makes use of any number of third-party facial recognition products. (Which may include the much-reviled Clearview AI, yet another company being paid millions to provide the government with questionable tech predicated on even more questionable business ethics.)
As has almost always been the case with the DHS, the tech was primed, pumped, and deployed without proper testing or legally required privacy impact assessments (PIA) in place. And it was in such a hurry to spread its surveillance tech throughout the nation that it willingly deployed a product that not only couldn’t reliably do the one thing it was asked to do — verify identities — but was only able to be deployed by unilaterally stripping away Congressional limits placed on government use of facial recognition tech.
We’re still waiting on PIAs for Mobile Fortify to arrive and we certainly don’t expect them anytime soon. We also haven’t seen the DHS even pretend to address the app’s major flaws. One would think an app that’s still half-broken would have an extremely short lifespan. But this administration doesn’t care whether or not it works well. It’s only interested in subjecting as many people as possible to it.
Apparently, it’s not enough that thousands of federal agents have access to this app. As Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media, ICE wants to make things exponentially worse by giving it to pretty much any cop who wants to give it a whirl.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone’s immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.
Regular cops will be given access to “Task Force Module,” which will use the underlying tech (and database access) found in the ICE app. Apparently the only difference is that TFM will provide text prompts to cops once the app has finished (mis)identifying someone.
When an officer scans someone’s face, the app will run their face against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records, and then provide instructions to the officer. Either “not detain or arrest under ICE jurisdiction,” or the app will provide a reference code the officer can use to get additional information from ICE.
The document readily admits that DHS expects this app to be used on US citizens. After all, how else can you verify their citizenship? I mean other than the documents people normally carry on them, like ID cards. Or the fact that people not crossing US borders aren’t legally obligated to prove they’re citizens to federal officers just because they’ve decided to spend more time far away from the nation’s borders. This app is a perversion of the American way — a point-and-shoot “papers please” by proxy that allows officers to, in essence, demand production of documents they’re not entitled to ask for.
If ICE, etc. actually cared enough to do their job right, an app like this wouldn’t be necessary. It should have stayed at the border where the government has the right to demand proof of citizenship. Now, this surveillance kudzu will become another toy for cops who are similarly uninterested in respecting rights and equally willing to treat everyone like a suspect because it’s easier than actually doing the legwork.
“Papers please” everywhere all the time is disturbing enough. But giving officers another surveillance toy that’s flawed and deployed without absolutely zero oversight is just going to deliver new horror stories of surveillance abuse by powerful government employees who know no one above them cares what happens to those the government turns its cameras on. Cops and federal agents alike are going to use the tech to stalk and harass protesters, critics, and anyone else they might want to fuck with. And all in service of a bigoted push to rid the nation of people who actually make it great.
What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:
Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.
Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.
And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.
[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]
I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.
On Monday, I wrote about Trump’s plan to use the “red mirage” of California's slow vote count to claim the results are fraudulent. Yesterday, the GOP leadership revealed how it will help him shape the false narrative that the midterm elections are somehow rigged in favor of the Democrats.
How they’ll prove that without actual evidence has always been a bit of a mystery. But no longer.
House Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN Monday afternoon to echo the president’s claims. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju pressed him on whether he had actual evidence that the California election had been rigged, Johnson’s answer was both candid and alarming. “I don’t,” he admitted. “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”
Vice President JD Vance joined the chorus on Jesse Watters’s Fox News program, calling the results “pretty shady” and suggesting that mail-in ballots ought to rank candidates in the same order as election-night totals. That’s a standard with no basis in how elections actually work, in California or anywhere else.
The outrage masks one inconvenient detail. The same “rigged” California system had somehow allowed Trump-endorsed Republican Steve Hilton to advance to the general election in the governor’s race. For a conspiracy apparently so diabolical it defies detection, it had a curious blind spot.
The GOP’s new argument is that the mere suspicion of fraud, unmoored from any evidence, is enough to delegitimize results Republicans don’t like. It is a position that is both remarkable and dangerous. It is also, to students of American history, disturbingly familiar.
History may not repeat itself, but its lyrics often rhyme. I composed the score to the Broadway show Allegiance, set during the Japanese American internment. So when I heard Johnson utter those words, they stopped me cold.
In 1942, Earl Warren (yes, that Earl Warren, who later became a liberal Chief Justice) was California’s ambitious attorney general. He was calculating, with a keen instinct for which way the political winds were blowing. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, as fear of a Japanese invasion swept the West Coast, Warren appeared before Congress to make the case for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes, their farms and their communities.
His argument was not that Japanese Americans had committed acts of sabotage or espionage. In fact, he admitted none had been reported. Instead, he turned that absence of evidence into evidence itself. He infamously claimed that the absence of reported sabotage or espionage was itself proof that something terrible was coming.
Historian Roger Daniels later gave this reasoning its epitaph: the “Invisible Deadline for Sabotage” theory. Warren had constructed an argument that could never be disproved. in Warren’s twisted logic, no evidence of wrongdoing only meant the wrongdoing was being carefully concealed, waiting to strike.
More than 120,000 innocent people were uprooted from their lives, in part because of that tortured reasoning.
Speaker Johnson invoked a kind of “Invisible Sabotage” himself on Monday: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove.” Replace “these efforts” with “their sabotage,” and Warren could have said it in 1942. As with Warren, Johnson’s accusation is evidence-proof by design. He presents the lack of evidence not as a weakness in his claim, but as a sign of the enemy’s sophistication.
Warren later expressed deep regret for his role in the internment, calling it one of the great mistakes of his life. That regret came too late for the tens of thousands of people who lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases, their lives.
Beware the unfalsifiable claim
There’s a name for the kind of argument made then by Warren and now by Speaker Johnson: the unfalsifiable claim. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that for any assertion to qualify as a genuine factual claim, it must be possible, at least in principle, to prove it wrong. A claim that cannot be disproved by any conceivable evidence is a trap dressed up as a factual assertion.
Johnson’s formulation is exactly that trap. If evidence of fraud emerges, that proves the fraud. If no evidence of fraud emerges, that proves the fraud is too sophisticated to detect. It’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” There is no result, no audit, no court finding, no canvass outcome that could ever satisfy this standard because the standard was never designed to be satisfied. It was designed to be repeated.
Speaker Johnson wasn’t alone in this effort, which suggests the line is now a GOP messaging point. The No. 2 Republican in the House, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), took us one step further toward the cliff, dropping even the pretense that any factual claim, much less proof, is required. “Whether you can prove fraud or not,” he said, “it does undermine integrity in the vote.”
Note what Scalise is actually saying. He’s arguing that the very suspicion of fraud—invented and stoked by the GOP itself, evidence-free, conjured from nothing more than a losing result—is enough to corrode faith in an entire election. “The vote count felt off to us, so it’s your fault that we’re ready to discard the results!” is quite the position.
Then there’s Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. When a NewsNation host pressed him on why no evidence of large-scale fraud had ever materialized, Johnson had a ready answer: “I mean, people do things to cover it up.” Johnson, in other words, attributes the absence of evidence to a massive cover-up.
That is standard operating procedure from the Trump White House: accuse the other side of precisely what you are doing, in this case, a cover up of a huge crime. In the Epstein files case, there is plenty of evidence of that cover up, whereas here there remains exactly none.
Johnson might have gotten away with the “cover up” framing had he not been caught on hidden camera in 2021 stating plainly that the 2020 election was not stolen and that Trump had lost. He knows the argument is false but is making it anyway.
No, vibes aren’t admissible evidence
There is a reason Trump’s legal team lost more than 60 post-2020 election lawsuits before judges from both parties, including many Trump appointed. Courts of law operate on evidence. Vibes, instincts and faith-based assertions are not cognizable legal theories. Judges know precisely what to do with claims that lack admissible evidence: dismiss them.
The post-2020 litigation is instructive. In case after case, Trump attorneys who had spent weeks on television claiming massive, coordinated fraud walked into courtrooms and conceded they were making no such allegations. The reason was simple: making a fraudulent claim to a court carries immediate consequences that making one on social media or television does not.
Speaker Johnson, Rep. Scalise and Sen. Johnson know this. But their arguments were never designed for a courtroom. The unfalsifiable claim is a political instrument built for feeds, rallies and the grievance ecosystem, where evidence is beside the point, blind faith is a test of loyalty, and unfounded suspicions are self-sustaining.
These claims worked well enough in 2020 to send a mob into the Capitol. With five months remaining before the midterms, it is being road-tested again.
Due to heavy information controls, people in Iran face significant barriers to accessing the Internet. Authorities have actively blocked numerous websites and apps, including conventional circumvention and digital security tools such as VPNs, social media platforms, and the app stores themselves. This creates a "chicken-and-egg" problem: users need a VPN to download a VPN.
Launched in 2016, Paskoocheh, Persian for "alleyway," is an open source alternative app store, community hub, and one-stop-shop for users to access information and tools to circumvent censorship, enhance their privacy, securely communicate, and express themselves freely online. Developed and maintained by ASL19, a technology and exiled media organization named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Paskoocheh restores access and allows people to reach trusted tools through four censorship-resilient channels: the Paskoocheh website, Android App, Email bot, and Telegram bot.
Users are also able to reach our Persian-speaking support team through the Paskoocheh Helpdesk, which handles over 200 tickets daily. In addition, ASL19 translates and publishes accessible user guides, blog posts, and multimedia content to help users navigate online privacy and digital security best practices.
Paskoocheh serves as more than an alternative app store; it is also a bridge between tool developers and in-country users. Our support team relays user feedback to tool developers, helping improve tools and overall experience in Iran. We also conduct in-country testing with developers and user communities to evaluate new features and strengthen censorship-resilient technologies.
Paskoocheh's impact so far
This combination of access, user support, and education has turned Paskoocheh into a critical lifeline for users in Iran.
# of tool downloads since 2016: 17,634,852
# of community members in Iran supporting testing and localization efforts: 2,000+
# of monthly active users on web and app: ~200K
During periods of internet disruption and nationwide protests in Iran, these tools became critical communication lifelines. One longtime user wrote to us:
"I've been using this free app for several years now. It's free, unique, and unlike others, it has no equal." Reflecting on the broader digital environment in the country, they added that "in these difficult economic conditions, people are struggling just to survive, while many apps either empty people's pockets, deceive and lie to them, or serve as tools for spying and propaganda."
Messages like these highlight the importance of privacy-preserving technologies in environments where surveillance, censorship, and disinformation shape everyday life online. In moments of crisis, internet freedom tools become part of how people maintain relationships, exchange trusted information, and stay connected to the outside world. For some users, these tools also made it possible to continue reporting on events on the ground, verify information during periods of state-backed disinformation, and safely communicate evidence of abuses despite widespread surveillance and connectivity disruptions.
The future of Paskoocheh: Scaling a community-first approach to internet freedom
As internet censorship tactics evolve rapidly, internet shutdowns are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, cutting communities off from information, communication, and one another.
What we have learned through this work is that access alone is not enough. Technology is only useful if people trust it, understand how to use it safely, and can rely on support networks when digital spaces become unstable or dangerous.
That is why our work extends beyond technical development. Alongside building secure access technologies, ASL19 invests heavily in user education, digital security guidance, and community capacity building. Every support ticket answered, training delivered, and piece of digital safety guidance shared helps people stay connected under pressure.
This human-centered approach is becoming increasingly important as authoritarian tactics evolve globally. During internet shutdowns and heightened censorship, local helper communities often become the first line of assistance for journalists, activists, students, and ordinary citizens.
With additional support, ASL19 aims to continue expanding Paskoocheh beyond its current capacity into a broader resilience ecosystem that combines technical innovation with stronger on-the-ground support systems. This includes improving access to trusted circumvention and privacy tools during shutdowns, expanding multilingual user support and educational resources, and deepening collaboration with communities operating under digital authoritarianism.
This work is not solely about technology products. At a moment when most people's understanding of the internet is shaped by the little squares in their pockets, it is important to acknowledge and support the broader ecosystems that make access possible. Civil society, independent media, and grassroots communities all play a part in helping people survive under pressure. This is why partnerships within the internet freedom ecosystem matter. Living under digital authoritarianism means that these are not abstract protections against hypothetical risks, but practical tools that make journalism, organizing, education, and communication possible in the first place.
About ASL19
Named after Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ASL19 is a technology and exiled media organization working to counter digital authoritarianism. For more than a decade, we have partnered with civil society groups, journalists, researchers, activists, and internet users living under some of the world's most restrictive online environments. Guided by the belief that privacy and internet freedom are essential to safe communication, access to information, and civic participation, ASL19 develops technologies and support systems that help people navigate censorship, surveillance, internet shutdowns, and information manipulation. In countries such as Iran, Russia, and China, these tools serve as critical lifelines, enabling people to communicate securely, access information, document human rights abuses, and stay connected to the outside world.
On one hand, the Trump administration wants to destroy most corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and regulatory autonomy. On the other hand, the administration very much wants to abuse government power and wield regulatory oversight in all sorts of terrible ways that censor speech, stifle journalism, and enable corrupt cronyism.
I’ve long noted how FCC boss Brendan Carr in particular personifies this inconsistency. He wants to abuse FCC authority to bully companies he doesn’t regulate (TikTok) and stifle journalistic criticism of the president (ABC, CBS), but he also routinely wants to try and claim that his agency lacks the authority to do anything to protect consumers or hold telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior.
Those inconsistencies came to a head last week when the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the Biden FCC’s attempt to fine AT&T and Verizon for spying on customer location data, selling access to that data to any random old nitwit, and failing to tell their paying customers about it.
A 2018 New York Times story showcased how stalkers, police, people pretending to be police, and the prison system routinely bought access to this data and then failed completely to secure it. Six years later the Biden FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon) for the abuses.
But the efforts were upended by a 5th Circuit ruling last year declaring that the FCC fines somehow violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial (one of several arguments AT&T and Verizon lawyers through at a wall to see what would stick). The 5th circuit had been supportive of a broader Trump administration second term initiative to basically defang the entirety of regulatory corporate oversight.
The wireless carriers’ case leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which declared that the SEC system for issuing fines violated the right to a jury trial. Verizon and AT&T lawyers insisted that they couldn’t be fined by the FCC for privacy violations, because it violated their Seventh Amendment rights.
So the Trump-stocked Supreme Court had a tricky choice. Do they support the administration’s effort to defang and neuter corporate oversight? Or do they protect their ambition to wield regulatory agencies as a blunt weapon? The Supreme Court decided to go with the latter, though the ruling shouldn’t be construed as any sort of good faith protection of consumer privacy rights or the public interest.
Only Clarence Thomas decided to buy into the telecom industry’s flimsy arguments.
“The Supreme Court got this one right,” John Bergmayer, Legal Director at consumer group Public Knowledge said in a statement. “AT&T and Verizon sold access to their customers’ location data, then failed to stop bounty hunters and even a rogue sheriff from using it to track people who had no idea they were being followed. The FCC investigated, found the carriers liable, and proposed penalties—which the carriers were always free to challenge in court.”
It’s a useful win, but it bucks the broader Trump court trend of declaring most regulatory agencies largely powerless to hold corporate power accountable across a wide variety of industries. And even here you’ll notice the FCC fines came six years after the initial revelations of wireless carrier misbehavior. They never would have come at all if not for the Biden FCC.
It may likely be years more before fines are collected (assuming Carr bothers), and they’ll still likely only comprise a fraction of the money made on the back of abusing consumer privacy. But in the golden age of corruption and incoherent Trump court rulings, you take whatever victories you can get.
Back in January of this year, RFK Jr. clearly strong armed the CDC into changing the childhood vaccination schedules in America to mimic those of Denmark. The public messaging was crafted to sound as reasonable as possible and amounted to a claim that America was going to revise vaccination schedules to match those of another successful, industrialized, peer country. There were a couple of problems with the move.
For starters, Kennedy did his usual move of trying to make this change completely outside of the normal process for such things. There was no indication that any of this was done at the behest of his reformed ACIP panel. It didn’t go through the normal scientific checks and balances. And even if it had, the courts later put a stay on all such changes, because Kennedy didn’t follow the American Procedure Act in either those revised schedules or even the formation of ACIP itself. The Trump administration has appealed that decision.
The other main issue with the change was the obvious one: America is not Denmark. Calling Denmark a peer nation to America is laughable for many reasons. As one Danish official pointed out at the time: Denmark has a homogeneous population, universal free healthcare, lower serious outcomes from infectious diseases that they don’t vaccinate for, and a population that actually largely trusts government institutions. America doesn’t have any of that, in large part because the party of Trump doesn’t want us to have it.
Donald Trump doesn’t know how to take an “L”, though, so of course he simply picked up a pen recently and is attempting to executive order his way to trying to change those same vaccination schedules.
While the federal government is appealing that injunction, the new executive order on Friday reaffirms Kennedy’s plans to adopt Denmark’s strategy, calling for “realigning” US vaccine policy with “best practices from peer, developed countries.”It states that the scientific assessment written by Høeg and Kulldorff is a “guiding resource for the Federal Government” and that the CDC shall ” take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule.”
As before, the AMA is strongly against the unilateral change made without backing from scientific evidence.
“Altering [the vaccine schedule] without clear, evidence-based justification risks continued confusion for parents and patients, undermining trust in vaccines, and ultimately lowering vaccination rates,” Mukkamala said. “That would put more children and communities at risk of preventable illness.”
The American Medical Association (AMA) wasn’t the only one to come out against this top-down edict. The American College of Physicians (ACP) likewise pushed back on the EO publicly, stating unequivocally that it must not be implemented or there would be severe negative health outcomes for American children.
As did, hilariously, scientists in Denmark itself.
Anders Hviid, who leads research on vaccine safety and effectiveness at the Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s equivalent of the CDC, told The New York Times in December that it did not make sense to compare the US to Denmark. “It’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark,” he said.
Hviid also told the Times that the US public health policies under Kennedy “get crazier and crazier” by the month. “It is surreal, and it is difficult, from a Danish perspective, to understand what’s going on.”
Trust me, dear Anders, it’s difficult to understand from within the American borders, too.
Now, neither Trump nor Kennedy give a flying damn about Denmark, of course. That much is obvious to anyone with a working frontal cortex. The country’s vaccination schedules are merely being used as a prop to reduce the vaccination schedules for American children because that’s all Kennedy really wants. Over the objections, it turns out, of Danish scientists themselves.
I’m sure the AMA, ACP, or the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) will be filing lawsuits over this Executive Order. And I see no reason why the courts shouldn’t put a hold on its implementation, as it did to Kennedy.
But the real mystery is why the do-nothings in Congress just can’t be bothered to push back directly on all of this.
The latest proof? On Monday night, for the first time in 27 years, the New York Knicks hosted an NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden. The city had been building toward this for weeks: 13 straight playoff wins as part of a 46-day winning streak, a 2–0 series lead over the San Antonio Spurs, and a cross-borough electricity rarely felt even in a metropolis of eight million.
The world’s most famous arena was about to host the most consequential basketball game played in New York since 1999. It would also, as the price of one man’s vanity, be locked down like a war zone.
Trump confirmed his attendance on Friday, citing an invitation from Knicks owner James Dolan, a longtime friend and campaign donor. “I’ve been a Knicks fan for a long time and also a Jim Dolan fan,” Trump told reporters. “He’s a nice guy.”
Trump showed up Monday night and promptly ruined everything.
Trump’s decision to crash the Knicks game was not an impulse. Since retaking office, he has attended the Super Bowl (the first sitting president to do so), the Daytona 500, the Ryder Cup, two UFC fights, the U.S. Open, the FIFA Club World Cup final and a Washington Commanders game—even going into the Fox broadcast booth during the latter. That’s roughly a dozen major sporting events in his second term alone, with a UFC fight night at the White House scheduled for June 14, Trump’s birthday.
According to communication professor Kara Alaimo, Trump’s strategy is “as old as human civilization.” Leaders often associate themselves with the pageantry and goodwill of major public events, borrowing the crowd’s energy for their own brand. Trump has refined the practice into a second-term signature move. As OutKick founder Clay Travis put it: “Sports has embraced President Trump for the second term in a way that it did not in the first term.”
The NBA Finals, though, presented a particular opportunity. The Knicks are New York. Trump grew up in New York. With Monday’s game being the first Finals game at MSG in a generation, the hometown team up 2–0 and two wins from their first championship since 1973, it was exactly the kind of cultural moment Trump couldn’t resist. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave him a warm official welcome, calling Trump “very much a New Yorker” and saying his attendance “adds to the bigness of the event.”
Ten city blocks closed
This is what the “bigness” of the event actually looked like for the tens of thousands of people who live, work and commute through Midtown Manhattan on a Monday evening:
Starting at 4 p.m., the NYPD established a security perimeter stretching from West 30th to West 35th Streets between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Seventh and Eighth Avenues were closed to vehicles and all general pedestrian traffic. There were only five designated entry checkpoints. No one was permitted inside the zone without a ticket, a train to catch, a business to reach, or “some other authorized reason.” In all, it was ten blocks of one of the densest neighborhoods on earth, locked down six hours before tipoff.
Inside the perimeter, the security apparatus included a TSA-style magnetometer screening at every entrance. There was a strict no-bag policy, no exceptions, and no locker storage. Fans who showed up with a backpack or tote got sent away or were forced to discard it.
The Secret Service deployed drones and counter-drone technology, protective intelligence and specialized tactical units—“from the ground to the sky,” in the words of Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool, who urged ticketed fans to arrive at the arena two hours before the 8:30 p.m. tipoff.
Attendees began lining up to enter MSG more than four hours before tipoff—a scene, as the AP observed, “more closely resembling New Year’s Eve in Times Square than the usual leadup to a basketball game.” For those who had paid upward of $7,000 earlier in the week for even the cheapest ticket just to get in the door, it was a horrible experience.
Greg Weldon had been in the stands when the Knicks were in the Finals more than half a century ago. He made the trip back from Florida with his son, standing in line outside MSG in his Knicks jersey. “You can’t really put a price on the experience,” he told reporters. The main inconvenience, he said, had been the sheer absence of information. “We’ve asked so many cops, Secret Service, guys with machine guns, what to do, where should we go. Nobody knows.”
The precedent from Trump’s other sporting appearances was not reassuring. At last year’s U.S. Open men’s singles final in Queens, thousands of fans missed the start of the match because of the security lines. The U.S. Tennis Association pushed back the start by a half-hour, and many fans still couldn’t get through in time.
The disruption reached inside the building long before tipoff. An MSG kitchen employee told NBC News that staff who normally enter the arena around 6 a.m. did not make it through the added screening until 8 a.m., two hours late, for people whose job it was to feed the crowd.
Even the players felt the disturbance in the force. Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, speaking from courtside after arriving early, described the experience as “like getting screened by TSA.”
“I think the president being here just makes it inconvenient on everybody else,” Fox said. “We’ve got more security. We’ve got to send stuff early, our buses are a little earlier… A little inconvenient for the people that’s gotta play.”
The outdoor watch parties that had become a fixture of the playoff run, with fans gathering on Plaza33 outside MSG, game after game through 13 straight wins, were gone for the night. Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambled to set up a substitute watch party at Bryant Park, half a mile north, capped at 5,000 and requiring pre-registration. “We improvise,” said Knicks guard Jose Alvarado, a New York native. “We’re New Yorkers. We’re going to find a way to watch a game, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Fan Gisele Cintron captured the mood outside: “I do feel sad, because the fans have been waiting for a while. I think they should be able to enjoy it outside. But it is what it is. We’ll make the best of it. New York always has fun, no matter what.”
“Get Lost”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a lifelong Knicks fan from Brooklyn, had been building toward this moment for days.
On Friday, speaking with CNN’s John Berman, he gave voice to the frustration felt by millions. “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing? Like literally, the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA Finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.”
He added, “I mean, come on, seriously, give us a break. Why doesn’t this guy just focus on trying to improve the quality of life of the American people? Because the Trump economy has been a disaster.”
By Monday, Jeffries’s exasperation had grown. “He has to make the America 250 celebration about himself. He’s got to make the World Cup about himself. He’s got to make the East Wing of the White House about himself. And now he wants to make this historic Knicks championship run about himself as well. Get lost. Doesn’t this guy have better things to do?”
Outside the arena, Jeffries added a kicker. “Does this guy even know the difference between Karl Rove and Karl-Anthony Towns? I don’t think so.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram on Sunday that Trump’s attendance had “already been a vibe killer, because now the city has to shut down all the MSG watch parties that happen outside of the arena.” She noted she frequently skips major public sporting events herself, out of respect for the fans who would otherwise bear the security burden.
Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN’s First Take Monday morning, said he had been publicly pleading with Trump not to attend for days. “This president has no business showing up in New York City. I am dead serious. It is selfish. It is narcissistic. It is ridiculous that he is coming to this game.”
Even Ann Coulter piled on. The conservative commentator called Trump’s decision to accept Dolan’s invitation “selfish, narcissistic” and “the worst decision” of his presidency.
I can think of far worse, to be honest, like the Iran War, global tariff wars, and ICE and troop deployments in our major cities. But this was certainly one of the more pointless and selfish.
Booo!
Outside, before he had even made it inside, Trump’s motorcade arrived to a wall of sound. Fans lined the route with signs and profanity-laced jeers. Some gave him the middle finger. “Put them gas prices down!” one fan shouted before adding an expletive. “F— Trump, but we came here for the Knicks!” another hollered. The crowd broke into chants of “F— Trump, go Knicks!”
Trump’s response, as the jeering washed over him, was a smirk.
He has worn that public mask before. At the U.S. Open men’s final in Queens last fall—his home borough—he was booed on the ABC telecast. When he heard the crowd’s reaction, the AP reported, he “offered a smirk,” which “briefly made the boos louder.”
Inside MSG, as Broadway star Avery Wilson sang the National Anthem, the broadcast cut to Trump standing in the Dolan suite, his hand raised to his brow. Madison Square Garden erupted in boos. Faint claps could be heard, but they were swallowed by the crowd.
Trump, boarding Air Force One afterward, was asked about the reception. “It was, I think, mostly cheers,” he told reporters. “It was loud, and it was very enthusiastic.”
The Longest Blink
As the game wore on, cameras in the Dolan suite caught Trump with his eyes closed, hands clasped in his lap. His head dipped slightly for roughly 45 seconds before he reopened his eyes with a start, glanced around and refocused on the court. Footage of the moment spread across social media within minutes.
Trump napping through major public events has become a regular occurrence. In May, a Reuters photograph captured him with his eyes shut in the Oval Office. A White House-associated account responded with “He was blinking, you absolute moron.” MeidasTouch deployed the “long blink” defense again when the MSG footage surfaced.
Worse still, Trump was apparently dozing through one of the tighter fourth quarters of the NBA season. The Spurs had pulled ahead 111–104 with under two minutes to play. The Knicks clawed back to within two on an OG Anunoby three-pointer. The Garden was loud enough to rattle the windows. Trump, in his suite above it all, was catching some shut-eye.
Social media quickly delivered its verdict. “So he ruined the night for all of those people just to take another nap?” “He shut down New York and screwed over Knicks fans just to nap in a new location.” “Bringing half your cabinet courtside just to take a historic nap is wild.”
He also left before the buzzer. Photographers captured his motorcade departing MSG while the final seconds were still on the clock.
The Trump Curse
The Spurs won 115–111. The Knicks’ 13-game winning streak—a 46-day run that had turned an entire city into believers—was over. The series was now 2–1. Would the Knicks come back stronger, now that Trump was gone? We’ll have to see.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom shared the news of the Knicks’ loss alongside a screenshot of a recent White House tweet. The tweet read: “Call it the Trump Effect.”
慶応 (けいおう) — Keio era (1865.4.7-1868.9.8) 弁慶 (べんけい) — strong person 慶事 (けいじ) — happy event 早慶 (そうけい) — Waseda University and Keio University 慶長 (けいちょう) — Keicho era (1596.10.27-1615.7.13) 内弁慶 (うちべんけい) — someone haughty and boastful at home but meek and reserved outside 慶弔 (けいちょう) — congratulations and condolences 国慶節 (こっけいせつ) — anniversary of founding (of PRC) 落慶 (らっけい) — celebration of the completion of a temple or shrine's construction 大慶 (たいけい) — great joy
President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed.
Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues. Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to collect communications from targets overseas – including communications with Americans in the U.S. – and stores them in massive databases. The NSA then allows other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to access untold amounts of that information.
Under current practice, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. What’s more, victims won’t even know and have very few ways of finding out that their communications have been surveilled. EFF and other civil liberties advocates have been trying for years to know how data collected through Section 702 is used in domestic investigations and prosecutions.
Our advocacy to reform Section 702 has been consistent across administrations, including when the federal Intelligence Community was run by people with experience in the relevant agencies. In fact, the 2004 law creating the position of DNI – which coordinates America’s 18 spy agencies – requires those who hold it to have “extensive national security expertise.”
“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Because Trump named him acting DNI, Pulte isn’t subject to Senate confirmation. And under the Vacancies Act, Pulte could remain in the role for about seven months.
This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets – including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency.
All these targets and others have denied wrongdoing. A federal criminal complaint filed against James in Virginia imploded after a judge found prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed, and prosecutors twice failed to convince a grand jury to indict James. Pulte’s accusations against Schiff, Cook, and others have not led to criminal charges.
Pulte isn’t a qualified intelligence administrator. He does, however, seem to be unquestioningly loyal to President Trump and willing to use his position to attack and smear the President’s political foes. As acting DNI, Pulte would have access to every scrap of classified information the Intelligence Community holds, and under Section 702, that includes massive amounts of information about Americans.
Even lawmakers who are typically friendly to the intelligence community acknowledge that this is a disaster in the making. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, told NPR that Pulte has “no experience in the military, no experience in Congress, no experience in the intel community or law enforcement” and was chosen because he is “100% loyal to doing anything and everything President Trump demands.”
And Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters “we don’t need a weaponized” national intelligence director. Asked about fears that Pulte might pursue Trump’s political opponents, Thune said: “We need professionals there.”
Congress already has had trouble reauthorizing Section 702 as Freedom Caucus Republicans and many Democrats joined forces to demand reforms including the common-sense requirement that federal agencies get a probable cause warrant from a judge before searching any data involving Americans. Pulte’s appointment exemplifies why no administration should have the power granted by Section 702 without the independent judicial review required in seeking a warrant.
The concept of “enshittification” has helped illuminate why companies and their products so often get worse over time, but the causes of this process are complex and multifaceted. In his new book Incorruptible, author Eric Ries presents a related but contrasting take on how good companies go bad, and how to build companies that resist the process. This week, Eric joins the podcast to talk all about the book and what we might be able to do to solve this problem.
In the last three months I’ve had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What’s been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an “all hands” email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that everyone in the company MUST start learning to use them immediately or they should look for a job elsewhere. Sometimes they talk about hiring “consultants” to come in and teach the team how to use the tools properly. Sometimes they are setting up “office hours” or internal “AI hackathons.”
But in every case the gist is the same “holy shit AI is amazing and you are expected to use it at your job all the time.” The worst case of these were the few companies that set up token leaderboards, which is perhaps the dumbest way possible to encourage learning how to use LLMs well. Good usage of AI includes learning how to view tokens as a scarce resource. Simply counting how much you use as a good thing is ridiculous because it’s incredibly easy to waste tokens on counterproductive uses.
As regular readers of Techdirt know, I actually do think that these tools are powerful and important, but I also think there are many problems with them and limitations to how useful they really are. I think when someone learns how to use them well and willingly chooses to use them as a tool to assist their work, they can be quite powerful. But the willingly choosing to use them part of that is important.
No one who is forced into using these tools will ever learn to use them well.
So CEOs losing their minds over the tech are not being helpful. Box CEO Aaron Levie — himself a genuine AI believer — puts his finger on exactly why.
CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.
So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.
“Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues.
“Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with.
The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a ton to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.
I will say that I hate the term “AI psychosis” because the term is extremely misleading, and many psychologists and psychiatrists have complained that it is inaccurate and may cause more problems itself. But the general sense that CEOs are going overboard with AI is definitely happening.
And I think Levie’s thinking as to why is also dead on.
Much of the issue may be in how disconnected the traditional CEO is from the people at a company actually getting stuff done. Normally, they have teams and layers and the actual work of getting things to work in a real way is so far removed from a CEO that they just get snippets of the details that filter back through the various org charts.
The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”
This is a bad CEO.
Making things work is different than making things work well. Or well at scale. Or well at scale in a specific environment. Obviously, it depends on the kind of project and what it’s being designed to do, but oftentimes the reason a company has a bunch of employees is to fill in the seemingly small, but incredibly important details that CEOs might not ever get much visibility into: things like security or legal compliance or accessibility or who knows what else.
Using an agentic tool to build something that works is all well and good, but building a product for the mass market to use — and use well, and use safely — involves much, much more. Agentic coding tools can sometimes help with that too, but the leap from “I built a thing” to “therefore anyone can build a thing” misses the entire point of why you hire knowledgeable, experienced people in the first place. It’s also why I think the best case of these tools is building totally personalized tools to assist you in accomplishing a specific task, and not for building mass market tools.
This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen.
That’s not to say employees wouldn’t benefit from a deeper understanding of both the power and the limits of these tools — they would. But there’s something darkly comical about watching a CEO go all in on the tech and then immediately conclude it means they can fire half the staff.
It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work productively.
Separately, companies pointing to LLMs as a reason for large layoffs are, in most cases, just using it as an excuse. They over-hired, and “AI efficiencies” is a much more palatable story for Wall Street than “we made bad headcount decisions.”
Levie’s prescription, though, is right: CEOs should learn how the tech works, but that includes the limitations of the technology. If a CEO thinks the prototype they vibe coded is production-ready, let them ship it and see what happens. If they think a vibe coded contract is as solid as one a lawyer reviewed, let them find out what the legal bills look like when it falls apart.
Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO.
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Trump has loved “travel bans” since his first term in office. It has nothing to do with making America safer or better and everything to do with making America whiter.
People were opposed to Trump’s blanket bans all the way back in 2017, when the heads of tech companies managed to collectively grow enough spine to push back against Trump and his bigoted take on immigration.
Well, it’s now Trump’s second term and for damn sure US tech companies aren’t going to be riding to rescue. The post-truth administration continues to welcome white migrants while doing everything it can to eject non-whites, even if it means repeatedly arresting and jailing actual US citizens.
The thing is that migrants actually make America greater than it would ever be if it was just a nation of white people pretending they’re actually the “native” Americans. Migrants break fewer laws, pay more taxes, and avail themselves of fewer social programs than naturally-born citizens.
This administration is fully engaged in Manifest Bigotry. It has stripped temporary protected status from thousands of people who fled from war-torn countries, abject poverty, and nations known for their perpetual human rights abuses. Those still being allowed to access this particular privilege are the kind of people this administration loves: whites fleeing imaginary “persecution” in a nation where Black people have finally been given the same rights as white people.
While it may seem plausible to extend a travel ban now that Trump has picked an unwinnable fight with a nation capable of destroying the world’s economy for the next several decades, it doesn’t explain why Trump feels the need to strip rights and privileges from so many people who’ve already made their way into the United States.
That US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy has blocked work permits and green cards for people from countries deemed “high risk” by the government including Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela—even though they were already present in the US. That’s led many to lose jobs and put their lawful status in jeopardy as the benefits pause has continued.
As the court notes in its ruling, this targeting of so many migrants is retroactive. Rather than treat the new policy as something that only effects everyone moving forward, the administration treats every new anti-migrant policy as retroactive, clawing back protections awarded them by previous administrations.
All of this is being done by executive order. At no point has Congress passed any laws in support of these executive declarations. And while far too many judges (especially those in certain appellate courts and the Supreme Court) seem to feel they’re incapable of reining in executive power, lower courts are more than willing to lay down a few roadblocks, even when it’s almost inevitable the higher courts will have them removed as soon as fucking possible.
And the administration continues this assault on non-white people, practically daring courts to do anything about it. This court — one that is currently entertaining the thought of sanctioning DOJ prosecutors — is trying to do something about it. And the Rhode Island court — represented here by chief judge John McConnell Jr. — points out the government has sabotaged its own reputation repeatedly while engaging in what appears to be blatant bigotry.
McConnell also found evidence—including derogatory statements about immigrants by administration officials after the National Guard shooting—of pretextual reasons behind the policies.
“The Government effectively invites the Court to shut its eyes and ignore the strong evidence of anti-immigrant animus before it,” he wrote. “Doing so would require profound naiveté on the Court’s part.”
This government wants courts to pretend they’re stupid. It wants the sort of deference handed over to despots, even as it pretends it’s still the leader of the Free World. And so the courts that respect the rule of law get this sort of bullshit from administration officials, who choose to present everything as some sort of liberal conspiracy against the Great Morbidly Obese White Hope:
The administration’s critics on the left have been “running the same gambit with so called ‘animus’ claims since 2017,” James Percival, general counsel for DHS, said in a statement.
“It is sabotage dressed in legal clothing,” he said.
Cause and effect, you racist idiots. If you’re seeing more anti-immigrant animus claims since Trump’s first term in office, it’s because the Trump administration (both versions) is deeply steeped in anti-migrant animus. Correlation and causation. That fewer judges ruled against the Biden administration on animus claims isn’t evidence of judicial activism. It’s nothing more than judges responding to stimuli.
Steinbeck points out that the stars shine in the sky, regardless of the drama here on Earth.
Perspective fools us into believing that our point of view is primary, but it’s not difficult to imagine a more distant (or closer) one that would change everything.
The service at table 7 might not matter much to the waiter, but it matters a great deal to the elderly couple celebrating a positive medical diagnosis. The greeting you offer to a stranger might seem trivial to you, but it could change the arc of that stranger’s day. And the drama that consumes us in this moment might be forgotten in just a few days…
“Important” always requires a modifier. Important to whom? Compared to what? In what time frame?
Object permanence: DD-WRT; iTunes DRM is illegal; Fingertip magnet; Sony passwords v Gawker passwords; RIAA recants on 3 strikes; Parachute wedding dress; Roald Dahl (jerk); "Level Up"; The rent's too damned high; RIAA v "Search by artist"; "Robopocalypse"; You are not a wallet; The man who created the religious right; NY x voting; NY x antitrust; Media companies fund Heritage Minister's campaign; Richard Dreyfuss x iTunes EULA; 3-way street; RIAA lawyer becomes Solicitor General; Brock Allen's wrist-slap; Ad-tech interop; Apple's manorial security; Billionaires aren't taxed, "Rabbits."
Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:
Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid:
Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us:
In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder:
Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer.
Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time.
Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold.
Liz sporadically regains consciousness in a van during a multi-day drive, and already she is thinking about her escape – even as she is becoming increasingly aware of how truly terrible her situation is. When she finally arrives at the cult's remote compound, frozen and isolated, she learns that she has been kidnapped because the fertility-obsessed cult needs an OB, especially since the daughter of the cult's founder, the "pastor," is carrying a high-risk pregnancy.
All that is in the first few pages, which leaves plenty of room for an expertly spun second act in which we get Kritzer's trademark interpersonal work, where carefully chosen and smartly wrought small details flesh out a picture of the complex dynamics of life inside a "high-demand" cult, from the way that members are manipulated into policing each other's compliance to the internal processes that keep members cowed even when they're unobserved by others. It's a brilliant work of sociological speculation and the engine that drives it is a series of maneuvers and gambits whereby Dr Liz hopes to make her way to safety.
I won't spoil the end, except to say that it is exciting, satisfying, and has a sweet denouement that does real justice to the whole book. All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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So last week we noted how Meta’s AI support assistant doled out access to high-profile Instagram accounts after hackers simply asked for it. Outside of using a VPN to match the account holder’s region, the hackers didn’t have to do literally anything of note to convince the Meta AI chatbot to provide access, suggesting like so many AI offerings, Meta incompetently rushed undercooked software to market.
Meta has subsequently confirmed the issues and outlined the full scope of the problem. In a data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office late on Friday and noticed by Techcrunch, Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised, including 30 people in Maine.
“The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person’s entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person’s posts, direct messages, and account activity, the notice reads.”
Meta’s notice confirmed the problem began with “a vulnerability in an AI-assisted account recovery system for Instagram,” that was exploited to “perform password resets on Instagram user accounts.” Fortunately, the “trick” didn’t work if users had two-factor authentication enabled.
The company also claims it’s “unaware” of specifically what information was compromised during the three-week long hacking spree. Which is to say that, as with so many security breaches, the full scope of this could be worse than what’s been revealed.
Meta/Facebook is, so we’re clear, a company with 70,000 employees and a $1.57 trillion market cap. That they rushed an AI support chatbot into widespread service across roughly 3 billion active Instagram accounts is just a stunning level of incompetence.
In 2021, a group of film production companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures sued internet provider WOW! at a federal court in Colorado, accusing it of turning a blind eye on piracy.
The stakes in this legal battle were incredibly high. After filing their original complaint, the plaintiffs recently expanded their claims to cover roughly 375 films, meaning potential statutory damages could be as high as $56 million.
WOW! previously tried to have the case dismissed, but a federal judge in Colorado rejected that attempt last year. After that, the case moved forward with both sides submitting cross-motions for summary judgment, hoping to get the matter resolved before trial.
DMCA Safe Harbor
The summary judgment requests focused on a single but important question: whether WOW! is protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Under Section 512 of the DMCA, an internet provider can avoid liability for pirating subscribers if it has adopted and reasonably implemented a policy to terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. This safe harbor is an affirmative defense, which means WOW! must show that it qualifies for this protection.
WOW! argued that it did, pointing to its documented policies and procedures for handling copyright complaints. However, the film companies argued the opposite, claiming WOW! failed to enforce its policy in any meaningful way and did not terminate subscribers who were repeatedly flagged for piracy.
Summary Judgment Denied
In March, Judge Daniel D. Domenico ruled on the competing motions. After reviewing the evidence in the light most favorable to each side in turn, he declined to rule for either party, finding that neither was entitled to win as a matter of law.
“I cannot say that WideOpenWest is entitled to the DMCA safe harbor as a matter of law. Nor can I say, construing the evidence in the light most favorable to WideOpenWest, that the plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law that it is not. A reasonable juror could find for either side on a number of material fact issues,” Judge Domenico wrote.
This order was initially shielded from public view, but it was published a few days ago, after both parties informed the court that their legal battle was over.
Settlement Instead of a Verdict
Instead of going to trial, the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal, and the court terminated the case on May 28.
The dismissal is with prejudice, which means that the film companies can’t bring these claims against WOW! again. Each side agreed to pay for its own costs and attorneys’ fees. There is no mention of a settlement payment by either side.
Dismissal
Denying summary judgment left the safe harbor question unanswered. However, in light of the Supreme Court’s Cox decision earlier this year, that question matters less than it might seem. Cox had already lost its own safe harbor years earlier, but still won at the Supreme Court on the liability standard itself.
This means that even if WOW! would have ultimately lost its safe harbor, the film companies would still be required, under the new Cox precedent, to show that the Internet provider intended its service to be used for copyright infringement. This intent can be shown in only two ways: the ISP actively induced infringement, or the service it offers has no substantial lawful uses.
The new liability rules have significantly changed the legal playing field for copyright infringement cases and several lawsuits have been settled or voluntarily dismissed after the Cox ruling came out in March.
—
A copy of the stipulation of dismissal is available here (pdf). Judge Domenico’s order on the motions for summary judgment can be found here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Back in March of 2025, when Elon Musk was spearheading his bullshit DOGE non-agency and running around cutting funding to all kinds of government programs under the notion that they were a blatant waste of taxpayer money, the cuts were so obviously haphazard and ill-informed that it was making everyone’s head spin. Then, after cuts to funding and staff were done, the very same Trump administration began scrambling to restore it after government agencies found themselves unable to function properly as a result.
But not every bit of funding was restored. Part of what DOGE cut was roughly 5,000 funding grants for USAID. One of those grants funded a detection and warning program for, you guessed it, screwworms!
Following the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s confirmation on Wednesday that the New World screwworm fly has reached south Texas for the first time in decades, questions are being raised about what role DOGE cuts played in what could become a crisis to the nation’s cattle industry.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gutted the United States Agency for International Development, which included a program dedicated to preventing the spread of the parasite across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report from Agri-Pulse published last March, which cited a list of cut programs sent to Congress.
The screwworm prevention program was part of roughly 5,300 grants and programs cut from USAID. The program also monitored outbreaks of avian flu in Asia, according to the report.
Everyone who was paying attention knew then that screwworm flies were a major problem. These parasites infect livestock, pets, and sometimes humans by burrowing into their flesh to lay their eggs, potentially killing the host in a matter of weeks. A mass-infection event would decimate the livestock of cattle specifically in America, which is already at an extremely low level. That reduction in cattle counts occurred because there are fewer ranchers today than before, which is itself due to the increasing costs of raising cattle in America. Those costs would be for fuel, parts for ranching equipment, and fertilizer. And you can explain most of those rising costs on a combination of tariffs and our idiotic maybe-war with Iran.
Meanwhile, the cost of beef has been further driven higher because of a USDA import ban on Mexican cattle that has been in place since May of 2025. You’ll never guess why that ban was put in place.
“The United States has ordered the suspension of livestock imports through ports of entry along our southern border after the continued spread of the New World Screwworm in Mexico. Secretary Berdegué and I have worked closely on the NWS response; however, it is my duty to take all steps within my control to protect the livestock industry in the United States from this devastating pest,” said Secretary Rollins. “The protection of our animals and safety of our nation’s food supply is a national security issue of the utmost importance. Once we see increased surveillance and eradication efforts, and the positive results of those actions, we remain committed to opening the border for livestock trade. This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety.”
But those increased efforts never came to pass, in part because DOGE cut the funding for them. This government doesn’t have the ability to claim they didn’t know screwworm flies were a problem. Its own USDA said it was. The Trump administration can’t claim it isn’t responsible for the reappearance of the parasite or blame the rising cost of beef and milk on someone else. Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran are directly responsible for it, and any significant issue with screwworm flies will cause that cost to rise even further.
Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.
And now we’re here, once again, with another once-eliminated issue that will plague the American people due to this administration’s rank incompetence. Just like the measles. This government is leading us backwards.
So what’s the plan for screwworm flies now? Fly-sniffing dogs and the release of millions of sterile male flies to crowd out the parasite’s ability to reproduce. And that actually is the proper plan to combat this thing… long term. But not in the immediate, which is why we’re likely to see it spread.
The plan to prevent a US outbreak of the New World Screwworm focuses on deploying hundreds of millions of genetically-altered sterile flies. Experts, though, say the supply of sterile flies is too low to immediately impact and halt the growing screwworm population.
60 years our country has been without the New World Screwworm. And now it’s back. Because this government would rather do government cut dinner theater than the hard work of governing.
So they next time you’re at the grocery store and can’t believe the price of a steak, you can thank the Trump administration for it.
Donald Trump’s plans for the November midterms have been crystallizing over the past months. He’s ordered raids on election offices, made federal demands for state voter rolls, and issued executive orders purporting to end mail-in voting, which he doesn’t have the power to do.
Over the weekend, his playbook for undermining—and possibly even stealing—the midterms flipped wide open on “Meet the Press.”
Trump sat down with NBC’s Kristen Welker at a farm in Wisconsin, and the interview careened through familiar territory—January 6, the anti-weaponization fund, Iran—before arriving at California. That’s when things fell apart entirely.
Welker noted that Republicans were doing well in the state’s ongoing primary count, but Trump dismissed it. “They’re dropping fast,” he said, “because it’s a rigged election.” Welker explained that California’s multiday count is simply how the state tallies its votes, but Trump had a ready answer for that too. “Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election.”
When Welker asked for evidence, Trump replied, “All I have to do is look.”
“But that’s not evidence,” Welker interjected.
It went downhill from there. Trump called California election officials “crooked,” and then turned the word on Welker herself, and on NBC. “Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” he declared. He then unclipped his microphone, threw it on the ground, stepped on it, and walked off.
The episode would be easy to dismiss as another Trump tantrum after being challenged by a reporter. But something else also comes through: genuine alarm. California’s slow vote count has become one of the most important political narratives Trump needs to control heading into the November midterms, because if and when Democrats retake the House, as current polling strongly suggests they will, it will happen largely through California, and it will happen days after Election Night as mail-in ballots are counted. Trump needs that process to look like fraud before a single midterm ballot is cast. This week, his poisoning of the results began in earnest.
Trump’s meltdown on “Meet the Press” was five days in the making, undercutting the idea that he was simply angry and speaking off the cuff.
His attacks began with Truth Social posts. “Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the Vote.” Then: “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???” Finally, “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”
The two races Trump has been watching obsessively show the vote shift pattern in real time. In the gubernatorial primary, Trump’s endorsed candidate Steve Hilton held an early lead, but that lead has slowly narrowed as the mailed ballots dropped him into second place. Ballots more favorable to Democrat Tom Steyer than to Hilton keep arriving and being counted. Hilton may still hang on to qualify for one of two top spots, but it could be close.
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the shift has proven more dramatic. Spencer Pratt, a reality TV personality, came out of Election Night with a 40,000-vote lead over City Councilwoman Nithya Raman as they vied for the second spot in November’s runoff. As of last night, with 83 percent of expected ballots counted, Raman has overtaken Pratt by roughly 3,100 votes, with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass holding first place comfortably at 34.7 percent. If the count holds, the November runoff will be Bass against Raman, meaning a Democrat versus a Democratic Socialist with no Republican on the ballot.
From the Oval Office, Trump elaborated on his unfounded suspicions and continued to spread disinformation. “You see what’s happening in California, they’re rigging the election, now maybe we caught them, and maybe they won’t be able to get away with it.”
The right piles on
Ron DeSantis was happy to amplify Trump’s conspiracies and false assertions. “California keeps dumping votes,” the Florida governor posted on social media Wednesday night. “Odds are shifting because the vote dumps always seem to go one way. Count until you get the result you want?” His reference to “dumping” echoes the vocabulary Trump deployed in the 2020 election. It’s designed to make lawfully cast ballots arriving by mail and counted in the ordinary course of business sound like something sinister and fraudulent dropped into the count.
Right wing mouthpiece Megyn Kelly went further and said the quiet part out loud. She called the delay “ridiculous” and “third-world crap,” and worried aloud that no one would trust the outcome if Hilton and Pratt were both eliminated. Then she turned on the voters themselves. “Do we really want to make it that convenient?” she asked. “I mean these are lazy-ass people. If they can’t get off their fat asses and get to election polling stations on Election Day, then we don’t want you.” In short, her complaint was never really about fraud. It was about participation, namely the legal votes of those who tend not to support Republicans.
Fox News hosts and Republican elected officials joined the pile-on. As MeidasTouch’s Ron Filipkowski compiled:
Jesse Watters told his audience: “I can’t prove it, but everybody watching thinks there’s shenanigans.”
Greg Gutfeld warned, “They said it’s going to take weeks to count. You know what that means: Shenanigans.”
Laura Ingraham offered, “If mail-in ballots are so cool and great, why is it mostly Democrats?” (That’s a self-own, by the way.)
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri called it “this crazy Democrat scheme to sort of rig the elections.”
And Rep. Randy Fine of Florida declared flatly and without basis, “They have designed a system to cheat.”
The White House went further still, sending First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli out to California to announce that his office was pursuing “multiple” election fraud investigations in the state. This happened the day after Trump’s accusations, and the DOJ has failed to identify a single specific case or present a shred of public evidence. Essayli also sent a federal prosecutor to observe the Los Angeles County ballot processing center in person.
Last November, when California voters approved Proposition 50—a redistricting measure that redrew the state’s congressional maps temporarily to favor Democrats—Trump immediately called it a “GIANT SCAM,” even though Texas moved first and now other red states have done the same. He claimed the ballot-counting voting process was “under very serious legal and criminal review.” With his latest attacks, it appears any California election that produces results unfavorable to Republicans will be labeled by Trump and the GOP as “stolen.”
Why it takes so damn long
Los Angeles County is home to nearly 10 million people. That’s larger than the population of 42 of the 50 states. The county must process the ballots of every registered voter who chose to participate, and in California, almost all of them vote by mail. Statewide, there are 23 million registered voters. In the 2024 presidential election, roughly 13 million of the 16 million votes cast arrived by mail.
California automatically sends a ballot to every registered voter, a policy made permanent by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. Under state law, those ballots are valid as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days. For the June 2 primary, that receipt deadline is June 9. There is no good workaround for this; the law deliberately created this window to ensure that voters who mail their ballots on time are not disenfranchised by postal delays beyond their control.
Each of those mail ballots goes through a signature verification process. That means every envelope must be checked against the signature on file with the county registrar. When a signature doesn’t match—for example because an older voter’s handwriting has changed, or they signed in haste, or any number of other innocent reasons—election officials are required by law to contact that voter and give them an opportunity to confirm their identity and have their ballot counted. That time-consuming process, called ballot curing, exists specifically to protect voters from having their votes thrown out on technicalities.
California also offers same-day voter registration at any voting center. Those voters cast provisional ballots, which can only be counted after officials have verified the voter’s eligibility—a carefully conducted process that historically results in 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots being counted.
Election experts have described the cumulative effect using a vivid analogy: a pig moving through a python. The processing systems in each county must absorb an enormous pile of late-arriving ballots, all legally mailed but at the last minute. These disproportionately come from Democratic voters. This cycle, millions waited especially long to make their choices in the wide-open governor’s primary race. County election officials technically have up to 30 days after the election to complete the count; final results from the June 2 primary must be certified by July 3.
Critical to the GOP “election fraud” narrative, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to vote in person on Election Day or to return their mail ballots early. Those ballots get counted first, producing an initial tally that skews Republican. Then, as the remaining ballots are processed over subsequent days, the count shifts toward Democrats.
Election analysts call this the “red mirage,” an illusion of Republican dominance created entirely by the sequence in which valid ballots happen to be counted. In California’s June 2 primary, the electorate as of Election Day was 45.9 percent Democratic and 33.5 percent Republican. The final electorate, once all ballots are counted, is expected to look much closer to the 2022 primary, with 50.6 percent Democratic and 29.5 percent Republican. In 2024, when the count finished the same way it always does, Republicans still won several close House races in the state.
The Los Angeles mayor’s race is a perfect example of this red mirage. Pratt’s 40,000-vote election-night cushion was built almost entirely on in-person and early mail votes, the ballots that get counted first and skew heavily Republican. As the remaining mail ballots came in over subsequent days, his progressive opponent Raman, whose support is concentrated among the kind of late-mailing Democratic voters who dominate California’s mail electorate, steadily closed the gap. On Sunday night, Raman eventually passed Pratt, as the math had predicted. The Los Angeles County Registrar’s office confirmed that each batch of results reflected the continued processing of lawfully cast mail and provisional ballots.
The stakes go way beyond California
On one level, the current dispute in California is a primary election fight over a governor’s race and a Los Angeles mayoral contest. On another, it is a dry run for something far more consequential.
California holds 52 seats in the House of Representatives, the most of any state in the nation. Democrats currently hold 43 of them. After Proposition 50 redrew the congressional maps, five seats currently held by Republicans were shifted into friendlier Democratic territory. With Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows and the generic ballot tilted sharply toward Democrats, those five seats are very much in play, and they may well be the seats that determine which party controls the House when the next Congress is seated in January.
Those California House races will be competitive and close, the very kind that take the longest to call. In 2024, nine California congressional races were still uncalled a week after Election Day, with control of the House hanging in the balance. In November 2026, the stakes will be higher, the margins potentially tighter, and the count will proceed exactly as it always has, meaning that on the night of November 3, Republicans will very likely hold apparent leads in several of those districts. Those leads will narrow over subsequent days as mail-in ballots are counted.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta saw this coming. During last November’s Proposition 50 special election, when Trump was already calling the results a “GIANT SCAM” before the polls had even closed, Bonta warned publicly that Trump’s tactics were “a tee-up for something more dangerous in the 2026 midterms and maybe beyond.” He said it would be “naive” to assume Trump would accept the results of any California election given his history. The Justice Department’s decision to send federal election monitors to five California counties during that special election, which Gov. Newsom called an intimidation tactic, now looks like a rehearsal for what a full federal monitoring and investigation apparatus might look like deployed across the state in November.
As Democracy Docket noted, Trump’s use of the California primary this week to revive his doomed SAVE America Act, which would effectively ban universal mail voting, makes the picture even clearer. The Senate blocked the measure again on Thursday, with four Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. But the plan remains in place. If they cannot stop mail-in ballots from being cast, their next best option is to destroy public confidence in the counting of them.
What To Expect In November
Trump and the election deniers can’t succeed at this scheme if they and their game are called out early, so that everyone—from talking heads in the media to judges barraged with baseless lawsuits—understands the heist the White House and its supporters plan to pull.
On the night of November 3, Republicans are expected to hold leads in several of California’s most competitive congressional districts. The television coverage will reflect those leads. Trump and his allies will declare victory in some of those races before the counting is anywhere near complete, just as he did in 2020 and 2024.
Then, over the following days, as California’s lawful counting process proceeds, Democratic candidates will close the gap and in some if not most cases overtake their GOP opponents. At that point, the Trump/GOP election denial apparatus will be reactivated at full volume, pointed at a much higher-stakes target: the House majority.
The voters who will determine House control are, in significant numbers, California mail-in voters whose ballots will be counted last in the entire country. When their favored candidates begin gaining ground as the count proceeds—just as they did in 2022 and 2024—Trump will reach into his toolbox. Perhaps he’ll try to tie up cases in court for months, or declare a national emergency, or demand that Speaker Johnson refuse to seat the new members of Congress.
We all need to be ready for this. Because no set of facts, no amount of evidence, and no basic math will ever deter Trump from his false claims. He’s only ever interested in the result that favors him.
As he told Kristen Welker, “All I have to do is look.”
In 2021, a group of film production companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures 
