This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Tom Homan’s complaints about people calling ICE murderers. In first place, it’s Bloof with a translation of his words:

‘People need to be civil and helpful when masked thugs come for their friends and neighbours, and to just follow orders like good citizens. Don’t worry when they come for the communists, socialists, trade unionists and jews, there’ll be plenty of others on the list before you, honest.’

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment with thoughts on his underlying feelings:

You can hear the fear in Homan’s voice

Can’t you? Can’t everyone? Isn’t it obvious?

These people are terrified of their fellow citizens — because some of them happen to be brown or black or women or LGBTQ or pretty much anything. They’re shaking with fear; they’re cowards — to the bone. Which is of course why they mask their faces and wear body armor and carry lots of weapons: THEY’RE AFRAID.

So remember: when you see them, mock them. Insult them. Degrade them. Humiliate them. Because they deserve it.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two more comments from that post. First, it’s Doctor Biobrain expanding on a line from the post asserting that “they seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power”:

Indeed. These people think respect comes with the job because they’re authoritarians trained to think authority is always legitimate so you should always respect the people above you. Just like they think being a white man automatically makes you the most qualified for every good job, so DEI hiring means you can’t be getting the best people. Because that’s actually the big joke of this: If they don’t like someone above them, they not only don’t get respect but are considered to have the job illegitimately.

The idea of earning respect seems impossible to them because they think fear and respect are the same things and not opposites. I’ve had several righties say this despite my best attempts to explain the difference. They were taught to fear authority and call it respect; then wonder why the people under them don’t like them. So much of what we see are emotionally repressed victims still traumatized by their mean parents and dumping that trauma on others. They were forced to fake maturity at a young age and never really grew up.

And yeah, Trump has been craving respect his whole life because his success is unearned and anyone with taste or brains knew he was a clown. Yet those are the people he wanted praise from and he loathes people who are submissive to him like MAGA because he doesn’t want to be the member of any club that would have a creep like him. He thought being called Mr. President would finally give him the admiration he needs and instead he just gets his handlers coddling him and telling him that all dissent is manufactured and his approval ratings are 1,600%. Sad!

Next, it’s dfbomb with a succinct response to Homan:

If you don’t want to be called a murderer then stop your agents from fucking murdering my neighbors.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad with a response to Microsoft’s CEO lamenting the backlash against AI slop:

“No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about Trump’s censorship record:

I think this is a little unfair. Trump’s presidency has actually been the most transparent administration ever. Case in point, the Epstein files proved this when it was revealed that ███████ ████ █████ █████████ ██████ ██████ and ██████ █████████ █████████ █████ ██████ ███████.

I mean, the ███████ alone should be all the ██████ evidence you need.

Also, anyone who disagrees will be summarily ██████ ███ ██████ ██████.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the pressure ICE faces:

You just don’t know what it’s like to walk the streets as an ICE agent. The person you’re walking by could pull out A PHONE and aim it at you. Some of these phones have FULLY AUTOMATIC recording with UNLIMITED DATA STREAMING plans.

And we’re not even talking about people in shadowy windows with zoom lenses. Last week I heard about an agent who was just minding their business, kicking in some 110 pound teenager’s head, when he saw the glint of a 700mm f/8 Canon aimed at him. Never saw the shot coming.

Dude had a wife and kids.

I mean, he still does. But he did, too.

Finally, it’s one more comment from Thad, this time about Larry Ellison’s propaganda war against Netflix:

Netflix is too woke? Sounds like it’s time for another Dave Chappelle special!

That’s all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, we wrote about how critics of Section 230 should rethink their position considering their biggest allies were Senators Hawley and Cruz, while former FCC boss Tom Wheeler was continuing to misunderstand and misrepresent Section 230 and the challenges of content moderation. Amazon’s decision to kick Parler off its web hosting service raised serious questions about content moderation at the infrastructure layer, which we dug into in depth. We also published thoughts from Paul Alan Levy on Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump’s account, shortly before Jack Dorsey came out with an explanation of how the decision was made.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, we looked at how despite fears of piracy Hollywood had yet another record-breaking year at the box office, which was even true with films that got leaked early like Hateful Eight. Louis Vuitton lost its trademark lawsuit over a joke bag and was gently rebuked by the judge, Forbes served up a bunch of malware ads after begging readers to turn off ad blockers, and the Bernie Sanders campaign sent a DMCA notice to Wikimedia for hosting its logos. Twitter was hit with a ridiculous lawsuit for “providing material support” to ISIS, and President Obama used his State Of The Union address to praise the open internet while complaining that terrorists were able to use it.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, we looked at all the mistakes the government made in demanding info about Wikileaks from Twitter, while giving kudos to Twitter for not just rolling over in response to the demands, and wondering what other companies were hit with similar demands. Rep. Peter King asked the Treasury Department to put Wikileaks on the list of terrorist organizations and was quickly rebuked since the site didn’t meet the criteria. Sony got a restraining order against George Hotz for restoring the PS3’s feature allowing the installation of other operating systems, Congress continued its January tradition of promising patent reform that would never materialize, and the AP and Shepard Fairey settled the lawsuit over Fairey’s famous image of Obama.

I’m going to start this post off with two rhetorical questions.

1. Do you believe that the use of AI should be free and unfettered in the video game industry and will certainly and overwhelmingly be a positive good for the industry generally?
2. Do you believe that AI should be banned and never used in the video game industry because it can only produce slop and result in job loss in the industry generally?

My position is simple: anyone answering “yes” to either of those questions is out of the conversation when I’m involved. Dogmatic approaches like those aren’t right, they’re not smart, they’re not helpful, and they will never produce any progress or interesting discussion. They’re a sort of religious beliefs pointed at a terrestrial industry and they make no sense.

And now let me add a rhetorical statement of my own, so that there’s no misunderstanding: every game publisher and developer out there is free to make their own decisions regarding AI, full stop. I’m here to talk, not to make demands.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about indie publisher Hooded Horse and its “zero AI” policy that it has written into its developer contracts. CEO Tim Bender spoke with Kotaku recently on the topic and he certainly didn’t hold back.

The label he helps run as CEO, Hooded Horse, struck gold after signing the medieval base-builder mega hit Manor Lords, but its library of published games has grown far beyond it in the past two years with releases like the Lego-like tower-defense game Cataclismo, the economic management sim Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, and the 4X sequel Endless Legend 2. Being strategy games isn’t the only thing they all have in common. They also all adhere to a strict ban on generative AI art.

“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways…suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told me in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.’”

Now, if Bender says this has made his life more difficult, I’m going to choose to believe him. Honestly, I can’t imagine why he’d lie about something like that.

But he’s also clearly answered “yes” to rhetorical question #2 I posted above. And I just don’t understand it as a long term contractual policy. If AI largely sucks right now in the gaming industry, and I agree there’s a lot of bad out there, that doesn’t mean it will in the future. If AI has the capability to take some jobs in the industry today, that doesn’t mean it can’t create jobs elsewhere in the industry as well. If some applications of AI in the gaming industry carry with it very real moral questions, that doesn’t mean that every use does.

But when you really dig into Bender’s stated concerns that have led him to a blanket ban on the use of any AI by partner developers, you quickly understand his actual concern is a quality control concern.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” continued Bender.

“Like some, people will have this thought, like they would never want to let it in the game, but they’ll think, ‘It can be a placeholder in this prototype build.’ But if that gets done, of course, there’s a chance that that slips through, because it only takes one of those slipping through in some build and not getting replaced or something. […] Because of that, we’re constantly having to watch and deal with it and try to prevent it from slipping in, because it’s cancerous.” 

It’s the Larian Studios concept art discussion all over again. Bender doesn’t seem to have an actual problem with developers using AI in developing a game. Instead, it appears he doesn’t want any AI-made product ending up in the finished game. Those are two very different things. But rather than trying to figure out how to QC the developers to make sure the end product is clean of AI, since that seems to be what Bender is after, we get a blanket ban on all AI use everywhere, all the time, by the developers.

Now, to keep things clear, my position is that Bender certainly can do this if he likes. It’s his company, have at it. But when I read this…

“When it comes to gen-AI, it’s not a PR issue, it’s an ethics issue,” Bender said. “The reality is, there’s so much of it going on that the commitment just has to be that you won’t allow it in the game, and if it’s ever discovered, because this artist that was hired by this outside person slipped something in, you get it out and you replace it. That has to be the commitment. It’s a shame that it’s even necessary and it’s a very frustrating thing to have to worry about.”

…I’m left with the impression that I’m listening to someone devoid of nuance reciting a creed rather than fully thinking this through.

AI will be used in gaming. To borrow a phrase, it’s a very frustrating thing to have to even state. It’s tough to get more obvious than that. The question and the conversation, as I keep saying, is about how it will be used, not if it will be used.

And people like Bender have exited that conversation, which is too bad. He’s clearly a good businessman and smart industry guy. We need his voice in the discussion.

AI can be useful. But so many people seem to feel it’s nothing more than an unpaid intern you can lean on to do all the work you don’t feel like doing yourself. (And the less said about its misuse to generate a webful of slop, the better.)

Like everyone everywhere, police departments are starting to rely on AI to do some of the menial work cops don’t like doing themselves. And it’s definitely going poorly. More than a year ago, it was already apparent that law enforcement agencies were just pressing the “easy” button, rather than utilizing it wisely to work smarter and faster.

Axon — the manufacturer of Taser and a line of now-ubiquitous body cameras — has pushed hard for AI adoption. Even it knows AI use can swiftly become problematic if it’s not properly backstopped by humans. But the humans it sells its products too don’t seem to care for anything other than its ability to churn out paperwork with as little human involvement as possible.

The report notes that Draft One includes a feature that can intentionally insert silly sentences into AI-produced drafts as a test to ensure officers are thoroughly reviewing and revising the drafts. However, Axon’s CEO mentioned in a video about Draft One that most agencies are choosing not to enable this feature.

Yep. They just don’t care. If it means cases get tossed because sworn statements have been AI auto-penned, so be it. If someone ends up falsely accused of a crime or falsely arrested because of something AI whipped up, that’s just the way it goes. And if it adds a layer of plausible deniability between an officer and their illegal actions, even better.

Not only is the tech apparently not saving anyone much time, it’s also being abused by law enforcement officers to justify their actions after the fact. But it’s shiny and new and seems sleek and futuristic, so of course reporters will occasionally decide to do law enforcement’s PR work for it by presenting incredibly fallible tech as the 8th wonder of the police world.

Sometimes reporters bury the lede. And sometimes their editors decide the lede should be buried by the end of the headline. That appears to be the case here, where Mya Constantino’s reporting isn’t exactly what’s being touted in this article’s original headline.

As can be observed from viewing the URL, the current headline (updated January 1st) wasn’t the original headline. The Wayback Machine tells the real story. This article was originally published on December 19, 2025 with this headline:

That headline (which reads “How Utah police departments are using AI to keep streets safer”) was immediately followed by these paragraphs:

Here’s a direct quote of those leading paragraphs:

HEBER CITY, Utah — An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

However, the truth behind that so-called magical transformation is simple.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” Sgt. Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

Fortunately, those paragraphs still remain in the updated post, which now contains a headline that makes a lot more sense:

The headline (accompanied by a short video of a tree frog) says:

Ribbit ribbit! Artificial Intelligence programs used by Heber City police claim officer turned into a frog

While I can understand why a small news outlet (albeit one that’s a Fox affiliate) might decide to play nice with the local cops rather than call out their software failure in the headline, it really doesn’t make it acceptable. My guess is the original headline was about maintaining access to officers and officials. At some point, someone realized the stuff detailed in the first paragraphs would probably attract more attention than some dry recitation of cop AI talking points.

But even the belated headline change doesn’t really make anything better here. There’s not really anything in the article that demonstrates how AI is making anyone safer. The article also notes that two different AI programs are currently being tested (Code Four, developed by a couple of 19-year-old former MIT students) and Draft One, which is part of Axon’s vertical integration strategy. That was the product that turned a cop into a frog, which probably explains why the reporter’s ridealong (so to speak…) only involved use of Code Four’s AI.

The reporter was on hand for a faux traffic stop that was later summarized by the AI to (apparently) demonstrate its usefulness. The journalist points out that the AI-generated report needed corrections, but at least didn’t turn any of the participants into a Disney-inspired character.

That being said, there’s nothing here that indicates these products will make streets “safer.” Here is the entirety of what was said about the tech’s positives by Sgt. Rick Keel of the Heber City PD:

Keel says one of the major draws is that the software saves them time, as writing reports typically takes 1-2 hours.

“I’m saving myself about 6-8 hours weekly now,” Keel said. “I’m not the most tech-savvy person, so it’s very user-friendly.”

Giving cops more free time doesn’t make streets safer. It just means they have more time on their hands. That’s not always a good thing. Of all the things that need to be fixed in terms of US policing, writing reports is pretty far down the list. It’s what’s being done with this extra time that actually matters. Pursuing efficiency for its own sake makes no sense in the context of law enforcement. The statements by this PD official raise questions that were never asked by the reporter, like the most important one: what is being done with this saved time? And if something still requires a lot of human activity to keep it from generating nonsense, is it really any better than the system it’s replacing?

One thing is for sure: AI doing the menial work of filing police reports is never going to make anyone safer. On the contrary, it’s only going to increase the chance that someone’s rights will be violated. And because law enforcement agencies refuse to be honest about the risks this poses and the fact that it appears only officers who don’t like writing paperwork will benefit from this added expense, they shouldn’t be trusted with tech that will ultimately only make the bad parts of US policing even worse.

Alexander Rhodes, the founder of the pornography addiction self-help group NoFap and repeat plaintiff, sued the parent company of Pornhub, Aylo, along with the University of California Los Angeles, two scientists, and an academic publisher for defamation. Filed in a court of common pleas in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and since removed to federal court by the defendants, the suit has gone under the radar by most news outlets.

I wrote for one of my publishers about the lawsuit but little coverage has picked it up. I hope that changes in the coming months as litigation advances in the case.

The lawsuit alleges a civil conspiracy bankrolled by Aylo to defame Rhodes and NoFap. Rhodes is a divisive figure in the wider anti-porn discussion as he believes that breaking “pornography addiction,” (which is not an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-5) requires participants to not engage in masturbation or watching pornography in a bid to “reboot” their brains. The theory is not supported by most science.

Nonetheless, he and his movement have gained traction over the years. Some sexual health experts started to scrutinize the claims of the NoFap philosophy as well as its supposed scientific basis. Because there has been some research pushing back on some of NoFap’s claims, lawyers for Rhodes claims it is proof of organized and explicit coordination to defame him. According to the lawsuit, Aylo is supposedly at the center of this scheme and allegedly paid off two scientists who have published critical research on NoFap. Furthermore, the complaint argues that UCLA and the academic publisher Taylor & Francis engaged in this defamation scheme by “aiding and abetting” the pair of scientists and Aylo by publishing the research.

This is a very weird lawsuit.

But what makes it weirder and more alarming than it is stems from the narrative pushed by the plaintiffs. In a bid to demonstrate the conspiracy, Rhodes presents a theory that the scientists and Aylo actively engaged in media pitches to dozens of journalists and other media personalities, including myself, to advance messages that disparage the NoFap company and its founder. Companies doing media pitches happen every day. Media pitches do not make anything into a conspiracy.

According to this theory, Rhodes alleges a coordinated media narrative that advances Aylo’s interests with the supposed end goal of… silencing this random dude who makes money off of telling people not to watch porn and jerk off. Even though Rhodes has the right to believe and communicate what he believes, it is quite a reach to insist that research and criticism of his beliefs and movement, including bog standard press coverage, amount to a conspiracy to defame.

Having people review strong claims is part of how academic research works. Having the media cover that research happens every day. It is silly to conclude that this turns it into a conspiracy.

And this week, Rhodes ramped things up a notch by claiming not just your garden variety conspiracy, but a RICO claim. Rather than go into the details of that, we’ll just point you to an archive of Ken White’s lawsplainer: IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT.

His lawyers mention about 38 people who have written or tried to write about NoFap and Rhodes in a negative light. Their coverage has been almost entirely critical of his claims. For example, my writing on NoFap has been critical in the context that it pushes and reinforces anti-pornography sentiments among social conservative groups and is a constituent faction of the so-called online manosphere. I have heard that some publishers of mine have been served up threats of legal action and/or retraction demands for my reporting and analysis about these groups.

Other journalists, like Gustavo Turner, have written on some of the more outlandish claims of so-called porn induced erectile dysfunction (PIED). PIED is not an official diagnosis, and is more likely to be related to underlying issues as pornography is wholly unlikely to contribute to erectile dysfunction among men. Turner was called a “collaborator” against Rhodes in the suit, even though Turner has never directly written about him, and defamation has to be of and about someone specifically. The article linked above, which is also mentioned in the lawsuit does not discuss Rhodes and only mentions “NoFap” in the context of a hashtag “phenomena,” not having anything to do with Rhodes’ organization specifically.

Others mentioned in the lawsuit include authors with bylines at other outlets like Salon, Rolling Stone, Vice, and many others. He mentions “disparaging” media communicated by LGBTQ+ figures like Dan Savage of the Savage Love podcast because Savage hosted one of the defendants on his podcast talking about her research.

The lawsuit is quite expansive.

While I am not a defendant in the case, I still feel that listing out the simple mentioning of Rhodes’ critics as part of the grand conspiracy is a form of intimidation. It’s not as direct, but Rhodes appears to be trying to put on notice those who scrutinize the claims he makes that they could be the next defendant added.

This chills speech and reporting on more than just Rhodes and NoFap. It speaks to wider sentiments in today’s culture about how the courts can be a weapon to censor journalists from doing their jobs.

Already I have heard from journalists who claim that publications are rejecting pitches about Rhodes and NoFap, with the implication being that the publications are worried about litigation threats for merely writing about him. It feels like a classic case of chilling effects via a SLAPP suit, and it’s why anti-SLAPP laws are so important.

What is ironic is that Rhodes accuses the defendants in this case of intimidation: buying off journalists and the very outlets they allege advances the talking points of an organized civil conspiracy against his business and personage. Journalists aren’t a part of the conspiracy. They’re just reporting on what’s happening, and sometimes that includes research results. And, yes, sometimes that includes criticism of companies like Aylo for bad things they’ve done as well. Because journalists are reporting the news, not engaged in a grand conspiracy.

A thoughtful, reasonable, reflective person might take the time to personally reflect on why so many articles question the narrative he’s pushing. Others, however, might just claim a conspiracy against them.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it because apparently it needs repeating: Donald Trump is not a free speech president. He just plays one on TV while doing the exact opposite behind the scenes. And in front of the scenes. And basically everywhere. Over and over and over again.

Nora Benavidez at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the civil society group that has been around for years) has done the tedious but essential work of actually counting the censorship attempts from the Trump administration over the administration’s first year. Writing in the New York Times, she puts the number at around 200 documented instances:

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump and his administration have tried to undermine the First Amendment, suppress information that he and his supporters don’t like and hamstring parts of the academic, legal and private sectors through lawsuits and coercion — to flood the zone, as his ally Steve Bannon might say.

Two hundred. In a single year. From the guy who never shuts up about how he’s the greatest defender of free speech in American history.

As we pointed out a few months back, Trump didn’t just stumble into hypocrisy—he (as he does so often these days) literally said the quiet part out loud when explaining his executive order attempting to criminalize flag burning:

“We took the freedom of speech away.”

That’s… that’s not the flex you think it is, my dude.

The examples Benavidez catalogs range from the high-profile to the quietly terrifying. Many you’ve probably heard about:

His administration banned Associated Press reporters from certain parts of the White House and Air Force One because the outlet uses “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the term Mr. Trump prefers, “Gulf of America.” It tried and failed to force some of the nation’s biggest news organizations to agree to restrictions on coverage of the Pentagon. He has said critical coverage of his initiatives is “really illegal.”

And, of course, the administration has weaponized immigration enforcement as a speech-suppression tool:

In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested and detained by immigration officials for several months. That month, Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder, was arrested by immigration officials and detained for several weeks, apparently because she was an author of an opinion essay criticizing Tufts University for its response to the Israel-Hamas war.

Arresting people and threatening deportation because of their political speech. That’s not a misunderstanding of the First Amendment—it’s a direct assault on it.

And the targets keep expanding.

After Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled against the administration in a case involving the deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador, Mr. Trump called for the judge to be impeached. A trainee was dismissed from the F.B.I.’s academy, apparently for having displayed an L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag. The F.B.I. also appears to have fired agents for kneeling during George Floyd protests.

The administration has gone after law firms, forcing settlements where they agree to do pro bono work for administration-approved causes. Universities have been coerced into changing policies and paying millions. Social media platforms—the same ones MAGA world spent years screaming about for “censorship”—have been sued over their content moderation decisions and forced into “settlements” to stay in the good graces of our thin-skinned dictator wannabe:

Mr. Trump has sued social media platforms for their content moderation policies — free-speech decisions, in other words — leading to Meta, X and YouTube capitulating through settlements totaling around $60 million.

Let’s be clear about what that means: the President of the United States sued private companies because he didn’t like how they exercised their own First Amendment rights regarding what speech to host on their own platforms. And got them to pay up, because the alternative of being a constant target, was worse.

That’s the opposite of free speech.

Remember all those years of Republicans insisting that when private platforms made moderation decisions they didn’t like, it was “censorship,” but when the government did it, that was just fine? Yeah. We’re living in that world now.

Benavidez makes an important point about how this all works together:

What is important to recognize is that these efforts work in concert in their frequency and their volume: Even the most egregious cases seem to quickly fade from public consciousness, and in that way, they’re clearly meant to overwhelm us and make us think twice about exercising our rights.

This is the Bannon “flood the zone” strategy applied to constitutional rights. You can’t focus on any single outrage because there are fifteen new ones by the time you finish reading about it. Each individual act of censorship might spark a news cycle, but two hundred of them? That’s just… Tuesday.

And here’s what’s maddening: this is the same guy whose supporters spent years screaming that the Biden administration was engaged in unprecedented censorship because some officials sent some angry emails to social media companies—emails that, as we’ve covered extensively, the companies routinely ignored. That was the constitutional crisis that required Elon Musk to buy Twitter and “free the bird.”

But actual government coercion? Actual arrests? Actual lawsuits forcing private companies to change their speech policies? Actual bans on journalists? That’s apparently just “making America great again.”

Benavidez closes with a warning that shouldn’t need stating but apparently does:

But constitutional rights and democratic norms don’t disappear all at once; they erode slowly. The next three years will require a vigilant defense of free speech and open debate.

She’s right. And part of that vigilance means not letting the “free speech” crowd get away with pretending that the guy actively engaged in government censorship at scale is somehow its greatest defender.

Two hundred times. In one year. And we’re just getting started on year two.

The DOJ can’t indict a ham sandwich these days. That old saying doesn’t ring as true as it used to now that most of the DOJ’s work is just vindictive prosecutions.

It’s not just cases being tossed because DOJ prosecutors weren’t legally appointed to their positions. This dates back to the early parts of last year when the DOJ was trying to turn anti-ICE protesters into convicted felons. Most notoriously, the government failed to secure an assault indictment against Sean Dunn, a DC resident who famously “assaulted” an ICE officer by throwing a literal sandwich at them.

Former Trump personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan did manage to secure indictments (after multiple attempts) against former FBI director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those case are gone but not because the grand juries rebelled, but because the “rule of law” party ignored a lot of rules and laws.

But the trend that began last year continues: federal prosecutors are seeing their cases rejected by grand juries at historically high rates.

In 2016, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has published data, federal prosecutors concluded more than 155,000 prosecutions and declined over 25,000 cases presented by investigators. In only six instances was a grand jury’s refusal to indict listed as the reason for dropping the matter.

Lindsey Halligan managed to rack up nearly half that amount in a single case:

A grand jury rejected one of three charges Halligan proposed against Comey. She initially secured an indictment against James, but after a judge threw that case out , two grand juries voted down new indictments.

She did this twice with the same proposed defendant. The DOJ surpassed this number of rejections less than halfway through 2025, as grand juries not only rejected the vindictive prosecution of the DC sandwich thrower, but dozens of other cases brought by prosecutors.

At one point earlier this year, [DOJ US Attorney Bill] Essayli’s office had managed to secure indictments in less than a quarter of the felony cases it brought in connection with protests or immigration raids, the Los Angeles Times reported.

We’ve spent plenty of time criticizing grand juries here at Techdirt. But something weird and quietly wonderful is happening all over the nation, which is returning grand juries back to their roots: a crucial part of the system of checks and balances.

They’re a carryover from the British Empire, but one the founding fathers felt actually had some merit, as former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason explained in post last year discussing the DOJ’s multiple failures:

The Constitution requires that every federal felony be indicted by a grand jury. This safeguard was inherited from the British legal system, where it dates back to the Magna Carta in the 13th century. To prevent the king from arbitrarily locking up people for improper reasons, British law required the Crown to present its evidence to a panel of residents of the local community to establish that criminal charges were justified. The case could only proceed if that group of citizens, the grand jury, approved the charges.

We’re dealing with a president who thinks he’s a king. And his DOJ is finding out that regular Americans not only don’t view him as a king, but aren’t willing to rubber stamp a bunch of vindictive prosecutions meant to remind citizens who’s in power.

Halligan went 1-for-3 in her attempted prosecution of James Comey. Former Fox commentator Jeanine Pirro did even worse when trying to prosecute an anti-ICE protester for assault.

Pirro’s office presented these facts to a D.C. federal grand jury and asked them to indict Reid for assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. When the grand jury refused, prosecutors tried again with a second grand jury. And then with a third. Each grand jury refused to return the indictment sought by prosecutors.

Now that this sort of thing is almost a daily occurrence, Trump loyalists like Pirro are blaming their inability to secure indictments on the public, rather than their own inability to read the room and discard felony charges jury members don’t seem to believe are warranted. That’s part of the reason why so many indictments are returned by grand juries: prosecutors who actually know what they’re doing (rather than the stunt casting that passes for federal agency appointments under Trump) will ditch cases that seem doomed to be rejected by grand jurors.

No one in the administration will learn anything from this. Bill Essayli will continue to scream at his underlings for failing to turn vindictive bullshit into prison sentences. Lindsey Halligan will continue to bumblefuck her way into an eventual firing for failing to fulfill Trump’s revenge fantasies. And other under-qualified former Fox b-listers will return to their former employer to complain their losses are just more evidence of a latent strain of liberalism that’s making America less great again.

“There are a lot of people who sit on juries and and they live in Georgetown or in Northwest or in some of these better areas, and they don’t see the reality of crime that is occurring,” Pirro said in August on “Fox News Sunday.”

Pirro also blamed that alleged indifference to crime for a grand jury’s refusal to indict Justice Department paralegal Sean Dunn for throwing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent during a street confrontation earlier that month.

“The grand jurors don’t take it so seriously. They’re like, ‘Eh, you know, whatever.’ My job is to try to turn that around,” Pirro said. 

Like many people in Trump’s orbit, Pirro is so divorced from reality she should be cutting it alimony checks every month. The grand juries are taking it seriously. It’s the DOJ prosecutors that are being glib, treating every ridiculous case like a foregone conclusion as they try to convert Trump’s desire for vengeance into criminal charges. Say what you will about grand juries, but it appears jurors aren’t willing to help the government strip people of their freedom just because it’s angry.

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With the current mess that the US is in, there has been plenty of talk of “what comes after” and how to think about the big structural changes needed to prevent another authoritarian from taking over and abusing all the levers of power for corruption and self-enrichment.

There are many different issues to address, but we should be thinking creatively about how to redesign our institutions to be more resilient to the abuses we’re witnessing.

One area ripe for creative rethinking is the federal judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court. Because right now, we have a system where individual judges matter way, way too much. Rather than the minor reforms and incremental changes some are suggesting, I think the solution is to go big. Really big. Expand the Supreme Court to at least 100 justices, with cases heard by randomized panels.

I’ll explain the details below, but the core philosophy is simple: no single Supreme Court Justice should ever matter that much.

The New York Times recently published an analysis of how federal appeals court judges appointed by Trump have voted on challenges to his administration’s actions. The numbers are stark:

President Trump has found a powerful but obscure bulwark in the appeals court judges he appointed during his first term. They have voted overwhelmingly in his favor when his administration’s actions have been challenged in court in his current term, a New York Times analysis of their 2025 records shows.

Time and again, appellate judges chosen by Mr. Trump in his first term reversed rulings made by district court judges in his second, clearing the way for his policies and gradually eroding a perception early last year that the legal system was thwarting his efforts to amass presidential power.

The actual figures are damning. Trump’s appellate appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. That’s 92 percent of their votes in favor of the administration.

When Chief Justice John Roberts responded to Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” back in 2018, he insisted that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

The data suggests Roberts was either naive or lying.

The Times analyzed every judicial ruling on Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda, from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31 of last year, or more than 500 orders issued across 900 cases. About half of rulings at the appellate level were in Mr. Trump’s favor — better than his performance with the district courts, though worse than his record at the Supreme Court, where the rulings on his agenda have almost all been on a preliminary basis in response to emergency applications.

And there it is. The higher you go up the judicial food chain, the better Trump does. District courts ruled in his favor 25% of the time. Appeals courts: 51%. The Supreme Court: 88%.

Now, some will argue this is the system working as designed—higher courts correcting overzealous lower court judges. And sure, that’s part of what appeals courts do. But the pattern here isn’t just about legal merit. It’s about how much individual judges matter, and how vulnerable the system is to ideological capture.

The uniformity of the judges’ votes is reason for serious concern, said Mark L. Wolf, a former federal judge nominated by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Wolf recently retired so he could speak more freely about what he has characterized as the threat that Mr. Trump posed to the rule of law.

“If you’re an impartial judge, the same party is not going to win every time,” he said. “Because the facts are different, the law is different, and so the result is often going to be different.”

This gets at the fundamental problem. When you have a small number of judges with lifetime appointments, whose ideological leanings are known quantities, those individual judges become enormously powerful. A single justice retiring or dying at the wrong time can reshape American law for a generation. That’s insane. No single person should have that kind of power over the constitutional rights of 330 million people.

And it gets worse. The Times found that three Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit—Judges Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker—accounted for more than half of all pro-Trump votes from Trump’s appellate appointees. Three judges. In one circuit. Exercising “outsized influence.”

Combined, Judges Gregory G. Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin R. Walker voted 75 times in favor of the administration — slightly more than half of the pro-Trump votes from Mr. Trump’s appointees logged by the Times analysis — and only three times against.

So what do we do about this?

The typical response from Democrats when they’re in power is to either accept the status quo or propose modest reforms that don’t actually address the structural problem. Republicans, meanwhile, have been playing the long game on judicial appointments for decades, understanding that packing the courts with ideologically aligned young judges is one of the most effective ways to entrench their policy preferences beyond electoral accountability.

We need to think bigger. Much bigger.

Here’s my proposal: Expand the Supreme Court to at least 100 justices, with cases heard by randomized panels of 9 justices. High-profile or particularly important cases could be reheard en banc by a larger panel or the entire court, similar to how it’s currently done in appeals courts.

Before you dismiss this as just another “court packing” scheme, let me explain why it’s fundamentally different from what FDR tried to do in 1937.

FDR’s plan was explicitly designed to shift the ideological balance of the court in his favor. He wanted to add up to six new justices precisely because the existing court kept striking down New Deal programs. The goal was partisan advantage, and everyone knew it. That’s why it failed—even FDR’s own party largely opposed it as a power grab.

What I’m proposing is the opposite. By expanding to at least 100 justices, you’re not packing the court in any ideological direction. You’re diluting the power of any individual justice—or any ideological bloc—to the point where it doesn’t matter nearly as much who gets appointed or when they retire or die. And unlike some reform proposals that would require a constitutional amendment, this one doesn’t. The Constitution doesn’t specify the size of the Supreme Court—Congress has changed it before, from as few as five justices to as many as ten.

Think about it this way: Right now, replacing one justice out of nine can shift the balance of the court from 5-4 one way to 5-4 the other way. That’s an enormous swing from a single personnel change. But if you have 100 justices, and cases are heard by randomized panels of 9, the ideological composition of any given panel becomes much more variable, and the overall composition of the court becomes much more stable over time.

No single president appointing one or two or even ten justices can fundamentally reshape the court. No single justice dying at an inopportune moment can throw constitutional law into chaos. The incentive for presidents to appoint ideological extremists diminishes because no individual justice will be important enough to matter that much.

This is the core principle: No single Supreme Court justice should ever be important enough to matter.

We shouldn’t care who any individual justice is. We shouldn’t have national freakouts when an 87-year-old justice refuses to retire. We shouldn’t have presidents salivating over the actuarial tables of aging justices. The system should be robust enough to absorb personnel changes without lurching wildly in one direction or another.

How would this work in practice? There are several possibilities.

One approach would be to elevate existing appeals court judges to the Supreme Court. This could happen all at once or gradually over time. Given that there are currently around 180 active appeals court judges, drawing from this pool wouldn’t be difficult from a numbers perspective.

Another approach would be a rotating system where appeals court judges serve temporary terms on the Supreme Court. This would actually align with how many other countries structure their highest courts and would create a more fluid relationship between the appellate and Supreme Court levels.

Either approach could be combined with term limits—say, 18 years—for Supreme Court justices. Term limits address a different but related problem: the arbitrary power that comes from lifetime appointments combined with advances in life expectancy. When the Constitution was written, justices served an average of about 15 years. Now they routinely serve 25, 30, or more. Term limits would make appointments more predictable and reduce the incentive for presidents to appoint the youngest possible ideologues who might serve for four decades.

There are additional benefits to this approach beyond diluting individual power.

First, the Supreme Court could actually hear more cases. The court has been steadily shrinking its docket for decades, from around 150 cases per year in the 1980s to around 60-70 today. With multiple panels operating simultaneously, the court could address far more legal questions, reducing the enormous backlog of important issues that never get resolved.

Second, it could help rationalize the federal circuit system. The Ninth Circuit, for example, is a behemoth that covers nine states plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, with more than twice as many judges as the smallest circuits. With a reorganized Supreme Court drawing from an expanded pool of appellate judges, there would be an opportunity to realign the circuits into more sensible and equally-sized units.

Third, randomized panels would undermine the strategic timing that currently shapes which cases reach the court and when. Right now, advocacy groups wait for favorable court compositions before pushing major cases. The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade didn’t happen by accident in 2022—anti-abortion activists had been deliberately holding back their most aggressive challenges for years, waiting until they knew they had a 6-3 anti-abortion majority locked in. With randomized panels drawn from 100 justices, that kind of strategic patience becomes pointless. You can’t game a court composition you can’t predict.

Now, there are legitimate questions and criticisms of this approach.

Some will argue that a 100-justice court would produce inconsistent rulings—different panels reaching different conclusions on similar issues. This is a real concern, but it’s manageable. En banc review could resolve circuit splits and ensure consistency on the most important questions. And frankly, we already have inconsistency—different circuit courts regularly reach contradictory conclusions that take years to resolve. Also the Supreme Court’s composition continually changes over time, and we still accept the results from different panels. No one sees a problem with relying on cases from half a century ago even though none of the Justices who made those rulings is even alive, let alone on the court, any more.

The most serious objection is political: any expansion would be seen as partisan court packing regardless of intent. This is true. Republicans would scream bloody murder if Democrats expanded the court by 91 justices, no matter how the new seats were filled. But Republicans are already screaming bloody murder about the courts whenever they don’t get their way. The question isn’t whether a reform will be controversial. The question is whether it will actually fix the problem.

The status quo isn’t neutral. A system where individual justices wield enormous power is a system that advantages whoever is best at the long game of judicial appointments. For the past several decades, that’s been Republicans.

Refusing to change a broken system because change might be controversial is just accepting permanent disadvantage while pretending to take the high road. Indeed, for anyone who (falsely) claims that this plan is “packing the court” (a la FDR), it’s the opposite. The Republicans and the Federalist Society spent decades plotting out things to get us where we are today, with a court that is “packed” in favor of their interests.

This is about unpacking the court.

The data from the Times analysis should alarm everyone who cares about an independent judiciary. When 92 percent of a president’s judicial appointees vote in his favor, that’s not impartial justice. That’s a rubber stamp. And when that pattern intensifies the higher you go in the judicial system, culminating in an 88% success rate at the Supreme Court, you have a system that’s been captured.

The solution isn’t to try to capture it for the other side. The solution is to build a system that’s resistant to capture in the first place.

Make the Supreme Court so large that no president can pack it. Make individual justices so interchangeable that none of them become celebrities or villains. Make the system boring. Make it work.

Because right now, we have a Supreme Court where everyone knows exactly who the swing vote is, where entire advocacy organizations are built around influencing specific justices, where presidential elections are decided partly on who might die in the next four years.

That’s not how a functional judicial system in a modern democracy should work. It’s time to unpack the court.

Last May we noted how Verizon was lobbying the Trump administration to eliminate rules making it easier to switch mobile providers (and bring your phone with you). And as usual with the pay-to-play Trump administration, the Trump FCC is tripping over itself to give Verizon what it wants.

The Trump FCC says it is eliminating rules requiring that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. As part of its lobbying efforts, Verizon has falsely claimed that adhering to the 60 day unlocking requirements is somehow a huge boon to criminals, something Brendan Carr’s industry-coddling FCC parrots in the agency’s announcement:

“[The rule] required one wireless carrier to unlock their handsets well earlier than standard industry practice, thus creating an incentive for bad actors to steal those handsets for purposes of carrying out fraud and other illegal acts.”

This is, you’ll be surprised to learn, a lie.

Older folks might remember that Verizon used to be even more obnoxious on this subject of consumer freedom. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon apps. It also used to be horrendous when it came to unlocking phones, switching carriers, and using the device of your choice on the Verizon network.

Two things changed that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.

Here you have both a major wireless company and U.S. regulators lying to your face, insisting that killing these basic protections help create a “uniform industry standard that can help stem the flow of handsets into the black market.”

Verizon used to sell phones that were already fully unlocked, but received a waiver from the first Trump administration in 2019 after the company again lied about how making it easier to switch carriers would make it harder to “prevent fraud.”

Ultimately, what Verizon (and its friends at the corrupt FCC) want is zero government oversight whatsoever, taking us back to the days when Verizon could impose any number of obnoxious restrictions designed to harm (device and app) competition and the public interest. They want to bring back the era where you were locked to one provider via locked phones and long-term contracts.

Given enough time and rope, they’ll inevitably push to be able to control what apps and services you can use (read: net neutrality). This desire to exploit telecom monopoly power operates a bit like the physics of running water; it only really goes one direction without functional government oversight.

Because U.S. journalism is a clown show, many outlets are taking Verizon and the FCC’s unsubstantiated claims of increased fraud and parroting them in headlines, like Reuters does here:

Ultimately, the Trump administration (and its Supreme and Circuit Courts) has been steadily moving toward making it impossible to hold unpopular giants like Verizon accountable for anything by dismantling whatever is left of U.S. regulatory oversight. And rubbing stamping more mergers that increase consolidation in the uncompetitive telecom sector.

In exchange, Verizon obediently acquiesces to administration demands that executives remain quiet while the administration destroys democracy and civil rights, and occasionally makes an effort to try to be more sexist and racist. So far that corrupt symbiosis is working out well for both parties.