The President of the United States is calling for the execution of six Democratic lawmakers—all military veterans or former intelligence officers—because they reminded US service members of their oath to the Constitution.

That’s not hyperbole or exaggeration. That’s an actual thing that happened yesterday.

Donald Trump spent hours on social media demanding that Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, along with Representatives Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow be arrested, tried, and put to death for “seditious behavior” and “treason.”

Their crime? Creating a two-minute video explaining that members of the military have a right—and sometimes a duty—to disobey unlawful orders.

The same oath that the president, in theory, took as well. The president is saying that elected officials of the opposing party should be put to death for telling people to remember their oath to the Constitution.

This comes after weeks of MAGA Republicans insisting that Democrats needed to “tone down the rhetoric” following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It comes after the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, who was among several Democratic officials on the killer’s target list.

And now the president is calling for elected officials to be put to death for reminding service members of their constitutional oath.

The video is worth watching (though, bizarrely, many news sites wouldn’t post it).

It’s less than two minutes. The six lawmakers simply remind service members that they have a right, and sometimes a duty, to disobey illegal orders.

Trump did not react kindly to this. He started out by SCREAMING that the lawmakers who did this engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and that they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL” and that “Their words cannot be allowed to stand.”

That post caused the usual unhinged cultists who egg the senile old man on to try to one-up him, and Trump just kept reposting them all.

Eventually, of course, some of his followers insisted that reminding soldiers of their oath is “treason” and that they were there for “traitors” who should be hanged. And the president of the United States just kept reposting it all.

And, so, it wasn’t long before he directly called for them to be put to death.

Let’s be clear about how unhinged this is, going step by step.

First, what these elected officials said was absolutely true. The military code of conduct does require that they obey lawful orders, which by default means they need not follow unlawful orders. And indeed, the Rules for Courts-Martial make it clear that the defenses for disobeying an order includes if it is unlawful. And the standard there is that “a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.”

Rule 916(d) of the rules states clearly:

Obedience to orders. It is a defense to any offense that the accused was acting pursuant to orders unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.

Second, disobeying an order may subject you to a court-martial, but not “sedition” and being sentenced to death. I mean, this should go without saying, but what the fuck?

Third, simply telling people about their rights and obligations under the oath they took to the Constitution is obviously and clearly protected under the First Amendment. Anyone who still thinks the president believes in free speech is a fraud.

Fourth, beyond being protected speech, this has nothing to do with “sedition” or “treason.” Sedition is stirring up rebellion against the government. Treason means levying war against the United States. Reminding service members of their oath to the Constitution and their legal right to refuse unlawful orders is neither. It’s the exact opposite—it’s reinforcing their duties as US service members.

And, look, even if these elected officials had done something wrong (they haven’t), and even if it broke the law (it didn’t), and even if it was seditious (it’s not even remotely close), it’s still wrong and ridiculously, unfathomably out of line for the president to be saying they deserve the death penalty.

Of course, Trump’s tantrum has amplified this message far beyond what the original video would have reached. And according to a Military Times survey, 80% of US troops already understand their duty to disobey illegal orders anyway. All Trump’s rage has accomplished is reminding even more people—including his own supporters in uniform—of something they already knew.

Remember: this comes right after his MAGA colleagues spent weeks demanding Democrats “lower the temperature” following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Yet here’s the president telling his followers that these officials deserve to die, forcing Democrats to alert the Capitol Police and the House Sergeant at Arms to protect these lawmakers and their families.

It’s fucking insane.

Congress should be calling for impeachment. Instead, you have the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, doing his usual run for cover routine by claiming that “attorneys will have to parse the language.”

That’s a hell of a position from someone who, two months ago, insisted that calling Republicans “fascist” was tantamount to inciting violence:

Seems like quite the double standard. When the president literally calls for his political enemies to be put to death, he deflects and wants “the attorneys” to “parse the language,” but should anyone refer to the authoritarian attacks on the institutions of the United States, he’ll immediately condemn you for inciting violence.

But, of course, that is the MAGA way: they can say what they want, you have to shut up. They can encourage and incite violence, but anything you say that’s a little mean to them is beyond the pale.

History will remember those who did the right thing and those who enabled our mad king and his unhinged violent fantasies.

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I’ve expended far too many words stating the obvious: the Trump administration’s deportation program isn’t interested in removing criminals. It’s only interested in removing people who aren’t white. That’s why it vets visa applicants for “anti-American” social media posts while throwing the immigration door wide open for any white people seeking to escape the “persecution” they face in post-apartheid South Africa.

And that’s why so many people being arrested and deported don’t fit the profile of the “worst of the worst.” There simply aren’t enough criminal immigrants in America. Too much of our crime is home-grown and even if you’re a racist who thinks Black people are skewing the data, the data still shows white people commit crime more frequently than immigrants.

Back in September, federal officers rolled up on a fire crew in Washington state. Washington is already on the list of states Trump doesn’t like. The fact that these firefighters were on loan from Oregon — a state Trump vehemently (to the point of martial law) doesn’t like — surely factored into this equation.

After hassling a bunch of people just trying to keep a wildfire from spreading, the collective of federal officers only managed to secure two arrests. One of those was Jose Cruz-Estrada, who had been working as a firefighter since 2019. Officers arrested him and deported him to Mexico. In defense of its raid on firefighters, DHS said this:

The two illegal aliens apprehended were NOT firefighters. The two contracted work crews questioned on the day of their arrests were not even assigned to actively fight the fire; they were there in a support role, cutting logs into firewood. The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time. No active firefighters were even questioned, and U.S. Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.

They were firefighters. Just because they weren’t on the fire line didn’t mean they weren’t doing work to support firefighting efforts. This statement also lied about Cruz-Estrada’s role in firefighting, which involved more than this alleged response to a Bureau of Land Management investigation into the contractor’s hiring practices.

Once it became clear Cruz-Estrada was not just some migrant hastily hired to handle a wildfire, the DHS decided to amp up its deliberately misleading narrative. It issued a press release that had this to say about the firefighter (emphasis in the original):

Jose Bertin Cruz-Estrada, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, past charges include the delivery and selling of methamphetamine. Border Patrol previously encountered this criminal illegal alien 15 times. Cruz-Estrada has a final order of removal from April 2015 and was last removed from the United States on February 27, 2016. He chose to disregard our laws and illegally re-enter the country again.

That’s the DHS skewing the facts to pretend a person, who not only runs his own lawn care business but has also handled supervisory roles in fire response teams, is a hardened criminal. According to the Guardian’s reporting, Cruz-Estrada has been a “squad boss and incident commander” since beginning his firefighting career. Here’s what actually happened, in far more detail than the DHS would ever be willing to share.

[I]n 2013, he got caught up in the criminal legal system after a local drug bust. Officers, records show, were not focused on Cruz-Estrada, but rather a resident of a home where Cruz-Estrada was hanging out. An informant bought drugs from the resident and secretly filmed the encounter; police accused Cruz-Estrada of being a “lookout”, because he was seen leaving the home and “walking around the surrounding area”, a prosecutor wrote.

Cruz-Estrada was charged with a litany of serious offenses, including racketeering and unlawful delivery of methamphetamine, but the charges were dismissed in exchange for him pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver meth, a charge stemming from the “lookout” allegations.

The conviction carried no prison time.

This is the evidence the DHS thinks is so damning: someone was once accused of serious drug crimes more than a decade ago and served no time in prison for the single charge the government secured via a plea deal. Since then, he has worked for firefighting crews when not running his own business, which he incorporated in 2022.

But fuck him, I guess, for not trying to obtain citizenship during Trump’s first term. Cruz-Estrada re-entered the US illegally in 2019, which wasn’t exactly the best time to be asking for asylum or trying to fast-track a citizenship application. But he went back to firefighting, contributing to several major wildfire-fighting efforts over the next six years.

And yet, this government continues to insist this is exactly the kind of person the United States should have fewer of. When asked for a comment on this recent article, the foul front-mouth of the DHS decided to spew the usual bullshit, letting everyone who doesn’t respond to racist dog whistling know that this administration is doing this to Cruz-Estrada because it simply doesn’t like people from Mexico:

[DHS Asst. Secretary Tricia McLaughlin] said the border patrol had “encountered” Cruz-Estrada 15 times over the years and again cited his past criminal charges without noting they were dismissed. “Once again, the Guardian is debasing itself by peddling sob stories from a criminal illegal alien … Stop publishing criminal illegal aliens’ testimonies as the truth.”

That’s the sort of thing you say when you have no real argument to make. You re-read the jacket, gloss over the lack of a serious conviction, refuse to acknowledge the fact that the offense occurred well over a decade ago, and insult the people asking you to explain your actions. This person should not be allowed to issue a Teams meeting invitation, much less serve as the underboss for Kristi “I Kill Pets” Noem.

Cruz-Estrada is the sort of person who actually makes America great: a human being as capable of failure as the rest of us, but willing to turn his life around and be a positive force in this nation — something far too few US natives are interested in doing. Migrants never get to rest on their laurels. Meanwhile, the MAGA crowd remains kicked back on the laurel lounger it scored at an asset forfeiture auction, applauding an administration that is deliberately destroying the American ideals these shitheels claim to love so much it might occasionally mean having to drink something other than Bud Light for a few weeks.

We’ve noted time and time again that Trump’s attack on U.S. cybersecurity defenses and oversight are utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Perhaps with the exception of more lip filler, spray tans, diabetes, bogus efficiency, and fake piety.

That’s been particularly true for Trump’s attack on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has done a lot of heavy lifting in recent years when it comes to thwarting security threats, maintaining election cybersecurity, providing useful threat assessments for orgs that can’t afford to do their own, and even deterring the spread of misinformation about government security.

The Trump administration has requested CISA’s $3 billion budget be slashed by nearly half a billion dollars and cut a reported third of its workforce. The organization has had to freeze most of its cybersecurity election protection work. Folks who worked on protecting the country from foreign cybersecurity threats have been redirected toward harassing minorities.

The Verge has a good read on how important key spots in DHS and CISA have been filled by weird and incompetent Trump-loyal zealots, causing chains of failures across U.S. cybersecurity defenses. So when things happen, like Iranian government-linked hackers accessing and modifying Arizona election websites, people can no longer trust CISA to competently lend a hand:

“It was late June, and something strange was happening on Arizona’s online portal for political candidates. Images of the candidates were disappearing. Photos of the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were popping up in their place. The state would later come to believe it was an attack from an Iranian government-affiliated group. When they first discovered the threat, though, they were in the dark — and they needed help.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office took action to contain the threat, which he says did not impact personal voter information. But one thing he didn’t do was contact the federal agency that would have once been among Fontes’ first calls: CISA.”

Experts are already seeing an increase in scams, ransomware attacks, and foreign government probes of key U.S. systems. And Trump’s incompetence and sabotage extends way beyond CISA.

The Trump administration has also gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating Salt Typhoon, the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom networks in history), and dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents).

Over at the FCC, Trump’s hand-picked earlobe nibbler Brendan Carr has been derailing agency plans to impose some baseline cybersecurity standards on “smart” home devices (because hardware vendors don’t want oversight). Carr is also killing new FCC rules requiring telecoms do a better, more transparent job securing their networks from foreign attacks (because again, AT&T and Comcast don’t want oversight). And he’s making it easier for robocalling scammers to abuse U.S. voice and data networks (because, yep, U.S. marketing companies don’t want oversight).

This will harm, and even kill, a lot of people.

MAGA loyalists don’t care because they aren’t interested in leadership and governance, they’re interested in scrapping the country for parts and selling it off the back loading dock. Whether or not that lines up with foreign governments and criminal organizations keen on undermining national security isn’t something they’re bright enough to understand or ethical enough to care about.

Ken Paxton’s bullshit lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol, built on Trump and RFK Jr.’s bullshit press conference in which they pretended that science says acetaminophen causes autism, is off to a predictably bad start. I had a bit of a laugh shortly after this turd was filed, mainly because Kennedy himself came out after the lawsuit was filed to walk back the claims made in the press conference and acknowledged that all that science he and Trump cited “is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.” And, while Trump repeatedly instructed women to not take Tylenol while pregnant, a stance medical professionals overwhelmingly disagree with, Kennedy instead said women should consult with their doctors on its use.

Well, it’s early on in this nonsense, but Paxton has already lost on two requests he made as part of it.

A Texas Judge has rejected a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to issue a temporary order barring Tylenol’s maker, Kenvue, from claiming amid litigation that the pain and fever medication is safe for pregnant women and children, according to court documents.

In records filed Friday, District Judge LeAnn Rafferty, in Panola County, also rejected Paxton’s unusual request to block Kenvue from distributing $400 million in dividends to shareholders later this month.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that Paxton is simply doing performative MAGA bullshit with this lawsuit. He’s running for the Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn, who is also seeking reelection. Wesley Hunt joins them to compete in the Republican primary for the seat. All of these men are simply attempting to out-MAGA one another.

The TRO request to keep Kenvue, current makers of the Tylenol brand, from stating that its product is safe for use by pregnant women and children, was always absurd. But it was made all the more so when Kennedy walked back his press conference claims. Judge Rafferty noted that she:

…denied the marketing claim, which even the Trump administration is not standing by. The day after Paxton filed his lawsuit, Kennedy said that “the causative association… between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.”

Like I said in my previous post on this: very funny.

As for the dividend disbursement, for which Paxton relies on a Texas law preventing companies giving out such funds if they are about to become financially insolvent, the court simply didn’t have jurisdiction to issue any such order.

According to Reuters, one of Kenvue’s lawyers, Kim Bueno, explained that the problem with the state of Texas making this request is that Kenvue is based in New Jersey and incorporated in Delaware. “There was no jurisdiction to challenge that,” she said.

All this flailing about would be merely unbecoming, except that Paxton is a damned state AG. He should, and likely does, know better than all of this. As I said before, this is performative nonsense designed to do nothing more than gain primary votes in a Senate race.

But in today’s political climate, you can see just how much chaos can be generated by an ignoramus like RFK Jr.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Meta wins FTC antitrust trial over Instagram, WhatsApp deals (CNBC)
• Commission eyes further simplification of tech rules after DSA review (Euractiv)
• Inside Europe’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ tech strategy (Digital Policy)
• NetChoice sues Virginia to block its one-hour social media limit for kids (The Verge)
• Tech Giants Sue California Over Social Media Access Law (2) (Bloomberg Law)
• TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds (The Guardian) 
• The Most Frustrating Word for Trust & Safety Professionals (LinkedIn)

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem compared antifa to the transnational criminal group MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State group in October 2025, she equated a nonhierarchical, loosely organized movement of antifascist activists with some of the world’s most violent and organized militant groups.

“Antifa is just as dangerous,” she said.

It’s a sweeping claim that ignores crucial distinctions in ideology, organization and scope. Comparing these groups is like comparing apples and bricks: They may both be organizations, but that’s where the resemblance stops.

Noem’s statement echoed the logic of a September 2025 Trump administration executive order that designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order directs all relevant federal agencies to investigate and dismantle any operations, including the funding sources, linked to antifa.

But there is no credible evidence from the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security that supports such a comparison. Independent terrorism experts don’t see the similarities either.

Data shows that the movement can be confrontational and occasionally violent. But antifa is neither a terrorist network nor a major source of organized lethal violence.

Antifa, as understood by scholars and law enforcement, is not an organization in any formal sense. It lacks membership rolls and leadership hierarchies. It doesn’t have centralized funding.

As a scholar of social movements, I know that antifa is a decentralized movement animated by opposition to fascism and far-right extremism. It’s an assortment of small groups that mobilize around specific protests or local issues. And its tactics range from peaceful counterdemonstrations to mutual aid projects.

For example, in Portland, Oregon, local antifa activists organized counterdemonstrations against far-right rallies in 2019.

Antifa groups active in Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 coordinated food, supplies and rescue support for affected residents.

No evidence of terrorism

The FBI and DHS have classified certain anarchist or anti-fascist groups under the broad category of “domestic violent extremists.” But neither agency nor the State Department has ever previously designated antifa as a terrorist organization.

The data on political violence reinforces this point.

A 2022 report by the Counter Extremism Project found that the overwhelming majority of deadly domestic terrorist incidents in the United States in recent years were linked to right-wing extremists. These groups include white supremacists and anti-government militias that promote racist or authoritarian ideologies. They reject democratic authority and often seek to provoke social chaos or civil conflict to achieve their goals.

Left-wing or anarchist-affiliated violence, including acts attributed to antifa-aligned people, accounts for only a small fraction of domestic extremist incidents and almost none of the fatalities. Similarly, in 2021, the George Washington University Program on Extremism found that anarchist or anti-fascist attacks are typically localized, spontaneous and lacking coordination.

By contrast, the organizations Noem invoked – Hamas, the Islamic State group and MS-13 – share structural and operational characteristics that antifa lacks.

They operate across borders and are hierarchically organized. They are also capable of sustained military or paramilitary operations. They possess training pipelines, funding networks, propaganda infrastructure and territorial control. And they have orchestrated mass casualties such as the 2015 Paris attacks and the 2016 Brussels bombings.

In short, they are military or criminal organizations with strategic intent. Noem’s claim that antifa is “just as dangerous” as these groups is not only empirically indefensible but rhetorically reckless.

Turning dissent into ‘terrorism’

So why make such a claim?

Noem’s statement fits squarely within the Trump administration’s broader political strategy that has sought to inflate the perceived threat of left-wing activism.

Casting antifa as a domestic terrorist equivalent of the Islamic State nation or Hamas serves several functions.

It stokes fear among conservative audiences by linking street protests and progressive dissent to global terror networks. It also provides political cover for expanded domestic surveillance and harsher policing of protests.

Additionally, it discredits protest movements critical of the right. In a polarized media environment, such rhetoric performs a symbolic purpose. It divides the moral universe into heroes and enemies, order and chaos, patriots and radicals.

Noem’s comparison reflects a broader pattern in populist politics, where complex social movements are reduced to simple, threatening caricatures. In recent years, some Republican leaders have used antifa as a shorthand for all forms of left-wing unrest or criticism of authority.

Antifa’s decentralized structure makes it a convenient target for blame. That’s because it lacks clear boundaries, leadership and accountability. So any act by someone identifying with antifa can be framed as representing the whole movement, whether or not it does. And by linking antifa to terrorist groups, Noem, the top anti-terror official in the country, turns a political talking point into a claim that appears to carry the weight of national security expertise.

The problem with this kind of rhetoric is not just that it’s inaccurate. Equating protest movements with terrorist organizations blurs important distinctions that allow democratic societies to tolerate dissent. It also risks misdirecting attention and resources away from more serious threats — including organized, ideologically driven groups that remain the primary source of domestic terrorism in the U.S.

As I see it, Noem’s claim reveals less about antifa and more about the political uses of fear.

By invoking the language of terrorism to describe an anti-fascist movement, she taps into a potent emotional current in American politics: the desire for clear enemies, simple explanations and moral certainty in times of division.

But effective homeland security depends on evidence, not ideology. To equate street-level confrontation with organized terror is not only wrong — it undermines the credibility of the very institutions charged with protecting the public.

Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Dayton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Donald Trump, who presents himself as a free speech champion, sure loves suing the media for their First Amendment-protected speech. CNN is a favorite target of his though these lawsuits don’t do particularly well. Back in 2022, he sued CNN for calling Trump’s lies about the results of the 2020 election “The Big Lie.” Two years ago the district court dumped that lawsuit easily.

It’s taken another two years, but the Eleventh Circuit has upheld that lower court dismissal, and done so in a simple 8-page per curiam opinion from a panel that includes two Trump-appointed judges: Elizabeth Branch and Kevin Newsom. The fact that even Trump’s own judicial appointees unanimously rejected his claims demolishes any narrative that this case had merit or that “biased” courts are persecuting him. This was simply a loser case that never should have been brought.

The appeals court’s analysis cuts straight to the heart of why Trump’s lawsuit was doomed from the start. The term “Big Lie” isn’t a factual claim that can be proven true or false—it’s CNN’s characterization of Trump’s conduct, protected opinion under the First Amendment.

Trump’s argument is unpersuasive. First, although he concedes that CNN’s use of the term “Big Lie” is, to some extent, ambiguous, he assumes that it is unambiguous enough to constitute a statement of fact. This assumption is untenable. Although we haven’t squarely addressed the point, case law from other circuits is persuasive. In Buckley v. Littell, 539 F.2d 882 (2d Cir. 1976), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 1062 (1977), the Second Circuit held that, by using the terms “fascist,” “fellow traveler,” and “radical right” to describe William F. Buckley, Jr., the defendant was not publishing “statements of fact.” Buckley, 539 F.2d at 893. Rather, the court ruled, the terms were “so debatable, loose and varying[] that they [we]re insusceptible to proof of truth or falsity.” Id. at 894. Similarly, in Ollman v. Evans, 750 F.2d 970 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (en banc), cert. denied, 471 U.S. 1127 (1985), the D.C. Circuit held that when the defendant called the plaintiff “an outspoken proponent of political Marxism,” his statement was “obviously unverifiable.” Ollman, 750 F.2d at 987. Trump argues that the term “Big Lie” is less ambiguous than the terms “fascist,” “fellow traveler,” “radical right,” and “outspoken proponent of political Marxism.” But he does not explain this assertion. If “fascist”—a term that is, by definition, political—is ambiguous, then it follows that “Big Lie”—a term that is facially apolitical—is at least as ambiguous.

The court’s comparison to terms like “fascist” and “fellow traveler” is particularly damaging to Trump’s case. If calling William F. Buckley Jr. a “fascist” constitutes protected opinion rather than actionable defamation, then CNN’s characterization of Trump’s election claims as a “Big Lie” clearly falls on the same side of the line. The panel essentially argues that Trump wants special protection from political criticism that no other public figure enjoys.

Second, Trump’s argument hinges on the fact that his own interpretation of his conduct—i.e., that he was exercising a constitutional right to identify his concerns with the integrity of elections—is true and that CNN’s interpretation—i.e., that Trump was peddling his “Big Lie”—is false. However, his conduct is susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including CNN’s.

Trump’s lawyers apparently thought they had found a silver bullet in the sheer volume of CNN’s coverage, arguing that more instances of the phrase somehow transformed opinion into defamation. The appeals court wasn’t buying it. If the thing is protected opinion five times, it’s protected opinion 10,000 times. It’s just speech.

Trump’s other arguments are likewise meritless. He argues that the district court erred in limiting its analysis to the five defamatory statements that he listed in his complaint. According to Trump, the district court should have also analyzed the “more than sixty instances of defamation set forth in the Notice Letter to CNN” and the “nearly 7,700 instances in which CNN had defamed Plaintiff with the ‘Big Lie’ allegation.” Brief of Appellant at 18. Trump has not alleged that any of these “instances of defamation” refer to something other than CNN’s use of “Big Lie.” We have held that, by using “Big Lie” to describe Trump, CNN was not publishing a false statement of fact. Therefore, whether CNN used “Big Lie” one time or many is irrelevant to the question of falsity.

This logic-chopping attempt reveals the fundamental weakness of Trump’s entire approach. He’s essentially arguing that repeating a protected opinion enough times magically transforms it into actionable defamation—a legal theory with no basis in the First Amendment whatsoever.

Trump, whose lawyers appeared to throw every possible argument at the court, also claimed that the lower court’s denial of his attempt to amend the lawsuit and try again was an abuse of the court’s discretion. The appeals court explains to Trump’s lawyers, that’s not how any of this actually works.

Trump argues that, when the district court denied his motion for leave to amend, it applied a standard that was too strict. Essential to his argument is his claim that the district court did not issue a judgment when it dismissed his complaint with prejudice. “In these circumstances,” Trump argues, “leave to amend should have been ‘granted liberally.’” Brief of Appellant at 41 (quoting Czeremcha v. International Ass’n of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, AFL-CIO, 724 F.2d 1552, 1556 & n. 6 (11th Cir. 1984)). But Trump overlooks that, in its order, the district court indicated that “dismissal of the complaint constituted dismissal of the action.” Id. After dismissing Trump’s complaint with prejudice, the court stated that “[t]he Clerk of Court is directed to CLOSE this case and DENY AS MOOT any pending motions.” Trump, 684 F. Supp. 3d at 1277. Therefore, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Trump’s motion for leave to amend.

Nor did the district court abuse its discretion in denying Trump’s motion for reconsideration under Rule 59. Trump asserts that the district court (1) “fail[ed] to consider the entirety of the circumstances surrounding CNN’s publication of the challenged statements” and (2) “appeared to reframe its understanding of [the clear error] standard in a manner unrelated to the case.” Brief of Appellant at 51–52, 55). “The only grounds for granting [a Rule 59] motion are newly-discovered evidence or manifest errors of law or fact.” Arthur v. King, 500 F.3d 1335, 1343 (11th Cir. 2007) (alteration in original) (quoting In re Kellogg, 197 F.3d 1116, 1119 (11th Cir. 1999)). Neither of Trump’s points involve newly discovered evidence or manifest errors of law or fact, and the record confirms that the district court cited and applied the correct standard. We find no abuse of discretion.

This ruling represents more than just another failed Trump lawsuit—it’s a textbook example of how SLAPP suits are supposed to be handled by the courts. Trump’s case had all the hallmarks: a thin-skinned public figure using expensive litigation to punish media criticism, weak legal theories designed more to harass than to win, and endless procedural gamesmanship when the substantive claims inevitably failed.

What makes this particularly significant is that the rejection comes from a panel that includes two of Trump’s own judicial appointees. This demolishes the narrative that Trump’s legal failures stem from “biased” courts rather than fundamentally weak cases. When even judges you appointed won’t buy your legal theories, that’s a pretty clear signal that the problem isn’t judicial activism—it’s your vexatious case.

The broader context here matters. Trump has weaponized defamation law as a tool to silence media criticism throughout his career, filing lawsuit after lawsuit against news organizations that report unflattering truths about him. Most of these cases follow the same pattern: grandiose claims, weak legal theories, and inevitable failure in court. But the process is the punishment—forcing news organizations to spend time and money defending their basic right to engage in political commentary.

There’s nothing new or novel about this case. There’s no deep need to explore some nuance of defamation law here. This is just a garden variety SLAPP suit by one of the most petulant thin-skinned presidents we’ve ever had who regularly loves to abuse the legal system to try to silence and suppress media who doesn’t praise his every move.

In theory, Trump could seek an en banc rehearing by the entire Eleventh Circuit or petition the Supreme Court to review this decision, but both moves would be long shots at best. The legal principles here are well-established, the factual record is clear, and there’s no circuit split or novel constitutional question that would warrant further review. This case is a dead end, which is exactly where it belonged from the start.

“Flock Safety” may be the brand name, but this company’s earliest sales successes had nothing to with safety. Its target audience was homeowners associations and people running gated communities in upscale neighborhoods. The purpose of the cameras (and, eventually, the attached license plate reader tech) was to make sure people who were plenty safe already weren’t annoyed by occasional intrusions by the rest of the world outside of their gates.

Then it went the Ring route, offering cheap cameras to cops. It was just inkjet printers all over again. The cameras were affordable. Subscription fees for access to footage and the company’s search engine were the real moneymaker.

And, much like Ring, Flock has ended up on the wrong side of public opinion. While it hasn’t quite generated the amount of negative press Ring’s cozy relationship with cop shops has (yet!), it’s been getting eyeballed pretty fiercely by people who aren’t fans of its access-it-all-from-anywhere attitude. A report from 404 Media showed Texas law enforcement officers utilizing the nationwide network of Flock ALPR data to hunt down someone who had engaged in a medication abortion. Weeks later, it was discovered this search was performed on behalf of her vengeful boyfriend, who sought to press criminal charges against her.

Other news has surfaced as well, making Flock Safety look even worse. It has placed almost no restrictions on access by anyone from anywhere, which has resulted in a lot of local law enforcement agencies performing searches federal agencies like CBP, US Border Patrol, and ICE can’t perform themselves. In some cases, Flock’s lack of restraint and nonexistent privacy policies has made their cameras pretty much illegal. In other cases, local lawmakers are finally reining in use of this camera network due to its steady abuse by federal officers.

That’s the case in Washington, where two cities have shut down camera networks — with the support of local law enforcement — that may have been illegally accessed by federal agencies.

Police departments in Redmond and Lynnwood have temporarily shut down their Flock license plate reader systems following growing public concerns about privacy and system access, according to city officials.

Redmond’s City Council voted unanimously Monday to turn off its Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras after learning that U.S. Border Patrol improperly accessed Auburn’s Flock system last month.

Redmond’s police chief, Darrell Lowe, insists no improper/proxy access has happened on his watch. But that doesn’t mean all that much, because it’s unclear whether or not Flock Safety would inform local cops if these agencies did. For that matter, proxy searches for federal agencies generally have access to any records generated anywhere in the country. So, it’s hardly comforting to assure people your agency hasn’t been approached directly by federal officers.

That was the point Senator Ron Wyden made in his letter to Flock Safety — one in which he pointed out that Flock has zero desire to deter abuse of its camera network, much less engage in good faith discussions about how it could go about siloing its networks so searches are restricted to areas directly overseen by local law enforcement.

The police chief in Lynnwood, however, didn’t try to make excuses. He actually attempted to do something when these concerns were first raised.

“Flock cameras have already proven to be an invaluable investigative tool in solving crimes and keeping our community safe,” Lynnwood Police Chief Cole Langdon said. “However, it’s equally important that we maintain the public’s trust.”

The ALPR program in Lynnwood launched June 29, 2025, with 25 cameras funded through a Washington Auto Theft Prevention Authority grant.

Shortly after implementation, the department learned a vendor-enabled “nationwide search” feature allowed broader access than Lynnwood authorized.

Police said they worked with Flock Safety to disable that feature on July 8.

While Flock pitched in there to respect its customer’s request, it has also gone the other way just as frequently. The company has previously been caught illegally installing cameras. In September, it was caught reinstalling cameras the city of Evanston, Illinois had ordered removed because the network (and Flock’s access options) violated the state’s privacy laws.

Private surveillance vendor Flock Safety reinstalled all of its stationary license plate cameras in Evanston that had previously been removed, apparently doing so without authorization from the city, which sent the company a cease-and-desist order Tuesday afternoon demanding that the cams be taken back down.

The city previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 automated license plate readers (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26.

Predictably, this push-back against Flock is generally occurring in areas already being threatened/invaded on a daily basis by the US military and swarms of federal officers. But that’s to be expected. Those most threatened by federal abuse of local camera networks are always going to be the first to fight back. The reason it’s not happening in “red” states is because the people running those states honestly don’t care what route enables authoritarianism, just so long as it does so while their party still holds power.

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Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart.

In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, 2), Carr indicates that his bogus inquiry is focusing on a minor edit made in a year-old documentary broadcast by the BBC about the president’s support of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Carr clearly doesn’t regulate UK media organizations. The PBS and NPR never even aired the documentary in question and had nothing do do with the BBC’s edits. So in his letter, Carr has to jump through a bunch of hoops to make his performative effort sound official and coherent:

Tim Karr, Senior Director of consumer group Free Press, told Techdirt that he spoke to the BBC, who never received the supposed letter Carr leaked to Breitbart. It’s also not posted to the FCC website. And it takes a few minutes of research to find that PBS and NPR, again, never aired the documentary in question (“Panorama,” which never aired in the U.S. and wasn’t even all that critical of Trump).

This is a manufactured scandal. Carr is putting on a cute little show for Trump and right wing media so he can pretend he’s being “tough” on “unfair” “liberal” media outlets. While this is performative grandstanding by a strange, unserious man, it’s still very dangerous for a government official to be abusing FCC authority to try and suppress journalism and free speech.

We’ve covered the BBC fracas recently. The short version: a right wing tabloid created a scandal out of the fact that a year old BBC documentary edited together two parts of Trump’s January 6 speech encouraging violence at the Capitol. While the snippet does reflect Trump’s clear and obvious intent to incite violence at the Capitol, the edit stitched together two parts of the same speech 54 minutes apart.

While the edits may have been in poor judgement, there was no actual distortion of Trump’s intent or of history. And to be clear: this is a bogus scandal U.S. authoritarians (no stranger to propaganda, news distortions, and misleading edits) created to pretend to be mad about. Trump and Carr have openly demonstrated they’re fine with misleading news edits if they help the President.

Still, as we’ve seen with outlets like ABC and CBS, that effort’s been working well so far when it comes to major U.S. media companies, whose affluent, usually Conservative owners are more worried about tax cuts, deregulation, and merger approvals than they are about consistently serving the public interest. It’s far less likely to work on a media organization in another country that isn’t regulated by Brendan Carr.

Trump has claimed he’s going to file a $1-$5 billion lawsuit against the BBC for the edit, despite the fact the edits occurred more than a year ago (outside the limits of UK defamation law).

The BBC hasn’t helped itself by over-reacting to the fake right wing scandal; with numerous high level BBC employees resigning, and the BBC CEO tripping over himself to apologize. Still, they’ve promised to fight Trump’s lawsuit, and have a very good chance of winning it.

Since that lawsuit isn’t likely to go well, Trump had Carr once again abuse FCC authority to launch a fake investigation based on the FCC’s decades-old “news distortion” rule. That rule, created in 1949, was supposed to be used to police major scandals — like a company or politician bribing a news organization to suppress a story important to the public interest.

Carr’s been instead weaponizing the rule to bully media companies that engage in commentary or reporting the President doesn’t like, with mixed success. Carr first leveraged the rule to harass CBS for some innocuous edits made to a 60 Minutes interview last election season. He then pushed his luck even further, abusing the rule in a very unsuccessful effort to censor ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel.

A bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials just last week wrote a letter to Carr, urging him to eliminate the dated rule and stop abusing FCC power to crush free speech and undermine journalism. Carr, a dutiful MAGA loyalist, unsurprisingly refused, continuing to pretend he’s “serving the public interest”:

Unfortunately when the cowed U.S. corporate media covers these obvious attacks on free speech, they tend to soft sell how monumentally full of shit Carr and Trump are on this subject. Which is, of course, the exact outcome Trump and Carr are looking for.

The U.S. right wing is openly buying up major social networks (X, TikTok), and what’s left of our broken mainstream media (CBS, CNN), then trying to bully or bribe any stragglers into being pathetic stewards of major online information spaces (Meta), or feckless echoes of serious journalism (ABC).

However silly and performative Brendan Carr may be, his party’s mission to own, bully, or destroy all the cornerstones of major media is extremely dangerous. It’s the same gambit authoritarians in countries like Hungary and Russia successfully implemented to successfully cement permanent rule. And while it may improve as Trump’s health and influence fails, most of the U.S. responses to date have been pathetic.

With any luck, their hubris and incompetence will be their downfall. But it’s going to necessitate a broader awareness — especially among the Democrat party gerontocracy easily befuddled by the modern information environment — of what’s actually happening and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Carr’s roping in of NPR and PBS comes as the U.S. right wing also tries to destroy whatever was left of U.S. public media. They’re well aware that, untethered from the distorted financial incentives of ad-based corporate media, public media is more likely to be honest about the dangers of idiot authoritarianism (Jon Oliver recently had a good segment on public media that’s worth a watch).

It’s unlikely anything real comes of this inquiry itself. Again, the FCC doesn’t regulate the BBC and NPR and PBS literally had nothing to do with the BBC’s decision. Carr is putting on a cute (but dangerous) show for his mad king and right wing media, wasting taxpayer resources, and trying to scare media organizations away from telling the public the truth about an unpopular, embarrassing administration.

After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump’s billionaire buddies (clearly his goal all along), though that too remains in mysterious limbo.

Meanwhile, backers of the ban in Congress, either duped into or willfully complicit with Trump’s effort to hijack the app, say are all either curiously silent or trying to play stupid:

“…after months of panic over the alleged dangers of TikTok, Congress has spent the year putting up relatively little fuss as Trump repeatedly extended TikTok’s sales timeline in clear violation of the divest-or-ban law.”

The Verge contacted a dozen current and former lawmakers, many of whom were previously incredibly vocal about the dire threat posed by the app, who suddenly don’t much want to talk about it. The only one that was even willing to give a statement, Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, didn’t really say anything useful:

““Congress is still waiting to get briefed on how the TikTok sale would actually stop Chinese algorithms from causing harm to U.S. citizens, U.S. military, and U.S. interests,” she said. “The lack of transparency has caused concerns for both Democrats and Republicans who are still waiting for secure briefings on how to stop malign actions.”

You might recall that Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump followed this up by promising to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Repeatedly.

Last September, Trump finally announced that he’d struck a deal with ByteDance to offload 45 percent of the app to Oracle (Trump’s friend Larry Ellison), Silver Lake (Michael Dell is a top investor), and Abu Dhabi’s MGX — as well as possibly Rupert Murdoch.

Trump’s goal was always pretty clear (remember this whole thing started with first term Trump plan to offload TikTok to Oracle and Walmart); hijack TikTok’s fat revenues for his billionaire friends, and apply pressure to turn TikTok into an even safer space for far right wing ideology and propaganda.

It’s kind of the worst of all possible outcomes. The deal maintains the app’s supposedly problematic connections to China, but it adds a layer of domestic corruption as Trump offloads control of the app to his billionaire buddies. Including Larry Ellison, who (with the help of his nepobaby son David) is clearly making a play to dominate whatever’s left of establishment U.S. media.

It remains unclear if China actually supports — and will allow — such a deal. Trump has implied that President Xi Jinping has given approval, but there’s been little public forward momentum despite a meeting between Trump and Xi in both June and late October. And even then, it’s not clear such a deal would be aligned with the law, notes The Verge:

“Even if China accepts the deal, it’s not clear the agreement meets the legal requirements for divestiture. Licensing the TikTok algorithm could potentially constitute an ongoing operational relationship between the US entity and ByteDance, which is explicitly barred by the law.”

I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for all companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.

It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for media consolidation limits and education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.

Banning TikTok was never really about national security. If that were true, we wouldn’t be dismantling our cybersecurity regulators, accidentally hosting sensitive military chats over Signal with journalists, voting to cement utterly incompetent knobs in unaccountable roles across military intelligence, and letting dodgy data brokers sell sensitive personal info to global governments (including our own).

TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always really about ego, money, information control, and protecting Facebook from competition from a foreign company it clearly couldn’t out-innovate.

And the Democrat decision to support a ban of a popular app during an election season when they were trying to desperately court young voters — despite little to no public support for such a move — continues to be one of the dumbest political tech policy blunders in recent memory.

Now all of the folks who were so breathless about the need for a ban — from Brendan Carr to large cross sections of Congress — are suddenly all weirdly mute as the proposal sits in policy limbo somewhere between Trump’s rank corruption and raw, blistering congressional incompetence.

There are lots of ways things play out when it comes to fans of multiplayer video games building out their own host servers to play them. Sometimes fans set those servers up simply because they can do it better and more securely than the publisher… and then the publisher takes them down because of intellectual property concerns. Sometimes gamers simply want to play an older version of an online game, before the publisher pushes out a bunch of updates and expansion packs… and the publisher takes them down because of intellectual property concerns. And, rarely, sometimes the publisher ends its official support and hosting of a game’s servers and actually acts human and cool by giving fans a cheap license to host their own servers to keep the game alive.

The most frustrating version of this sort of thing is when a publisher fully ends support for a game, shuts down its servers, and then prevents any and all fans from ever playing the game again over IP concerns. And there can be no more stark example of this than Concord, an online game that Sony shut down 2 weeks (!!!) after its release, over a year ago.

A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.

The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”

Those DMCA takedowns came from MarkScan, a longtime partner of Sony that looks around the internet for anything remotely resembling IP infractions and fires off DMCA notices. No demands about the actual game servers have been made… yet. And that makes this all the more strange. MarkScan, presumably at the behest of Sony, is taking down gameplay videos for a game that simply doesn’t exist outside of this fan effort. There are a billion gameplay videos of Sony games that are actually active and out in the world, but these get taken down?

And, again, it’s the absurdity that is the real star here. Concord officially existed for 2 whole weeks in 2024. Sony shut it down and refunded the money of any buyer that wanted one. It shut down the studio that made the game. So when some actual fans of the game come along and want to revive it on their own, Sony starts issuing threats?

“We’re choosing to not make this game available and insist you don’t either.”

While the team behind Concord Delta hasn’t been contacted by Sony directly, the YouTube video takedowns have put the group in something of a defensive crouch. “Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites [to our Discord server] for the time being,” Red wrote on the Discord, as reported by The Game Post.

Of course, Sony could also decide to simply look the other way and let players enjoy a game the company seems to have no interest in officially supporting. That’s what Nintendo appears to be doing with fan projects like The Pretendo Network and WiiLink, which restore online functionality that’s no longer officially available on classic Nintendo consoles.

When you manage to make Nintendo look relatively fan-friendly, it should be obvious you’ve done something horribly wrong.

You’ve heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it.

This story comes via a fascinating Sporkful podcast episode where reporter Paul Karolyi spent years investigating why Colorado-style pizza remains trapped in obscurity while other regional styles became national phenomena.

The whole episode is worth listening to for the detective work alone, but the trademark angle reveals something important about how intellectual property thinking can strangle cultural movements in their cradle.

Here’s the thing about pizza “styles”: they become styles precisely because they spread. New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Haven—these aren’t just individual restaurant concepts, they’re cultural phenomena adopted and adapted by hundreds of restaurants. That widespread adoption creates the network effects that make a “style” valuable: customers seek it out, restaurants compete to perfect it, food writers chronicle its evolution.

Colorado-style pizza never got that chance. When Karolyi dug into why, he discovered that Beau Jo’s—the restaurant credited with inventing the style—had locked it up legally. When he asked the owner’s daughter if other restaurants were making Colorado-style pizza, her response was telling:

We’re um a trademark, so they cannot.

Really?

Yes.

Beau owns a trademark for Colorado style pizza.

Yep.

When Karolyi finally tracked down the actual owner, Chip (after years of trying, which is its own fascinating subplot), he expected to hear about some grand strategic vision behind the trademark. Instead, he got a masterclass in reflexive IP hoarding:

Cuz it’s different and nobody else is doing that. So, why not do it Colorado style? I mean, there’s Chicago style and there’s Pittsburgh style and Detroit and everything else. Um, and we were doing something that was what was definitely different and um um licensing attorney said, “Yeah, we can do it” and we were able to.

That’s it. No business plan. No licensing strategy. Just “some lawyer said we can do it” so they did. This is the IP-industrial complex in microcosm: lawyers selling trademark applications because they can, not because they should.

I pressed my case to Chip that abandoning the trademark so others could also use it could actually be good for his business.

“If more places made Colorado style pizza, the style itself would become more famous, which would make more people come to Beau Jo’s to try the original. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, like everyone would know that Beau Jo was the originator. Like, do you ever worry or maybe do you think that the trademark has possibly hindered the spread of this style of pizza that you created that you should be getting credit for?”

“Never thought about it.”

“Well, what do you think about it now?”

“I don’t know. I have to think about that. It’s an interesting thought. I’ve never thought about it. I’m going to look into it. I’m going to look into it. I’m going to talk to some people and um I’m not totally opposed to it. I don’t know that it would be a good idea for us, but I’m willing to look at it.”

A few weeks later, Karolyi followed up with Chip. Predictably, the business advisors had circled the wagons. They “unanimously” told him not to give up the trademark—because of course they did. These are the same people who profit from maintaining artificial scarcity, even when it demonstrably hurts the very thing they’re supposedly protecting.

And so Colorado-style pizza remains trapped in its legal cage, known only to a handful of tourists who stumble across Beau Jo’s locations. A culinary innovation that could have sparked a movement instead became a cautionary tale about how IP maximalism kills the things it claims to protect.

This case perfectly illustrates the perverse incentives of modern IP thinking. We’ve created an entire industry of lawyers and consultants whose job is to convince business owners to “protect everything” on the off chance they might license it later. Never mind that this protection often destroys the very value they’re trying to capture.

The trademark didn’t just fail to help Beau Jo’s—it actively harmed them. As Karolyi documents in the podcast, the legal lockup has demonstrably scared off other restaurateurs from experimenting with Colorado-style pizza, ensuring the “style” remains a curiosity rather than a movement. Fewer competitors means less innovation, less media attention, and fewer customers seeking out “the original.” It’s a masterclass in how to turn potential network effects into network defects.

Compare this to the sriracha success story. David Tran of Huy Fong Foods deliberately avoided trademarking “sriracha” early on, allowing dozens of competitors to enter the market. The result? Sriracha became a cultural phenomenon, and Huy Fong’s distinctive rooster bottle became the most recognizable brand in a category they helped create. Even as IP lawyers kept circling, Tran understood what Chip apparently doesn’t:

“Everyone wants to jump in now,” said Tran, 70. “We have lawyers come and say ‘I can represent you and sue’ and I say ‘No. Let them do it.’” Tran is so proud of the condiment’s popularity that he maintains a daily ritual of searching the Internet for the latest Sriracha spinoff.

Sometimes the best way to protect your creation is to let it go. But decades of IP maximalist indoctrination have made this counterintuitive wisdom almost impossible to hear. Even when presented with a clear roadmap for how abandoning the trademark could grow his business, Chip couldn’t break free from the sunk-cost fallacy and his advisors’ self-interested counsel.

The real tragedy isn’t just that Colorado-style pizza remains obscure. It’s that this story plays out thousands of times across industries, with creators choosing artificial scarcity over organic growth, protection over proliferation. Every time someone trademarks a taco style or patents an obvious business method, they’re making the same mistake Chip made: confusing ownership with value creation.

When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and yet leave the original behind. For a quarter of a century, the open access movement has been fighting to break those virtual chains for academic works, and to allow anyone freely to read and make copies of the knowledge contained in online virtual libraries.

The detailed history of the movement can be found in Chapter 3 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). As the timeline there, and posts on this blog both make clear, the open access movement has made only limited progress despite the enormous effort expended by many dedicated individuals. Moreover the open access idea has been embraced and then subverted by the academic publishers whose greed and selfishness it was meant to fight.

One version of open access, known as the “diamond” variant, still offers hope that the goals of free access to knowledge for everyone could still be achieved. But even this minimalist approach to academic publishing requires funding, which raises questions about its long-term sustainability. Economic issues also lie at the heart of wider discussions about what could replace copyright, which was born in the analogue world, and whose dysfunctional nature in the digital environment is evident every day.

Walled Culture the book concludes with a look at perhaps the most promising alternative model, whereby “true fans” support directly the creators whose work they value. This approach can also be applied to open access. In this case, the “true fans” of the research work published in papers and books are the academic libraries, acting on behalf of the people who use them. There are various ways for them to support the journals their academics want to access, but one of the most promising is “subscribe to open” (S2O), which helps publishers convert traditional journals into open access. The idea was formalized by Raym Crow, Richard Gallagher, Kamran Naim in 2019. Here’s their explanation of how it works:

S2O offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access at a discount off the regular subscription price. If current subscribers participate in the S2O offer, the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription. If participation is not sufficient – for example, if some subscribers delay renewing in the expectation that they can gain access without participating – then the content remains gated. Because the publisher does not guarantee that the content will be opened unless all subscribers participate in the offer, institutions that value access to the content – demonstrably, the journal’s current subscribers – must either subscribe conventionally (at full price) or participate in S2O (at a discount) to ensure continued access. The offer is repeated every year, with the opening of each year’s content contingent on sufficient participation.

As with the “true fans” model, supporting S2O journals is in the self-interest of libraries, which receive subscriptions to journals their academics want, and for a lower price. But there is a collateral benefit for society because everyone else also receives access to the knowledge contained in those titles. Publishers receive a guaranteed subscription income up front, and as a consequence of the open access route, they can also reach a larger audience. For example, when the Annual Review of Public Health publication tried out the S2O model, its monthly usage factor went up by a factor of eight. Since that successful trial, the S2O model has gone from strength to strength, as a review article published at the end of last year explains:

As of 2024, thanks to the Subscribe to Open model, over 180 journals have been able to publish entire volumes in open access, which would never have been possible otherwise because of the shortcomings of the [article processing charge] models for these journals and their respective disciplines. The S2O model continues to grow, with more publishers set to launch their S2O offerings in 2025.

In August, the prestigious Royal Society announced that it would be moving eight of its subscription journals to S2O. Among those titles is Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s longest-running scientific journal. In an article reflecting on that move, Rod Cookson, publishing director of The Royal Society, explained why he and other forward-thinking publishers are fans of S2O:

It is cost neutral and a relatively small change through which libraries can enable entire journals to become open access. This combination of simplicity and transparency has generated enthusiasm for S2O among librarians the world over. Publishers now need to demonstrate to those librarians that in addition to being aligned with their missions, S2O delivers a return on investment that justifies their expenditure. With sensible features that make the S2O proposition work well for both libraries and publishing houses—like multi-year agreements, “premium benefits” for S2O supporters, and collective sales packages—S2O will continue to grow as a trusted and durable model for delivering open access.

S2O represents a successful application of the true fans idea in the context of academic publishing. But perhaps supporters of open access should embrace even more of the true fan spirit and look to the example of fan fiction to help re-imagine scholarly publishing. That, at least, is the bold idea of Caroline Ball, who is the community engagement lead for the Open Book Collective, and whose advocacy work appeared in Walled Culture four years ago. Here’s why she thinks academic research should be more like fan fiction:

At first glance, fanfiction—non-commercial works created by fans who reimagine and remix existing stories, characters, and worlds—and academic research may seem worlds apart. But look closer, and both are practices of deep engagement, intertextual interpretation, and knowledge creation.

Fanfiction doesn’t just regurgitate stories; it interrogates, reinvents, and expands on them, often filling in gaps and exclusions left offscreen. Likewise, scholarship builds on prior work, challenges assumptions, and contributes new insights. Both are iterative, dialogic, and community based. And both, at their best, come from a place of passion and curiosity.

Her post explains how Archive of Our Own (AO3), a community-run digital repository for fan fiction, works, and why it could be a model for a new kind of open access:

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a community-run digital repository for fanfiction. Launched in 2008 by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), AO3 is entirely open access. It charges nothing to publish, nothing to read, and is powered by open-source code and volunteer labor. As of May 2025 (according to the OTW Communications Committee), it hosts over 15 million works across 71,880 fandoms and sees a daily average of 94 million hits.

Ball goes on to suggests ways in which scholarly publishing could learn from that evident success. Specific areas include AO3’s flexible metadata system; its innovative approach to reviews and comments; its “format agnosticism”, accepting any kind of contribution; and the way it re-imagines recognition and reputation. In summary, she writes:

AO3 reminds us that platforms can be built by and for communities, without extractive profit models or exclusionary hierarchies. It shows what’s possible when infrastructure is treated as a public good, and when participation is scaffolded, not gated. And crucially, AO3 demonstrates how practices that have been piloted in isolation across the scholarly landscape—open peer commentary, volunteer governance, flexible metadata, inclusive formats—can be woven together into a single, sustainable system.

The S2O model described above is a welcome addition to the ways in which sustainable open access can be brought in by publishers. But ultimately Ball is right in emphasizing that universal and unconstrained access to knowledge will only be achieved when the entire scholarly publishing system is re-invented with that goal in mind. It’s well past time for all the fans of open access to unite in this endeavor, and to do away with today’s digital chained libraries forever.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.