What do EFF staffers Sarah Chen, Javier Morales, Caitlin Chin, Emma Rodriguez, and Mikko Kopponen have in common? 

For one thing, they don’t exist. 

For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site called News-USA Today, which describes itself as “an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism.” 

Uh… 

(Please don’t confuse this site with USA Today, in which real EFF experts are accurately quoted on a regular basis.) 

News-USA Today is hardly the only slagheap that’s hallucinating or fabricating EFF personnel and quotes; as we wrote last September, media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations— assuming they care about reputation at all. 

But this many fake EFF sources in two months? That’s making a play for the championship title of bogus news content. 

News-USA Today’s site proclaims, “Our goal is simple: give readers the facts and the context they need to make informed decisions.” It then defines its mission:

• “Deliver timely, factual reporting grounded in verifiable sources and public documents.”
• “Make complex topics understandable without losing nuance or accuracy.”
• “Serve the public interest by surfacing stories that affect lives, institutions, and communities.”
• “Maintain a clear separation between news, analysis, opinion, and sponsored content.” 

Attempts to reach contacts listed on the site went unanswered. In fact, after we reached out to them, they published a story on June 9 with quotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Jared Cohen — who also doesn’t exist. 

As we noted last year, EFF is all about having our words spread far and wide. Per our copyright policy, any and all original material on the EFF website may be freely distributed at will under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY), unless otherwise noted.  

However, we don’t want disreputable sites making up words (or false identities!) for us, whether or not they’re using AI. False quotations that misstate our positions damage the trust that the public and reputable media outlets have in us.  

The best thing a news consumer can do is invest a little time and energy to learn how to discern the real from the fake. It’s unfortunate that it’s the public’s burden to put in this much effort, but while we’re adjusting to new tools and a new normal, a little effort now can go a long way.   

As we’ve noted before in the context of election misinformation, the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica ha

s published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news,” as has FactCheck.org. 

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

In mid-May, the Todd Blanche-run DOJ agreed to “settle” the fake case Donald Trump had brought against his own IRS. The “settlement”? A $1.776 billion fund to pay reparations to the MAGA faithful. Much of that money was expected to flow to January 6th insurrectionists — many of them convicted of actual crimes that Trump himself wiped out via pardon the moment he was re-inaugurated. The whole thing was so hellishly corrupt that even Republicans in Congress started making noises about how problematic it was.

A couple weeks later, when Blanche had to testify before Congress, he said that the slush fund was dead, but he wouldn’t agree to sign anything making that official.

There have been multiple court cases about the fund, including one brought by Andrew Floyd, the former Assistant US Attorney for DC who led the prosecutions against January 6ers. In that case, Judge Leonie Brinkema told the DOJ that the case would be closed as moot if a bunch of Trump officials signed declarations under the penalty of perjury that the fund was really dead:

ORDERED that, to avoid any further litigation in this civil action, defendants Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent FILE a declaration under the penalty of perjury that they will not take any action to create or operate the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will not proceed in any manner, or under any name. If such a declaration is not filed by June 19, 2026, the Court will issue a Scheduling Order and require defendants to file a responsive pleading by July 17, 2026

On Friday, the DOJ said “no, we will not file such declarations.” It claims that the government has made it clear already that the fund will not move forward and so they see no reason to file another declaration to that effect:

The Acting Attorney General has testified before Congress that the Fund is “not going forward, period.” House Appropriations Committee, Oversight Hearing – Department of Justice, at 40:30-42:50.1 Undersigned counsel have twice signed briefs reaffirming that “the Fund is not going forward.” And counsel for Defendants has twice said substantially the same thing in open court. All these statements were made against the backdrop of serious penalties for falsity. See 18 U.S.C. § 1001; Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)–(c). So there is no reason why declarations should affect the Court’s mootness analysis.

This isn’t defying the court. The DOJ was given an option: have the case closed as moot if the declarations were filed, or have the case continue. This decision just means the case will continue — even as the DOJ keeps insisting it has already said the fund isn’t going to happen.

But Judge Brinkema has good reasons to be concerned that the DOJ is lying to her. After all, Trump and MAGA loyalists in the administration are apparently acting as though the fund is still going to happen.

It turns out that it’s not that simple. Behind the scenes, Justice Department and other Trump-administration officials have quietly assured allies that plans for some form of payout remain on track. I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated. Across the administration, and even within the Justice Department, officials have differing perspectives on whether the fund itself will ultimately be restored. But either way, officials see a path forward for the government to pay those who say they are victims of supposed government “weaponization.”

[….]

Those familiar with the internal conversations—all of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they feared possible retaliation—told me that the work is being kept quiet while the Trump administration waits for opposition to the fund to blow over. Crucially, the administration is also trying to avoid a fight over the payout plan, which has been deemed a political slush fund by critics, while the Senate considers Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

So that seems like a pretty good reason for the judge to want signed declarations from officials in the Trump administration, even if it sounds like officials are working on ways that are less public to pay off insurrectionists.

Once again, in any other administration this entire thing would be seen as exponentially worse than Watergate. The fund is extraordinarily corrupt, but worse than that, it’s being dangled over the heads of literal insurrectionist criminals who tried to overturn the results of a free and fair Presidential election… and are now being told “if you keep being willing to break the law for Trump, we’ll pay you American taxpayer funds.”

In any normal world, this would end the Trump presidency.

The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump “made in America” phone to most of the customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But they did recently start to ship early review copies to a handful of outlets and preferred cultists. What outlets generally found wasn’t surprising: it’s a pretty substandard smartphone pre-loaded with Trump propaganda apps like Truth Social.

But reporters working with iFixit have also confirmed something that was speculated for a while. Namely that the phone is just a lazy rebrand of the two-year old Taiwanese-made HTC U24 Pro with a garish coat of yellow paint (here’s a non-paywalled iFixit exploration):

“The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News.”

As is pretty typical for Trump business ventures, this entire affair is the laziest slop imaginable.

Trump Mobile launched last year with a lot of fanfare. But as we noted when it was unveiled last year, even calling it a mobile company was being generous: the company is really just a lazy rebrand of an existing MAGA-friendly MVNO provider, Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service (Patriot just got caught up in an interesting influencer marketing dust up, if you missed it).

A cornerstone of the venture was a “made in America” “gold” “Trump phone” named the T1 that was supposed to launch last August. Though shortly after launch the Trump Organization eliminated all the “made in America” claims, shifting to promises that it was “made with American values in mind.”

If by “American values” we mean lazy, poorly secured slop preloaded with spyware and propaganda and slathered with half-assed branding logos and ugly paint then dramatically marked up to exploit suckers, then sure, okay.

The knockoff phone with Chinese internals of course arrives as the Trump FCC pretends to be cracking down on Chinese gear in hardware, routers, and other electronics. It’s also worth noting that the HTC U24 Pro was priced $469.99 retail when it launched two years ago. The Trump Mobile T1 is selling for $500, and they’ve hinted that the price could be going up.

It’s also worth pointing out that before the Trump Organization could even get phones into peoples’ hands, they suffered a significant data breach. A breach that not only revealed customer names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers, but also that they’d likely only sold around 30,000 phones, a far cry from the 600,000 they had claimed.

The curious part is that it really shouldn’t have taken even the Trump Organization this long to get a sloppy rebrand into consumers’ hands. It’s not like they even had to manufacture new phones at meaningful volume. Maybe their plans were upended by ignorant tariffs and unnecessary wars? Anyway, it’s just hard to really overstate how very much on brand this all has been.

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The Sixth Circuit just handed Ohio a win on its social media law restricting minors, and reading the majority opinion, it’s immediately obvious why: the court fell hook, line, and sinker for the moral panic that social media is inherently poisonous to children. The first few pages of the decision are nothing but cherry-picked, out-of-context horror stories about what social media does to kids — with no mention of the substantial corresponding evidence that the picture is far more complicated than that.

This was, frankly, predictable. Last year, when the Supreme Court heard the FSC v. Paxton case regarding online age verification for adult content websites, we were disappointed that most of the internet industry sat the case out, deciding that they didn’t want to go on the record as supporting the First Amendment for porn sites. We’ve discussed how deciding to sit the case out was a mistake that would come back to bite the companies. When the Supreme Court decided, effectively overturning earlier Supreme Court cases, that age verification laws were fine for porn sites, we also warned that this seemed unlikely to be limited just to adult content. Turns out, the age verification/parental consent virus is spreading.

A bunch of states have passed laws requiring age verification or limiting teenagers’ access to all sorts of non-porn websites, and at least some courts are willing to go along with it. In Ohio, the state passed a very bad social media law a few years ago and NetChoice sued. The district court realized how problematic the law was, including the requirements regarding “parental consent” for kids to use social media, and put the law on hold, which the Sixth Circuit has now reversed.

This new ruling starts out by saying that NetChoice isn’t the proper party to bring this challenge, suggesting that if there is any violation of anyone’s rights, it would be the children who use these social media platforms, and NetChoice represents the companies, not their users. There are some problems with this finding that seem to go against precedent, but if this was all that the court did, a new challenge could be brought on behalf of users.

Instead, though, the majority opinion decides to move forward anyway and consider the First Amendment issue. It properly says that the law must survive strict scrutiny (Ohio tried to argue for lower standards) but then — in a move that can only be described as delusional — claims that the act survives strict scrutiny. If anyone has read the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. EMA — in which the Supreme Court said that California’s law requiring parental consent in the sale of video games was unconstitutional — it should be easy to see how this law is unconstitutional as well. For some reason the Sixth Circuit thinks that this is different, mainly because the majority, again, has misread some of the moral panic studies on social media and kids:

the state’s supporting evidence in Brown was weaker than Yost’s evidence here. In Brown, California “acknowledge[d] that it [could ]not show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm to minors[,]” relied on studies that had “been rejected by every court to consider them” and most of which “suffer[ed] from significant, admitted flaws in methodology[,]” and “show[ed] at best some correlation [with] minuscule real-world effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game . . . .” Id. at 799–800. Yost relies on findings by the Surgeon General and researchers who have identified a potentially significant connection between social media and serious harms such as depression and body dysmorphia. Additionally, the evidence in Brown suggested that the effects of violent video games were materially indistinguishable from the effects from other sources of violent material. Id. at 800–01. NetChoice has not brought to our attention evidence that other forms of media have the same negative effects on minors as social media. The link between social media and minors’ wellbeing seems “neither novel nor implausible[,]” and therefore Ohio has met the “quantum of empirical evidence needed to satisfy heightened judicial scrutiny of [its] legislative judgment[] . . . .” OPAWL – Bldg. AAPI Feminist Leadership v. Yost, 118 F.4th 770, 780 (6th Cir. 2024).

So, California lost in Brown (in part) because the state couldn’t show causal evidence of a connection between violent video games and harm, and the Sixth Circuit says social media is different… pointing to the Surgeon General’s report… even though the Surgeon General’s report admits that there is no causal evidence of harm, and says that many kids get tremendous benefit from social media. In particular, that report said that LGBTQ+ kids, especially those in homes with parents who disapprove of their kids’ sexuality, find social media to be a lifeline.

It’s difficult to see how the Sixth Circuit’s majority ruling here makes any sense, unless the majority simply thinks it’s okay for LGBTQ+ and other marginalized kids to suffer. And, really, so much of this ruling makes sense if you read it that way.

The majority opinion, incredibly, brushes off the idea (raised by NetChoice) that it’s not easy for platforms to verify a parent-child relationship. This is a huge problem with any of these laws. How exactly can platforms confirm such a relationship without deeply invasive, privacy-destroying data collection? And, even then, how is a platform to know whether or not a child and parent are estranged, or if there’s a custody battle, or anything of that nature? The majority just dismisses this out of hand, saying it’s easy to figure it out.

First, verifying parental consent will not necessarily present such a great challenge.

That’s literally all it says on that. I’m dying to know exactly how Judge Eric Clay thinks this is possible. Because if he’s figured it out, he’d be the first to do so and he could sell that to every internet platform out there now required to figure out this technical challenge.

There is a dissent from Judge Kevin Ritz, who says that he would affirm the lower court’s ruling, though he would limit the injunction to just NetChoice’s members, rather than against the law as a whole. He notes that NetChoice should have standing to sue, that the law requires strict scrutiny, but that there is no way it should survive strict scrutiny. Unlike his colleagues, who tap dance around Supreme Court precedent by screaming “but think of the children!” Judge Ritz points out that rights are rights. And kids have them.

Yost cannot meet this high bar. At the outset, it is worth emphasizing that “[m]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.” Brown, 564 U.S. at 794 (citation modified). After all, “[a] fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more.” Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98, 104 (2017). Although the websites the Act seeks to regulate may pose serious risks to children, these sites are also zones for constitutionally protected speech. And they cultivate “vast democratic forums” with the “potential to alter how we think, express ourselves, and define who we want to be.” Id. at 104-05 (citation omitted). Indeed, the Supreme Court has described social media platforms as “perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.”…

The parental-consent provision at the core of the Act represents a significant burden on the rights of NetChoice’s minor users to avail themselves of these “powerful mechanisms” of speech. Id. For many minor users, in fact, the Act would represent an “insurmountable [ ] barrier to entry for online speech.” Carr, 789 F. Supp. 3d at 1223; see also Uthmeier, 2025 WL 3458571, at *17 (Rosenbaum, J., dissenting) (“When it comes to speaking online, the Act effectively prohibits many minors from speaking at all.”). Like my colleagues and Yost, I do not doubt “that unfettered social media access can and does harm minors.” Griffin, 2025 WL 978607, at 11. But the state does not have “a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” Brown, 564 U.S. at 794. “We should be wary of governments supplanting parents in deciding which ideas children should and should not be exposed to.” Uthmeier, 2025 WL 3458571, at 18 (Rosenbaum, J, dissenting). Besides, the question under strict scrutiny “is not whether [the Act] would be effective, but whether there are less restrictive alternatives.”

And, unlike his colleagues, Ritz notes that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. EMA appears directly on point:

Brown is instructive. There, the Supreme Court considered a law that prohibited selling or renting violent video games to minors, though minors could still access these games if purchased by an adult. Brown, 564 U.S. at 789, 802. In enacting this law, the legislature created a “wholly new category of content-based regulation that [wa]s permissible only for speech directed at children.” Id. at 794. The Supreme Court “emphatically” rejected this law as “unprecedented and mistaken.” Id. at 792, 794. And although the Court recognized that the legislature’s goal of “addressing a serious social problem” was “legitimate,” the solution was both “seriously underinclusive” and “seriously overinclusive.” Id. at 805.

Ohio has made the same error.

The dissent also calls out the silliness of Clay’s bold assertion that it’s easy for platforms to verify a parent-child relationship noting that, not only is this not true, it’s yet another reason why the law is clearly unconstitutional:

The Court in Brown noted that “one parent (or even an aunt or uncle)” could conceivably purchase a violent video game for a child, but the statute at issue did not have “any requirement[] as to how this parental or avuncular relationship is to be verified; apparently the child’s or putative parent’s, aunt’s, or uncle’s say-so suffices.” 564 U.S. at 802. Here, the Act allows covered operators to register parental consent by one of five ways, including by signing a form, using a credit card, or calling “a toll-free telephone number . . . staffed by trained personnel.” Ohio Rev. Code § 1349.09(B)(1). But Yost cannot explain how these methods prove a parental relationship. For instance, how would an operator know that a person who called the toll-free telephone number is actually the prospective minor user’s parent? Apparently, the caller’s “say-so” is sufficient. Brown, 564 U.S. at 802. The Act’s approach to protecting children fails strict scrutiny.

The dissent also mocks the majority claim that this law somehow protects children. Since the entire point of the law is a one-time consent, Judge Ritz notes that, if we assume that there is real harm from social media to kids, then the second a parent gives consent, that harm is still likely to occur. Ritz calls out the underlying reality that Judge Clay misses: Clay assumes that all parents will refuse to give consent.

In finding that the Act survives strict scrutiny, Judge Clay argues that “Ohio seeks to involve parents because their involvement itself will inherently mitigate some of the harms of unsupervised social media use.” Clay Op. at 23. But it is hard to see how one-time parental consent mitigates such harms unless those parents categorically prohibit their children from using social media on the front end. After all, the Act does not require parents to supervise their children as they use the covered websites. Nor does it create mechanisms for parents to check in with their children about social media habits or to re-consent periodically. The Act only requires that parents are engaged in the beginning and in a binary way—they can either allow their children to use covered websites or not. This approach does not narrowly or effectively advance the goal of involving parents in children’s social media use.

With similar laws popping up all over the country, sooner or later this is absolutely going to the Supreme Court.

When it gets there, here’s what the justices will be looking at: a majority opinion that treats the Surgeon General’s report as proof of causation even though the Surgeon General’s own report explicitly admits there’s no causal evidence of harm. An opinion that waves Brown v. EMA aside while the dissent methodically demonstrates it’s “directly on point.” And an opinion that resolves the question of how platforms are actually supposed to verify parent-child relationships — a problem no one in the industry has managed to solve — with a single sentence asserting it won’t “necessarily present such a great challenge.” No mechanism. No explanation. Just confidence.

Judge Ritz’s dissent does what the majority refuses to: it applies the law. Minors have First Amendment rights. Social media platforms are, as the Supreme Court said in Packingham, “perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.” And one-time parental consent — which requires no ongoing supervision, verifies nothing meaningful, and defaults to “apparently the caller’s say-so is sufficient” — cannot survive strict scrutiny.

The majority chose moral panic over legal analysis. Now it’s the Supreme Court’s problem.

It’s no secret ICE officers are using their phones and their tech toys to do way more than they’ll openly admit to doing. Tech tools that can be abused will be abused. And ICE has plenty of those, including an app that’s supposed to be used for “verification” of migrant status, but is just facial recognition tied to whatever other information ICE has access to.

The cameras come out and the harassment begins, as detailed here in this NPR report. Shortly after Portland, Maine resident Xenia Pantos stopped her car to observe some ICE activity in her neighborhood, their spouse, Carly Williams got a call from a blocked number. The caller identified himself as calling from the Department of Homeland Security.

Williams said the caller asked if anyone else drives her vehicle. When Williams mentioned her spouse sometimes did, the caller asked Williams if she knew her spouse had stopped at an incident that morning.

“What he basically said was, ‘You should let her know to not do that anymore because people who are doing that type of thing are getting added to a domestic terrorist watch list,'” Williams recalled in an interview with NPR.

ICE continues to deny it targets anti-ICE protesters with its surveillance tools. According to the report, it has “repeatedly denied” utilizing its tools and databases to find out more about those who protest or observe its anti-migrant efforts.

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.” 

“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”

Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.” 

That’s what Todd Lyons said in February. And it’s definitely not true. ICE has a database that is definitely capable of “tracking American citizens,” because it has access to plenty of law enforcement databases filled with information about American citizens. One needs to look no further than the heat it has drawn by asking local law enforcement to perform searches of things like Flock’s ALPR databases on its behalf.

And it’s definitely not true because the same Todd Lyons said as much in a written response [PDF] to congressional queries that has only recently been made public.

Lyons in February: “There is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”

Lyons in April: “Well… except for this one.”

Your letter asks what specific personal information DHS officers collect. ICE collects information to identify the person(s) with whom the officer or agent is engaging. During these interactions, a variety of data may be collected by ICE law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration and criminal law. ICE collects essential biographic and biometric information and situational details required to support criminal investigations, safety, and immigration concerns.

If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.

That sounds like a database is being created and maintained — one that deals solely with people who are not targets of immigration enforcement effort. And most of those people would be (1) US citizens and (2) protesters and observers engaging with ICE officers.

Further down in the letter, Lyons offers up another phrase that sounds like a denial, but really isn’t:

DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.

That would mean something if no information was collected on these people. But Lyons has already stated that officers collect this information. If DHS is not “creating or maintaining a separate database,” that only means exactly what that says. However, it does not mean DHS is not collecting and storing information about people ICE officers “encounter” who are not “arrested or detained.”

Even if all applicable laws and retention standards are being followed (and DHS has given us little reason to believe it follows laws and standards), this information is still being collected, stored, and — because it’s there — accessed by federal officers.

And even if we choose to believe Lyons’ dissembling, we’re still left with the fact that people identifying themselves as federal employees are calling up citizens who’ve done nothing more than exercise their First Amendment rights and threatening them with being added to government databases. So, even if Lyons ain’t lying, the people who worked for him (until he stepped down) aren’t doing what Lyons thinks they’re doing. They’re doing the other thing: collecting information on protesters and observers for the sole reason of keeping an eye on them, if not actually tracking them down to harass them.

This week, MrWilson takers both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a comment about the growing global threat of internet age gates:

One of the biggest benefits of the internet is the ability to talk to people outside your personal sphere. It’s similar to the exposure to diversity that a lot of people get when they leave home for college. You can see how a bunch of conservatives who are dismayed by their inability to control what the youth access and talk about would want to lock them out so they can be limited to the indoctrination of their immediate vicinity.

Internet access helps LGBTQ kids when their parents are unsupportive hateful bigots. Internet access helps kids on the spectrum find other people who share their interests and won’t think they’re weird. Internet access helps kids who are being abused finds strategies to report and escape from those situations.

In second place, it’s a reply to someone who felt they needed to give Trump some reluctant half-praise for ending the war in Iran:

This is a completely unnecessary take. It’s entirely possible to be happy some of the bullshit is over without giving credit to the asshole who caused it. You don’t thank the guy who intentionally shat on the floor for taking a dirty rag and smearing it around while pretending he’s cleaning it up.

He already did double down multiple times.

It’s like saying he gets credit for not punching his wife the 50th time after he punched her 49 times before.

He’s not trying to end the war. He’s trying to get out of a mess he created. And he’s leaving a bigger mess than when he started. Anyone who thinks Iran was a problem before should recognize that they’ll be enriched and emboldened by this. Trump has done more good for the Iranian regime than he has for the US at this point.

“Trying to turn the page” here just means he’s going to move on to another fuck up. He’s going to go back to fucking over our European allies or bullying someone else. He got humiliated trying to bully Iran, so he’ll pick an easier target to shore up his ego and pretend he’s still big and smart and powerful.

Absolutely no credit should go to the man who is responsible for all the fuck ups. He’s too old, arrogant, and stupid to learn from his mistakes. And we’re going to pay the cost.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Ninja about what Trump will do next:

He’s rerouting his attention to the Latin America. It’s not only Cuba. It’s every country that doesn’t bow to the US will. He attributed the “terrorist organization” status to PCC and CV, the largest organized crime groups operating in Brazil opening up a window to conduct operations ignoring the country sovereignty under some shitty US law.

He is also attacking Brazilian banking system, mainly what we call Pix, an electronic transaction system that’s free for the ordinary citizen while commercial entities pay a much smaller fee than using Visa and Mastercard for instance. Via USTR. He says it’s unfair competition.

Another major attack vector is against our institution, mainly our supreme court and the electoral system, one of the most advanced and secure in the world. All while tagging along with people that have already been found guilty of trying a coup d’état.

This man is a fucking piece of turd and nobody is stopping him. Hopefully this complete loss and the continued destruction Trump is promoting in all areas of the USA strips some power and the ability to cause so much destruction of future baboons the Republicans will eventually put in power.

Next, it’s a comment from Bloof about RFK Jr. checking out of doing any work:

He’s gotten most of what he wants, but isn’t able to feed raw milk, beef tallow and sodium chlorite to every school kid so he’s acting like the narcissistic trust fund child he is, crossing his arms and sulking because it’s no fun anymore, the day to day work isn’t enjoyable and people are fighting him in the courts.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous quip calling out a bizarre phrase used by another commenter to describe Trump’s supposed “victory” in Iran:

YouTube listslop clickbait be like

“top 10 levels of their government”

You’ll never believe number 7!

In second place, it’s The Phule with one more message about the situation:

Dear Iran: My congratulations for your complete and total victory.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, our first place winner is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the mess in Microsoft’s Xbox division:

Remember when people actually liked Microsoft as a company?

…yeah, me neither.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about a certain annoying venture capitalist:

My main vivid memory of Andreessen is Dan Aykroyd playing him in a 1993 biopic about how he first came to Earth.

That’s all for this week, folks!