News

You’re all sick of me saying we need to have more nuance in the discussion about AI use in the gaming industry. I get it. I’m also not going to stop. And I hope you will have noticed that I have called for nuance in both directions. While I’m more optimistic than many in our community that there is a place for this technology in the industry, and that it could actually have some net positive effects therein, I’m also not blind to the potential negative consequences. Concerns about industry jobs are a very real thing. A desire to protect the artistic intent of game makers is a worthy enterprise. Quality of output is paramount.

That’s why I’ve been repeating over and over again that we should be talking about how AI will be used in games, not if. The “if” question has already been answered in the affirmative, at least for some portion of the industry. Now we need to build very real guardrails around the “how.”

And, to be frank, comments such as those from Fallout co-creator Tim Cain are wildly unhelpful in the opposite direction.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says a world where AI generates games, TV shows, and even doctor’s appointments is inevitable, and he’s even “looking forward” to that future.

In arguably the veteran game developer’s saddest “fun Friday” video ever, Cain envisions a world in which dead MMOs come back to life with AI-generated players mimicking real-life personalities, where generative AI makes Joey from Friends a lawyer instead of a struggling actor, and where you take vacations in VR. Yes, really.

He goes way, way beyond even that. He talks at some length about using AI to create more episodes of retired shows that people still hunger for. As a massive fan of Firefly, I can’t tell you how ecstatic I’ve been these past several weeks with Nathan Fillion’s announcement that the show would be coming back in an animated form to build on the story that was infamously canceled by Fox after only 1 season. If that announcement was instead made by the rightsholder and said the new episodes would be created whole cloth using AI and that they would be customizable and tailored to my desires, my reaction would have been horror, not excitement.

AI needs to be a tool on the perimeter, not the creative force itself. I don’t want the pen telling me the story of Odysseus; I want the writer to use the pen to do so. And if the pen turns into a typewriter, which then turns into a word processor, that all works. There is still a human being telling the story.

Even Cain’s remarks tailored specifically for the gaming industry ring super hollow.

Cain goes on to say this will be especially handy for MMO players, in particular those who miss being able to play games that aren’t active anymore. “Have an AI make a local server,” he proposes. “Great, now you can play it again. Oh, it’s empty? Fill it with AI players. Have it watch videos of people who have played that game and just fill it up with players, and it mimics their personalities.”

Look, Cain is a veteran of the industry who was instrumental to one of the most beloved video game IPs of all time, but with all due respect, the idea of playing Ultima Online with AI-generated players designed to mimic the personalities of my friends who I used to play with… is genuinely one of the grimmest, most dire, dystopian realities I can possibly fathom. Likewise, my heart sinks at the thought of playing AI-generated stories with AI-generated characters that I can change however I want. That sounds like it would entirely rob a game, or any work of art, of its artistic intent. But alas, Cain reckons this is all inevitable, so get ready.

This is what the AI detractors are worried about. And when you hear an industry veteran speak so glowingly about gamers operating within these soulless arenas designed merely to mimic the authentic fun that these games produced, it’s easy to understand the concern. This isn’t helpful. Pretending to not understand that the very fucking point of MMOs is to play with other human beings in a single realm, not ginned-up robots pretending to be human, is incredibly frustrating.

And Cain, oddly enough, seems completely unconcerned with artistic intent at all. There is no reason why his example of requesting changes to a TV show wouldn’t translate into a video game. And if people can just customize games not through mods, but through fundamental changes driven by AI requests, then there is no game anymore. There is merely a shell of a game where the player is then free to remix it to extents that transform the intent of the maker completely.

I had to search around a lot to see if Cain was being sarcastic or making a fake attempt at over the top AI evangelism purely to make a point. Everything I have seen and read indicates that’s not what this was. And, again, that makes all of this very unhelpful if you want to get into some real discussions about where this technology should be used and where it shouldn’t.

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free – is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That’s because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent that the costs for research institutions of publishing in OA journals have barely changed at all. And yet one of the other key aims of open access was to save money while widening availability. Against that background, a natural question to ask is: if open access has failed to deliver savings, why bother supporting it? Cancer Research UK, the world’s leading cancer charity, has evidently asked itself that question and come up with an answer, which it explains in a post entitled “Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more”:

We need efficient scholarly communications to spread scientific ideas via a fair economic model. We currently don’t have that. The open access movement was bold and promising, but ultimately disappointing. Now is the time to stop and call for a new way to make publishing work…

…

Ceasing to fund open access in the way we currently do will save us £5.2m of donors’ money over the next three years. That’s a substantial amount which can be put towards cancer research.

The post by Dan Burkwood, Director of Research Operations and Communications at Cancer Research UK, explains what exactly the problem is:

We currently fund open access publishing for our researchers in a number of ways. Despite hopes that this would enable a flourishing of open access dissemination of science, most of the growth has occurred in hybrid journals. These are publications that combine OA articles with those behind a paywall – this means the publishers will still charge for university and institute libraries to access them, even though researchers have paid for their work to be published. For us, this means we currently use donated money to fund our researchers, institutes and centres to publish OA research articles, yet they still have to pay to access the majority of journals in which those articles appear. The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it.

These so-called “hybrid models” are discussed at length in Chapter 3 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). They were presented as a transitional approach towards journals that were fully open access, but in many cases that transition hasn’t happened, not least because the hybrid model is so profitable for publishers, who therefore have little incentive to move to fully open access titles. Burkwood rightly points to a key reason why academic publishers continue to wield such power: the academic world’s insistence on using published articles in prestigious titles as a metric of success.

Cancer Research UK are working to widen the way we evaluate research in order to mitigate the heavy focus on publication outputs. It’s clear to us that a broader view of an applicant’s career is vital to gauge potential success. By signing up to DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), we encourage our reviewers to assess the quality and impact of research through means other than just journal impact factor. Additionally, we invite applicants to submit a narrative CV, allowing a more holistic view of their track record, research outputs and career progression.

But as he acknowledges, “Despite our, and others, attempts to limit the emphasis of the ‘publish-or-perish’ mindset, it will take time for the culture to change.” In the meantime, he suggests:

If researchers have no access to publishing funds they can publish their work for open access at no cost, but the publication will sit behind a paywall for 6 months (under embargo) before being deposited on Europe PMC open access – this is known as green open access.

Green open access provides full and free access to papers, but only after an embargo period, typically six months, but sometimes longer (gold open access provides instant access, but requires payment by researchers’ institutions.) That makes green OA a poor substitute for real, immediate open access.

The problem here is that such embargo periods have long been accepted as the norm, but that is only because a terrible blunder was made over two decades ago by the Research Councils UK (RCUK). In 2005, the RCUK stipulated that the work it funded would require open access publication. However, when the final version of the RCUK’s policy appeared in June 2006, it had a significant flaw, expressed in the following provision: ‘Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors.’ As the leading open access scholar Peter Suber wrote at the time, this was a completely unnecessary concession:

Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream from publishers. If one condition of the funding contract is that the grantee will deposit the peer-reviewed version of any resulting publication in an open-access repository [immediately], then publishers have no right to intervene.

At the root of the issue of embargoes lies copyright. If researchers retained full control of the copyright of their articles, rather than assigning it to publishers, they could prevent any embargoes being applied to them.

Cancer Research UK’s decision is regrettable but understandable. The fear has to be that others will follow suit. While the hybrid model is not universal, it is widespread enough to undermine the open access idea. Until researchers refuse to publish in such hybrid titles, publishers will continue to profit from them. Given the unnecessary embargoes imposed on articles released under green open access, that leaves alternatives such as diamond open access, where there are no charges for anyone, an approach that has long been espoused on this blog.

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

Raids and arrests around the nation by federal immigration officers all feature the same thing: a bunch of people in masks shoving people into unmarked vehicles. What’s happening under Trump during his second term doesn’t feel like America. And it certainly doesn’t look like America. Instead, it looks like the actions of paramilitary jump-out squads, roaming US streets looking for people to “disappear.”

DHS and ICE officials have repeatedly tried to justify this level of person-by-person obfuscation as being essential to the safety of federal officers. But we all know what this is really about: protecting these officers from the consequences of their own actions. If safety was so paramount, the ICE officers sent to airports to… well, mainly just stand around… would have been wearing masks. But they weren’t. So the context (like detaining children or straight up murdering people on the streets) matters.

California’s legislature passed a law banning federal officers from wearing masks while carrying out their mass deportation efforts in the state. Governor Gavin Newsom signed it, triggering an immediate round of apoplectic responses from federal officials.

The law, however, didn’t last long.

A federal judge blocked the mask ban in February, ruling that it discriminated against the federal government because it did not apply to state troopers. The law made exceptions for undercover agents, protective equipment like N95 respirators or tactical gear, and other situations where not wearing a mask would jeopardize the operation. That judge let the ID law stand.

The state of California appealed this decision. Unfortunately for Californians and government accountability in general, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has upheld the lower court’s ruling.

We conclude that § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions. The Supremacy Clause forbids the State from enforcing such legislation.

While the lower court did suggest the California law might find its way around the Supremacy Clause issue by rewriting it to cover all law enforcement officers, not just federal officers, the Appeals Court wasn’t nearly as receptive to this argument. The legislature already has a bill prepped to do exactly this, but it seems unlikely to survive a federal court review following this ruling.

The district court asked the wrong question. By looking to the degree § 10 interfered with the activities of the United States, the district court applied a standard pertaining to States’ regulation of federal contractors and third-party employers, not the standard applicable to direct regulation of governmental activities of the United States.

[…]

The district court also misunderstood Clifton v. Cox, 549 F.2d 722 (9th Cir. 1977). There, in concluding that California could not criminally prosecute a federal officer despite allegations that he “exceeded his express authority” under federal law, we asked “whether the [officer’s] conduct was necessary and proper under the circumstances.” That standard is inapplicable here because § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act directly regulates inherently governmental conduct of federal officers carrying out their duties under federal authority.

Finally — and perhaps most distressingly — the Ninth Circuit completely sidesteps the public safety concerns that were the basis for this bill. The concerns weren’t theoretical. They were echoed by Trump’s own FBI, which issued a memo to law enforcement informing them that masked criminals posing as law enforcement officers had committed robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults.

None of that matters to the Ninth Circuit, which says it doesn’t even need to discuss the kind of public safety concern law enforcement generally uses to justify police misconduct or repeated rights violations.

California nonetheless contends that even if we determined that § 10 of the No Vigilantes Act likely violates the Supremacy Clause, we would still need to balance the equities. California specifically urges us to consider the public safety concerns which spurred the Act’s enactment. We decline to do so. Because the United States has shown a likelihood that the Act violates the Supremacy Clause, it has also shown that both the public interest and balance of the equities tip “decisively in . . . favor” of a preliminary injunction.

Oh, well. The masks stay on. And if it failed in this circuit, similar efforts are likely to fail in other appellate jurisdictions. The administration gets another “win” by arguing against the interests of the public it’s supposed to be serving.

James Comey is not exactly someone we’ve ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We’ve spent years criticizing the man — for his crusade against encryption, his supporting the FBI’s ridiculously aggressive impersonation of reporters, his embrace of the FBI’s program to coerce and entrap people down on their luck into fake terrorist plots, and much more. And, while the impact has been exaggerated, it is true that he took multiple actions violating DOJ procedures that likely helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016. So it’s not like I’m rushing to support the guy. He’s a bad cop and has been for some time.

But the indictment the Department of Justice handed down against James Comey on Tuesday is a truly embarrassing legal document, and everyone involved in producing it should be professionally radioactive for the rest of their careers. I would have said it’s one of the most embarrassing legal documents that this DOJ has produced, but remember, just a day earlier they filed a legal brief that was indistinguishable from a Truth Social post.

The charge, in its entirety, concerns this Instagram post from May 2025:

If you can’t see that, it’s an Instagram post from Comey showing some shells on some sand with the shells spelling out 8647 and the caption on the post saying:

Cool shell formation on my beach walk

For this — for posting a photo of arranged seashells in a slightly sassy pattern and posting it to Instagram — Comey has been charged with two federal felonies: threatening the President under 18 U.S.C. § 871, and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c). (For what it’s worth Comey has claimed he didn’t arrange the sea shells, but just found them. It’s unclear if that makes much of a difference, it’s protected speech either way).

Ken “Popehat” White, who has perhaps done more than any other lawyer in America to explain First Amendment doctrine to laypeople, didn’t mince words about what this is:

The charge is preposterous and no competent or honest prosecutor would bring it. It represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump.

He’s right, and the way to understand just how right he is requires understanding the path that brought us here.

Because this is the second time the Trump DOJ has tried to indict Comey. The first attempt collapsed in spectacular fashion last year, after Trump — in what was apparently supposed to be a private direct message but accidentally went out as a public Truth Social post — demanded that Pam Bondi install Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer with no relevant experience, as a U.S. Attorney specifically because she had promised to indict Comey. The problem: Halligan wasn’t legally appointed. The entire indictment got tossed before the court could dismiss it for being ridiculous (which would have happened) because the person who filed it wasn’t allowed to file it.

As we noted at the time, this pattern of procedural self-sabotage is a recurring feature of an administration that treats legal procedure as an inconvenience rather than the actual point of having a justice system.

So how did the DOJ respond to that humiliation? By coming back with something substantively even worse. In theory, they tried fixing the “wrong person filed it” problem by having an actually legally appointed person file something… even if that something has no legal basis whatsoever. Progress! Sort of?

The seashell indictment was filed by W. Ellis Boyle, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew R. Petracca listed as the prosecuting attorney. Remember those names. They put their signatures on this. Boyle is listed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, but he’s serving in an acting capacity — Trump has nominated him multiple times, yet the Senate has still refused to confirm him.

The legal problem with the indictment is pretty easy to spot: to convict someone under either of the threat statutes the DOJ is invoking, the government has to prove the communication constituted a “true threat.” Under controlling Fourth Circuit precedent (this case is in North Carolina), a true threat is something “an ordinary, reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context in which the statement is made would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm.”

As Ken White noted, the Supreme Court established this framework in Watts v. United States, a 1969 case involving an 18-year-old draft protester who said:

They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.

The Court found this was protected political hyperbole, not a true threat. An explicit statement about wanting a President in your rifle sights — protected.

If Watts isn’t damning enough, there’s United States v. Bagdasarian, a much more recent Ninth Circuit case where a man posted online statements about wanting to shoot then-candidate Barack Obama, including some genuinely vile racially explicit language about hoping Obama would be killed. The court held that even that did not constitute a true threat under the relevant statutes.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone defending this indictment whether they think Bagdasarian was wrongly decided. Or do we change the “true threat” standard when the target is Trump?

So the descending ladder of seriousness looks like this:

• Explicit racial language about wanting a President shot: protected
• Telling a crowd you want LBJ in your rifle sights: protected
• Posting a photo of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47”: two federal felonies

Any first-year law student who’s taken a basic First Amendment course could tell you the seashell post is constitutionally protected. Any prosecutor with five minutes of research time would know that Bagdasarian and Watts exist. But, of course, as we’ve seen over and over and over again in the Trump era, the point is not to bring a good case or a winnable case. The point is just to punish Trump’s enemies with vexatious, vindictive prosecutions in hopes of creating a chilling effect among the populace and stopping them from criticizing the President with the thinnest skin possible.

Now, “86” has had various meanings over the years — to “86” something in restaurant slang means to remove it from the menu or get rid of it. The DOJ’s theory is apparently that when used about a person, it means to kill them. No one else believes that. This is the kind of motivated reading that requires ignoring both the dictionary and how actual humans use language.

But fine, let’s grant the absolute most uncharitable reading and say “86 47” means “get rid of the 47th President through killing.” Even granting that — even doing all the work for the prosecution — it’s still obviously protected political expression, and still obviously not a true threat under the controlling case law.

Which brings us to the part that genuinely cannot be explained by anything other than pure vindictiveness. Here is a tweet from Jack Posobiec, a prominent Trump loyalist/conspiracy theorist, posted in January 2022:

That tweet is still up. I just made that screenshot minutes ago. As of this writing, it has been online for nearly four years. No FBI investigation. No federal indictment. No felony counts. Literally no one thought that was an actual threat. Because it’s not. Apparently the DOJ’s theory of criminal threats has a loyalty-based expiration date — the same numerical expression is a felony when arranged in shells by a Trump critic and a perfectly fine tweet when posted by a Trump supporter about a different President.

Indeed, the fact that Posobiec seems to have no issue keeping this tweet up is itself a sign that the MAGA world knows it’s engaged in purely theatrical vindictive prosecution — and wants you to know they know. To them, once again, nothing here is about justice or the rule of law. It’s just “will this make the people I dislike upset.” That is their only motivating factor.

The DOJ has baked the selective prosecution argument directly into its own theory of the case. Comey’s lawyers will surely refresh the selective prosecution motion they filed in the first, dismissed indictment, and the facial absurdity of this one — combined with the existence of identical, ignored expression by Trump allies — makes that motion approximately as easy to support as such motions ever get.

There’s a specific kind of institutional rot in play here, driven entirely by Donald Trump and his minions. Competent authoritarianism is dangerous in obvious ways. Incompetent authoritarianism that keeps trying anyway is dangerous in different ways: it normalizes the use of state power for personal vengeance while demonstrating that the people wielding it will stop at nothing — even on the most facially ridiculous grounds. That’s a chilling effect doubled: a politicized DOJ, staffed by people who can’t pass a First Amendment quiz.

White is right that the indictment is unlikely to survive. Comey’s attorneys can challenge it on its face, arguing that even taking every allegation as true, seashells spelling “86 47” are protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law. The assigned judge was appointed by a Republican but is reportedly not a partisan hack, and the case law here is so clear that it would take extreme judicial bad faith to let this proceed. The selective prosecution motion is also stronger now than it was the first time, with Posobiec’s untouched tweet sitting there as Exhibit A.

But as White notes, surviving the motion to dismiss isn’t actually the point:

The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass. The point is to show that the administration can, and will, use the Department’s mechanisms to punish enemies. The point is to show that the Department can, and will, punish protected speech. The point is to show that the Department is staffed by committed fanatics willing to do anything, however unethical and unconstitutional, to promote Trump.

The point is to show that in the war between Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump has won. Now they’re on the field slitting the throats of the wounded and looting bodies.

W. Ellis Boyle and Matthew R. Petracca put their names on this indictment. They will, presumably, lose this case the way the previous Comey case was lost — embarrassingly, on grounds that any competent attorney not engaged in cult-like performative fealty to a wannabe authoritarian could have anticipated. And when this is all over, when there is some accounting for what was done to the Department of Justice in these years, the people who signed the seashell indictment should never be trusted with prosecutorial power, a bar membership, or any position requiring professional judgment ever again.

The shells, for what it’s worth, were on a beach. The tide has presumably long since rearranged them. The Instagram post was taken down fairly quickly when the MAGA world lost their minds over it. The federal felony charges, somehow, remain.

Across 30 hours of instructor-led content, you’ll learn how to diagnose different kinds of cybersecurity attacks and how to defeat them in the Complete Ethical Hacking Course. You’ll practice all the skills and techniques in real-time using an ethical hacking lab so you can put your learning to the test. You’ll experience real-time hacking examples while learning how to protect yourself against them. It’s on sale for $15.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The administration’s anti-migrant tactics are now months into an indefinite period of continuous escalation. That protest efforts have escalated alongside it apparently means nothing to the officials spearheading this brazen attack on non-white people.

It wasn’t until federal officers began killing people in front of witnesses that the administration decided to dial things back a bit. But did it ever actually do it? Or did it just sideline the most famous faces associated with this wave of violence and unlawfulness?

Punting former DHS head Kristi Noem into the nosebleed section of the federal government didn’t do much to change things, not when “Border Czar” Tom Homan (the guy who more or less said protesters were to blame for the Minneapolis murders) is still hanging around and her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, looks like just another expendable MAGA footsoldier.

Some small sort of de-escalation seems to be happening now, but it’s hard to tell if this is due to policy changes, budget issues, or the natural result of pushing this hard for this long. Sooner or later, things tend to trend towards inertia, no matter how much motivational frothing is being done by those who aren’t actually on the front lines.

Then there’s the DOJ upsetting the administration’s own apple cart by admitting in court that ICE officers were committing illegal arrests by pouncing on migrants attending immigration hearings. Not that ICE officers have necessarily stopped doing this (there’s evidence to suggest at least some of them haven’t), but it does make it clear that continuing to do so is at least a violation of policy, as well as being, you know, actually illegal.

So, when things are being said about further de-escalation, you may as well start ingesting fistfuls of salt. First, here’s the good news, which comes from two unnamed DHS officials who insist things are being calmed down from the top down:

Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly instructed immigration enforcement officers to cut back on arrests inside courthouses and to no longer enter homes without a warrant, backing off two controversial policies that have sparked violent and chaotic scenes in the president’s mass deportation campaign.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices across the country were verbally instructed by their superiors that they should no longer enter homes unless they have a judicial warrant, two Homeland Security officials told NBC News.

That would seem to be the least this administration could do since it would finally align ICE’s actions with the law and its internal policies. However, if these instructions are only be handed out “verbally,” it means the DHS is deliberately avoiding creating a paper trail that might be used against it should it decide to just go back to doing this the old, illegal way.

And that probably explains the immediate, contradictory statement that followed the reporting based on assertions made by two unidentified DHS officials.

A spokesperson for Homeland Security told The Independent that there has been “no change in policy.”

“We will continue to arrest illegal aliens at immigration courts following their proceedings in compliance with the law and any applicable court orders,” the person said. “It is commonsense to take them into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings.”

That’s definitely not the same thing as what was expressed by these DHS officials. And the rest of the statement makes it clear federal officers will continue to arrest people who show up for their scheduled immigration hearings. While it does make sense to arrest people who’ve been issued an order of removal, that’s not actually what ICE has been doing. It has been bringing in DOJ lawyers to dismiss pending cases to immediately make people eligible for removal. And — as has been shown in court — ICE officers have been arresting people not currently under orders of removal and then generating arrest warrants after the fact.

So, it’s not a good news/bad news thing going on here. It’s bad news/worse news, with a balance that constantly shifts depending on what mood the administration is in on any given day. Courts haven’t been able to stop ICE from engaging in illegal arrests. And the growing national opposition to Trump’s anti-migrant actions hasn’t made any discernible dent in the administration’s lust for punishing non-white people simply for existing.

Anonymous insiders tell the access journalists at Semafor that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is cooking up a “review” of ABC broadcast licenses after Jimmy Kimmel once again made the President sad.

The FCC clearly leaked word of the inquiry to Semafor in the hopes that Semafor would present it as a serious, big boy sort of inquiry. And Semafor was happy to oblige, with a six paragraph story that can’t bother to mention that the Trump administration has serious credibility issues, ABC doesn’t really have many broadcast licenses, and that none of this is legally supportable:

“The Federal Communications Commission is moving toward a review of Disney’s broadcast licenses, according to people familiar with the matter, a maneuver that would up the pressure on the ABC owner as it faces fierce scrutiny from the administration — again — over a late night monologue.”

We’ve mentioned time and time again that most of these national media giants don’t personally own all that many broadcast licenses to review. Those are generally under the domain of local broadcast affiliates, most of which are increasingly being consolidated in the hands of right wing rich men who already gushingly support the administration (see: NexStar, Tegna, Sinclair).

The licenses ABC does have are limited and not up for renewal anytime soon. There’s eight in total, and while the FCC claims they can just accelerate renewal review, that’s not how any of this works. Stripping them away isn’t quick, or easy. It never really happens. Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone commissioner (because Republicans refuse to seat any more), made it very clear the purported reviews are illegal:

“This is unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere. This political stunt ​won’t stick,” Gomez said. “Companies ​should challenge it ⁠head-on. The First Amendment is on their side.”

If you recall, when one activist media reform group suggested pulling a single Philly Fox News affiliate license for lying repeatedly about election conspiracy theories back in 2023, Carr (and the GOP generally) responded with pure revulsion. These folks are not… ideologically consistent. They’re not even logical.

The threat against “ABC’s broadcast licenses” (because a comedian told a joke) is obvious an illegal assault on the First Amendment (something Semafor can’t bother to make clear). But more generally, it’s designed as an ambiguous threat of costly legal headaches and annoyance if ABC executives don’t help the administration silence voices (journalists or comedians) critical of our unpopular president.

Obviously the last time Brendan Carr illegally abused FCC authority to try and censor Kimmel, it didn’t go well for Brendan Carr (something else Semafor doesn’t mention). Given the mass cancellations to their streaming services, Disney’s decision to temporarily suspend Kimmel didn’t go well for them either (something else Semafor doesn’t think is worth mentioning).

Fighting the deep-pocketed Disney corporation on obvious shaky First Amendment grounds is not something Brendan Carr actually wants. What he wants is for pathetic, feckless executives to pre-emptively bend and quiver at his very serious threats as a very serious big man. But as Trump’s power and health wanes, that’s going to happen less and less, putting Brendan Carr in a sad little box.

Carr’s options as a dutiful little authoritarian lapdog are limited, so he’s increasingly trying to pretend he’s got more leverage and legal authority than he actually does. In addition to vague anonymous threats of broadcast license “inquiries,” he’s also recently leaked word he’s “investigating” Kimmel for his political donations, another hollow effort that’s destined to go nowhere.

Ironically Semafor’s toothless coverage of this is precisely the sort of lazy, pseudo-journalistic cack the administration likes. Fluff that normalizes, elevates, and validates the empty rants and illegal, incoherent acts of unpopular and lame autocrats, but can’t be bothered to mention to readers that the king is not wearing any pants.

We discussed RFK Jr.’s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing.

The Secretary of HHS doesn’t believe in the foundational theory that powers modern medicine.

Read that again. It’s an insane sentence, the sort that should be fiction. What we’re talking about here is the germ theory of disease, which is the accepted science when it comes to how many diseases infect and spread through pathogens. We mentioned in a post last year, which was chiefly about how Kennedy decided to take his grandkids swimming in a creek filled with poop, that he had also written in a 2021 book that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and instead believes in what he incorrectly labels “miasma theory”.

It’s one thing to write something in a book as we were mired in a global pandemic. But Kennedy both admitted that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and defended that belief, before Congress.

In the hearing on Wednesday, Sanders called attention to Kennedy’s denial of germ theory while raising one of Kennedy’s shaky arguments for debunking. In opening statements, Sanders warned Kennedy that he wanted to question the “things that you have written which call in doubt the very existence of the germ theory.”

Sanders pointed out a 2024 study led by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found that since 1974, vaccines had saved an estimated 154 million lives, including 146 million children under the age of 5—or, as WHO put it, vaccines saved the equivalent of six lives every minute of every year over the past 50 years.

“My question is a simple one,” Sanders said, “do you still believe that one of the central tenets of the germ theory, that vaccines sharply reduce infant mortality, is quote-unquote simply untrue?”

Kennedy first did what he always does: try to tell you that the experts and studies have no idea what they’re talking about, or are hopelessly corrupted tools of industry. He does this so often that you can set your watch by it. If a study agrees with him, it’s a good study. If it doesn’t, it’s bad. He’s more like Trump than any of us realized.

Then he launched into his own justification and offered up a 2000 study that he claimed demonstrated that it was improved nutrition and sanitation that reduced childhood deaths this century, and explicitly not medicines like vaccines. Unfortunately for Kennedy, Bill Cassidy piped up with a, oh, let’s call it a minor correction.

The study by Guyer notes that sanitation, among other public health strategies introduced in the first half of the 20th century, drove major declines in mortality. But, as Cassidy noted during the hearing, it’s not all that the study found. Cassidy looked up the studies Kennedy raised and read through them during the hearing.

The Guyer study highlighted that vaccination did not become widely used until after the middle of the century, thus it cannot account for mortality declines prior to that. But it concluded, as Cassidy read out loud at the hearing:

The reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175,000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.

Kennedy tried again, with another study, but Cassidy pointed out that it had the same issue as Kennedy’s first: it measured data from the beginning of the century to the early 1970s. Many of the vaccines Kennedy rails against had barely been out during the period the study analyzed, or in many cases hadn’t come out at all. Speaking specifically to the measles vaccine, released in 1963, Cassidy said:

“There’s 3.5 million cases of measles per year before the vaccine came along and about 550 deaths, and then the vaccine took those to less than 100 [cases] and like zero deaths,” Cassidy said. “So a tremendous impact of the vaccination.”

The problem with Cassidy is that he’s acting like he’s trying to convince Kennedy to change his mind on this. He’s not going to. Not ever. He’s made that clear.

So impeach him or convince Trump to make Kennedy his next cabinet firing. That’s all that’s left to do. Because we certainly cannot continue having someone run HHS who doesn’t believe in the very baseline theory for medicine.

There’s still a meaningful effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

Alaska could be up next. Two versions of a new right to repair law are winding their way through the Alaska state House and Senate. The bills would amend the Alaska Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, requiring tech hardware manufacturers to make parts, tools or software needed for repairs available to independent service providers and consumers.

As is always the case, the proposal has broad, bipartisan support among the actual public:

“In a lot of ways, this is a deeply conservative bill in the sense that for most of the 20th century, you could fix the stuff you bought, and the parts would be available, because it was another revenue stream for the businesses,” said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Forrest Dunbar, the sponsor of the Senate bill.”

As is also always the case, hardware vendors from a variety of sectors (agricultural, medical, tech, consumer hardware) are lobbying against Alaska’s proposal, falsely claiming that easier, more affordable repairs constitute a privacy and security threat to the public.

TechNet (a lobbying coalition that includes Dell, Apple, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Verizon), for example, is trying to convince the Alaska state legislature that everything is working fine currently, and that fixing anything would make consumers less safe. Apparently because truly independent repair professionals are too incompetent if they don’t have big corporate oversight:

“TechNet wrote that the bill would erode the current system where manufacturers work with authorized repair service providers, and that these agreements “ensure that technicians have the appropriate training, access to safe repair procedures, and the qualifications necessary to protect both the device and the consumer.”

TechNet is also trying to claim that the Alaska bill is “misaligned with language of right-to-repair bills from other states” such as New York. Granted they would say that, given that after New York passed its bill, tech lobbyists convinced NY Governor Kathy Hochul to water that states’s bill down to the point of uselessness.

The concern now is that lobbyists successfully manage to water the Alaska bill down so badly that it ultimately becomes similarly useless.

Something that’s broadly not mentioned in coverage of right to repair: while eight states have passed right to repair laws in recent years, not one of those states has actually managed to actively enforce it, despite no shortage of bad behavior by companies looking to secure repair monopolies. That’s something that needs to change if the movement is to have any serious impact.

Apparently we’ve reached the stage of the second Trump presidency when we’re doing reruns of the old hits. As you’ll recall, Donald Trump has been desperate to get late-night TV host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired for quite some time. While Trump has long complained about any late night comedian making fun of him, he really has gone after Kimmel in particular. Things went into overdrive last fall when America’s top censor, FCC chair Brendan Carr, threatened an investigation if Disney didn’t punish Kimmel for a joke. Disney initially caved, before millions started canceling their subscriptions, leading to a backtracking.

But, since then, both Trump and Carr have continued to look for opportunities to get Kimmel fired for his speech.

In any normal world this would be a huge five alarm fire as an attack on the First Amendment. The president and his minions keep trying to get a comedian fired for his jokes because they are critical of the president. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. But because Trump does it so often, almost everyone seems to just shrug and move on.

And now Trump is at it again. Both Donald and Melania went on social media to whine about Kimmel mocking Trump again — and to demand he be fired again. Because he told a pretty standard joke about Donald Trump being old.

While the White House Correspondents Dinner this past weekend was shut down after someone tried (and failed) to rush past security with a couple of guns (you know, the kind that Trump and the Republicans have made sure it’s easy for anyone to purchase), even before that the Correspondents Association knew better than to hire the usual comedian to entertain the journalistic elite in the room, preferring instead to hire a magician/mentalist.

Kimmel decided last week, on his show, to present an alternative — effectively what his own White House Correspondents Dinner roast would have been. It’s a pretty typical WHCD comic routine, interspersed with “audience reaction” shots spliced in from other events. You can watch it here:

One joke in it referred to Melania Trump, pretending that she was present (like she would be at the actual dinner) and saying: “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

Anyone not desperate to exploit a situation for political gain would hear that joke and recognize immediately that it’s about the fact that the president is decades older than his third wife, and that his health does not appear to be that great (in multiple ways).

But, because no big news story can go unexploited by the Trumps for personal and political gain, they’re pretending that this mid-level joke, combined with the failed security breach by a lone nut, somehow… demands the firing of Jimmy Kimmel all over again..

In his social media post Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump described the comedian’s joke as “really shocking” and “something far beyond the pale.” He ended his post: “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

The first lady had posted about Mr. Kimmel a few hours earlier.

“His monologue about my family isn’t comedy,” she wrote. “His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” She called Mr. Kimmel “a coward” who “shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.” She said he “hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him.”

“Enough is enough,” she wrote. “It is time for ABC to take a stand.”

Oh come on.

This theatrical pearl-clutching over a joke is pathetic and ridiculous on almost every level. First, Kimmel was making an obvious joke about the age difference and the obvious decline in health of the president. It had nothing to do with political violence. Second, claiming that this joke has anything to do with the attempt at violence makes no sense. Kimmel’s joke about the age difference between the Trumps was made two days prior to the scheduled WHCD. The comments above act as though they’re somehow associated with the lone nut’s failed assassination attempt, but unless time works backwards that makes no sense.

Third, if we’re going to talk about “corrosive” dialogue that “deepens the political sickness within America,” the only one to talk about is President Trump, who can barely go a day without issuing corrosive attacks on anyone who criticizes him… or just anyone who is a non-white, non-male who doesn’t praise him.

Fourth, Trump has had it in for Kimmel for years, so of course he’d jump on this excuse to attack him again and demand he be fired — even though the last attempt not only failed badly, but made millions more people aware of Trump’s insecure lashing out at comedians.

Finally, Trump and his MAGA cultists keep pretending that they’re all about free speech, when he is actually (by far) the most censorial president of our lifetime. And here he is demanding someone be fired (not for the first time) over a simple joke. That is authoritarian, censorial bullshit.

Yet, we hear nothing from the folks who spent years insisting that when the Biden admin sent emails to Facebook asking them how they were going to handle health misinformation, that was the greatest attack on free speech in history. Those same people are still making things up about the Biden administration… and have nothing to say about yet another actual attack on free speech. We don’t need to review this all over again, but some Biden officials sent weak emails asking Facebook and Twitter to improve their policies on disinformation, which were mostly ignored. As the Supreme Court said clearly in the Murthy ruling, there was no evidence presented of any actual coercion by the government, which meant the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case (there needs to be an actual case or controversy, and they could present none).

Meanwhile, between Trump and Carr, we see clear, detailed attempts by the administration to punish a comedian and the company he works for speech that is critical of the president. It’s about as big an attack on the First Amendment as we’ve seen from a President in decades.

Kimmel, for his part, mentioned the latest verbal attacks and attempt to get himself fired on his monologue Monday night, seemingly taking it in stride, but having the President of the United States repeatedly target a comedian for making jokes about him is about as far from a free speech presidency as you can get.

There have been plenty of absolutely batshit crazy legal filings from Trump and his crew over the last few years, but a filing last night takes the crazy to new levels. This is in the case filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the National Park Service over the ballroom Donald Trump is trying to build (and for which he already tore down the East Wing of the White House despite earlier promises that it wouldn’t even touch the existing building). It absolutely reads like a typical Donald Trump Truth Social post more than any legal filing you’ll ever see:

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation” is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words “in the United States” to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not. In fact, the United States refused to continue funding it in 2005 because they strongly disagreed with their mission and objectives. They are very bad for our Country. They stop many projects that are worthy, and hurt many others. In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members. They were asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built. They were shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified, and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service. But this did not deter them because they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly referred to as TDS, as noted by Democrat Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, and are represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig. The lower section of the building does not work without the upper section and, likewise, the upper section of the building does not work without the lower. It is all one highly integrated unit! As an example, one venting system, one electrical system, one plumbing system, one security system, one air conditioning and heating system, one elevator connector and, very importantly, one structural steel and enforced concrete system — and more. Even the bullet proof windows and glass, and the heavy steel, drone proof roof, protect what is below. With such a facility, it would have been impossible for an attack like that which took place last Saturday evening in D.C. when an attempted assassin, armed with a shotgun, pistol, and knives, charged through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton in an attempt to assassinate President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and members of the President’s Cabinet and senior staff, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Secret Service fortunately neutralized the assassin before he could reach the ballroom. However, Saturday’s narrow miss—which marks the third assassination attempt on President Trump since 2024—confirms what should have already been obvious: Presidents need a secure space for large events, that currently does not exist in Washington, D.C., and this Court’s injunction stalling this Project cannot defensibly continue, for the sake of the safety of President Trump, future Presidents, and their families, Cabinets, and staff. Defendants thus request that this Court issue an indicative ruling under Rule 62.1 that it will dissolve its injunction. Three assassination attempts—including the attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassin’s bullet hit the President’s ear—is enough. There is absolutely no argument that a woman walking her dog in the vicinity of the White House has STANDING to stop such a desperately needed structure for the people of the United States of America, as it will provide Presidents, current and future, a secure space to do their jobs.

I kid you not: that is the entire first paragraph of the legal filing. At the very least it raises the question of who actually wrote this. In tone and style, it reads as identical to a typical Donald Trump social media post.

And also, as explained below, it seems to admit to a potential sharing of a top secret military plans with an organization that (in the same paragraph!) the DOJ claims is “fake.”

Beyond the craziness of the filing, there are so many other problems with this. First off, the case is already on appeal at the DC Circuit, meaning that filing this in the District Court is meaningless, given that it’s out of that court’s hands for now. The judge in the lower court, Judge Richard Leon (who is not known for suffering fools gladly), literally has no ability to step in and take back control over the case and change his earlier ruling. That’s not how any of this works.

You would hope the DOJ understands such basic concepts regarding civil procedure. But apparently not!

Separately, as Law Dork’s Chris Geidner points out, the lawyers who filed this (including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche) aren’t even the lawyers who are on the caption on the appeal:

The Monday night filing was not submitted by any of the 11 lawyers who filed the notice of appeal in the case on April 16. Instead, shortly before the filing, Woodward entered an appearance in the case.

It is very rare for the associate attorney general — No. 3 at DOJ — to enter an appearance in a case, let alone personally file a brief.

Also, if you actually read the filing, the DOJ bizarrely admits that it shared the supposed details of an apparently top secret military structure with an organization it simultaneously deems “fake.” It’s worth breaking down, because it demonstrates, yet again, the hallucinating ChatGPT nature of this President — just keep generating plausible-sounding answers, consequences be damned.

The piece starts out by (falsely) saying that the plaintiffs in the suit, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, is a “fake” organization:

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation” is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words “in the United States” to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not.

I mean, no, it doesn’t make it sound like a Government Agency. It makes it sound like a non-profit. And there are many non-governmental organizations that one could argue sound like a government agency: the US Chamber of Commerce, for example. But most people can deal with that.

Next, the filing admits that the details of the ballroom are “top secret” and a national security issue:

In this case, they are trying to stop one that is vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents of the United States, both current and future, their families, staff, and Cabinet members. They were asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built

And then immediately admits that the US government supposedly showed the plans of this top secret military installation of great national security importance to an organization they themselves are claiming is fake:

They were shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified, and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service.

So even taking the filing at its word, the DOJ is admitting to what might very well be an Espionage Act violation — revealing the “detailed plans and specifications” of a “top secret” military facility to a “fake” group.

And that’s their opening argument here!

One can reasonably call into question the underlying lawsuit, or even Judge Leon’s earlier ruling. But this filing is beyond crazy not just in what it says, but how it’s written. In normal times, this filing would be cause for a court to order sanctions against the lawyers filing it. That it’s filed by the Acting Attorney General of the United States should be cause for serious concern. Instead, it’s just another Tuesday.