Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that American had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer functions in the public interest.

As a longtime telecom beat reporter I was particularly struck by Klein’s chapter on broadband, which mostly seemed to amplify Republican attacks. One of Klein’s biggest targets was the infrastructure bill and Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access (BEAD) program, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, and set aside $42.5 billion for improved internet access.

BEAD was never going to be a poster child for government efficiency. But as I noted at the time, Klein’s criticism of the program was bizarre and simplistic, downplayed why the program was taking so long (we had to remap the entirety of U.S. internet access, for one), and ignored how other legislation that same year (like ARPA) was delivering much of the abundance Klein claimed to be looking for.

I could tell from reading Klein’s Abundance chapter on broadband that he didn’t spend much time talking to telecom policy experts. After Klein’s attacks made inroads on the podcast circuit (including on Jon Stewart’s) they were then picked up again by right wing media, further perpetuating the idea that BEAD was a completely useless boondoggle:

I bring it up because a little more than a year later and this BEAD program really is now a boondoggle under Trumpism, as Sean Gonsalves and I explored in a new feature over at The Verge.

Republicans, it should be noted, voted against the infrastructure bill and ARPA, but can still routinely be found taking credit for the improvements they opposed.

Last election season, Republicans ran on the idea that they’d reshape BEAD and trim the fat. Instead they’ve stripped away all oversight, eliminated any requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable or equitably deployed, and gone out of their way to redirect money away from future-proof fiber toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband networks.

Republicans — and the Joe Rogan infotainment universe — are positively convinced that Starlink is akin to magic. So they’ve decided to throw billions of taxpayer money at Bezos and Musk in exchange for slower, more expensive, congested low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity that chips away at the ozone layer. It’s worth noting they’re being given billions for service that already exists and was already set to be deployed.

In our Verge piece, we talked to minority communities in Louisiana who were slated to get fiber upgrades, but are now being shoveled toward Starlink service (that already existed) thanks to Republican BEAD changes. They are very aware they’re now getting the short-end of the stick:

“The most frustrating part is that it was a zero dollar investment in infrastructure,” Wills told The Verge. “Nothing fundamentally changed. People with Starlink are going to just get mailed a box and many won’t be able to install it. And we still won’t have anybody really served,” leaving the community with “no growth in our economic potential.”

“No money will stay here,” he said. “No jobs will be created from this — no installation jobs, zero construction jobs, or even any small stimulus.”

Republicans are then claiming they “saved taxpayers money” by throwing money at billionaires for satellite broadband they already planned to deploy. States and the Trump administration are now bickering over these $20 billion in “non deployment funds.” Congress said this money had to be used for broadband access; but the law under Trumpism is very clearly optional. It’s a giant mess.

All of this corrupt retooling has caused endless new delays, pushing real-world deployments out by another year or two. As of this writing, the $42.5 billion program has only provided new (fixed wireless) connections to a handful of homes in Louisiana and Nebraska (the Trump administration tried to use this as a press op highlighting how amazingly successful their revamp has been).

Due to the higher costs of deployment created by stupid tariffs and pointless wars, many additional fiber deployment bids originally supposed to be funded by BEAD are likely to go into default and be cancelled, opening up the possibility of Musk and Bezos getting billions more in taxpayer subsidies. It’s expected that this whole mess will get significantly uglier later this year.

Curiously, Ezra Klein hasn’t made a peep. All the press coverage last election season about how BEAD was a boondoggle is nowhere to be found now that the program is a bigger boondoggle than ever. And it’s a bigger boondoggle than ever because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, something that needs to be addressed (and candidly acknowledged by our press) before we can even begin to sniff “abundance.”

I’ve always felt that the abundance movement was an influence campaign by affluent centrists to pre-empt genuine populist progressive reform as the response to authoritarianism. The abundance movement always struck me as Clinton-era vibes-based deregulatory corporatism with a new coat of paint; something seemingly supported by its proponents’ curiously limited attention span.

It should be obvious at this point that JD Vance is a purely political creature. There’s no virtue to find in there, no moral stances firmly taken, nor anything resembling a true political ideology. There is only the attainment and retention of more and more power. You need look no further than Vance’s prior status as a self-affirmed “never Trumper” that compared the current president to Hitler, only to flip-flop completely and become both Trump’s greatest defender and running mate. He wants to be president, of course, and will take whatever action or stance he thinks gives him the best chance to sit behind the Resolute Desk.

Now, I’m not particularly keen on giving free political advice to someone so loathsome, but I don’t think I’m breaking new ground when I say it’s not a great idea for Vance to brag about how this administration has so perfectly neutered the free press that they could do a bunch of Watergates and it wouldn’t be a major issue for them.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by “deep state” forces.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance said.

He went on: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

On this, Vance is sadly correct on multiple fronts, while incorrect on others. A Watergate scandal today probably wouldn’t get as much attention as it did in the 70s, in large part due to the bifurcation of our news media into one traditional media wing and one plain propaganda wing for the proverbial right. But that’s not a good thing. It’s bragging about the culmination of a long term plan to subjugate the press being that you can pull off wild scandals and get away with it. And if you need proof of that, you need only remember that January 6th happened, Donald Trump attempted to pull off a coup to retain the presidency over the clear will of the voters, and then managed to get elected to office again.

Vance’s comparison of Trump to Nixon is also quite apropos, though it’s quite incredible to see him willing to make it voluntarily. Once again, if you’re making a list of the worst political scandals in United States history, Watergate and January 6th are 1 and 1a, with the only argument being in which order you place them.

But it’s what he gets wrong about Watergate that explains why Vance somehow thinks these are good words to say out loud. The Nixon resignation from office was most certainly not the work of some “deep state.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Nixon used what might be called the deep state, or at least government intelligence services and the Justice Department, to attempt to evade accountability for breaking into the DNC headquarters and bugging them. He was caught attempting to hide and destroy evidence of his involvement in this crime. He’s on tape ordering an end to an investigation into his own reelection campaign. He resigned instead of being impeached. None of the above is a matter of debate.

Which is why, when Vance goes even further and happily compares himself to Nixon, I suggest we take him at his word.

Vance then noted his own similarities with Nixon.

“Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,” he said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

Nixon was not a perfectly terrible president, but nobody serious wants to compare themselves to Mussolini over the apocryphal claims that he kept the trains running on time. Until the current president, Nixon was clearly the most disgraced American president ever. Again, I don’t really think that is a matter for debate.

What this smells like instead is Vance attempting to will into existence the “renaissance” he claims Nixon’s legacy is undergoing at the moment. I have not heard of this renaissance until Vance decided to talk about it. Normalizing a scandal-plagued president must surely serve some purpose, but I can already see campaign ads in a few years asking the public if they really want another Nixon president, since that was Vance claims to be.

These are not the most talented people, it is clear. I can’t possibly see the percentage for Vance in trying to frame himself as a modern day Nixon. But I suppose there is some honesty in the claim, for what it’s worth.

Call me crazy, but I tend to think when Supreme Court Justices make a big sweeping statement in one case, they should actually follow it through with other cases. You may recall, for example, that in the Dobbs case, where the right to an abortion was overturned, Justice Samuel Alito took the ‘history and tradition’ test and made it the centerpiece of modern conservative jurisprudence — using it to wipe out a 50-year-old precedent. Specifically, his reason for overturning Roe v. Wade was that he, a very weak amateur historian, could find no support for such a right in the history at the time the 14th Amendment was passed.

That very bad amateur historian shtick was on display again this week in the (otherwise good) decision in Watson v. the Republican National Committee, regarding whether or not the federal government could invalidate mail-in ballots received after election day. The majority, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and joined by Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, pointed out that (duh!) while the federal government sets the date of the presidential election, the states get to determine how those elections are run, including how the ballots are counted, including absentee ballots.

Barrett goes through the history of how absentee and “mail-in” ballots have been used since the Civil War, and for over a century many states have allowed them to be counted, so long as they were post-marked by election day. And democracy has survived without any indication of any problem with those mail-in ballots arriving after election day.

But, to Justice Alito, this is the end of democracy. In a typically overwrought dissent, he claims that this move (which again, many states started doing over a century ago), upsets the entire concept of an election.

The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement.

But as Barrett notes in the majority opinion, federal law sets the date of the election, not the date of the vote counting, or the date results get announced. Those are different things, and Alito pretending they’re the same is bizarre for someone who seems to think history should be his guide in legal issues. The majority points out:

The Constitution requires the “Day on which [the electors] shall give their Votes” to be “the same throughout the United States.” Art. II, §1, cl. 4. But it says nothing about the day for receipt, and, of course, 18th-century modes of transmission did not offer same-day delivery. The Constitution therefore envisions a system in which receipt is necessarily divorced from voting, and it sets the crucial, uniform day as the day of voting, leaving receipt to happen down the line. The federal election-day statutes follow the same pattern: They set when the people “shall give their Votes,” ibid., but leave open when those votes must be received.

And here, Alito’s complete ignorance of the history of American elections shines through. All we need to do is go back to the very first presidential election of George Washington, in which election day was set as February 4th, 1789, but Congress waited until April 6th of that year to fully gather and actually count and certify those votes — over a month past the originally planned March 4 inauguration date. The votes were all technically “submitted” — you could loosely say “mailed in” by election day — but it took two months to actually count them (and then over a week for anyone to tell George Washington he’d been elected).

So, I’m sorry, but Alito can spare me with the idea that counting ballots that arrive after election day somehow “postpones the day on which the electorate’s choice is made.” That’s just utter bullshit and wholly inconsistent with the history of this country and the way elections work. The actual election day can be a single day, but the votes can be counted way later, and the results announced even later. Saying that it violates the historical concept of “election day” to allow mail-in ballots that are post-marked by election day makes zero sense at all.

And it’s not like the Washington situation was a one-off of a young country trying to sort out its presidential election system. Four elections later, in the infamous 1800 presidential battle between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the US had to wait until months later when the matter went to the House to resolve (perhaps Alito should rewatch the musical Hamilton, which dramatizes this moment).

Or the elections of John Quincy Adams, which was also sent to the House to decide long after election day. Or the infamous Hayes-Tilden fight in 1876, where many of the votes were disputed and it took a specific (and possibly corrupt) “Electoral Commission” to sort things out and give the election to Hayes just days before the inauguration was set to take place.

No matter how you look at it: the US has a long “history and tradition” of voting on election day, and then (sometimes) taking a great long while to sort out who actually won, including waiting to count all the ballots. Mail-in ballots that are post-marked by election day and counted later are perfectly within that tradition, no matter what Alito has to say.

Alito’s entire jurisprudential brand is built on the idea that history and tradition should constrain what courts can do. He made that the centerpiece of Dobbs. But when that same history turns around and bites him — when it turns out the United States has a long, consistent tradition of counting ballots well after election day — suddenly history doesn’t matter anymore. What matters, apparently, is whether the outcome suits the narrative. That’s Alito retrofitting a legal standard to reach an outcome he desires. It should be seen as an embarrassment for a Supreme Court Justice to do so, but as we’ve all learned, Alito has zero shame in cooking up pretenses to reach his desired outcome.

We’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. And while it doesn’t disappoint, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for celebration.

Okello Chatrie has been challenging the geofence warrant that led to his arrest and prosecution since 2019(!). Nearly seven years later, he’s a step closer to… well, maybe setting precedent that will help others? That’s how it usually works in cases like these: the person experiencing a new violation of rights sets the precedent. But because there was no precedent, the government is generally given a “good faith” pass, even when warrants seem so far removed from Fourth Amendment principles even the government should have known its warrants were unconstitutional.

The Fourth Circuit Appeals Court handled Chatrie’s case multiple times. It reviewed it twice and still decided the government didn’t do anything (intentionally) wrong when it used a geofence warrant to narrow down its list of suspect and, finally, put Chatrie on trial.

Don’t let the word “warrant” fool you. There are legitimate warrants that adhere to particularity standards meant to deter officers from just searching wherever, whenever. Then there are geofence warrants, which are more comparable to the “general warrants” the Fourth Amendment was put in place to prevent.

When investigators have no idea who they’re looking for, they stop looking for people and start demanding Google cough up tons of location data. The government argues these warrants are “particular” because they only ask the most likely repository of this data to search for this data. Normal people would argue these are “general warrants” because they force Google to search everyone’s location data on the government’s behalf, in hopes of generating a list of devices that match up with the government’s date/location range inputs — something that’s also often far more vague than it should be.

The government likes to say it doesn’t even need a warrant. Location info generated by phones is “third party” data “voluntarily” relinquished by phone users. The problem with that argument is that the Supreme Court — via its 2018 Carpenter decision — has already made it clear there is at least some expectation of privacy in that data, especially when the government is capable of gathering it en masse.

The time stamp on the Carpenter ruling works a bit in Okello Chatrie’s favor because the alleged crime happened after that ruling. The Supreme Court majority also agrees with Chatrie’s other arguments, including those pointing out geofence warrants cannot possibly satisfy probable cause/particularity requirements generated by Fourth Amendment case law.

Here’s the briefest description of the Supreme Court’s ruling [PDF], as delivered by SCOTUS itself:

Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.

More specifically, the Court points to its own precedent:

Everything Carpenter relied on to find that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they accessed CSLI records applies as well or better to the police’s accessing of Location History data. First, Location History provides an even more fine-tuned picture of a person’s movements, pinpointing location within around twenty meters rather than within sectors of one-eighth to four square miles; it records location every two minutes or so for a daily average of 720 chartings rather than 101; and it can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on.

Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places. Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 312.

And third, Location History implicates personal privacy interests even more than CSLI, because Location History is more the cell-phone user’s own. Most cell-phone users have no awareness of CSLI records, and would never try to retrieve them; by contrast, Google users regularly employ Location History as a personal journal. In that way, Location History resembles other private materials—e.g., emails, documents, photographs, or calendars— that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own and expects to be shielded from the “inquisitive eyes” of the government.

While this is a good ruling, it also does little more than tell the Fourth Circuit to do what it has already done: rule the warrant a search under the Fourth Amendment but still give the government a pass for not knowing its warrant was unconstitutional. A concurrence written by Justices Jackson and Sotomayor says the Court should have gone further, declaring this warrant (and any like it — which would be most of them) so unconstitutional the government couldn’t possibly claim to have obtained them in good faith.

Geofence warrants generate waves. The first one is the vaguest. Once more information comes in, investigators approach Google with narrowed lists. These repeat visits are almost never brought to the attention of magistrate judges. If a judge OKs the first search, the government just keeps going back to the well without bothering to seek judicial approval.

This “uncommon, multi-step” process, ante, at 30, meant that officers conducted key portions of the search outside the supervision of “a neutral and detached magistrate,” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14 (1948). Put differently, officers could obtain additional, sensitive information at steps two and three without having to convince a magistrate that there was probable cause to believe this particular information would uncover evidence related to
the crime. In this way, the warrant left “too much to the discretion of the officer[s] executing the order,” giving them a “roving commission” to collect more data absent any justification to a magistrate.

The facts of this case illustrate why the lack of magisterial oversight is dangerous. When executing steps two and three, law enforcement initially sought unbounded data and account information from all 19 devices identified at step one. Nothing in the warrant prevented officers from obtaining this broad set of data; they narrowed the list only because Google insisted on it.

Because that’s only a dissent, it won’t be taken into consideration when the Fourth Circuit takes its third look at the case. That should have been a point raised by the majority. As it stands, it just means the government will take its good faith ruling and sprinkle it generously on the further unconstitutional acts it engages in while holding a single geofence warrant.

There’s a dissent, of course. And if you can guess two of the three authors, you won’t win anything. No one is going to offer those odds.

JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins as to Part I and with whom JUSTICE BARRETT joins as to Parts II–B, II–C–1, and II–C–2, dissenting.

As is always the case when something isn’t about what this president wants to do/get away with, Alito and Thomas are there to LiveJournal their complaints about constitutional rights:

Eight years ago, I warned that this Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296 (2018), would produce one of two outcomes. Either the Court would need to clarify Carpenter’s limits in a future decision, or Carpenter would usher in “revolutionary developments” in our doctrine by giving criminal suspects a “protected Fourth Amendment interest in any sensitive personal information about them that is collected and owned by third parties.” Id., at 385 (ALITO, J., dissenting). Today, the Court takes the country down the latter path. In doing so, the Court sheds Carpenter’s self-imposed boundaries and further destabilizes longstanding Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

To make matters worse, the majority does all this in an advisory opinion. Although today’s decision will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine, not one iota of the majority opinion will affect the outcome of this case. The Court knows this and does not claim otherwise. Indeed, by refusing to review the one question that could have at least theoretically given Chatrie some hope of relief, the Court carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age. I cannot support this irresponsible escapade.

Note the loaded language, where Alito attaches “giving criminal suspects” to his complaint about recognizing the Fourth Amendment needs to be interpreted in conjunction with today’s realities, not left to be a dusty relic that cannot be expanded to cover things that were impossible to envision more than two centuries ago.

Note also that Alito, et al. bitch about the majority not addressing the one thing that might have helped Chatrie: a ruling on the good faith exception itself. And while I have the same complaint, I would have limited myself to asking the court why it didn’t do this, rather than immediately pivot in the very next paragraph to saying the Court should never have taken this case up in the first place.

The Court should not have granted certiorari in this case, and under any faithful application of our precedents.

Right after that Alito immediately says “Fuck Chatrie,” only sentences after (disingenuously) expressing concern for the Court’s unwillingness to tangle with the “one question” that could have given Chatrie “some hope of relief.”

[I[t should now either dismiss this petition or affirm the decision below based on the “good-faith exception” to the exclusionary rule.

I agree with the dissent in terms of the Court’s unwillingness to draw a bright line that will guide future rulings. But I say that because I think this will just allow law enforcement to roll the dice on questionable searches and hope the muddied water will get them forgiven for willfully bypassing the spirit of this ruling, which unfortunately hasn’t carried over to the letter of the ruling.

But these motherfuckers — Justices Alito and Thomas — think the real harm is that the government won’t be able to engage in as much warrantless surveillance as it would like to:

If the Court maintains its unwillingness to engage with such “line-drawing questions,” ante, at 21, n. 9, Carpenter’s warrant requirement might soon come for all forms of digital surveillance.

Take a long walk off a short pier, boys. You are the worst people to be entrusted with standing as a bulwark against government excess. You welcome it. You absolutely crave it when its one of your boys sitting in the Oval Office. You’re supposed to be serving the entire United States, not just those in the ruling class. But you’d clearly rather give the government unlimited power, rather than ensure the only people guaranteed rights — WE, THE PEOPLE — are allowed to use them.

It is zero surprise that the Supreme Court officially overturned its 91-year-old precedent first created in Humphrey’s Executor. That case held that when Congress designates an agency as independent of the executive branch, the president cannot just fire its commissioners. The Humphrey’s Executor opinion stopped FDR from trying to fire an FTC Commissioner he didn’t like, and reinforced the important idea that Congress could design independent agencies, staffed by experts, that should be less prone to partisan political influence.

The Roberts Supreme Court has been signalling it wanted to overturn Humphrey’s for years, and it finally took until the case brought by former FTC Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya* (unceremoniously fired by Donald Trump for being Democratically appointed) to make it official. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court said outright that the president can fire commissioners of government agencies and laughed off the idea that Congress could ever create truly independent agencies.

And yet, on the very same day, the same Court said in Trump v. Cook, that the president cannot fire members of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve. In that ruling, the majority makes it clear that of course the Federal Reserve should be seen as wholly independent from the Executive Branch and the president can’t fire its Board members, because that would cause chaos!

Both cases involve the same basic fact patterns — involving whether or not the president can fire board or commissioner members of independent agencies. Both decisions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Both seem to take wholly opposite views without even a remote attempt by Roberts to explain how he can say both things (on the same day, no less).

And, as many people are noticing, about the only thing you can say about these two contradictory rulings coming down on the same day is that John Roberts believes in the imperial presidency when it impacts everyone else, but believes in Judicial supremacy when it impacts his retirement funds.

There is no other consistent principle here at all. None. Zero. Zilch.

As Madiba Denne writes in that last Balls & Strikes link:

Throughout Slaughter, Roberts warned that the “unity” of the executive branch would be “destroyed” if presidents could not fire agency officials at will. But in Cook, Roberts was much more worried about the destruction of the stock market. Roberts traced the development of the country’s first banking systems and asserted that the Framers knew “calamities” could arise from “even the suspicion of political manipulation of monetary policy.” The chief recounted at length how President Andrew Jackson opposed a national bank that “he could not control,” and suggested that the president’s meddling directly contributed to “an era of ruinous financial panics.” 

Without an independent central bank, Roberts said, there would be “no way to contain the damage whenever a major institution fell,” “no lender of last resort,” “no elastic currency that could expand to meet demand,” and “no mechanism to ensure that small banks issued loans only within their means.” Roberts concluded that at-will removal would be “corrosive” to the Fed independence that Congress sought to safeguard. The possibility that at-will removal would be similarly corrosive to the independence that Congress sought to safeguard at dozens of other agencies seems not to have crossed his mind.

Roberts ignores that the same reasons the Fed is designed to be independent are why the FTC, FCC, and other agencies were designed to be independent. Congress relied (for basically a century) on the Supreme Court blessing this arrangement to create a variety of independent agencies that lived under the Executive Branch, but were designed purposely by Congress with strong independence in mind.

In the Cook decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh is the one who actually comes close to blurting out the truth, which Roberts carefully avoids. Kavanaugh admits that Slaughter and Cook stand in contrast, but that contrast is okay to him, because Trump fucking up the Federal Reserve would really fuck with monetary policy, and that’s what he really cares about:

I agree with the Court, moreover, that we should not leave open the question whether the Federal Reserve can remain an independent agency in the wake of Slaughter. After Slaughter, there is a clear choice: Either the Federal Reserve may remain independent (with the Governors removable for cause, not at will), or it may not. Leaving that question open would create significant uncertainty about whether the Court might soon eliminate the Federal Reserve’s independence, and thereby expose the Federal Reserve to political influences and jeopardize the efficacy of U. S. monetary policy. Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political upheaval, including confusion about whether the President could immediately remove multiple Governors at will, as well as turmoil in the U. S. and world economies.

I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U. S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have been thinking about for many years.

This is quite the admission, though it’s unclear if Kavanaugh recognizes how astounding it is. He is basically admitting that while Slaughter creates chaos for all sorts of policies — consumer protection, labor relations, financial protection, etc. — that’s all for the little people. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the ruling in Slaughter creates a hugely damaging scenario for all sorts of rights:

The impact of this decision is gobsmacking. It strips independence from a vast range of federal agencies, including those that regulate nuclear energy, consumer safety, unions, hazardous chemicals, mine safety, crypto, and large swaths of the economy.

But those policies don’t matter to the Justices like Kavanaugh. Monetary policy, however, impacts his bottom line, and we can’t have that.

Such is also the situation with Roberts. Those other policies don’t impact John Roberts. But a screwy economic system would really put a dent in his various investment funds.

Denne again:

Part of Roberts’s justification for the outcome in Slaughter is democratic accountability—that removal power is necessary for the president to be the one person “with whom the buck stops.” But Roberts was clear, in Cook, that he’s really just concerned about the bucks: Giving Trump unfettered control over most federal agencies could help the rich get richer, and only screw over the little people, but giving Trump control of the Fed could cause an economic crisis big enough to negatively affect Roberts and his rich friends, too. 

Of course, the reality is that this decision isn’t so much about giving the presidency more power, it’s about giving Roberts’ Supreme Court more power. Yes, in the immediate future, this gives Donald Trump, as president, much greater power over the federal government, which will have many dangerous and damaging results.

But does anyone actually believe that the same John Roberts, who blocked former President Obama’s immigration policies or former President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies, really believes in giving the executive so much power? Of course not. The lesson from John Roberts is clear: when Republicans hold the presidency, they have nearly unlimited power, with the one exception being when Trump threatens to wreck John Roberts’ investment funds. But when a Democrat is president, then suddenly the Supreme Court tut-tuts about how Congress restrains the power of the Executive Branch and it just can’t do anything about it.

The end result is that the power really resides in the ever-consistent view of John Roberts: Republican presidents can do anything they want, so long as it doesn’t harm Roberts’ investments. Democratic presidents are rightly restrained by Congress, and Roberts’ biggest job is swinging that big dial back and forth depending on who is in the White House.

Roberts has spent years whining about how unfair it is that people think his decisions have a political bias. But, really, if he didn’t want that, he maybe shouldn’t have handed down two rulings on the same day that so nakedly confirm exactly what he’s denied.

* Bedoya had to drop out of the case because while he was suing to get his job back, he couldn’t wait around unpaid for the years this case took, and had to go get a real job.

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DOGE was always designed to provide flimsy pseudo-efficiency cover for wholesale corruption. It was designed to pretend that the government was “cutting waste and fraud” while a bunch of velour tracksuit wearing con men stripped the country for parts and sold what was left off the back loading dock.

As we’ve since explored, DOGE also burned through billions of dollars, exposed the sensitive data of untold Americans, killed untold millions of people worldwide, and generally distracted dim and misinformed Americans from the fact their government is too corrupt to function in the public interest and is no longer capable of consistently standing up to corporate power.

Enter Brendan Carr, who appears to be under fire for the FCC’s efforts to hide his agency’s correspondence with DOGE bros. Last year, journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward sued the FCC, alleging that the agency violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. 

In a new filing (via Ars Technica) in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Burleigh and Frequency Forward say Carr also hid his use of Signal as a communications tool, which they apparently believe he used to communicate with DOGE:

“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”

While Carr’s obnoxious censorship efforts get all the policy and media attention, he’s also been at work destroying the FCC’s consumer protection authority, eliminating media consolidation limits, and dismantling what little corporate oversight we had left at the agency. This was “cleverly” dubbed Carr’s “delete, delete, delete” agenda. Telecom monopolies and robocallers love the plan.

It’s not clear what a bunch of 20-something Elon Musk cult members could have contributed to Carr’s mindless demolition of public interest governance, but it sure would be nice to take a transparent look, given the vast financial conflicts of interest between Musk’s fake government agency and the multiple Musk-owned companies looking (and getting) giant financial favors from the FCC.

Starlink has been getting a lot of favors in particular, with more likely coming given rumors that Starlink wants to launch a wireless phone provider.

“The evidence strongly suggests that Musk bought his way into the White House and to obtain his position as the de-facto head of DOGE, and that he had used his government authority and access to information to earn huge profits for himself and his companies,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Plaintiffs’ FoIA request seeks documents that shed light on the relationship between the FCC, Musk as regulator and Musk and his companies as regulated entities.”

Meanwhile, I still think it’s embarrassing that the press, and some Dem politicians, initially treated DOGE as if it was a good faith effort they could work with. As opposed to what it clearly was all along: corruption and grift under the flimsy veneer of improved government efficiency.

The folks at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) have spent decades demonizing technology (and speech) they don’t understand, so it seems particularly ironic that they’re now getting benchslapped for allowing AI hallucinated citations in legal filings.

First, some background: NCOSE has gone through a few different branding phases, but for a long while were known as “Morality in Media,” an extraordinarily prudish and busybodyish entity that went around scolding retailers for offering magazines that showed models on the cover for being too sexy.

When they renamed themselves to NCOSE and started focusing on the internet (including the laughably false claim that any porn is a health issue and, now, that it’s a national security issue), they jumped on the anti-encryption and anti-Section 230 bandwagons, and politicians (including many Democratic ones who should have known better) quickly embraced the group under the false pretense that they actually were interested in ending sexual exploitation, rather than locking down the internet, and blocking any speech that acknowledges LGBTQ+ people exist.

Suffice it to say, the group is a far right, anti-sex, anti-speech, and anti-internet group, and it’s ridiculous that any politician supports them.

And now we can add to the list that their lawyers apparently can’t make it through a filing without fabricating citations — and then doubling down when caught. This came out in a convoluted case, in which NCOSE lawyers sued some Nevada brothels for supposedly exploiting women who chose to work there. It is possible that something bad happened in those places, but NCOSE apparently did themselves no favors by hiring a local lawyer whose AI-assisted work they were supposed to review — and then didn’t. Even worse, when the other side called out the hallucinated citations, NCOSE’s lawyers tried to attack the defendant and play down the hallucinations… in a filing with more hallucinated citations:

Let’s have Judge Andrew Gordon explain the basics:

Her briefs contained AI hallucinations. Despite Bistro pointing out these errors in its opposition, JD2 did not withdraw or correct her motion and her reply brief also contained misquotes. Bistro then filed a notice identifying the reply’s misquotes. About a month later, JD2 filed multiple errata, an amended motion for reconsideration, and an amended reply that purported to correct these errors, but the amended motion still contained AI hallucinations.

The order also suggests that NCOSE and the local lawyer they hired engaged in an awful lot of finger pointing and blame passing rather than, you know, doing actual lawyering. And then, once they were on notice of falsified filings, they… didn’t fix them. Indeed, NCOSE’s lawyers continued to rely on a hallucinated citation.

And thus, the defendants win their motion for sanctions, striking the falsified filings from the document, and denying the original request to reconsider an earlier ruling dismissing NCOSE’s exaggerated claims. The court notes that while it was the local lawyer who used the AI (and eventually admitted to doing so), the real problem is with NCOSE’s lawyers:

I have read Guinasso’s affidavit about the serious life events he was experiencing during the time frame of these violations, and I am sorry for his losses and the strain that must have put him under. But, as he acknowledges, that does not excuse the over-reliance on artificial intelligence without a human cite-checking the papers. I credit him for accepting responsibility and implementing procedures that hopefully preclude repeating this incident.

Although JD2’s motion and Guinasso’s declaration request that any sanctions fall solely on Guinasso, that is not appropriate here. There were six NCOSE attorneys on this case at the time. Additionally, the evidence before me shows that the NCOSE attorneys had some responsibility for cite checking. Although the errors may have begun with Guinasso, both Guinasso and Hirsch state that the NCOSE attorneys were supposed to double-check his citations. Moreover, Bistro’s opposition to the original motion for reconsideration should have put all attorneys on notice that there was an AI hallucination problem. Bistro devoted considerable space in its opposition to pointing out those errors, including that cases did not stand for the proposition cited, that quotations did not exist as cited, and that specific cited sources did not exist altogether. Rather than apologize and promptly fix the motion, JD2’s counsel minimized Bistro’s concerns and, in what is a bit of a pattern, criticized Bistro for attacking citation errors, calling Bistro’s concerns quibbling and distraction devices.

The NCOSE attorneys admit they were asked to review the original draft reply brief. That reply brief mentioned that Bistro had challenged citations in the motion for reconsideration. Despite being asked to review the reply brief, Hirsch stated at the hearing that the NCOSE attorneys had not read Bistro’s opposition brief, which is itself disturbing. Reading the draft reply brief should have tipped the NCOSE attorneys off to a potential problem. So laying all the blame on Guinasso’s shoulders for the initial errors is not warranted.

Moreover, Hirsch admits that she drafted the amended filings. The amended motion for reconsideration still contains two critical citation errors. It cites the Marcum case for a proposition that Marcum does not even address, much less stand for. And it cites the Cross case, which does not exist. These are not minor errors. JD2’s reconsideration motion rests in significant part on the argument that, under Nevada law, a contract procured through a threat is void, not voidable, and she cites Marcum and Cross for that proposition. Those errors remain uncorrected to this day, and the briefs with the offending AI hallucinations still have not been withdrawn. At the hearing, Hirsch stated that “even without those cases in there and without the premises that we said that they stood for, the substance of the motion is — stands and is still arguable.” But “[i]t is irrelevant that other cases may stand for the propositions asserted” because if other cases support the propositions, then it is the lawyer’s “responsibility to cite them.” Malkeet Lnu, 2026 WL 1587554, at *8. Moreover, later in the hearing, JD2’s new local counsel candidly admitted that he could locate no existing Nevada law that would support the reconsideration motions’ argument that duress makes a contract void rather than voidable. Thus, the failure to withdraw or correct these citations in the amended motion is significant.

So in the end, the judge orders the plaintiffs lawyers at NCOSE and the local counsel, Guinasso, to pay the defendant’s legal fees.

I also impose monetary sanctions in the form of Bistro’s reasonable attorney’s fees jointly and severally against the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Guinasso Law, Ltd. Reasonable attorney’s fees are an appropriate sanction under both my inherent power and 28 U.S.C. § 1927. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Haeger, 581 U.S. 101, 107 (2017) (inherent power); 28 U.S.C. § 1927 (“Any attorney . . . who so multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct.”). “Citing even a single fake case can be sanctionable because no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations—whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that a lawyer has not personally read and verified.” Whiting, 170 F.4th at 461 (simplified)). Citing fake legal authority is not harmless. It wastes the other parties’ and the court’s resources trying to track down the nonexistent cases. Id. at 467 (“Citing fake cases unnecessarily burdens the court and the taxpayers, so courts can and should fine the offending lawyers to reimburse the court for its time.” (simplified)). And the burden it imposes on the opposing party and the court is lopsided because “[w]hile one party can create a fake legal brief at the click of a button, the opposing party and court must parse through the case names, citations, and points of law to determine which parts, if any, are true. As AI continues to proliferate, this creation-response imbalance places significant strain on the judicial system.” Ferris v. Amazon.com Servs., LLC, 778 F. Supp. 3d 879, 880-81 (N.D. Miss. 2025). To rectify that imbalance, an award of fees is warranted in this case.

For what it’s worth the NCOSE lawyers apparently also had tried to argue that the defendants legal fees were its own fault for not filing for sanctions earlier, and the court is (rightly) having none of it:

I reject JD2’s argument that Bistro’s fees are its own fault for not filing a Rule 11 motion. Bistro did not originally seek sanctions and instead was content to point out the errors in its response brief and let the original motion for reconsideration play out on the papers. It was JD2’s counsel who did not read the opposition brief that pointed out the errors, did not withdraw the briefs, decided to instead file the errata and amended briefs, did so without leave of court, left AI hallucinations in the new filings, and materially altered her briefs through a procedural mechanism that did not give Bistro an opportunity to respond to these changes. Despite acknowledging that the amended reconsideration motion still has AI hallucinations, JD2’s counsel has not withdrawn that document or moved to correct it to this day.

The next time NCOSE shows up at a Senate hearing — and they will, because nothing stops a well-funded moral panic lobby from getting a Senate invite — someone should slide this ruling across the dais. Senator Richard Blumenthal has treated NCOSE as a credible voice at KOSA hearings for years, despite ample evidence that the group cares far more about restricting speech than protecting anyone from exploitation. Now there’s a federal judge’s order explaining, in patient detail, that NCOSE’s lawyers fabricated citations, doubled down when caught, and filed corrected briefs that still contained fabrications. The fake cases are still in the record. The organization still hasn’t withdrawn them.

And yet this is who Blumenthal thinks you should trust in helping set internet policy for hundreds of millions of Americans.

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has been waging an Orwellian war on knowledge and information for most of his second term thus far. While purging history of American racism, slavery, and anything else that makes us look less than perfect has been the primary focus in this war, so too has Trump attempted to simply disappear data and information around climate change from the public view. This attempt to make us all more ignorant about the harms and potential negative outcomes from climate change is, of course, completely insane and self-destructive. But if you’re an octogenarian suffering from a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder, what happens years after you’re going to be worm-food probably doesn’t concern you all that much.

Most recently, the Trump administration shut down climate.gov, a website that contained a wealth of information and research generated by government researchers and third-party scientists that worked at the request of government. Decades and decades of content and data, wiped away with the wave of a bruised hand by Trump.

Over decades, researchers in the US government and programs it sponsored built up a tremendous number of climate resources, from comprehensive analyses to massive datasets to basic explainers meant to inform the public. And people within the government built the climate.gov website to make it all accessible. But if you try to navigate there today, you get redirected to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and are greeted with the following message:

In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (“Restoring Gold Standard Science”), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (“Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities”), 15 USC § 2904 (“National Climate Program”), 15 USC § 2934 (“National Global Change Research Plan”), and 33 USC § 893a (“NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs”), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.

This is, of course, nonsense. Or, to borrow a phrase, a litany of inconvenient truths that gave Trump indigestion and therefore had to be done away with. This was a repository of knowledge. It was a public good, making information on climate science available to anyone who sought it out. It didn’t cost a bunch of money. It contained work done by real scientists doing real science.

And, poof, it was gone.

Except many of the people who worked to build and maintain the site seem to have anticipated that this might happen. I don’t know how else to explain how they managed to not only maintain the full library of the site, but also spun up their own non-profit organization to host and maintain a nearly identical site on their own. And because this is material the government can’t copyright, it appears there is fuck-all the Trump administration can do about it.

While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.

The website features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources, classroom materials, and restored access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.

If our own government is going to attempt to make us more stupid by trying to hide information, this is all of our jobs now. It may be a shame that it is the work of citizens to restore what our government is attempting to steal from us, but it is also a necessity. This is how you fight back against an authoritarian. It takes work. It takes effort. And it takes some money.

But this knowledge isn’t Trump’s property to erase. It belongs to all of us.

Back in July of 2024, when two of the biggest big shots in venture capital, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, explained why they had decided to go all in to back Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election, they talked up a good game about how they would support any candidate who supported their “little tech” agenda. This always rang hollow — Andreessen has been on the board of Meta for years, which is the most anti-little tech company around. They also whined about the Biden administration tech policies, in particular around AI, cryptocurrency, and antitrust. But the most telling part of the full podcast had nothing to do with tech policy at all. Marc and Ben spent a bunch of time positively offended that Joe Biden and some (only some) of his agency heads wouldn’t meet with them:

We have been spending a tremendous amount of time with Senators, Congress people on both sides of the aisle. Mark mentioned we met with President Trump. We did meet with White House officials, including Jeff Zients the chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan the National Security advisor, Gina Raimondo the Commerce Secretary and so forth. We have not met with President Biden. We attempted and failed.

….

We tried to meet with Gary Gensler — he’s the chair of the SEC, he’s running this campaign against crypto. We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times. I even was able to get in contact with his office mate at MIT, who said ‘surely Gary will meet with you, it’s so important that he meets with you’… and he couldn’t get us the meeting.

Meanwhile, they seemed to love the fact that Donald Trump would have dinner with them, and Trump family members would vacation with them. Here’s Marc:

Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey, and had a three-hour dinner. And so, you know, we were quite literally just with him… you know, he’s a very complicated guy, people have a lot of opinions, but when you know somebody like that — you know the family — it really hits hard

And here’s Ben:

Marc and I have both gotten to know the family, particularly Jared and Ivanka and their kids — Arabella, Joseph and Theo. And in fact, like, Ivanka and the kids were just at my house. We went to see David Copperfield, all that.

The real complaint was never about policy. It was always about embracing the fascism of it all, in which they (Marc & Ben, not the wider tech industry) would get to write the rules in a way that helped them personally, even if it fucked over actual innovation. Indeed, they seemed tickled that after they had dinner with Donald Trump, he rewrote part of his campaign policy platform. These total political novices were so overwhelmed that they could get one side to listen at all that they figured it was obviously the side to back. They seem positively giddy that Trump was willing to make changes to his platform based on their conversations.

There was also a longer discussion regarding how Marc and Ben contrast what they think (misleadingly) was Biden’s policy on AI vs. what Trump’s policy would be. My favorite bit is where Marc says they “confirmed” with Trump what his AI policy would be, as if the guy doesn’t have a decades-long history of promising one thing to whoever is in front of him and then doing something entirely different.

Ben: Let’s talk about Trump’s proposal. We actually discussed this with him when we had dinner

Marc: Yeah, we discussed all these topics and confirmed all this. So: Chapter Three, “Build the Greatest Economy in History.” Bullet five, “Champion Innovation.” Item two, “Artificial Intelligence”:

“We will repeal the dangerous executive order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, we will support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”

Ben: That sounds like a good plan to me!

When we met with him, I thought his comment was really insightful and good. It’s funny — I would contrast the Biden administration’s approach, particularly in the inner core of the White House, with Trump’s approach. The White House has a very complicated model of things. They think they know a lot — they know that startups aren’t going to be important, that only a few companies will be able to field big models. They know all these things that we don’t know, and we don’t. They’ve never heard of distillation, apparently, or how AI is actually working in practice. It’s a very complex view of the world.

Trump’s view was very simple. What he said to us is, “Look, AI is very scary, but we absolutely have to win — because if we don’t win and China wins, that’s a very bad world.” And I think that’s actually a more correct view. That’s basically true. When things start happening that do need regulation, then we should regulate them. But to anticipate it would be kind of like saying, “Oh, the automobile is coming out, and we think somebody’s going to make an automobile that drives 500 miles an hour nobody can control, so we’re going to just outlaw cars now.” That’s a little bit this approach to AI — “Well, we think in the future there’s going to be a sentient model.” Now, nobody has built anything anywhere that’s on the way to sentience. And so doing that — what we have are these great things that can tutor kids, so “No, you can’t tutor kids, because maybe somebody will come up with an idea that will make AGI, and so we have to cut off the tutors.” It’s that kind of thinking, which is quite scary, I would say.

That final bit is quite telling as well. Biden’s plan was too complex. Trump’s plan was simple. Perhaps that’s because he’s a simpleton who has no understanding of actual policy tradeoffs. Biden’s team definitely made some decisions I strongly disagreed with regarding tech policy, but the “complexity” they whine about is because the issues here are, legitimately, complex.

So, um, given that the Trump administration has basically put in place a much dumber and much worse version of what Marc & Ben said Biden was doing… clearly they’re out there admitting they were wrong, right?

In just the last few weeks we not only had the US government force Anthropic to turn off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models (even as the NSA itself was finding them useful!), it also made OpenAI limit the release of GPT 5.6. Meanwhile there are reports that the Trump administration is furious that Meta has been the one US frontier model provider that won’t let them pre-vet its AI models and decide which ones can and can’t be released.

So, two years ago Marc & Ben were yucking it up about how the Trump admin would stop trying to hold back and regulate big models, which they (falsely) claimed the Biden admin was doing. And now that the Trump admin is doing exactly that… it’s crickets from Marc and Ben.

Apparently their real concerns had nothing to do with such policies after all. Marc and Ben won’t tell you that directly, of course. But someone in their general orbit already has.

A little while ago the Bulwark’s Tim Miller did an interview with Jason Calacanis, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor/gadfly, discussing a variety of issues regarding the tech industry. I only came across this because Karl Bode’s discussion regarding the SpaceX IPO mentioned it, to point out some delusional thinking about how Starlink works. But the rest of the interview is actually a lot of Calacanis saying the quiet part out loud regarding how Silicon Valley bros view all this fascism and corruption: positively, because they think they can handle fascism and corruption.

Miller pushes Calacanis on some points regarding why the Silicon Valley VC bros still support Trump’s fascism when it’s so obviously against things like open innovation and the free market, and Jason (almost gleefully) mocks Tim for just not getting it. He happily admits that the tech bros don’t have any actual principles at all. They just understand transactions, and Trump remains transactional.

Jason lays it all out as Tim points out that if a President Kamala Harris did a tiny bit of what President Trump is doing right now, the VC bros would be losing their minds, and Jason says none of that matters, because the VC bros understand that as long as everything is corrupt and “coin-operated” then they understand the game. Their biggest fear is that they’re just not that important, and policy might get made with no one caring what they thought:

Tim Miller: I want to give you a counterfactual. Kamala Harris did win. Okay. She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies unilaterally. It doesn’t go through Congress. Puts a tax on them. It’s not legal, but she just does it. She says, “It’s an emergency. I’ve decided I have the right to do a, you know, whatever — windfall profits tax on all these companies. I’m going to do that.” And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it, sometimes she doesn’t — kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they’ve given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, “No, actually you’ve got to give the money back to the companies.” And she says, “No, actually I don’t want to. I’m not going to do that. In fact, I’m going to threaten them, and maybe I might actually take a percentage.” Donald Trump just suggested he might take a percentage of the company for the government. If Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies and the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds, and it would [be] communism.

Jason Calacanis: So you’re making this analogy to tariffs?

Tim: This is what Trump is doing — with tariffs, and with taking a percentage of Intel, and he’s suggesting he’s going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. That’s left-wing autocratic politics is what he’s doing.

Jason: Yeah. I can educate you as to why they don’t have a problem with it and why you do. You are looking at it from a moral perspective, and from a logic perspective of like, “Well, if you were okay with one side doing it and not okay with the other side doing it, this doesn’t make intellectual sense to you.” Totally understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense. Let me tell you on a business level what this means.

The tariffs, when they’re under 15%, when they actually hit, are easily absorbed on one side or the other — the folks who are selling items, or the folks who are providing those. They each make a bit of a concession, and maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it’s not as dramatic as the left feels it is. It was chaotic, but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So, a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact.

And you find it offensive, reasonably so, that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line. And South Park did a whole sendup of it — that you have to bend the knee and make your donation. That’s what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. You may think it’s crummy. Business people love to have a coin-operating situation.

Tim: I guess. But this whole Biden thing is crazy. It’s like — he didn’t even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised tax. You can tell me that fine, the tariff thing is inconsequential. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in ’93. Like, they haven’t — they’ve only gotten cuts, from Obama, from Biden. They haven’t faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years or more. So who — why, who cares? Why are they so upset about the Biden situation?

Jason: Because Biden didn’t return their calls.

Tim: So the tariff isn’t a big deal. The phone call is. That’s fine. All right.

Jason: No, it actually is. You’re brushing that off. And this is where you have a blind spot, Tim. Respectfully, you have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration, and then you can shape policy and you can say, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and hey, can you help us with this, and this regulation doesn’t make sense?” — that actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if [that’s] what you have to pay for it — I’m not saying this is my belief; you have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side, I’m explaining it to you — they much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook’s like, “I gotta show up for a documentary. That sucks. I gotta bring a gold bar. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones.”

It’s possible this is correct, but that’s basically the definition of Mussolini’s brand of corporate fascism, when the business elites team up with an autocratic ruler to better control the entirety of society, not for the benefit of society or the public good, but for their own.

Early on in the second Trump administration, I wrote an article titled Fascism for First Time Founders, about how this tends to end very badly for the business leaders who embrace it. I stand by that article, and think it’s even more relevant today than it was then. Fascist regimes don’t tend to last long, and the business leaders who embrace fascism in pursuit of becoming all-powerful oligarchs tend not to come to happy endings, no matter how wealthy it makes them for a short period of time, or which leaders are willing to return their calls.

You’d think that some of these “visionary” business leaders could look beyond the current administration and get a sense of where this story is heading. Apparently, that’s too much to ask.

Dean Ball, a policy analyst on AI who was placed in the White House by Silicon Valley folks to write Trump’s original AI policy (which was published to great fanfare and then totally ignored) has written an article about how the Trump AI policy is a total mess right now, where it’s based on whims where literally no one knows what’s allowed (the situation Marc & Ben falsely claimed would happen under Biden).

1. When President Trump signed it earlier this month, I argued that the Executive Order on Cyber and AI, which claimed to establish a voluntary testing program for frontier AI models, was really establishing a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime for frontier models. This analysis has proven correct. First the administration revoked public access to Fable, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, because of security fears. Now, it appears that OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 is being limited to only a small set of US companies at the request of the US government.
2. One major problem with this, as implemented, is that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.
3. When I say “nobody” I mean it literally: the administration itself does not seem to know what safety standards or best practices a company would have to observe for them to be comfortable with the broad release of a model that matches or exceeds Mythos in capability.
4. This means that, every time a lab asks if they can release their model to the general public, the answer from the government will be “no.” This will be true until there is some sort of safety standard or specification that gives the government a sense that the models are safe.

Ball doesn’t attribute any of this to a deliberate authoritarian agenda, but rather argues that the AI has just gotten so good that the doomers’ fears are finally coming true. That’s the charitable read. The simpler explanation is right there in the Calacanis interview: these VC bros thought they could control Trump and are still over the moon he returns their calls, even as he does all the things they claimed would destroy the industry.

But he returns their calls. For now, at least.

The main issue is that we have a power mad president, surrounded by yes-men and sycophants pushing him to grab more power. And you have the Silicon Valley elites who have the president’s ear egging him on… because he’ll return their calls and because, as Jason said, they understand a coin-operated president.

Even if it’s worse for innovation. Even if it’s worse for society. But it might be better for their bank accounts (for a while) and their egos to be a part of making the AI trains run on time. Until they don’t. Because situations like this are woefully unstable, and at some point, Trump and the MAGA crew won’t actually be in charge any more.

Marc and Ben claimed what they feared most in 2024 was a presidential administration that would shut down the most powerful AI models, regulating math, and hand-picking a few winners and losers. And that’s why they supported Trump. Now that Trump has gone way further than Biden even suggested he’d go in limiting powerful AI models, there’s been no public indication I can find that Marc and Ben regret their choice as president. After all, he’s still coin-operated and he still returns their calls.

Jason explained it perfectly. They bend the knee, they get in the room, they bring the gold bar. That it doesn’t lead to innovation policy that helps tech (little or big) doesn’t really matter. Trump returns their phone calls. They get to feel big. They still get richer. The point was always about access. They got it.

That’s the corporatist fascism they always wanted anyway. Business elites teaming up with an autocratic ruler not to figure out what’s best for the public or for innovation. But for power and control. They get to decide who gets what innovation. What models are allowed. Who can innovate.

The problem with Biden, apparently, wasn’t so much that he wanted to put some safety guardrails on AI. It was that he wouldn’t let the VC bros sit with him while deciding who the winners and losers would be. But here we have it. Business elites and an autocratic ruler picking winners and losers. History is pretty consistent about where this all ends up.

The VC bros said it was about policy. It wasn’t. But no one should ever accept Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pretending they speak for “little tech” or innovation ever again. Not after this.

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system. 

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us. 

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back. 

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills. 

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access. 

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users’ identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that. 

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills. 

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all band-aid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don’t even work. 

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity. 

Both of these databases create massive data “honeypots” that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem. 

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn’t pass laws that force us to give them even more of it. 

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance. 

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents. 

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults. 

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here. 

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the “great rewiring” of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

4. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information. 

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright. 

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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It just wasn’t enough to pardon hundreds of people who raided the Capitol building to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss — people who assaulted police officers, smashed windows to gain entrance, shut down election proceedings for several hours, stole stuff from federal offices, and generally acted liked they intended to kill Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying election results.

No, Trump had to go further. He sued the IRS (as a non-president) because a government contractor leaked his IRS filings to the media. It didn’t matter that the leaker had already been convicted and served time for his criminal act. That wasn’t enough. Trump claimed he was owed $10 billion in damages for someone leaking documents every other presidential candidate has released voluntarily.

He didn’t get the $10 billion. But he did get a whole lot of money. Trump was back in the White House and had stocked both the IRS and DOJ with loyalists. The end result was never going to be any but this: Trump’s IRS and DOJ agreed to give Trump a $1.776 billion fund, presumably for the sole purpose of rewarding MAGA insurrectionists for their loyalty.

Less than two weeks later, the federal court system froze the fund and demanded the government explain how this wasn’t anything more than Trump utilizing two agencies he controlled to give himself a bunch of money he could spend at his discretion. It was yet another crossing of the Rubicon by the Trump administration, but at least this time there was some pushback.

Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund isn’t even popular within his own party. It’s not that the MAGA-cooked GOP isn’t up for some corruption, it’s that there are still a few Trump supporters within the party that believe what his supporters did on January 6, 2021 was inexcusable.

With the fund blocked by a federal court and very few GOP leaders willing to defend it, the administration has seemingly abandoned the prospect of forcing US taxpayers to hand out paychecks to convicted criminals.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t get paid. Lawyers seeking payouts for convicted insurrectionists are seeing if they can slip in the side door to pick up a paycheck, using a federal law that almost never secures wins for plaintiffs.

The defendants are pursuing their claims using the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows individuals wronged by the government to file claims for monetary damages. The justice department has complete and unchecked discretion over whether to settle the claims, giving the Trump administration a powerful vehicle to reward those responsible for violence on January 6. The claims would be paid out from the judgment fund, a perpetual appropriation allowed for by Congress and the same pot of money Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund was going to draw from. All of the defendants seeking compensation received a pardon from Trump.

The Supreme Court has been steadily shrinking the coverage provided by the Federal Tort Claims Act for years now, making it all but impossible to successfully sue the federal government or its employees for violating constitutional rights.

And one would think (if they didn’t think too long or too hard about it) that this would mean these pardoned insurrectionists and other MAGA loyalists would be shit out of luck. But two plaintiffs closely tied to Trump have already converted the FTCA into an ATM:

The justice department agreed to settle FTCA claims filed by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, for $1.25m each earlier this year.

The FTCA is only nigh-impermeable if the government decides to defend itself. These plaintiffs — and the opportunists representing them — are hoping the administration will just give them paychecks, rather than force them to actually engage in honest litigation.

And it’s a lot tougher for courts to deter voluntary settlements paid out by the federal government in cases where the DOJ does nothing more than ask plaintiffs how much money they’d like to have. That means that the existence/non-existence of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” hardly matters. Criminal loyalists like the ones listed below are more than likely going to be stuffing some taxpayer cash in their pockets in the near future.

Among those seeking money are Kenneth Joseph Thomas, an Ohio man who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after being found guilty for assaulting several police officers. Video showed him shoving multiple police officers and throwing himself into a line of officers as he shouted for other rioters to “hold the fucking line”. Also seeking compensation is John George Todd III, a Missouri man sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty on several charges, including injuring a Capitol police officer.

[…]

Andrew Taake, a Houston man sentenced to six years in prison and who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon, is also seeking at least $2.5m in damages. 

This is an inevitable reality. The administration definitely wants to pay these people for breaking laws on Trump’s behalf. And the DOJ isn’t going to do anything more than write checks because filing anything other than short statements announcing the impending settlement might give legitimate plaintiffs something to work with in FTCA lawsuits brought by people who didn’t break a bunch of federal laws in hopes of undermining democracy itself.

The FTCA can be beat. You just need to be the right kind of shitheel to take advantage of the thoroughly corrupt government you’ve chosen to support. So, it hardly matters whether or not Trump’s ill-gotten IRS settlement will ever be disbursed to his favorite criminals. The DOJ has an unlimited fund to use for FTCA lawsuit settlements that will be almost impossible for courts to block.

A month ago, I wrote that the Supreme Court’s six conservative Justices have exactly one consistent rule on whose votes count: Black people’s votes shouldn’t count. The pattern was simple. If a ruling would help Black votes count, the Court — led by Justice Samuel Alito — found a reason to block it. If it would help suppress the Black vote, that was treated as normal and fine. Indeed, it would be treated by Alito as “race-neutral.”

Now Alito has given us an even starker version of the same instinct, and this time it’s not even about votes. It’s about whether the most openly racist rhetoric imaginable counts as racist at all. To Alito, apparently, it doesn’t — because to Alito, it’s just how the world works.

It’s in the case of Mullin v. Doe, regarding the Trump administration terminating “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. The lower courts had blocked that effort, but Alito leads the MAGA Six in reversing it, and primly insists that there’s simply no evidence at all of any racial motive in ending TPS status for Haitians. If there had been a racial motive, then it could violate the Equal Protection Clause, but Alito insists that it’s not racist to hate Haitians. It’s just normal and “race-neutral.”

The President’s comments fall into four main categories. First, many express strong objections to the immigration that this country has experienced in recent decades and to many of the immigrants who have come here, particularly those who have come to or stayed in the United States illegally. These statements associate these immigrants with crime and other social ills. Second, some statements express great displeasure with TPS. They note, among other things, that TPS designations have often been far from temporary and that aliens who are allowed to stay in the United States under the program are not vetted like other aliens who seek admission. Third, some statements broadly denigrate the countries for which TPS designations have been granted—including Haiti—portraying them as hellish places in which to live. And fourth, some statements malign Haitians who have come to the United States….

…. None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.

Justice Kagan, in her dissent, points out how full of shit Alito is by noting he can’t even bring himself to quote Trump’s vile bigotry, which would immediately broadcast the lie that Alito is pushing: that the ending of TPS for Haitians has nothing to do with race:

Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.)

So here are some of those statements. Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” … And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” … And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” … And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” … And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” … And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. … And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” … The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” ante, at 21, but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community. No very “sensitive inquiry,” of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what they are, 429 U. S., at 266; judges, as we often say, are “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,” Department of Commerce, 588 U. S., at 785. The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.

This is how an extreme racist who doesn’t think of himself as one operates. Alito can’t see Trump’s bigotry as racist because he shares the underlying worldview — and a worldview that feels like simple common sense to you doesn’t register as “bias.” That’s not a charitable read of Alito. It’s the least charitable one: the racism is so deeply baked in that it’s become invisible to him, the default setting. He can squint at a “they’re eating the pets” / “they probably have AIDS” / “shithole countries” rant and call “race-neutral” with a straight face.

And here’s the tell that collapses the whole “race-neutral” defense. Alito’s argument depends on the idea that all of this could rest on some neutral, non-racial criterion — poverty, crime, lax vetting, take your pick. But the same administration has built what is effectively a whites-only refugee policy: all but three of the 4,499 refugees admitted under Trump are white South Africans. If the criterion were really poverty or danger or vetting, that is not the population you would end up with. The only criterion that explains both halves — Haitians out, white South Africans in — is the one Alito insists isn’t there.

Adam Serwer, over at the Atlantic, points out that this particular makeup of the Supreme Court has now made it clear: they are so overtly racist that they will never, ever deem anything as racist.

In his opinion, Alito notes that the administration had previously eliminated TPS protections for countries in Asia, Africa, South America. “Most would regard this as a racially diverse group,” he writes, as if racism toward all nonwhite people doesn’t count as racism. But that’s a perfectly coherent ideological principle, the same one that led to the eugenics-inspired racist immigration restrictions that Miller has insisted should be restored, right down to the preference for Nordic immigrants.

And here’s where it connects back to where I started. That “any pretext will do” logic isn’t new — it’s the exact machinery I described last month in the voting cases. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court decided that requiring Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district — so that Black voters could actually elect someone — was itself the real racism. The trick is the off-ramp: a state caught discriminating against Black voters just has to say the magic words “we were being partisan, not racist,” and the Court waves it through.

Mullin now sets up an even more impossible double standard. If the government wants to discriminate against Black people, any pretext will do. “As long as there is a plausible basis—any plausible articulable basis—for the government’s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me, “even in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus.” If a Black person wants to prove they’ve been discriminated against, however, no amount of evidence will suffice.

Well, there is one exception to the idea that “no evidence” will be seen as racism. If a policy is seen as helping minorities, Alito will eagerly claim that’s totally racist.

Alito’s insistence on ignoring the possibility of someone using a pretext to engage in racial discrimination is actually quite selective. In a 2009 case on affirmative action, Ricci v. DeStefano, for example, Alito was happy to dismiss as “pretextual” the city of New Haven’s reasoning for why it threw out test results in which white firefighters performed better than their Black colleagues (it feared a lawsuit). When a Virginia school implemented a race-neutral, class-based affirmative-action policy, however, Alito insisted that the policy was by definition racist because it changed the demographic composition of the student body.

This is exactly how a racist thinks: any bigotry towards non-whites is normal and good and “race-neutral.” But anything seen as attempting to help fight back against bigotry is unfairly making decisions based on race, and therefore racist.

Indeed, as Serwer quotes law professor Melissa Murray in his piece:

“This Court sees race when it wants to, and blinds itself to racism in most other cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “It’s hard to imagine how egregious the statement would have to be to be considered ‘overtly racial’.”

Georgetown law professor Aderson Francois goes further — arguing that Alito’s pretense is in one respect uglier than the Court that ushered in Jim Crow:

Francois compared the Roberts Court to the 1880s justices who opened the door to Jim Crow. That Alito “pretended these statements were or could be race-neutral means that in some ways,” the current Court is worse than that earlier one, Francois told me. At least the 19th-century Court had “the intellectual courage to state its racist convictions plainly.”

In the meantime, though, many, many thousands of Haitians are going to suffer. So too will the communities where they have integrated and become vital to the local economy. Even Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has been calling out how unnecessary, cruel, and damaging this ruling will be to all of Ohio:

“It’s Haitians who many times are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” DeWine said. “And to say we’re going to pull all those out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.”

History will not be kind to Samuel Alito. He is already widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court Justices, one who is overtly political and regularly engages in obviously biased and partisan judging. But it’s time to stop pretending he’s not driven by a pretty aggressive, extreme, and despicable level of out-and-out racism. It appears to be a key driving force behind his judicial decision making, and it should have no place in modern America.

Once again, it’s time to expand the court to at least 100 Justices, so that no single Justice — such as the overtly racist Samuel Alito — has as much power as he does. Yes, it’s true that the other MAGA five have no problem going along with and enabling Alito’s brand of racism, which many of them may harbor as well. But the fact that Alito’s name keeps appearing on so many of these blatantly racist decisions needs to be called out as an example of how broken the Supreme Court is.