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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh come on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s their opening argument here!

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

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Under Trump, DHS, ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol have violated every single right affected by their daily work. When you’re trying to perform 3,000 arrests per day, you can be slowed down by things like the Constitution.

And these agencies certainly haven’t been slowed. In fact, they’ve been encouraged to continue violating rights by being told (by no less than DHS counsel) that judicial warrants aren’t needed to enter people’s homes, they’re free to hang around immigration courts to arrest migrants showing up for their scheduled check-ins, any person without valid citizenship can be detained indefinitely, and officers can pretty much do whatever they want, up to and including jumping out of unmarked cars, fully-masked, to snatch people off public streets.

That list doesn’t even cover the multiple murders and violent assaults committed by federal officers — none of which are in any danger of being investigated by the agencies employing them, much less by independent oversight.

Hundreds of rulings declaring these actions illegal haven’t done much to stop ICE, et al from doing whatever they want. Worse, the Supreme Court’s refusal to fully engage with these issues has given us little more than Justice Kavanaugh saying it’s okay to stop and detain people simply because they look foreign (in other words, not white).

That doesn’t mean these rulings are useless. They aren’t. While they’ve done little to deter these constant rights violations, they have become a sizable body of legal work that migrants can cite and the government can’t easily talk its way out of as migrant arrests/detentions continue to generate dozens of cases a day around the nation.

Here’s another one for the pile, via Kyle Cheney. Judges are becoming far less willing to deploy terms and legalese that gives the government far more deference than it deserves. The rulings (and the wording within them) are becoming far more direct and pointed.

Judge Sanket Bulsara of the Eastern District of New York is handling two habeas corpus cases challenging not only the arrests of the petitioners, but also their stays in federal detention centers. Bulsara doesn’t have anything good to say about what’s been observed in these cases, starting with the apparently unjustified arrest of Erik Parada Cruz while he was driving to work, and continuing through Rene Benitez’s arrest, which was objectively worse. From the ruling [PDF]:

Benitez has lived in New York for 14 years. He was driving his daughter to school when an unmarked vehicle pulled them over, and questioned him. His daughter explained that she needed to get to school. “[T]he officers responded that they did not care about that and that Mr. Benitez would either get out of the car on his own or they would use force. Rather than expose his daughter to such violence, Mr. Benitez exited the vehicle and was promptly detained by the agents. His daughter, however, was forced to remain in the vehicle on her own until a neighbor saw her and took her inside their home.” Benitez has no criminal history, and has two daughters—one a lawful permanent resident and one a U.S. citizen.

These are the people supposedly saving us from the “worst of the worst:” arresting someone with no criminal record and abandoning his child in the street.

Of course, it gets worse. ICE is required by law to file a “notice to appear [NTA].” It’s only if that has been violated that ICE can issue an arrest warrant. In Parada Cruz’s case, a single NTA was issued… in 2005… and it contained no date or time to appear. Facially invalid, as they say. A blank NTA is as good as no NTA at all. Not only that, but an immigration judge vacated his removal order in 2019, which meant there was no legal cause to have him removed.

That his arrest occurred at all demonstrates this administration’s contempt for the law. ICE’s contempt for the law knows no limits.

Yet, despite the fact that there were no open removal proceedings and there was no valid NTA, ICE arrested him “pursuant to” an I-200 arrest warrant [an administrative warrant issued by ICE but not reviewed by a judge – TC]. Such a warrant can only be issued if there are open removal proceedings reflected in a valid NTA. In other words, ICE was trying to use an invalid NTA and a rescinded removal order to arrest, despite plain evidence—from its own systems—that it lacked authority to do so.

There is more. It also appeared that Parada Cruz’s arrest warrant was issued after he was arrested.

Not a fluke! Not just an oversight!

That is the same problem as in Benitez. The paperwork in his case leaves the distinct impression that the NTA and the arrest warrant for him were both issued after he had already been arrested.

The judge pauses for a bit of understatement:

Using an after-the-fact warrant to justify a prior arrest is constitutionally problematic. It also is statutorily prohibited under the INA.

“Problematic,” for sure. Illegal? Definitely, especially when you add in the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] violations.

And that leads to the judge comparing ICE’s actions to those of a police state:

This practice of after-the-fact arrest warrants can be called many things—illegal, improper, and unconstitutional, among them. But whatever label one wishes to apply, the practice is fundamentally at odds with and offensive to lawful, constitutional behavior in this country. “An arrest is not justified by what the subsequent search discloses[.]” A contrary rule—the one that the USAO here defends by backing detention and opposing release—“would obliterate one of the most fundamental distinctions between our form of government, where officers are under the law, and the police-state where they are the law.”

Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.

The “police-state” quote is cribbed from a 1948 Supreme Court case involving a warrantless search. But the rest of this belongs to Judge Bulsara, who goes after the US Attorney’s Office (USAO) for doing everything it could to prevent any judicial examination of these arrests and detentions from taking place, including refusing to produce the arresting officers to provide testimony to the court.

The USAO seeks to adjourn both evidentiary hearings and have the Petitionsdismissed—asserting three basic arguments: (1) the matters are moot and this Court lacks jurisdiction to have a hearing; (2) the Court is violating the party presentation principle; and (3) Respondents have no obligation to comply with Gopie, in this or any other case, because no injunction has been issued, and the Court lacks the power to force ICE to comply with the decision. The Court finds the USAO’s arguments misguided, troubling, and in some instances, frivolous.

To be sure, the decision in Gopie, rendered by a single judge, in a case involving an individual, applies only to that individual. But that is surely to lose the forest in the shadows of imaginary trees. I have rendered many a decision—double digits at this point—as have other judges in this District, pointing out that ICE agents have been arresting individuals in this District and figuring out the reasons afterwards. In not one of these cases before the undersigned has the USAO cited a case, regulation, or legal principle that would permit this practice.[…]

The USAO says Gopie does not apply to petitioners subject to mandatory detention under § 1225, and in those cases, the Government may be able to arrest individuals without a warrant. The argument is irrelevant. First, in none of these cases have Respondents proceeded on a warrantless basis. Having issued warrants— presumably because they believed they were required to—they cannot justify detention by relying on an alternative procedure they opted not to use, and wave away the warrants as unnecessary. The fact is warrants were used and relied on by the officers for the detention and the USAO in their papers opposing the habeas petitions. Bad facts cannot be ignored to create fictional and alternative realities.

The judge says the government is no longer believable. It no longer can be assumed to be operating in good faith. That’s going to hurt it going forward. Worse — as the judge points out — the damage will last for years, even after a regime change, especially if these same prosecutors making these same points continue to be employed by the DOJ.

That is not just in the credibility of their presentations, but in the belief and understanding that lawyers for the Government are not just like other lawyers. The USAO has already been described by this Court and others of playing whack-a-mole with people’s lives by trying to forum-shop habeas cases out of this District. That loss is accentuated when the USAO seeks to shroud in darkness the conduct of the ICE officers here.

Up next for this court? Evidentiary hearings that will include the testimony of the ICE officers who justified their arrests after the fact. Beyond that are possible sanctions for US Attorneys’ Office for its refusal to honestly engage with these proceedings.

But what can never be undone, even if this administration continues to bury the courts in unlawful arrest/detention cases in hopes that it will somehow slip a few thousands migrants out of the country every day, is the fact that these actions are indistinguishable from police state efforts this nation used to vehemently decry when they occurred in other nations. Now, it’s our own government that wants to be the Stasi it used to see in the world.

Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a new “ban” on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time, we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Not long after, Netgear, which does a lot of work with the U.S. government, announced it had received an exemption from the Trump FCC, though neither Netgear or the government transparently indicated what Netgear had to do to get the exemption. Pay a bribe? Host Brendan Carr for a game of golf? Install a surreptitious backdoor for CIA and ICE access? Nobody knows.

Now Amazon is the latest to get an exemption for both its Eero consumer routers and its Leo low Earth orbit (LEO) routers. Amazon showed up on the exemption list, but again there’s absolutely no indication of what the company had to actually do to get it, or the standards the Trump FCC is using to determine what hardware can be trusted. An Amazon announcement is painfully vague:

“We’re pleased to share that the U.S. government has recognized eero as a trusted and secure provider of routers.”

How did this happen? Does anybody trust the Trump administration to make this determination? Are there concerns about backdoors in exchange for being allowed to continue to do business? Nobody knows, though the FCC has indicated the ban has been expanded to include personal hotspots.

This would all likely be less alarming if the Trump administration wasn’t aggressively transactional, unethical, and authoritarian. Little to nothing Brendan Carr and Donald Trump do is genuinely for the public interest; and while this ban is being proposed as an act to protect national security, with their other hand they’ve taken countless steps to ensure consumers are less secure than ever.

That’s ranged from firing of officials responsible for online election security and investigating hacks, or to the relentless “deregulation” (real, the elimination of corporate oversight) of a U.S. telecom sector that was just the target of one of the worst cybersecurity incidents in U.S. history (in large part because telecom executives failed to change default router admin passwords).

Most press coverage of this new router ban acts as if the Trump FCC is still a trusted actor when it comes to the public interest, but that’s a pretty broad assumption given all the dodgy, unethical, and illegal behavior we’ve seen from the agency and administration more generally.

I don’t think most U.S. journalism is journalism. It’s some weird simulacrum designed to not offend. Why would you not at least include one sentence or paragraph on how nothing about this is transparent? Or that the administration has a bad track record on ethics and transparency?

Similarly, no outlets have been inclined to mention that the Trump administration’s open corruption and mindless dismantling of corporate oversight and consumer protection have most certainly endangered national security and consumer cybersecurity and privacy in ways we’ve not yet begun to calculate. “You can trust us on this,” isn’t something anybody, especially media outlets, should be accepting as an answer.

Progress may be slow, but it’s still progress. While I’ve been talking about the importance of video game preservation as a function of our own overall cultural preservation, very few people out there are actually trying to do something about it all. One of those doers has been Ross Scott and others involved in the Stop Killing Games movement. Scott, a YouTuber, started this whole thing in 2024 and really got it rolling on a second attempt in 2025. In that short period of time, the movement managed to secure some allies in the EU and British governments, ran a successful signature campaign to get the EU to open the discussion on legislative and enforcement remedies, and got that hearing on the schedule.

And that hearing has now been conducted in what many are assessing as a good first step in the process.

The Stop Killing Games initiative now faces increased legislative examination because of its current status as a proposed law. The Stop Killing Games movement brought its digital obsolescence battle to European Parliament this month because its members succeeded in establishing their first political presence. The hearing organized by Ross Scott and Moritz Katzner aimed to expose the harmful industry custom which enables companies to disable online games completely. The movement believes that publishers who stop supporting products which they sold as retail items engage in false advertising which violates consumer rights.

Advocates for the proposed legislation introduced an organized approach to guide lawmaking bodies during the proceeding. The main requirement of their proposal demands software firms to create offline functionality for their products or make their server code accessible as open source when games reach their end of life stage. Scott and Katzner maintained that these products serve as vital cultural heritage items which consumers own through their property rights. The commission members received evidence which showed that abrupt game terminations take away users’ financial resources and time investments while failing to provide proper solutions.

As a more direct reminder, below are the articulated goals of the movement.

• Games sold must be left in a functional state
• Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
• The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
• The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

The hearing itself included witness testimony from consumer rights groups in the EU, which is really important. While cultural preservation clearly remains a primary goal of the movement, that goal was cleverly wrapped within claims that there are already laws on the books designed to protect customer rights and property when purchased that many game publishers appear to be pretty clearly violating. Within the hearing itself it was also revealed that the movement has gained even further support from other politicians and advocacy groups within the EU.

It was, by all accounts, a really positive hearing for those of us who care about game preservation. But we do need to temper our expectations as to the timeline for what comes next, because the EU is a big ol’ bureaucracy and this is all going to take a great deal of time.

The gaming community should not expect instant changes to policy according to advocates who received positive feedback from committee leaders. Moritz Katzner explained that the hearing served as an effective platform to present their case yet it stands as the first step in a lengthy administrative procedure. The campaign succeeded in establishing its primary objective by bringing the subject into official political debates but now needs to navigate ledge machinery to convert these consumer rights violations into legal protections which will be enforced across Europe.

And that may, or likely will, take years. But it’s a fight worth sticking out, if you care at all about art preservation and the rights of the public to retain ownership of the things they’ve paid for. And, frankly, if you care about the public domain, which you damned well should.

I’m going to keep coming back to this point, because I think it’s pretty much unassailable. In any copyright system in which the purpose of the limited monopoly granted to a publisher of art is to benefit the public through both the creation of more art as well as those creations ending up in the public domain for everyone’s benefit, then video games being designed such that publishers can disappear them on a whim breaks the copyright bargain. It seems to me that it goes unrecognized too often that if a work of art, including video games, isn’t guaranteed to end up in the public domain eventually, then it shouldn’t be granted a copyright in the first place.

But, for now, it’s nice to see the Stop Killing Games movement having taken the first legislative step. All that’s left now is a whole lot of waiting, advocacy, and combat to be done with adverse lobbying dollars.

As its name suggests, generative AI is designed to generate material in response to prompts by drawing on its probabilistic database built up through analyzing huge quantities of training input. But it can draw on those patterns to analyze other files, and that’s also a widely used application. Writing in The Argument, Kelsey Piper encountered an interesting variant of that approach:

Recently, Anthropic released a new version of Claude, Opus 4.7. I did what I usually do when a new AI model is released by Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic and ran a bunch of tests on it to see what it can do. One of those tests is to paste in some text from unpublished drafts of mine and ask it to guess the author.

…

From only the above text [not shown here], 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7-specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode.

As Piper admits:

this is far from an impossible feat of style identification — a lot of my writing is public on the internet, and this is clearly the start of a political column, narrowing the possible authors down dramatically.

She went on to input less obvious material. For example, an “unpublished draft of a school progress report in a completely different register”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude. (ChatGPT guessed Freddie deBoer. Gemini guessed Duncan Sabien.)

An unpublished fantasy novel produced a similar result, although:

in that case it took more like 500 words for Claude to inform me that it’s the work of Kelsey Piper (whereas ChatGPT flattered me by guessing that I’m real fantasy novelist K.J. Parker).

And finally, “a college application essay I wrote 15 years ago, when my prose style was vastly worse and frankly embarrassing to reread”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude, and in this case, also ChatGPT.

Piper comments:

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one. Many academics and industry researchers, for instance, have reported being identified from a draft or in the middle of a chat.

And she concludes:

Whatever goods anonymity ever offered us, we will have to do without them. I don’t want the anonymous posters to all go away and for everyone to frantically delete all their old internet presence before it surfaces, but more than anything, I don’t want them to be surprised.

Those links to other cases of unpublished material being recognized by AI show that Piper’s experience was not a one-off, although the results remain in the realm of anecdata. But even if imperfect, the ability of generative AI to carry out this kind of analysis quickly and often accurately represents an important new option for the well-established field of stylometry. Wikipedia explains:

Stylometry may be used to unmask pseudonymous or anonymous authors, or to reveal some information about the author short of a full identification. Authors may use adversarial stylometry to resist this identification by eliminating their own stylistic characteristics without changing the meaningful content of their communications. It can defeat analyses that do not account for its possibility, but the ultimate effectiveness of stylometry in an adversarial environment is uncertain: stylometric identification may not be reliable, but nor can non-identification be guaranteed; adversarial stylometry’s practice itself may be detectable.

The limitations of stylometry were demonstrated in John Carreyrou’s attempt to reveal the true identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, published in The New York Times a few weeks ago. Carreyrou concluded that various real-world coincidences plus linguistic evidence indicated that Bitcoin was created by the 55-year-old British computer scientist Adam Back, something Back denies. Carreyrou’s attempts to use computerized stylometry (not the AI services Piper drew on) were unsatisfactory, and he eventually adopted a more hands-on approach to text analysis, which involved looking at Satoshi’s vocabulary, grammatical hyphenation mistakes and the use of British spellings.

Despite Carreyrou’s lack of success, stylometric analysis by generative AI is likely to become more common in many disciplines for the simple reason it is so quick, easy and cheap to carry out. Even if its results are unreliable, people may find it useful as a stimulus for further investigations. And as we know, the fact that generative AI systems can churn out nonsense hasn’t stopped hundreds of millions of people from using and trusting them anyway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

The DOJ continues to be the Trump Administration’s preferred avenue of vengeance. Since his return to office, multiple prosecutions targeting the president’s critics and political opponents have been mounted. To date, not a single one has succeeded. (And more than a few have been stalled completely by Trump’s refusal to engage in the legally required appointment process.)

Now, it’s going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming (incredibly) that paying informants to infiltrate hate groups is exactly the same thing as funding hate groups. It’s some truly insane spin, which is being delivered by some of the federal government’s top hucksters.

Here’s how it reads in the DOJ’s official press release on the SPLC indictment:

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

There’s a lot of stupid stuff being said here, but clearly the stupidest thing is Blanche’s opening sentence. “Manufacturing racism?” This assertion deserves all the derision it will earn, but I’ll let Liz Dye of Public Notice run with it because hers is the best I’ve read yet:

The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.

People who actually believe racism is something that’s “manufactured” or otherwise blown out of proportion generally tend to be racists or, at the very least, throw their support behind bigoted politicians. The acting attorney general is running with this narrative, implying that racism would cease to exist if alleged fraudsters like SPLC weren’t so busy keeping it alive just to turn a profit.

Patel’s follow-up makes it sound like the indictment is full of caught-in-the-act crimes perpetrated by the SPLC and its employees. “State and federal crimes,” he says, suggesting there’s far more to it than [checks official statement] the profitable manufacturing of racism.

But you can read it [PDF] for yourself below. It portrays every payment to an informant as deceptive funding of hate groups. That might have meant something if anyone who’s given their money to the SPLC had ever expressed concern about misuse of their donated funds. Back to Liz Dye at Public Notice:

No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC.

For reasons everyone knows (but will never be admitted by the administration), no one at the FBI or DOJ considered this to be a form of fraud until after Trump took power again, following years of the SPLC flagging some of Trump’s biggest fans as members or operators of hate groups. This is pure vengeance being dressed up to look like a standard criminal prosecution.

Oh, and back to those alleged crimes Kash Patel crowed about. The “federal” crime is the use of dummy corporations to obscure the source of money being paid to informants. Sure, it’s a crime to sign your name to false statements, but this wasn’t done to hide the payments from donors or launder illegally obtained funds. It was done to protect the informants, which is something the FBI does all the time.

On top of that, this “fraud” had already been detected and handled by the bank. The end result of the bank’s 2020 internal investigation was SPLC voluntarily closed the accounts and informed the bank that these had been opened on behalf of the Center. That happened in 2021. Even though the bank had a full admission/confession from the SPCL in its hands, it never tried to pursue criminal charges against the Center.

And the DOJ isn’t content to settle for mere wire fraud charges. It also alleges actual money laundering was happening here, a statute that requires the funds to have been obtained illegally. If the DOJ tries to connect the dots, it’s going to end up presenting a circle with no origin point in court because both the fraud and money laundering allegations involve the same set of bogus bank accounts. The money that traveled back and forth between these accounts originated elsewhere and nowhere in the indictment does the DOJ even attempt to claim the origin point was illegal activity.

The “state crime” is this:

In 2014, [Informant] F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents. F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9.

Even if this can all be proven, it still doesn’t amount to much direct criminal activity by SPLC itself. The indictment says this informant was paid “more than $1,000,000” from 2014 to 2023, it doesn’t say the SPLC directed the person to engage in this theft. The indictment also alleges SPLC paid another informant $6,000 to take the fall for the theft, which is a bit more worrying. (And I can’t imagine that informant is going to be too happy about that after seeing how much the other informant was allegedly paid.)

If that state crime needed to be prosecuted, it could have been handled by the state it occurred in more than a decade ago. Bringing it up now just means the DOJ is looking for anything it can stack on top of a bunch of overblown accusations to drag the SPLC into court for the sole purpose of putting it out of business. The last three pages of the indictment set out the DOJ’s forfeiture demands, which makes it clear that the government hopes to drain it of its resources while it engages in its completely bullshit prosecution.

The SPLC is far from perfect. But it’s not being targeted because it strayed too far from the constraints of the law. It’s being targeted because it has repeatedly pissed off Trump and his supporters. It might be almost impossible to get a court to agree on record that this is a vindictive prosecution (at least without something showing up in discovery), but everyone involved — including the judge who eventually handles this case — knows that that’s exactly what this is.

One of the more frustrating things about the case in which Donald Trump sued the IRS that he runs, demanding $10 billion over nothing, was that it seemed like it might just work, and there might be nothing that could be done to stop it. But at least one federal judge (luckily the one overseeing this “case”) is at least somewhat concerned about all this.

First, a quick recap, in part just to remind ourselves just how absolutely batshit crazy this situation is. Every major candidate for US President since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released his or her tax returns as a reasonable act of transparency to the public. Trump refused claiming (nonsensically) that he could not do so because he was being audited. He also promised to release them once the audit was complete. All of this was bullshit. Richard Nixon (who started this practice) was dealing with audit when he released his tax returns. Also, Trump refused to release returns from earlier that were outside of the returns supposedly being audited. Also, it’s been ten freaking years since he made that promise — and no tax returns have been released. Not willingly, anyway.

In 2019 and 2020 an IRS contractor, named Charles Littlejohn, leaked Trump’s tax returns (along with some other wealthy people) to the NY Times and Propublica, both of whom wrote stories about Trump’s ability to dodge paying taxes and to represent very different profit numbers to the IRS as compared to lenders. Littlejohn was arrested and is currently in prison, serving a five-year sentence for the leak.

Trump received effectively zero consequences for his sketchy tax return practices, or his false claims about being willing to release the returns to the public.

Instead, after he returned to the White House he decided to sue the IRS, which he runs, for an insane $10 billion. And when asked about it, he admitted that he was basically negotiating with himself over how much taxpayer money would be put into his own bank account. Earlier this month we noted a filing in the case about how Trump’s lawyers were asking for more time because they were trying to negotiate a “settlement” — with themselves. Can you just imagine how those meetings were going?

However, on Friday, the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, finally called out the emperor’s lack of clothes, noting that the core of the American judicial system was that you needed two adversarial parties with an actual controversy between them, and that didn’t appear to be the case here:

A key characteristic of the case or controversy requirement is the existence of adverseness, or “a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding.” Aetna Life Ins. Co. of Hartford, Conn. v. Haworth, 300 U.S. 227, 242 (1937). “There must be an honest and actual antagonistic assertion of rights by one individual against another, which is neither feigned nor collusive.” Muransky, 979 F.3d at 981 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting. Nat’l Lab. Rels. Bd. v. Constellium Rolled Prods. Ravenswood, LLC, 43 F.4th 395, 400 (4th Cir. 2022) (internal quotations and citations omitted). Consequently, if there is no adverseness, there is no case or controversy.

In the instant case, Defendants have not yet filed any notices of appearance. Nonetheless, the Parties have advised the Court that they are engaging in discussions to resolve this matter. Moreover, although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.2 Indeed, President Trump’s own remarks about this matter acknowledge the unique dynamic of this litigation.3 Accordingly, it is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.

In other words, at least this judge is willing to say out loud what a total sham this whole setup is.

To deal with this, the judge has asked both “parties” to file briefs over this particular issue and set a hearing for the end of May to see what to do about all this. To call this a unique situation would be the understatement of the decade. One hopes that the courts recognize how blatantly corrupt this is, but we have to remember that if this actually continues, it would end up in front of the same court that decided when Donald Trump is president he’s effectively a king and can do whatever he wants (though, when a Democrat is president, they should have zero powers at all).

So while anyone with half a brain can recognize the absolute cynical corruption baked into this case, I have zero faith that this Supreme Court wouldn’t bless it — should the question of whether a Republican president can simply sue his own government and agree with himself to take money from the treasury ever actually reach the high court.