As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there’s something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But Donald Trump as president will come to an end in the not too distant future.
The millions and millions of people who have been negatively impacted by him and by those who have decided to bow at his cultish altar, are not temporary. They are not going to go away. And they will remember the actions of many during this time.
And I imagine the American Diabetes Association, and specifically those currently leading it, will be in the memories of its members and many others for a long, long time. It’s been nearly a week since the ADA had five diabetes scientists, including its own former president, involuntarily removed from outside the ADA’s annual conference by police. Their crime? Distributing a copy of an editorial from the April edition of the ADA’s own journal.
The scientists were distributing the editorial outside the conference’s opening speech, which was originally scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute, and senior NIH official Rick Woychik took his place.
Within minutes of beginning to hand out the editorial, police reportedly escorted the scientists out of the conference, which was held in New Orleans. The police reportedly shoved at least one scientist, took all of their conference badges, and threatened to arrest them if they tried to return. Louisiana State Police later told media that they acted at the request of the ADA. The ADA subsequently barred the five scientists from the rest of the conference.
The editorial just so happened to be very critical of the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s funding at NIH and other health agencies and groups. It’s quite obvious that the ADA feared repercussions from the Trump administration if it wouldn’t allow these scientists to hand the article out while members of the administration were speaking and tried to use the police to silence them. And then, when this whole thing went viral, the ADA offered up justifications for its actions. Justifications that kept changing, as it turns out.
In an email to ADA members Saturday, the association said the scientists were removed because they didn’t have prior approval to distribute material at the conference and that it was “not because of the viewpoints expressed in those materials,” according to reporting from Science.
In a statement Sunday, the organization, which is a nonprofit, said it removed the scientists because it was complying with federal regulations for 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which requires “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission.” However, the federal regulations do not restrict leaders of organizations from sharing political views in a personal capacity or from speaking on important public policy issues.
And from there, the Streisand Effect took over. The editorial, which you can find right here, went somewhat viral itself, getting a ton more attention than it had to date. But the real backlash came from the public and from within the medical community itself. There have been resignations in protest of the ADA’s actions. An open letter to the ADA signed by 40 members was written to torch leadership’s actions and treatment of the scientists at the conference. Another open letter was also written, likewise demanding an apology.
And, finally, the ADA did in fact apologize days later.
In the video Wednesday, ADA CEO Charles Henderson personally apologized to the five scientists, including Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota; Justin Ryder of Northwestern University; and Irl Hirsch, also of the University of Washington, in addition to Kahn and Schatz.
“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”
In addition to apologizing to the five ejected scientists, Henderson apologized to the community as a whole, saying that the ADA would commission a “thorough independent review of the events that occurred as well as the policies, procedures, and decision-making process that guided our actions.”
Yeah, no, not good enough. The fish stinks from the head down, as the saying goes, and there have been days worth of attempts to make this stupidity anyone’s fault but leadership at the ADA. This was a clear attempt to lick the Trump administration’s boots, at the very moment when clear leadership from medical groups is so sorely needed, and that’s a bell that cannot be un-rung.
Henderson needs to go. And I have little doubt that he will before too long. Trump and RFK Jr. will eventually be gone, as well.
But we won’t forget how groups like the ADA, and the people leading them, acted during this time.
Much of last week I had been working on a different article than the one this became. The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full video depositions of four government witnesses to YouTube. I had been watching through the many hours of those videos, planning to write specifically about what former DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh actually said under oath about how they decided which grants to kill.
I had already written about what the legal filings revealed back in February, well before the NY Times published its own deep dive into the depositions last week. But the videos added something the transcripts couldn’t fully capture: the demeanor of two young guys with zero government experience who were handed the power to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in already-approved humanities grants, and who were now forced to sit there, on camera, and attempt (weakly) to explain themselves. Before I could publish my piece, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox covered some of what was found in the depositions and illustrated it with these thumbnails of Fox straight from YouTube that certainly… tell a story.
And then, of course, the government got the videos taken down. Because these alpha disruptors who thought they were saving America by nuking grants for Holocaust documentaries and Black civil rights research turned out to be too fragile to withstand a little internet mockery for their dipshittery.
We’ll get to that part. But first, let’s talk about what made the depositions so devastating, and why the government was so desperate to hide them.
As we covered in February, the actual “process” by which Fox and Cavanaugh decided to terminate nearly every active NEH grant from the Biden administration was, to put it charitably, not a process at all. Fox fed short grant descriptions into ChatGPT with a prompt that read:
“Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.”
That was it. A chatbot verdict in fewer characters than a tweet. As Cox reported after watching all six-plus hours of Fox’s deposition, nobody told Fox to use an LLM for this. He did it on his own. He called it an “intermediary step” — a fancy way of saying he asked the magic answer box to justify what he’d already decided to do.
The depositions revealed the ChatGPT prompt raising flags that would be comedic if the grants hadn’t actually been terminated. As the NY Times reported:
A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.”
The Thomas Gage one is really something. The British general who oversaw the colonial crackdown that helped trigger the American Revolution is apparently too “diverse” for Trump’s “America First” humanities agenda. George Washington’s papers got spared, but the papers of the guy Washington fought against? DEI.
A sizable portion of the deposition was spent trying to get Fox to define DEI. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He repeatedly deferred to the text of Trump’s executive order on DEI, while also admitting he couldn’t recall what it actually said.
How do you interpret DEI?
Fox: [sighs and then a very long pause] There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
It’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.
Fox: Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.
Okay, so can you…
Fox: I don’t remember what was in the EO.
So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay, so what’s your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
Fox: Um, well, it it was exactly what was written in the EO. And so anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order, we would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had relation to it.
Okay. But I guess I’m stepping back from your uh methodology strictly in terminating the grants. Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay. So what’s your understanding of what it means?
Fox: Well, I [scoffs] it is it is is exactly what was written in the EO. And I don’t have the EO in front of me, but that was we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that this grant was in compliance with the EO.
I understand that. Okay, but I’m not asking necessarily about what was in the EO. I’m asking very specifically about your present understanding of what… of DEI? Do you have a present understanding of DEI?
Fox: Yeah!
Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is?
Fox: Um well, it It’s just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.
Are you refusing to answer the question?
Fox: I’m not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language. And so, I think giving a a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.
And that’s okay. We can look at the EO as well.
Fox: Great.
I’m asking you for I mean this is a deposition. I’m asking you questions. You’re under oath to answer them. So what what is your understanding of what DEI means?
Fox: Well, I I think I would say again that I I would go back to the EO to make sure I’m capturing enough. I don’t I don’t feel comfortable saying a high level overview because it is such a big bucket and there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
What’s a part of the bucket?
Fox: Um gender fluidity um sort of promoting um like promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ that um might um alienate another part of the community. Um. Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EO.
Okay, so …
Fox: And I don’t want to give you a broad overview because it’s at the end of the day it it is capturing… it is all encompassing in the EO. It’s how we it’s how we did our methodology.
Right. Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?
Fox: What do you mean?
You you say that you have an understanding what DEI means and when I ask you you say you need to reference the EO. Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, what’s stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today? On January 28th, 2026.
Fox: It wouldn’t be capturing enough of how big the topic is. DEI is a very broad structure. I’m giving giving my limited recall of what’s included is just not…
But his understanding leaked through anyway when specific grants came up.
Take the grant for a documentary about the 1873 Colfax massacre, where dozens of Black men were murdered by former Confederates and Klan members. ChatGPT flagged it as DEI. Fox agreed. Here’s how he explained it during the deposition. The lawyer reads aloud ChatGPT’s output and questions Fox about it:
“The documentary tells the story of the Colfax Massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-black violence during Reconstruction. And it’s historical and leg NAACP for black civil rights, Louisiana, the South, and in the nation as a whole.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes. Okay.
And then in column B right next to that, it says, “Yes, the documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Is it fair to say that what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompts in the first column?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. Do you agree with ChatGPT’s assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that significantly impacted black civil rights?
Fox:Yes.
Okay. Why would that be DEI?
Fox: It’s focused on a singular race. It is not for the benefit… It is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being black.
Why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind.
Fox: That’s not what I’m saying.
Okay, then what are you saying?
Fox: I’m saying it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
You said it’s not to the benefit of humankind. Right?
Fox: Is that what I said?
[Laughs] Yeah.
Then there was the documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust:
The grant description of column row 252 says, “Production of My Underground Mother, a feature-length documentary that explores the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust through a daughter’s search for her late mother’s past, a collective camp diary in which she wrote and interviews with dozens of women survivors who reveal the gender-based violence they suffered and hit from their own families.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. And then in that row or column, you say “Yes DEI.” Did you write the rationale in that column?
Fox: Could you scroll over, Jacob?
Again, the rationale says, “The documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Fox: Yes.
Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?
Fox: It’s the… gender-based… story… that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.
It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?
Fox: The gender-based so females… during the Holocaust.
And you believe that that’s inherently discriminatory?
Fox: I’m just saying that’s what it’s focused on.
Sure.
Fox: And this is related to the DEI.
Right. But you just use the term inherently discriminatory. What did you mean by that?
Fox: It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them.
So a documentary that’s about women would be DEI. Is that fair to say?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, tell me why what I just said isn’t DEI, but what you just said is DEI.
Fox: It’s a Jewish specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to DEI for those reasons.
Because it’s about Jewish culture?
Fox: Plus marginalized female voices during the Holocaust gender-based violence.
Okay. Is this… when we focus on a minority, is that your understanding that, you know, the Jewish people fall into the category of a minority?
Fox: Certainly a culture that could be described as minorities.
Okay. So, how did you go about determining what was a minority and what wasn’t a minority for the for the purpose of identifying DEI in grants?
Fox: Inherently focused on any ethnicity, culture, gender, no matter the sort of race or gender or or religion or… yeah.
So a documentary about anti-Black violence during Reconstruction is “not for the benefit of humankind.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust is “inherently DEI” because it’s focused on “gender” or “religion.” But remember, the keyword list Fox built to scan grants included terms like “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “BIPOC,” “native,” and “immigrants.” Notably absent: “white,” “Caucasian,” or “heterosexual.” When pressed on this, Fox offered the defense that he “very well could have” included those terms but just… didn’t.
Now, about Nate Cavanaugh. If you haven’t heard of Cavanaugh, he’s the college dropout who co-founded an IP licensing startup, partnered with Fox on the DOGE work at NEH, and was subsequently appointed — I am not making this up — president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, among other roles. When asked about DEI in his own deposition, Cavanaugh provided what might be the most inadvertently self-aware definition imaginable. While obnoxiously chewing gum during the deposition, the following exchange took place:
What is DEI referring to here?
Cavanaugh: It stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.
And what is your opinion of diversity, equity, inclusion.
Cavanaugh: My personal opinion?
Well, let’s start with what does it mean to you?
Cavanaugh: It means diversity, equity, inclusion.
Well, that’s the label, but what does what do those words mean?
Cavanaugh: It means uh it means making decisions on a basis of something other than merit.
Irony alert: Nate Cavanaugh — a college dropout with no government experience, no background in the humanities, and no apparent understanding of the grants he was terminating — defined DEI as “decisions on the basis of something other than merit.” He said this while sitting in a deposition about his time holding multiple senior government positions for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. The lack of self-awareness is genuinely staggering.
And what did all of this actually accomplish? By Cavanaugh’s own admission, the deficit didn’t go down. Fox was asked about this too. From 404 Media:
When the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE’s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.
“I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending, and so, again, in the broad macro: an unfortunate circumstance for an individual, but this is an effort for the administration,” Fox says. “In my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,” Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: “those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.”
There is no evidence these funds were directed in that way. The Trump administration has kicked millions of people off of food stamps. It has, just as an example, given ICE tens of billions of more dollars, though.
Sure, kiddo. It was all for grandma’s food stamps. (Though given Fox’s ideological priors, one suspects that food stamps themselves would end up on the ‘wasteful spending’ list soon enough.)
The NY Times piece also revealed some remarkable details about how the process played out internally. Acting NEH Chairman Michael McDonald, who had been at the agency for over two decades and could recall fewer than a half-dozen grant revocations in that entire time — all for failure to complete promised work — went along with the mass cancellation of nearly every active Biden-era grant. When DOGE’s process wasn’t moving fast enough, Fox emailed McDonald:
We’re getting pressure from the top on this and we’d prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you’re no longer interested.
McDonald expressed some reservations, calling many of the grants slated for termination “harmless when it comes to promoting DEI.” But he rolled over:
“But you have also told us that in addition to canceling projects because they may promote DEI ideology, the DOGE Team also wishes to cancel funding to assist deficit reduction. Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list.”
Out of all grants approved during the Biden administration, only 42 were kept. The rest — 1,477 grants — were terminated. No appeals were allowed. Termination letters bore McDonald’s signature but were sent from an unofficial email address the DOGE employees created. McDonald himself admitted he didn’t draft the letters and couldn’t tell you how many grants were cut. And when pressed on whether the grants concerning the Colfax Massacre and the Holocaust were actually DEI, McDonald — who, unlike Fox and Cavanaugh, actually has a doctorate in literature — said he didn’t agree they were. But he signed off on their termination anyway.
Oh, and McDonald apparently didn’t even know Fox and Cavanaugh had used ChatGPT to make the determinations.
So that’s the substance. Two unqualified guys, a chatbot, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and the destruction of a century-old institution’s grant portfolio in about two weeks. We covered the mechanics in February. The depositions just put it all on video, in their own words, in all its arrogant, ignorant glory.
And then the government decided it couldn’t handle the public seeing it.
After the plaintiff organizations uploaded the deposition videos to YouTube and shared materials with the press, the government filed an urgent letter asking the court to order the videos removed “from the internet” — yes, they actually used that phrasing — and to restrict the plaintiffs from further publicizing discovery materials. Their argument was that the videos “could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm.”
A few days later, the government came back even more agitated, reporting that Fox had received death threats and that the videos had circulated widely, with “well over 100,000 X posts circulating and/or discussing video clips” of the depositions. The filing cited media coverage from People, HuffPost, 404 Media, and The Advocate.
“Unfortunately, that risk has now materialized—at least one witness has been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats. Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Court enter the requested order as soon as possible to minimize the risk of additional harm to the witnesses and their families.”
Death threats are genuinely bad and nobody should send them. Full stop. That said, let’s explore the breathtaking asymmetry for a moment.
Fox and Cavanaugh subjected more than 1,400 grant recipients to termination with no warning, no due process, no appeal, and effectively forged the director’s signature on the letters. They didn’t give an ounce of thought to the livelihoods they were destroying — the researchers mid-project, the documentary filmmakers, the archivists, the teachers, the organizations that had planned years of work around these grants. When asked if he felt any remorse, Fox said:
Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately—the more important piece is reducing the government spend.
But now that people are being mean to them on the internet? Now, suddenly, the government needs an emergency protective order and the videos must be scrubbed from existence.
Judge Colleen McMahon did initially order the plaintiffs to “immediately take any and all possible steps to claw back the videos,” pending further briefing. The plaintiffs responded with an emergency motion pointing out a fairly important detail: the government never designated the deposition videos as confidential under the existing protective order. They had the opportunity to do so and didn’t. From the plaintiffs’ filing:
Defendants never designated the video depositions in question as Confidential under the Protective Order, and Defendants have never alleged in their correspondence with ACLS Plaintiffs that ACLS Plaintiffs violated the protective order presently in place.
In other words, the government had a mechanism to keep the videos under wraps. They chose not to use it. And now they want the court to do retroactively what they failed to do at the time.
The judge’s response to the emergency motion was delightfully terse:
DENIED.
See you Tuesday.
And then there’s the part where the government’s own filing accidentally makes the case for why these videos are important. In arguing that the plaintiffs were acting improperly, the government noted that the MLA’s website had links to the deposition videos alongside a link soliciting donations to its advocacy initiative:
Directly below these materials is a link soliciting monetary donations to the MLA’s advocacy initiative “Paving the Way.” To the extent the MLA or other ACLS Plaintiffs are publicizing these documents as part of their fundraising efforts, that is improper.
Which is an interesting argument to make when the entire lawsuit exists because DOGE used ChatGPT to destroy a hundred million dollars in humanities funding.
Now, finally, about those videos the government wanted removed “from the internet.” As anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes studying the history of online content suppression could have predicted, the attempt to get the videos taken down had precisely the opposite of its intended effect. The videos were backed up almost immediately to the Internet Archive, distributed as a torrent, and spread across social media. As 404 Media reported:
The news shows the difficulty in trying to remove material from the internet, especially that which has a high public interest and has already been viewed likely millions of times. It’s also an example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomenon where trying to suppress information often results in the information spreading further.
We’ve written about the Streisand Effect many, many times over the years here at Techdirt, and the pattern is always the same: someone sees something embarrassing about themselves online, panics, tries to make it go away, and in doing so ensures that orders of magnitude more people see it than ever would have otherwise. The government’s frantic filings, complete with citations to specific media articles and X post counts, served as a helpful reading list for anyone who hadn’t yet seen the videos.
The judge’s order, notably, only directed the plaintiffs to take down the videos. It said nothing about the Internet Archive, the torrent, the clips on X, the embeds in news articles, or the countless other copies that had already proliferated. And, really, given that none of the other sources are parties to the case, and the associated First Amendment concerns, it’s difficult to see those videos going away any time soon.
The government wanted the videos removed “from the internet.” They have now been seeded to the internet in a format specifically designed to be impossible to remove.
This is what happens when you try to suppress something the public has already decided it wants to see.
And that gets to the broader absurdity here. Fox and Cavanaugh walked into a federal agency they knew nothing about, used a chatbot to condemn more than a thousand grants they never read, created spreadsheets labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” planned to highlight them on DOGE’s X account for culture war clout, sent termination letters with someone else’s signature from a private email server, and explicitly told the agency head that no appeals would be allowed.
When asked under oath to justify what they did, Fox couldn’t define DEI, couldn’t explain why documenting anti-Black violence isn’t “for the benefit of humankind,” and could only offer that the money they saved was probably going to food stamps for grandma — which it very much was not. Cavanaugh couldn’t define DEI either, acknowledged the deficit didn’t go down, and gave a definition of DEI that perfectly described his own role in the federal government.
These are the people who DOGE sent to reshape the government. And now that government is asking a federal judge for an emergency protective order because the internet is being kinda mean about it. Poor poor snowflake DOGE boys.
As the ACLS president put it, “DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”
She’s right. Though I’d argue watching these depositions is — unlike Fox’s ridiculously bigoted definition of Black history — very much for the benefit of humankind.
We’ve noted how Microsoft is a little sensitive about AI slop at the moment. Back in January, CEO Satya Nadella wrote a well-circulated blog post lamenting critics of “AI slop” and demanding the public simply move past such conversations. It was relatively innocuous, but wasn’t received well for some valid reasons.
Last week found Microsoft under fire yet again, this time for defensively locking down a Discord server after people wouldn’t stop calling the company “Microslop.” More specifically, Microsoft Streisanded themselves after they tried to ban the term on its Copilot discord server. When people found creative ways to get around the ban, Microsoft decided to lock down the entire server.
When called out for that by frustrated users, Microsoft tried to blame the entire incident on “spammers” who were trying to post “harmful content”:
“The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us, adding that the “blocking of terms like ‘Microslop’ and some others associated with this spam campaign were temporary while the company worked to implement better safeguards.”
Microsoft executives don’t really seem to want to engage in any serious introspection into their rushed adoption of AI in ways customers don’t always appreciate. Most recently, their integration of Copilot into Notepad opened up a major cybersecurity vulnerability.
This whole incident will, of course, only result in users doubling down on their criticisms:
These companies have invested untold oceans of cash into a technology that may have utility for many, but hasn’t, to date, been all that profitable. Many AI companies have layered under-cooked automation on top of very broken systems (see: health insurance or journalism or war) in problematic ways, raising questions about company valuations and systemically poor judgement. All while AI’s immense energy consumption has caused companies to disregard already tepid climate goals.
Instead of engaging in real conversation about these issues you tend to get a lot of generalized defensiveness (“why can’t you simply praise us for our innovation?”), all of which has been made worse by the tech sector’s enthusiastic coddling of authoritarianism.
The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially a World Cup for baseball, 20 nations are playing against one another in a banger of a tune-up for the Major League Baseball season. It’s a flamboyant delight, with cultural celebrations such as the Italian team doing a shot of espresso after they hit home runs in the dugout.
The American team is managed by former major leaguer Mark DeRosa. While I won’t bore you with too many gory details, DeRosa royally fucked up during the tail end of pool play. Through a complicated series of winning scenarios and tie-breaker rules, the American team headed into its game with Italy needing to win to secure its place in the playoffs. DeRosa, it appears, was under an entirely different impression. These were his comments before the game with Italy.
After the game, he mentioned that some of his players were “dragging” on the field and he essentially put in a lineup that didn’t include many of the normal starting players. If you don’t know professional baseball culture, there’s a reason for the dragging. With nothing at stake, it’s pretty clear DeRosa thought the playoffs were already secured… and told his players to go out and celebrate that night. They likely did, late into the night and with the help of plenty of alcohol. Then they lost to Italy, which meant they needed Italy to win or to get into tie-breaking scenarios against their next game with Mexico. They got lucky in that Italy did beat Mexico in the next game, but the fuck up took things out of the hands of Team USA, leaving it up to their rivals.
You may not care about any of the above, but baseball fans do. DeRosa, in his day job, is also an employee of MLB, serving as a commentator on the MLB channel. MLB itself took down the original video of DeRosa’s comments and put up a version in which you don’t hear DeRosa’s mistake nor his admitting later that he screwed up.
“The league appears to have taken down video that included DeRosa’s mistaken comments from MLB.com, with attempts by The Athletic to access it yielding error messages early Wednesday morning. A version of the interview that remained on MLB Network’s Facebook page appeared to be condensed and did not include the now-scrutinized remarks.”
I really don’t know what MLB was thinking here. American baseball fans would somehow forget what they heard DeRosa say? A screw up that could have bounced the American team from the WBC entirely would somehow fly under the radar?
Regardless, the Streisand Effect took over and now then the reporting on all of this went into wide circulation. In discussing MLB’s attempt at the hidden ball trick, reporting on DeRosa’s fuck up went through another, and larger, round of reporting. By trying to hide what DeRosa did, MLB made it public all the more.
This is classic Streisand Effect stuff at work and I can barely believe that Major League Baseball thought this isn’t exactly what would occur.
In short, Brendan Carr’s continual threats and unconstitutional distortion of the FCC’s “equal opportunity” rule (also known as the “equal time” rule) resulted in a candidate getting exponentially more attention than they ever would have if Brendan Carr wasn’t such a weird, censorial zealot.
If only there was a name for this sort of phenomenon?
Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, there’s no evidence the GOP specifically targeted Talarico in any coherent, strategic sense. This entire thing appears to have occurred because CBS lawyers — focused on numerous regulatory issues before the Trump administration, didn’t want to offend the extremist authoritarian censors at Trump’s FCC. It’s always about the money.
CBS tried to do damage control and claim they never directly threatened Colbert, but you can tell by the way they’re being a little dodgy about ownership of those claims (demanding no direct attribution to a specific person “on background”) they likely aren’t true:
Phil Gonzalez from CBS, welcome to the Verge’s background policy www.theverge.com/policy/88000…
Colbert’s response to the claim he wasn’t threatened was… diplomatic:
Amusingly some of the news outlets covering this story (like Variety here) couldn’t be bothered to even mention that CBS has numerous regulatory issues before the Trump FCC, which is why they folded like a pile of rain-soaked street corner cardboard at the slightest pressure from the Trump FCC.
As we’ve noted repeatedly, Brendan Carr has absolutely no legal legs to stand on here. His abuse of the equal opportunity rule is equal parts unconstitutional and incoherent. CBS (and any other network with bottomless legal budgets) could easily win in court (I wager they could even get many lawyers to defend them pro bono), but Ellison (and his nepo baby son) have a much bigger ideological mission in mind.
Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That’s the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. “We can always get more china,” says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can’t, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won’t be buying from the US any time soon, much less selling replacement china at the expected price point.
This is worse than the inmates running the asylum. This is more akin to a bunch of Nurse Ratchets running the asylum. The asylum becomes more cruel and less competent with each passing day. Cruelty isn’t generally associated with intelligence. And that truism remains unbothered during Trump’s second ascendance to the Oval Office.
Trump and his fans spent years stoking conspiracy theories about Democratic party members and the wholesale sexual abuse of children. These conspiracy theories led to actual violence that those participating in these conspiracy theories refuse to take responsibility for.
New York financier/pimp Jeffrey Epstein was apparently a friend to everyone rich or powerful. And he gave them what they couldn’t get elsewhere: sexual access to minors. Some of this remains alleged. But some of it was the supporting evidence for Epstein’s conviction. Epstein is dead and I can imagine lots of his friends and acquaintances breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported he had (allegedly) died by suicide in jail.
A resurgence of interest in Epstein’s files posed a unique problem for Donald Trump. On one hand, Trump had spent years stoking interest in these files, claiming they would expose a vast Democratic party cabal solely interested in sexually exploiting minors. But he also knew these files would reveal things about his own relationship with Epstein and, very likely, contain implications about Trump’s interest in much younger women.
After a period of proclaiming the Epstein files to be something no one was interested in (blatantly false, no matter which side of the MAGA you fall on), Trump and his DOJ decided to move forward with a staggered release of these documents. Congress actually managed to get in on the governance game (something lately completely subsumed by Trump’s desire to rule solely from the confines of the Oval Office via executive orders) and passed a bill that required a full release by December 19.
This didn’t happen. GOP leaders made sure it wouldn’t happen by declaring a Congressional holiday recess well in advance of the holidays to ensure GOP reps would be safely back in their home states before the release of additional Epstein files.
We got whatever the DOJ chose to release. And that release was a combination of stuff we’ve mostly already seen, some (heavily-redacted) stuff we hadn’t seen yet, and more than 200 pages of fully-redacted documents. We already knew we were in for a whole lot of opacity. What we possibly didn’t expect was the DOJ attempting to hide stuff after the fact.
At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump’s DOJ is either too dumb to know or too stupid to care about the Streisand Effect. The quickest way to draw attention to something you don’t want people paying attention to is to perform a hasty deletion.
Anyone who was paying attention to this release had already saved the documents to a bunch of cloud services and static storage devices. Those who were paying attention past the initial release would know if the government decided to bury something after the fact.
Of course, the government did try to do that. The people with the most power and money seem to think they’re the smartest people walking the earth because they’ve fully bought into the meritocracy illusion. And they’re always wrong. Being rich or powerful doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes it easier to shrug off your losses.
The DOJ tried to do that after people outside of the imaginary “meritocracy” pointed out this post facto deletion.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche early Sunday said the image was removed from the website after learning there were concerns about women in the photo, “so we pulled that photo down.”
“It has nothing to do with President Trump,” said Blanche on NBC’s “Meet the Press.
That’s impossible to believe because everything this particular federal government does has everything to do with Donald Trump. It’s a system of supposed checks and balances manned entirely by people who demand that the moment Poochie isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking “Where’s Poochie?”
Here’s the most high profile image the DOJ deleted (albeit temporarily) just in case it tries to do it again. Take a look in the drawer to find a photo of the current president next to someone the DOJ now implies was “a victim.”
After everyone noticed this premature burial, the DOJ restored the files, pretending this was all about protecting victims of crimes committed by Epstein and his associates (Donald Trump among them), rather than a misguided attempt to rewrite history while this particular history was still being published.
The Department of Justice on Sunday restored online a photo from the Jeffrey Epstein files that contained images showing President Donald Trump after backlash over its removal.
[…]
“The Southern District of New York flagged an image of President Trump for potential further action to protect victims,” the DOJ said in a post on the social media site X.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice temporarily removed the image for further review. After the review, it was determined there is no evidence that any Epstein victims are depicted in the photograph, and it has been reposted without any alteration or redaction.”
I’d love to be able to take the DOJ at its word. But it has steadily destroyed that option ever since [gestures at the long history of the DOJ, but emphasizing its recent actions with much more demonstrative hand gestures] it has been the (alleged) Department of Justice. But it gets even less of a benefit of a doubt here because we are absolutely right to assume this DOJ considers Donald Trump to be the victim of any criminal acts he may have actually perpetrated while getting cozy with Mr. Epstein.
At some point, the Trump DOJ is going to insist that if Trump ever participated in the rape of underage women, he was forced to do by Antifa protesters backed by billions in George Soros funding. He will have been the victim of a “woke” cabal that recognized him for the sexual predator he is and then used his predilections against him.
This move by the DOJ to temporarily bury a photo of Trump makes it clear it will always do whatever it thinks might please Trump even when it’s immediately obvious it cares more about fluffing Trump than serving the nation.
Since we know that FCC Chair Brendan Carr sometimes reads what we write here at Techdirt, I figured I’d post this one just for him and hopes that he watches it, seeing as we know that, thanks to his own mafioso-like tactics, his good friends at Sinclair Broadcasting (along with Nexstar) refused to show Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night in Washington DC where Carr lives and works. You sure missed a good opening monologue. So I figured I’d help him out by making sure it got as widely seen as possible.
Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can’t control or doesn’t own. Here’s Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop:
An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open broadcasters, obtained by Bounces, requested that broadcasters censor any possible protests or other reactions to President Donald Trump’s presence at Sunday’s U.S. Open men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.
Here’s the key text from the USTA email obtained by Bounces:
“With respect to Broadcast Coverage, the President will be shown on the World Feed and the Ashe Court Feed during the opening anthem ceremony. We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity, including ENG [Electronic News Gathering] coverage.”
Yeah, that’s just sad. The USTA already scheduled Trump’s visit to coincide with the National Anthem part of the programming to better hide the boos behind the expected cheers for the American flag and the singing of the national anthem. But sooner or later, the camera is going to pan to Trump and even a stadium loaded with millionaires and influencers is going to send at least a few boos Trump’s way.
The nice thing about this cowardly ask is that it’s just an ask. It’s not a demand. It’s not part of the broadcasting agreement. And while it could certainly play a factor in future contracts if ABC and/or ESPN go rogue and revel in the boos cascading down on Trump’s whiny shoulders, there’s nothing in this email that threatens anything more than future unhappiness if broadcasters do not comply with the email.
What’s tacitly admitted here by this set of instructions is that the USTA fully expects Trump to be booed, possibly quite frequently. After all, the last time he showed up at the US Open — shortly after his announcement of his campaign for president — he spent most of his time being loudly booed by the New York crowd.
He hasn’t gotten any more popular during the ten years between US Open appearances. Sure, he’s president again, but he’s actually far more polarizing this time around. Those covering Trump’s return to the US Open (as the guest of Rolex, no less) should not only broadcast audible booing, but comment on this reaction and who it’s directed at. After all, broadcasters don’t shy away from naming the target of audible booing when it’s an athlete on the field/court. Why should they pretend the thing that’s happening right at that moment simply doesn’t exist just because the USTA has opted for preemptive capitulation to a bully who does nothing but punch down?
Anyway, this is the real reason you’ve read this entire post: footage of Trump being booed at the 2025 US Open. It happened and even if ESPN won’t show it to you, journalist (and US Open attendee) Marisa Kabas of the always-essential The Handbasket has got you covered. Enjoy!
BREAKING: Trump makes his first appearance at the US Open. There were audible boos and a few light claps. Important to stress the stadium is at most 10% full and the start time has been pushed to 2:30pm ET.
NEW — Trump, along with Jared Kushner, Pam Bondi and others stand for the National Anthem. Crowd boos as the American flag is unfurled on the court. Stadium is still only about 50% full.
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire to counter the US government’s moves, people are also coming up with new systems to warn people about what is happening in their community.
For example, the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network sends and receives warnings about nearby ICE activity using text messages. On its home page, it claims to have over 470,000 subscribers currently. That approach, while effective, might be a little basic for some people, and a number of smartphone apps have been created to meet the need for something more sophisticated. One of them is ICEBlock, which came to the notice of a wider public thanks to a CNN report on 30 June. Its developer, Joshua Aaron, told CNN that his free app was designed to be an early warning system for users when ICE is operating nearby. Its slogan is “See Something, Tap Something”:
Users can add a pin on a map showing where they spotted agents — along with optional notes, like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. Other users within a five-mile radius will then receive a push alert notifying them of the sighting.
Aaron says he does not want users to interfere with ICE’s operations directly, and when a user logs a sighting, the app warns: “Please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only. It is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Aaron has also tried to minimize the risk that the platform is flooded with false reports:
Although ICEBlock has no surefire way of guaranteeing the accuracy of user reports, Aaron says he’s built safeguards to prevent users from spamming the platform with fake sightings. Users can only report a sighting within five miles of their location, and they can only report once every five minutes. Reports are automatically deleted after four hours.
Privacy for users is naturally a key concern:
ICEBlock doesn’t collect personal data, and users are completely anonymous, according to Aaron. It’s only available on iOS because Aaron says the app would have to collect information that could ultimately put users at risk to provide the same experience on Android.
Reassuring users of those privacy protections will likely be key to growing ICEBlock’s user base, given how the government is building a database to aid in its deportation efforts.
I’ll have to watch the clip myself but surely it sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ICE officers. As you stated, there’s been a 500% increase in violence against ICE agents, law enforcement officers across the country who are just simply trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from our communities.
Despite her use of a misleading statistic about assaults on ICE officers, Leavitt’s criticism of ICEBlock naturally led many people to investigate it. In fact, soon after her comment, ICEBlock became the top social networking app in the App Store— ahead of Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook — a position it still holds at the time of writing. In the CNN interview, Aaron said his app had more than 20,000 users, but thanks to Leavitt the number is more than ten times that. According to a story on Wired, ICEBlock now has over 240,000 users, and Trump administration officials have threatened to prosecute Aaron for creating the app, and CNN for reporting on it.
Another app that aims to report and share sightings of ICE activities is Hack Latino. On its GoFundMe page, which is no longer accepting donations, the organizer claims “30,000 app users and 50,000 website visitors”. As someone from Guatemala who uses the Hack Latino app explains in an article on the Rest of the World site, the app works like Waze, which provides live traffic updates: “It sends you a message saying there’s a Border Patrol ahead and that you need to turn back. Most migrants are protecting themselves with it.” However, the same article warns that the US government has taken note of the rise of these apps, and is already working to counter them. It quotes Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that supports migrants and refugees:
The U.S. government, said Rios, is hiring companies that can identify users who post information about raids on these platforms.
“Many of us no longer post all the information,” said Rios. Instead, details on immigration sweeps are “being shared on paper from person to person, or through photos and WhatsApp.”
And so the contest between the hunters and the hunted continues.
When you’re a huge country, and a communist one to boot, the Streisand Effect is a thing that’s just going to inevitably happen to you at times. China has definitely lived this experience. The government is the unfortunate combination of incredibly authoritarian and completely devoid of a sense of humor. The result is the serious belief that it can control everything through sheer force of will, when it very much cannot. China tried to silence Taiwan during the heights of the COVID pandemic, but it only propelled the messaging. China tried to hide its Muslim concentration camps within online maps by blanking them out, that only pointed researchers to exactly where something terrible must be hiding. China attempted a global blackout of a protest song in support of Hong Kong’s independence, but the result was the same song hitting the top of the charts for a stretch.
Authoritarians rarely learn from their own failures until they’re out of power. And, so, they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. The government in Hong Kong, certainly at the request of Beijing, has banned a mobile game called Reversed Front: Bonfire because of its anti-government content.
Anyone who has the game downloaded on their phone risks an offense, and players who have made in-app purchases could face punishment for providing funding to developer ESC Taiwan, according to a notice from Hong Kong police. The game has since been removed from Apple and Android’s app stores in Hong Kong. It remains available in the U.S. via Apple’s App Store, and also currently has a Steam page. As of Thursday morning, Aftermath was not able to access the game on the US Google Play Store; according to Bloomberg, it was removed from the Google Play Store in May for issues unrelated to the current ban. We’ve reached out to Google for comment. (Update, 6/12/25, 7:20pm–A spokesperson for Google pointed us to an AP article noting the game was removed from the Play store “because it did not prohibit users from adopting hateful language in naming.”)
Google’s excuse for its capitulation aside (I’m not entirely sure what that “hateful language” thing even means, even after reading the AP article), far too many non-Chinese platforms are complying with attempting to disappear this game in Hong Kong. The objectionable content here is purely political, with the CCP showing once again just how thin its skin really is. And the ban essentially makes the game’s entire point perfectly.
Reversed Front: Bonfire, which released in April, has the player “pledge allegiance to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Tibet, Kazakhs, Uyghur, Manchuria or the Rebel Alliance of Cathaysian and Southeast Asia to overthrow the Communist regime,” according the game’s website. Or, players can choose to lead the Chinese Communist Party. This plays out in visual novel-esque storylines dispersed between simple, turn-based battle segments. Characters with different abilities and skills are unlocked with gacha mechanics.
An ESC Taiwan representative told Aftermath via email, “The content of Reversed Front: Bonfire includes various political propositions existing in East Asia today, not only self-determination and separatism but also the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. We allow supporters of the Chinese Communist Party to defend their political views in the game, resulting in two different storylines.”
They continued, “The fact remains that while we dare to let the Chinese Communist Party express itself in the game, the Party doesn’t allow dissidents to speak out.”
But ultimately the ban hasn’t been terribly successful, as the developer of the game has claimed that interest in the game has surged since the ban in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s removal of the game from app stores has been a boon for Reversed Front: Bonfire, the representative said. “The Hong Kong government’s ban on Reversed Front: Bonfire indeed made millions of people, who previously didn’t know about the game, aware of its existence.”
That is certainly the case for this writer. While I’m probably not really the target audience for the game, I now know about it purely because of the Hong Kong government’s attempt to silence the game. And I don’t for one second believe that the threat of police action has somehow stamped out all instances of the game in Hong Kong either. In fact, it would not shock me at all to learn that the ban has created more interest in the game on the island than there had been before the ban.
The Streisand Effect in action, in other words. May China never really learn from its mistakes.
