There’s a particular kind of person who cheers when the president deploys military forces against American cities over the objections of their elected leaders. They call themselves patriots. They wrap themselves in the flag while applauding the systematic demolition of everything that flag once represented. They claim to love America while celebrating the transformation of American governance into something the founders would have recognized as tyranny.
So let’s settle this question once and for all: who are the “real” Americans in this moment? Those cheering the militarization of domestic law enforcement, or those defending the constitutional principles that make America worth defending?
The Theater of Fake Patriotism
When Donald Trump announces plans to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago over the explicit objections of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, his supporters don’t see an authoritarian power grab. They see strength. When he federalizes state forces using Title 10 to override local democratic authority, they don’t recognize constitutional vandalism. They see Trump “getting tough on crime.”
This represents the complete inversion of American patriotism. The same people who spent decades lecturing about states’ rights and federal overreach now cheer the most dramatic federal military deployment against local authority in modern American history. What changed wasn’t constitutional principle—it was who holds the whip hand.
It turns out “states’ rights” was never about principle—it was just about who had the whip hand.
Funny how “federal tyranny” became “law and order” the moment their guy was holding the federal badge.
What Real Patriotism Actually Looks Like
Real patriotism in this moment looks like Illinois Governor Pritzker standing up to federal overreach: “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”
Real patriotism looks like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson defending his city’s right to democratic self-governance: “There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them.”
But real patriotism isn’t just for elected officials. It’s for every citizen who refuses to normalize military occupation of American cities, who votes against candidates who support domestic militarization, who organizes to defend local democratic institutions, who calls their representatives to demand they choose constitutional principle over partisan loyalty. The founders didn’t create this system to be defended by politicians—they created it to be defended by citizens who understand that democracy dies when good people do nothing.
The Authoritarian Inversion
The people cheering Trump’s military deployments have internalized a fundamentally un-American understanding of patriotism. They’ve confused loyalty to the country with loyalty to whoever happens to control federal power. They’ve mistaken submission to authority for love of freedom. They’ve traded the messy, contentious, argumentative democracy the founders created for the clean efficiency of strongman rule.
They’ve been conditioned to see their fellow Americans as enemies to be defeated rather than citizens to be persuaded. Democratic governors become “radical leftists.” Sanctuary cities become “lawless zones.” Local officials exercising their constitutional authority become “obstructionists” who deserve federal punishment.
This is how republics die—not through foreign invasion but through the systematic redefinition of opposition as treason, of constitutional limits as obstacles, of democratic accountability as weakness.
The Pattern of Militarization
What Trump is doing follows a clear pattern that any serious student of authoritarianism would recognize: declare emergencies that don’t exist, militarize responses to civilian problems, target political opponents, normalize federal military presence in domestic settings, and use military deployment to intimidate broader opposition.
Crime rates are at historic lows in most American cities, but Trump claims unprecedented lawlessness requiring military intervention. Notice that the cities being targeted—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York—are all led by Democratic officials who oppose Trump’s policies. This isn’t about crime; it’s about punishing political opposition.
Each deployment becomes precedent for the next, each “emergency” power becomes standard operating procedure, each violation of constitutional limits becomes the new baseline. The message isn’t just directed at the mayors and governors being overruled—it’s directed at every elected official considering whether to resist federal overreach.
This is the playbook authoritarians have used throughout history to transform democratic systems into military rule.
The Constitutional Crisis
Let’s be clear about what’s actually happening: the president is using military force against domestic populations over the objections of their elected representatives. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s the military occupation of American cities whose only crime was electing leaders who refuse to comply with federal demands.
The Constitution these fake patriots claim to revere contains specific protections against exactly this kind of military deployment. ThePosse Comitatus Act exists precisely to prevent federal military forces from being used for domestic law enforcement. The federalist system exists to prevent any one level of government from overwhelming the others.
But constitutional protections only work when people are willing to defend them. When large portions of the population actively cheer their violation, when elected officials refuse to exercise oversight, when courts create immunity doctrines that place executives above accountability—the Constitution becomes paper rather than framework.
The Real American Tradition
The real American tradition is suspicion of concentrated federal power, especially military power deployed against domestic populations. The founders who wrote the Constitution had just fought a war against precisely this kind of military occupation by a distant government that claimed to know better than local communities.
As James Madison warned: “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” They created a system specifically designed to prevent any one person from wielding the kind of power Trump now deploys against American cities.
The real American tradition is messy federalism, where different levels of government check each other’s power, where local communities get to make decisions about their own governance, where federal authority has limits and those limits are enforced.
The real American tradition is that when you don’t like how a city is governed, you work to change it through democratic means—you run candidates, organize voters, make arguments, build coalitions. You don’t send in federal troops to impose your preferred policies through military force.
Who the Founders Would Recognize
If the founders could observe this moment, who would they recognize as defending American principles? The people cheering federal military deployment against elected local officials? Or the governors and mayors standing up to federal intimidation, the citizens defending their right to democratic self-governance, the Americans who understand that constitutional principles matter more than partisan advantage?
The Declaration of Independence was written by people who understood that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from their capacity to deploy military force against opposition.
The Choice Before Us
We face a fundamental choice about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to be a nation where local democratic decisions get overruled by federal military force? Where constitutional constraints get swept aside whenever the executive declares an “emergency”?
Or do we want to remain a constitutional republic where power is divided, where military force is not used against domestic populations, where even presidents must respect constitutional limits?
The people cheering Trump’s militarization have made their choice. They’ve chosen strongman efficiency over constitutional process, federal dominance over democratic federalism, military occupation over civilian governance.
The rest of us need to make ours. We can organize, vote, protest, and demand that our representatives defend constitutional principles. We can refuse to normalize military occupation as “law enforcement.” We can choose to be citizens, or we can be subjects polishing the boots that march over us.
The Test of Our Time
Every generation of Americans faces a test of whether they’re worthy of their inheritance. Our test is whether we’ll defend constitutional government against military rule, preserve democratic federalism against federal dominance, maintain civilian control against militarization.
The people cheering Trump’s military deployments have already failed this test. They’ve chosen tribal loyalty over constitutional principle, the aesthetics of strength over the substance of freedom.
The rest of us still have time to pass it. But only if we’re willing to call this what it is: not law enforcement but military occupation, not patriotism but authoritarianism, not strength but the systematic destruction of everything that once made America worth defending.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And military deployment against domestic populations over the objections of elected local officials is tyranny, not patriotism.
The real Americans are the ones willing to say so—and willing to act on it.
That’s what real patriotism looks like when democracy is under assault.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
The CDC has plunged into chaos. Dr. Susan Monarez, the newly minted CDC Director, a role she held for a matter of mere weeks, has been fired by the Trump administration. We actually wrote about Monarez previously, as she was engaged with both the CDC team that was the target of an attempted mass shooting in Atlanta, as well as the broader CDC staff, largely over their concerns that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. was both putting them in danger with his bullshit conspiracy theories and that Kennedy’s theories were completely at odds with good science. CDC, along with the broader HHS agencies, have gone through a large number of layoffs, firings, and resignations. I’ve joked before that Kennedy is responsible for more loss of brain matter at our nations health agencies than any worm could hope to achieve.
But this ultimately isn’t a joke. We traditionally staff agencies like CDC with very, very smart people for a reason. Life and death reasons. Pandemic reasons. Child safety reasons. And playing a cavalier game with these people is not smart. Nor is treating them like pawns in someone’s personal political agenda, which is exactly what Kennedy is doing.
Lawyers representing Dr Monarez said her sacking was illegal, and alleged she was targeted by Kennedy because she refused “to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives”.
Other reports suggest that she was given an ultimatum directly from Kennedy: support the things I say about vaccines as well as our updated vaccination schedules, or resign. That’s not someone who is looking for “gold standard science,” a phrase Kennedy loves to use but clearly doesn’t understand. Instead, it’s someone who has a conclusion in mind and simply wants the science to be mocked up to make it look like he’s right.
The White House came pretty damned close to admitting as much in this hilarious back and forth.
On Wednesday, Dr Monarez’s lawyers issued a statement saying that she had chosen “protecting the public over serving a political agenda”.
The White House statement announcing the termination of her post said: “As her attorney’s statement makes abundantly clear, Susan Monarez is not aligned with the president’s agenda.”
Yes, you asshats, she made it clear that she wants to protect the public instead. Your response sure makes it sound like you’re acknowledging that she was asked to serve the political agenda instead of protecting the public.
And she isn’t the only one. Several high-ranking CDC staffers resigned in the wake of her firing in protest. CDC staff who didn’t resign lined the outside of CDC offices and clapped for their former colleagues as they exited the building.
Demetre Daskalakis, who was director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said recent policy changes surrounding the COVID vaccine threatened lives and there had been an “intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines.” Other departing officials include CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry and Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.
Daskalakis, responding to a question about what Kennedy should be asked if he were to appear at a Senate hearing, said: “Has he ever been briefed by a CDC expert on anything? Specifically, measles, COVID-19, flu? I think people should ask him that.
“The answer is no. No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics. He’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts, who really are the world’s experts in this area. Perhaps he has alternate experts that he may trust more than the experts at CDC that the rest of the world regards as the best scientists in these areas,” he said.
It’s hard to know how to even respond. We have the worst outbreak of measles in several decades… and Kennedy never sought or received a briefing on it from the CDC? Kennedy is radically altering the vaccine schedules for children and for COVID vaccines… and he never got a readout on the science of either from the CDC? This brain-wormed growl-monster ended half a billion dollars worth of federal funding for mRNA vaccines generally… and didn’t get any input from CDC on that decision?
I half expect this to turn out to be untrue and that briefings of some sort did in fact occur. If not, then holy shit, Congress needs to start firing up some hearings and get to the bottom of what is occurring at HHS, because all of this uninformed chaos is going to result in very real deaths.
Congress has absolutely zero constitutional authority to investigate a private website for its editorial decisions. Zero. None. This is First Amendment 101.
Yet House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Cybersecurity Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Mace have decided otherwise. In a letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander, these two Republicans are demanding that Wikipedia hand over editor identities, internal communications, and arbitration records because some studies suggest there might be bias in Wikipedia articles about Israel-Palestine issues.
Imagine for a moment if Democratic members of Congress sent an identical letter to Fox News, demanding they explain their editorial choices on Israel coverage and turn over internal communications, source identities, and decision-making records. Comer would be on every cable news show screaming about government censorship and the death of the First Amendment. And he’d be right.
But because it’s Wikipedia—a platform that operates on transparent editing processes and neutral point of view policies—suddenly government intimidation is perfectly fine.
Government Doxxing With Official Letterhead
The letter’s requests read like a fishing expedition designed by people who fundamentally misunderstand both Wikipedia and the Constitution. They want:
Records of all editor conduct disputes and disciplinary actions
“Identifying and unique characteristics” of editor accounts, including IP addresses and activity logs
Internal communications about “coordination by nation state actors”
Analysis of “patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel”
Let’s translate that bureaucratic language. When they say “identifying and unique characteristics” and “IP addresses,” what they really mean is: they want to doxx Wikipedia editors. They’re demanding that Wikimedia turn over personal information about volunteer contributors so Congress can identify and potentially target people whose edits they don’t like.
That’s not oversight. That’s government-sponsored doxxing with official letterhead.
This isn’t oversight—it’s an attempt to intimidate volunteer editors and chill speech by threatening to expose their identities to government scrutiny. The fact that they’re specifically targeting coverage of Israel-Palestine issues makes the political motivation embarrassingly obvious.
What This Is Really About: Working the Refs
Don’t be fooled by the concern trolling about “foreign manipulation” and “academic institutions subsidized by taxpayer dollars.” This investigation has nothing to do with protecting Wikipedia’s integrity and everything to do with destroying it.
This is “working the refs” taken to its logical extreme—and it’s exactly the kind of government pressure that should terrify anyone who actually cares about free speech. The goal isn’t to fix supposed bias; it’s to create actual bias by making editors afraid to include information that doesn’t align with MAGA talking points.
Can’t win the argument on Wikipedia using reliable sources and neutral editing processes? No problem—just get Congress to investigate until editors start self-censoring out of fear that their personal information might end up in the hands of hostile government officials.
The chilling effect isn’t an accidental side effect. It’s the entire point.
Wikipedia’s strength comes from its army of volunteer editors who contribute their time and expertise to building a free, accessible encyclopedia. These volunteers now have to worry that Congress might demand their personal information if politicians don’t like their edits.
Think about what this means in practice: a volunteer editor researching Israeli settlement policies or documenting civilian casualties in Gaza now has to consider whether adding well-sourced information might result in Congress demanding their IP address and personal details. That’s not oversight—that’s intimidation designed to silence inconvenient facts.
The Wikimedia Foundation should tell Comer and Mace exactly where they can stick their unconstitutional demands. Wikipedia doesn’t answer to Congress about its editorial decisions, and Congress has no business trying to intimidate volunteer editors.
Free Speech Absolutists Suddenly Go Quiet
Here’s what’s particularly galling, though not at all surprising: the same people who spent years screaming about “government censorship” when social media companies made actually independent editorial decisions are now dead silent about actual government officials actually threatening to investigate a platform for its speech.
Where are all those passionate defenders of free speech now? Hey Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger! Where’s the outrage about government overreach? Where are the warnings about authoritarianism?
Oh right, they only care about “free speech” when it means protecting their ability to spread misinformation without consequences. When it comes to actual First Amendment violations by government officials trying to intimidate encyclopedia editors, suddenly they’re nowhere to be found.
Wikipedia Has a Well-Known Reality Bias
Wikipedia isn’t perfect. No human endeavor is. But it’s built on transparent processes, neutral point of view policies, and verifiable sources. When those processes lead to conclusions that don’t align with certain political narratives, the problem isn’t with Wikipedia.
The problem is with people who can’t accept that reality doesn’t always conform to their preferred version of events.
If Comer and Mace think Wikipedia articles about Israel-Palestine issues are biased, they’re free to create accounts and try to improve them using reliable sources and Wikipedia’s established editing processes. That’s how the system works. But, of course, Comer and Mace know that such action would require them to do actual work, and likely would fail as they’d be unable to back up their assertions with credible sources.
What they can’t do—or at least, what they shouldn’t be able to do in a country with a functioning First Amendment—is use the power of government to intimidate editors into compliance with their political preferences.
But here we are.
The Wikimedia Foundation should fight this tooth and nail. And every American who actually cares about free speech should be paying attention to what happens next. Because if Congress can investigate Wikipedia for “bias,” they can investigate any platform, any media outlet, any website that publishes information they don’t like.
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Trump’s desire to punish, oust, and eject anyone who isn’t white and/or MAGA enough from this country means the preferred outlets for his aggression are running out of manpower.
Tons of federal officers have already been rerouted to immigration enforcement, leaving those left with the unenviable task of actually catching the kinds of criminals Trump claims to be concerned about understaffed and underfunded.
Meanwhile, ICE just can’t catch people fast enough, whether or not they’re dangerous criminals. (90% of the time, they aren’t.) This administration considers 3,000 arrests per day to be the minimum entry requirement to the Greatness that is the Making America Great Again psychosis.
To that end, the DHS has altered its age requirements, expanding the upper and lower levels of the age brackets. To be sure, the DHS isn’t interested in (nor is it going to attract) anyone in the 18-20 year age range. This move is aimed entirely at targeting those most likely to find this invitation attractive: aging bigots who have been forcibly retired by their former law enforcement employers, especially if they’ve been sent out to pasture for being old-school racist in a new-school world.
The masked marauders that make up most of ICE aren’t there for the glory. Maybe they’re just there for the paycheck. Whatever the case, there’s not enough of them. The get-off-my-lawn crowd can now be paid handsomely for converting their prejudices to action.
This federal law enforcement cannibalization also affects the FBI, which has plenty of its own work to do as the official extension of Trump’s political and personal animus. Understandably, the FBI is struggling to maintain staff levels now that it’s clear it’s either do the dirty work of aspiring fascists or get the fuck out. A lot of people have left. Those that remain are steadily finding themselves riding around in cars with ICE officers or wandering around the streets of Washington D.C. looking for some laws to enforce.
Those who haven’t been brainwormed by MAGA aren’t happy with the new status quo, as this New York Times report notes. It’s easier than ever to get into the FBI — a Trumpian move that isn’t exactly endearing itself with the rank-and-file:
Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.
The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.
I think the NYT is being far too kind in its assessment of the situation. I don’t doubt thousands of FBI employees are planning to leave. But it’s not about budget cuts. It’s about no longer desiring to work for these pricks. And by pricks, I mean everyone from Kash Patel to Dan Bongino to Pam Bondi to the president himself.
When you’re leaking talent, you might be inclined to patch the leaks with whatever warm bodies you might find willing to be utilized as hole filler. But the FBI can’t reverse a brain drain by prioritizing quantity over quality. Of course, this administration — including the people currently running the FBI (into the ground) — isn’t competent enough to mitigate the consequences of its destructive actions, which means that the FBI is going to continue to bleed talent that will never be replaced during this administration.
Chris O’Leary, a former F.B.I. agent and senior counterterrorism official, called the plan the latest example of “generational destruction” at the agency.
If the bureau’s leaders “knew anything about leading organizations,” he said, “they would know that when you lower the standards, your mission effectiveness goes down with that, because not only does the capability of each individual agent decline, but your reputation, both domestically and globally, takes a hit.”
It’s quite obvious the current “leadership” doesn’t know a goddamn thing about “leading.” That much cannot be argued. Even the “leadership” is unwilling to argue this point, claiming the lowering of standards aligns with its dumbing down of the FBI, which is the kind of self-own we’ve come to expect from this administration.
The new plan, current and former agents say, seems to be part of a larger effort by Mr. Patel to have the bureau focus more on street crime, rather than on complicated cases touching on financial fraud, public corruption and national security.
So, we’re hiring feds to do the work of beat cops because that’s all the FBI can get at this point and that’s all Patel can hope to do given the number of self-inflicted wounds sustained by this administration.
Welcome aboard, G-men! Sharpen those pencils and grab those pads! You’ll be doing the federal equivalent of meter reading in no time, which will, fortunately, probably not expose your utter lack of investigative expertise!
If there’s any justice in this nation (is there? I’m asking seriously), courts are going to start rejecting every proclamation of “experience and expertise” in criminal complaints and warrants as literally unbelievable. And I wouldn’t put this stint in law enforcement on your resume. It’s hardly an achievement to collect a paycheck periodically from an employer headed by people even less qualified to do your job than you are.
The bills were good and popular, generally. And by and large, Republicans voted against both of them. Yet Republicans will repeatedly take credit for the impact of both bills when talking to their constituents. I’ve lost track of the Republican reps, senators, and governors who have taken credit for ARPA improvements in local communities (especially broadband).
One major reason Republicans get away with this kind of lying is we’ve let policymakers and corporations eviscerate local news at the hands of mindless consolidation and the extraction class. Neither the hedge-fund hollowed husk of your local paper or right-wing fake broadcast news machines like Sinclair broadcasting are going to clearly tell the South Carolina public that Mace is lying.
“They can just go online to get the truth,” I hear someone say, ignoring that 54 percent of U.S. adults operate at or below a 6th grade reading level, and the internet has been actively been filled with badly automated bullshit and propaganda at a scale never before seen in human history.
The national media generally finds infrastructure boring because it doesn’t get clicks. And when they do press lawmakers like Mace on these kinds of lies, like CNN tried to do, politicians like Mace will just lie some more without any press follow up.
For example, at a recent South Carolina town hall, Mace again not only lied and insisted she was directly responsible for getting the $195 million infrastructure bill money needed for traffic improvements, the media was somehow covering up her involvement:
“One of the things the press will not tell you: I am one of the leading members of Congress who’s gotten resources for our state,” Mace said. “In fact, our office assisted in getting the largest infrastructure grant in South Carolina history, at $195 million earlier this year. The press won’t tell you that.”
When someone from CNN tried to press Mace on that lie, she lied some more, insisting that she deserves credit because she later injected herself into the spending process:
“We fight over how we spend the money, how we appropriate it, but once the appropriations happen, I’m gonna make sure that South Carolina, that we get our fair share, because that money’s getting spent and our tax dollars in South Carolina is equal to anybody else’s in California, New York, Tennessee.”
Except when MAGA Republicans get involved in infrastructure bill spending fights, they routinely make things worse. Case in point: Republicans are effectively rewriting the part of the infrastructure bill that doles out $42.5 billion in broadband grants to not only eliminate affordability and equality requirements, but to try and slather Elon Musk with undeserved taxpayer subsidies, making the resulting broadband more expensive and shittier.
So no, voting against a bill, undermining the bill at every opportunity, then later injecting yourself into the process (in a way that, at best, probably didn’t actually help anybody) doesn’t really qualify as helping your constituents, unfortunately. With a lot of the infrastructure bill funding still slowly winding its way to the states, you’re going to see a lot more extremist MAGA lawmakers taking credit for policies they not only voted against, but repeatedly tried to undermine.
This isn’t helped by Dem lawmakers that lack the messaging competency to take loud (and annoyingly repetitive) credit for the successful policies they push. I study broadband access for a living, see first hand the direct good ARPA is doing for access, but between woeful Dem messaging and a broken press, I’m hard pressed to find voters who actually know why a local project happened and how it got funded.
That creates a vacuum for opportunistic liars like Mace to stumble into without much serious effort.
I’m starting to think that American is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia. Look, whatever your opinions on how the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its early days, I would hope we can all agree that it sucked. Think the government was far too restrictive, or lacked nuance in how it put forth restrictions, regarding lockdowns and the like? Hey, you know what, me too to some extent. On the other hand, you know, over a million Americans have died from the pandemic, so we need to be really careful with discussions about how to handle it.
I don’t think it will surprise anyone when I say I am not a fan of Donald Trump. That being said, if you were to ask me what his signature accomplishment was during his first term, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was Operation Warp Speed, which helped to bring us the COVID vaccines. But for his second term, Trump put RFK Jr. in charge of American health, which is why this signature accomplishment is being reduced to an approval for the fall COVID vaccines under the tightest restrictions yet.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved updated COVID-19 shots for the fall season on Aug. 27, implementing the tightest restrictions on who can access the vaccines since they became available.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the approval on social media platform X, saying emergency use authorizations for COVID-19 vaccines have been terminated and that the Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax immunizations are approved for “those at high risk.”
Under the updated approvals, only those over the age of 65 and people with existing health problems will be recommended the COVID-19 vaccine, according to federal guidelines.
Kennedy went on in a separate post to reiterate that he’d promised that vaccines would be available to everyone who still wanted them. But as is typical from Kennedy, the claim he’s keeping that promise is steeped in bullshit. With this new FDA approval with the included restrictions, there’s a lot we don’t know:
Will insurance cover the vaccines outside of those approved for groups?
Will doctors be willing to even prescribe them, a necessity now, if they fall outside of those groups?
Will there be punishments as a result of not adhering strictly to the FDA approval guidelines?
Depending on the answers to those questions, there indeed might be a great many people who suddenly can’t get COVID shots even if they want them, either due to an unwillingness to prescribe them by doctors fearful of reprisal, or because they simple can’t afford them if insurance doesn’t cover the shots.
We will begin to lose whatever benefits we’ve gained against COVID through widespread vaccination. And, yes, it’s certainly true that vaccination rates have waned as the disease has evolved to be less serious and deadly for most people.
But there’s nothing to say that it can’t roar back with a vengeance.
It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.
Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.
But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.
Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.
Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.
The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”
While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.
“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.
He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.
A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.
Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.
In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.
At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.
For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”
With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.
Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.
“The Taliban Gets DOGED”
At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”
Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.
Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”
“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”
“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.
He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”
In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.
While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
Timeline of Events
Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
Mar. 313:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
Mar. 317:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. ESTto 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.
USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.
He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.
As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.
Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.
After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.
Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)
The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.
“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”
It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.
When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”
Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.
Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.
But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.
Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.
Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.
While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.
In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.
When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.
Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.
Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.
When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.
Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.
But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.
It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.
But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.
When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.
Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.
The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.
Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.
They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.
Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.
During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.
A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.
Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”
As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.
Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”
USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.
Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”
At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”
George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”
Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.
In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?
“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”
If you’ve read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws. As of July 1st, South Dakota and Wyoming enacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures. These laws would potentially capture a broad range of non-pornographic content, including classic literature and art, and expose a wide range of platforms, of all sizes, to civil or criminal liability for not using age verification on every user. That includes social media networks like X, Reddit, and Discord; online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble; and streaming platforms like Netflix and Rumble—essentially, any site that allows user-generated or published content without gatekeeping access based on age.
These laws expand on the flawed logic from last month’s troubling Supreme Court decision, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which gave Texas the green light to require age verification for sites where at least one-third (33.3%) of the content is sexual materials deemed “harmful to minors.” Wyoming and South Dakota seem to interpret this decision to give them license to require age verification—and potential legal liability—for any website that contains ANY image, video, or post that contains sexual content that could be interpreted as harmful to minors. Platforms or websites may be able to comply by implementing an “age gate” within certain sections of their sites where, for example, user-generated content is allowed, or at the point of entry to the entire site.
Although these laws are in effect, we do not believe the Supreme Court’s decision in FSC v. Paxton gives these laws any constitutional legitimacy. You do not need a law degree to see the difference between the Texas law—which targets sites where a substantial portion (one third) of content is “sexual material harmful to minors”—and these laws, which apply to any site that contains even a single instance of such material. In practice, it is the difference between burdening adults with age gates for websites that host “adult” content, and burdening the entire internet, including sites that allow user-generated content or published content.
Wyoming’s law is also particularly extreme: rather than provide enforcement by the Attorney General, HB0043 is a “bounty” law that deputizes any resident with a child to file civil lawsuits against websites they believe are in violation, effectively turning anyone into a potential content cop. There is no central agency, no regulatory oversight, and no clear standard. Instead, the law invites parents in Wyoming to take enforcement for the entire state—every resident, and everyone else’s children—into their own hands by suing websites that contain a single example of objectionable content. Though most other state age-verification laws often allow individuals to make reports to state Attorneys General who are responsible for enforcement, and some include a private right of action allowing parents or guardians to file civil claims for damages, the Wyoming law is similar to laws in Louisiana and Utah that rely entirely on civil enforcement.
This is a textbook example of a “heckler’s veto,” where a single person can unilaterally decide what content the public is allowed to access. However, it is clear that the Wyoming legislature explicitly designed the law this way in a deliberate effort to sidestep state enforcement and avoid an early constitutional court challenge, as many other bounty laws targeting people who assist in abortions, drag performers, and trans people have done. The result? An open invitation from the Wyoming legislature to weaponize its citizens, and the courts, against platforms, big or small. Because when nearly anyone can sue any website over any content they deem unsafe for minors, the result isn’t safety. It’s censorship.
Imagine a Wyomingite stumbling across an NSFW subreddit or a Tumblr fanfic blog and deciding it violates the law. If they were a parent of a minor, that resident could sue the platform, potentially forcing those websites to restrict or geo-block access to the entire state in order to avoid the cost and risk of litigation. And because there’s no threshold for how much “harmful” content a site must host, a single image or passage could be enough. That also means your personal website or blog—if it includes any “sexual content harmful to minors”—is also at risk.
This law will likely be challenged, and eventually, halted, by the courts. But given that the state cannot enforce it, those challenges will not come until a parent sues a website. Until then, its mere existence poses a serious threat to free speech online. Risk-averse platforms may over-correct, over-censor, or even restrict access to the state entirely just to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit, as Pornhub has already done. And should sites impose age-verification schemes to comply, they will be a speech and privacy disaster for all state residents.
And let’s be clear: these state laws are not outliers. They are part of a growing political movement to redefine terms like “obscene,” “pornographic,” and “sexually explicit” as catchalls to restrict content for both adults and young people alike. What starts in one state and one lawsuit can quickly become a national blueprint.
Age-verification laws like these have relied on vague language, intimidating enforcement mechanisms, and public complacency to take root. Courts may eventually strike them down, but in the meantime, users, platforms, creators, and digital rights advocacy groups need to stay alert, speak up against these laws, and push back while they can. When governments expand censorship and surveillance offline, it’s our job at EFF to protect your access to a free and open internet. Because if we don’t push back now, the internet as we know it— the messy, diverse, and open internet we know—could disappear behind a wall of fear and censorship.
Ready to join us? Urge your state lawmakers to reject harmful age-verification laws. Call or email your representatives to oppose KOSA and any other proposed federal age-checking mandates. Make your voice heard by talking to your friends and family about what we all stand to lose if the age-gated internet becomes a global reality. Because the fight for a free internet starts with us.
So I’ve noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper).
I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: these networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. Money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives.
Quick background: the 2021 infrastructure bill created a $42.5 billion grant program dubbed the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD). BEAD is overseen on the federal level by the NTIA, but individual states are largely going to be in charge of how money is spent.
A few months ago, the Trump administration retooled the program in order to strip away any language related to climate, fair labor practices, equity, or affordability. But the changes also urged states to redirect as much money as possible to Bezos and Musk.
Most states were happy to purge their BEAD plans of any language ensuring that taxpayer-funded broadband is actually affordable. But not all states have been quite as quick to slather Musk with the kind of subsidies he wants. Virginia, for example, released a plan that continues to primarily fund fiber networks over satellite, something Space X and Starlink immediately started to whine about.
Colorado doled out $25.4 million BEAD award to Amazon, despite the fact that the company’s LEO network is barely operational. Starlink received $9.16 million for 5,400 locations. The two companies won the bids because they promised to do it so much more cheaply than other companies, including cellular or fixed wireless providers:
“The LEOs were primarily picked because they could do it much cheaper than everyone else, Reitter said.
“LEO was really aggressive in their coverage and also their pricing,” she said. “They decreased their cost per BSL (broadband serviceable location) quite a bit to be more competitive against the other technologies. Fixed wireless is probably their main competitor.”
But again, simply stating that these LEO satellite systems are cheaper to deploy that cellular, fixed wireless, or fiber is extremely misleading.
One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.
Ideally, if you’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, you want to prioritize pushing fiber as deeply into rural America as you can. From there, you want to leverage higher-capacity cellular and fixed wireless. After that, you can leverage LEO satellite broadband to fill the gaps. And you probably want competent regulators to prevent telecoms from ripping off captive customers in monopolized areas.
Especially given that one of the two companies is led by a highly erratic, extremely conspiratorial, overt white supremacist with a history of empty promises and labor violations.
Hoping to appease their billionaire friends, Republicans have turned this program on its head. So unfortunately, that means in many states, a big chunk of your taxpayer money is being directed away from locally-owned fiber and wireless companies, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities, and toward unproven LEO satellite ventures with a long list of caveats.
This is, of course, complicated by the fact that lobbyists for our biggest, shittiest cable and phone companies (also traditionally directly allied with Republicans) are also in the mix, trying to direct money their way, and away from more popular alternatives (like the surging number of municipal broadband projects scattered around the U.S., or the kind of popular city-owned utilities in cities like Chattanooga).
States that resist the Trump administration’s desires to ignore affordability and slather Musk with subsidies risk having their funding plans rejected entirely by the NTIA, potentially losing out on billions in historic broadband subsidies. So it will be interesting to see how hard states are willing to fight over the next six months or so.
Should Musk and friends get what they want, in a few years, when these LEO networks are overloaded and over-billing captive customers in rural locations, a lot of these policymakers will slap a stupid look on their faces and wonder how it happened. But because the Trump administration has also taken a hatchet to federal regulatory oversight, holding these satellite companies (or giant telecom monopolies) accountable when they once again fail to deliver will be an uphill climb.
