ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later.
It’s nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn’t resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the rot has spread. It’s not enough for ICE to engage in daylight snatchings on the regular. Now, its internal oversight office has abandoned any pretense of keeping ICE in line. In fact, it has completely gone in the opposite direction, turning this wing of ICE into another set of secret police, as this report from Wired makes clear:
Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.
The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.
“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”
That’s just one person who’s been subjected to the OPR’s decision to stop investigating allegations against ICE officers to focus on allegations of external “threats” to ICE officers. There are more. Many more.
OPR was behind at least one of the flurry of administrative subpoenas sent to tech companies in recent months in an effort to unmask online critics.
[…]
In a court declaration filed in April, an ICE official said that between January 2025 and March 2026, OPR investigated 131 cases involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.”
That’s fucked up. This is definitely not what the Office of Professional Responsibility is supposed to be doing. According to the ICE OPR itself, its purview is limited to investigatingICE.
The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.
To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated. OPR’s role permits the agency to focus on its larger mission of promoting homeland security and public safety.
Nothing in this says the OPR is investigating ICE critics. Nothing in this even minimally suggests the OPR’s directives can be expanded to cover external investigations of US citizens over social media posts, etc.
You have to scroll down the page a bit and expand a few things before you find ICE OPR’s justifications for being America’s ICE-focused Gestapo:
OPR protects the agency by detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating internal and external threats against the agency, ICE senior leaders and ICE headquarters facilities by managing the ICE Insider Threat Program and counterintelligence functions involving ICE personnel.
This is new language, specific to Trump’s version of ICE. It wasn’t there last year. There’s nothing in this December 2018 OIG report on ICE OPR operations that says anything at all about “detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating external threats.” There’s nothing in this 2008 OPR directive that says anything more than that the OPR is tasked with investigating allegations against ICE officers or personnel handling its detention facilities.
So, it’s reasonable to believe this language was added shortly after (March 2026) the OPR was rerouted to hunt down ICE critics, rather than focus on what must be thousands of complaints about ICE officers and/or detention facilities.
And despite these efforts apparently being well underway by April 2026, acting ICE director Todd Lyons made sure he didn’t bring up that part of OPR’s operations up when publicly testifying before Congress.
In written testimony for an April hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, which helps set the budget for DHS, Lyons touted OPR’s work inspecting detention facilities, vetting job applicants, and overseeing the agency’s 287(g) program, but didn’t mention the office’s work investigating online posters. ICE did not respond to questions about why Lyons didn’t discuss that work.
First off, the OPR should not be doing this, full stop. There are plenty of federal law enforcement resources available to be utilized in the rare case where an actual threat exists. Second, the OPR has never done this prior to being run by this administration. Third, this rerouting of OPR’s resources makes it clear the administration is more interested in punishing critics (First Amendment be damned) than engaging in any minimal oversight of ICE’s activities.
And this is bad news for the nation, obviously. If this OPR can be turned into literal speech police, the same can be expected from any other law enforcement agency with an in-house OPR. That’s tyranny. That’s fascism. That’s an entire administration treating Trump like a king and 325 million Americans subjects. It’s not only unacceptable, it’s antithetical to everything America once stood for. And all of this news arrives shortly Trump presided over the Republic’s wake on July 4th. We had a good run, but it’s probably time to stop pretending we don’t have a second King George that needs to be shown the door.
Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines powering the system.
As is so often the case, Musk’s “innovation” is quite often just a combination of media manipulation, opportunism, crony capitalism, and openly ignoring public safety. The more you look, the more of a theme it becomes across Musk’s entire post-IPO delusionverse.
Anyway, the lawsuit points out that his Memphis-area data centers are violating the Clean Air Act, funneling all manner of pollutants into minority neighborhoods that already see a disproportionately high number of pollution-caused childhood illnesses:
“xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year.”
Musk also promised to build a next-gen water filtration system so that the xAI data center doesn’t imperil the local water supply, but he simply decided to apparently not do that. Instead, Musk ran crying to the Trump administration, whose DOJ is trying to have the pollution case-dismissed on national security grounds, because the administration sometimes uses Musk’s shoddy fifth-place AI services.
“The unique capabilities of the Colossus datacenters could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community.” SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, wrote on X on Tuesday.
“Happy to bring affordable and great @SpaceX @Starlink connectivity to our neighbors,” Nicolls added.
I’m sure a temporary (these sorts of discounted rates never last) internet access discount will definitely help the kids with formaldehyde-driven asthma. There are a few other layers of irony: one being that data has repeatedly shown that Starlink is routinely too congested to be of help in more densely populated areas like Memphis. Hidden “congestion” fees also ensure the service isn’t really affordable.
Meanwhile, you have guys like Mark Andreessen pretending to be confused why civil rights groups like the NAACP wouldn’t be big fans of discriminatory environmental pollution. As with all (bipartisan) opposition to AI data centers, the very legitimate complaints going on outside of Memphis are being portrayed as unreasonable attacks on innovation by radicals:
These people are, in case you’ve not been paying attention, just foundationally not good human beings, who simply love to engage in phony surprise at the width and breadth of the public backlash to AI.
Sony just gave the world another lesson in how they don’t actually own the content they’ve bought digitally generally, and particularly not through Sony’s digital storefronts. Instead, as readers here will largely know, what is actually being bought is a temporary license to download and play these games, movies, music, whatever. Sony has done this sort of thing before, disappearing bought items from people’s accounts when licensing agreements expire. Many are surprised to find their shit gone.
This doesn’t happen when you buy physical media, typically, unless it relies on backend servers to operate. But for movies on disc, books on pulp, music on physical media, and physical games this generally isn’t a concern.
Some gamers are concerned about the future of game ownership after Sony’s announcement today that it won’t produce physical discs for PlayStation games as of January 2028. On that date, “new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” Sony said in a blog post.
Ditching discs is “a natural direction” for Sony “to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” the post said.
Now, for some numbers to chew on. The reality is that nearly 80% of PlayStation games are bought digitally these days. This is pretty much a perfect example of companies following the 80/20 rule, where you plan and account for 80% of the reality you face and de-prioritize the 20% of the outliers. If you left it there, this plan might make some sense.
But in this case, that 20% of the market is both a sizable chunk of revenue and almost certainly made up in no small amount of people who will not move to digital purchases instead. There is a very passionate, vocal community who believes in ownership rights that you can’t get currently with digital purchases, or who believes in video game preservation efforts that can’t exist at the pleasure of gaming companies that haven’t shown a ton of interest in the topic.
For example, the official Sony account on Twitter posted a simple tweet teasing the upcoming release of the next Spider-Man movie with a single spider emoji. Normally, this account gets a few hundred replies at most, but the Spider-Man tweet now has over 3,000 replies, and most of them are from people yelling at Sony for killing PlayStation game discs.
Similarly, over on the official PlayStation Instagram account where most posts get around 200 to 300 replies, the most recent video shared by the company has amassed over 2,000 comments. And once again, most of them are very angry about PlayStation abandoning physical media, begging the company to reconsider, or threatening to boycott future Sony products and games if it doesn’t.
The most recent video on the PlayStation YouTube account, a trailer for a World of Tanks update, has over 300 comments, most of them yelling at Sony over the news. Usually these videos, outside of the biggest trailers, get less than 50 comments.
This has been going on for a week. Somewhat amazingly, Sony has been running with a typical playbook of ignoring the backlash entirely and waiting for it to just go away. The PlayStation ExTwitter account went fully silent for nearly a week after the news broke, which is one more giant middle finger to its own customer base. At the time of this writing, July 7th, the account finally posted again… to pitch a new wireless flight stick. The reaction to that was, well…
In less than an hour, Sony’s fight stick video received over 12,000 negative comments and nearly 4,000 angry quote-tweets. If there is anyone in there defending the company’s move to all-digital, I couldn’t find it. “As was evident, PlayStation has followed the strategy of acting as if nothing had happened,” one fan wrote. “They think we’re going to forget it easily, but we can’t allow that. They’re trying to kill physical games with lies and using us players as an excuse. It’s shameful.”
The level of tone-deaf going on at Sony over all this is fairly astounding. There is no support for ending all physical media on PlayStation consoles. None whatsoever that I can find. There is either silence or hatred.
For ownership rights, for preservation efforts, for collectors, and for many others, this may be a “Give me physical media or fuck all the way off” type scenario. We’ll now have to wait and see if Sony bothers to listen.
In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the Trump administration had been on the offensive against the sprawling Ambani energy empire, placing it at the center of an escalating tariff campaign against India. But after Trump Jr. touched down, the two men toured the Ambanis’ private zoo, and at night they performed a Gujarati folk dance, grinning as they moved together to the music.
Four months later, an obscure Texas startup called America First Refining announced that it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’ company. The deal puzzled numerous energy investors familiar with the project, which aims to build the first major new oil refinery in the U.S. in about 50 years. The company is run by a serial entrepreneur with a history of bankruptcy and lawsuits alleging fraud. After more than a decade of failed attempts to raise money, blown deadlines and rebrands, it had been floundering.
America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.
Over the past year and a half, Trump Jr. has amassed a fortune from stakes in companies ranging from crypto startups to a drone business to a firearms retailer. Some firms tied to the president’s son have received contracts or other support from the federal government, part of what critics describe as a run of Trump family self-dealing. In December, Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth had rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But the Forbes figures were based on the investments that have been publicly disclosed. The America First Refining episode suggests there is much about the family business that remains secret.
The size of Trump Jr.’s stake in America First Refining and what he paid for it remain unclear. Top executives at the startup have also said that they speak regularly with Trump Jr., according to a person close to the company. And after the Ambani investment was announced, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer took credit on social media for playing a part in the deal.
America First Refining has flexed its Trump Jr. connections during pitch meetings with foreign officials. Early last year, Trump Jr. joined the company’s leadership for a meeting in South Florida with potential investors from Saudi Arabia, according to two people familiar with the matter. Another foreign government official pitched on the project told ProPublica that the company’s team emphasized they had backing from the Trump family and suggested that an investment would help with White House access.
The Ambanis’ investment coincided with the family’s securing major U.S. policy wins that their company, Reliance Industries, had been lobbying for. “Reliance Goes From Trump Foe to Friend With Refinery Pledge,” ran the Bloomberg headline after the deal was announced. Reliance’s intent with the deal was to “smooth out” tensions between the U.S. and India, the outlet reported.
A Trump Jr. spokesperson said that Trump Jr. “has no operational involvement in AFR and is simply a passive minority investor in an American company that aligns with his worldview.”
“The entire premise of this story relating to Don is false,” the spokesperson said, adding, “Don does not interface with the Federal Government on behalf of any company that he invests in or advises.” ProPublica did not find evidence Trump Jr. was aware of refinery executives’ suggesting that an investment would help with White House access.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for America First Refining said, “The claims in this story are false,” but declined to specify what they were referring to. The company’s CEO previously denied wrongdoing in the lawsuits against him reviewed by ProPublica, and the suits were either settled or dropped.
The Ambani family had long been cultivating its relationship with the Trumps. Reliance paid $10 million to the Trump Organization in 2024 as a “development fee” for a project in Mumbai, according to the president’s financial disclosure. (Despite the payment, Reliance has not yet announced a Trump project. Reliance told ProPublica that “the real estate project is real” and “remains under development.”) Ivanka Trump attended Anant Ambani’s wedding party in India that year, where guests were treated to a Rihanna concert. Anant’s father, Mukesh — who is worth an estimated $90 billion and lives in a 27-story home — came to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s second inauguration, posing with the president at a private reception.
But by the summer of 2025, the family was under attack from the White House. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Reliance had reportedly made billions in profits by purchasing vast quantities of Russian oil at a discount. In August, as Trump grew frustrated with his administration’s struggles to bring the war to an end, the president doubled his tariffs on India to 50%. The move was explicitly designed to force companies like Reliance to stop buying Russian oil. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly assailed “India’s politically connected energy titans” for “funding Putin’s war machine,” widely read as a reference to the Ambanis.
Amid this tension, Trump Jr. visited Anant Ambani on his November trip to India. At the end of the trip, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer commented at a business conference in Miami: “I had a nice closing this morning with Don Trump Jr., who’s flying back from India today.” (The following week, the Texas startup — then called Element Fuels — filed paperwork to create America First Refining LLC. In an email, the attorney, John Willding, told ProPublica that there was “no transaction in India or with an Indian company that I was ever involved with.”)
Anant Ambani, who helps run Reliance’s energy business, personally worked on the Texas refinery deal for months before it was announced, a major Indian newspaper later reported.
As the Ambanis quietly finalized their deal with America First Refining, U.S.-Indian relations appeared to warm. In February, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with India, dramatically lowering tariffs, and also reportedly gave Reliance a license to buy Venezuelan oil. When the Iran war broke out and rocked global energy markets, the U.S. gave India a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude. (The waiver was later expanded to all countries.)
In response to ProPublica’s questions, the White House said that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Reliance did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Trump Jr.’s and Anant Ambani’s roles in the investment deal, but said in a statement that the company did not receive “any unique or preferential treatment” from the U.S. government.
“There is no connection between Reliance’s investment in AFR and any unique measures associated with general U.S. trade, tariff, sanctions or licensing outcomes,” Reliance said. “The investment was evaluated and approved on its commercial merits, strategic fit and long-term value creation potential.”
In March, President Trump personally announced Reliance’s deal with the Texas startup on Truth Social, thanking the Ambani company for its “tremendous Investment.”
After the announcement, Willding, the Trump Jr. lawyer, shared the news on LinkedIn: “Just so proud to have been part of this one.”
Willding rowed back his claim in an email to ProPublica. “I have never worked for or advised AFR and had zero involvement in their deal with Reliance Energy,” he said. “I simply saw the press release and was excited for them.” America First Refining’s spokesperson called Willding’s comment “moronic and false.”
In June 2025, Willding registered a new entity in Wyoming called TX Fuels, LLC, listing the company’s address as Trump Jr.’s mansion in Jupiter, Florida. In his email, Willding said his “only involvement in AFR was handling the legal paperwork” for the Trump Jr. LLC’s investment in the startup.
Trump Jr. first hired Willding in May 2021, according tointerviews the lawyer has given. A corporate deal lawyer in Dallas, Willding has referred to himself as “outside business counsel to the Trump family” and has said he talks to Trump Jr. or Eric Trump almost daily. A former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voter who fell hard for MAGA, the attorney has installed a portrait of President Trump over the mantel in his living room.
Willding’s practice has boomed during the second Trump administration, bringing the lawyer to Argentina, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. “Everybody in the world wants to do business with the United States right now,” Willding said at a conference in June 2025. “Every company wants to do business with the Trump family.”
There are other fingerprints of the Trump world on the refinery deal.
Howard Lutnick’s firm Cantor Fitzgerald — which his sons took over when Lutnick became Trump’s commerce secretary — is working as the financial adviser to America First Refining, including on the Ambani investment deal, Cantor Fitzgerald announced. (Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment.)
And the Trump administration played a direct role helping America First Refining find potential foreign investors, according to public comments from the company’s CEO, John Calce. “We have received support from the White House,” he told a local news outlet. The National Energy Dominance Council, led by the interior and energy secretaries, has “helped us with, candidly, introducing us and helping us meet some of these people overseas,” Calce said on an industry podcast.
America First Refining has recently explored going public, according to three people close to the company. That could allow its current investors to start cashing out even if the refinery never gets built — a milestone many energy industry insiders still view as a long shot. Reliance made its investment in the startup at a valuation of at least $1 billion, according to America First Refining’s announcement.
Building a refinery at the Port of Brownsville on the Gulf Coast has been Calce’s mission for a decade. A former Yale offensive lineman, he started his career as a high school football coach after an unsuccessful attempt to make the NFL and now describes himself as a “lifelong entrepreneur.”
The project has been serially delayed, out of money, rebranded and trailed by angry former business partners. At one point, Calce’s companies were being sued simultaneously by eight other firms. In 2022, during bankruptcy proceedings for an earlier iteration of the project, the trustee appointed to impartially oversee the case sued Calce too. The trustee alleged that Calce and other insiders had improperly siphoned away cash and other assets. (Calce denied wrongdoing. The case was ultimately settled.)
During the Biden administration, as the company sought financial support from the Department of Energy, it pitched itself as a climate-friendly green project that would also help “people of underrepresented social demographics” in Brownsville, according to records from that period. The company failed to get enough money from outside investors, and the planned construction was delayed.
By the company’s own estimate, building the refinery will take years and cost $3 billion to $4 billion. Even if it’s built, profitability could be hard to achieve. Many energy investors told ProPublica there’s a reason the U.S. hasn’t seen a major new refinery in decades. “Refineries cost a lot of money and essentially make pennies on the dollar,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist in Houston. “Wall Street is not going to finance a new refinery.”
Even after the start of the second Trump administration, the company was in jeopardy, according to interviews and documents. It laid off workers last year, and, by late 2025, with delays continuing to plague the refinery, officials at the Port of Brownsville believed the project looked to be dead, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.
That has not stopped Calce and his team from making grandiose claims to the public. Earlier this year,a website went live for another Calce company called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. It claims to have a far-flung network of oil storage terminals in places like the Netherlands and Singapore, more than 850 employees and a C-suite of experienced energy executives. But ProPublica could find no evidence that the executives are real people or that the storage terminals actually exist. The phone numbers on the website are also currently listed online as the contacts for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office. The numbers are dead.
America First Refining’s political ties, though, may have boosted its standing with Texas state regulators. In February, shortly before the Ambani investment became public, the company sought an extension on its permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Inside the state agency, emails obtained by ProPublica show, officials scrambled to approve the request.
“Need to get this one logged and processed asap,” wrote one official.
“You are going to have to do this one. I will explain why in person in a few,” wrote another. “You can guess if you check out the name.”
America First Refining got its approval the next day. A spokesperson for the Texas agency did not address questions about the emails. “This request was processed quickly due to the quality of information provided,” the spokesperson said.
For a while there, you might remember how giant telecom monopolies, running out of new subscribers, all decided to get into the media business. But because terrible telecom monopoly executives can’t innovate and generally don’t know how competition works, it never really goes that well.
The various Yahoo/Tumblr/Verizon/AOL exploits were a legendary mess, only outshined by AT&T’s disastrous mergers with DirecTV and Warner Brothers. Then there’s the Comcast NBC Universal tie up (Peacock saw a $432 million loss in the first quarter), which now appears on the cusp of being unwound after seeing its stock drop 54% in the past five years.
Last week, Comcast execs stated they’re now formally unwinding NBC Universal from the Comcast telecom properties. Comcast CEO Mike Cavanagh says the company simply “changed its mind” about being a monolithic giant that dominates both media and physical internet access:
“We’ve simply now changed our mind. We’ve now concluded that future success for each of our businesses will depend on focus, speed and strategic flexibility that this separation will unlock. This is the right move to put each company in the strongest position to create value, fully monetize its assets, and aggressively pursue its own organic growth strategies.”
Yadda yadda yadda.
Comcast had already spun off its cable TV network portfolio (except for Bravo) into a new company named Versant Media earlier this year. Comcast executives insist that they’re “definitely not” looking to sell NBC Universal off as part of the broader U.S. media merger madness, but amusingly nobody inside or outside of Kabletown believes them:
“The collective eye roll [on management’s denial] was almost audible,” former NBC Studios president Tom Nunan told TheWrap. “I thought that their recent effort to go after Warner’s was a sign that there was still gas in the tank, that they really still wanted to be among the big media players left standing. When that didn’t work out, they suddenly go, in my view, from a buyer to a seller.”
Unsaid by the trade mag coverage is that telecom giants routinely demonstrate they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing when it comes to Hollywood and content. They’re endlessly just chasing their own tail and shuffling the cards around in the hunt for the next merger, tax break, or giant executive compensation package. None of these deals work out, because the kind of execs birthed in the bowels of telecom monopolization aren’t really competent or competitively/innovatively battle tested.
Normally Wall Street rewards this kind of mindless consolidation chasing by men out of original ideas, but both ends of Comcast’s business are facing headwinds. On one side traditional broadcast TV is dying and Peacock requires a ton of money to remain competitive; on the other Comcast’s steadily losing broadband subscribers due to increased competition from cheaper 5G wireless or community-owned fiber.
Selling the whole thing was likely too much for any suitor to chew. Splitting off NBC Universal makes it a more digestible target for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, or Apple, leaving traditional Comcast time to focus on its core agenda: buying up smaller telecom companies and dismantling U.S. broadband competition.
Comcast’s problem is NBC’s journalism has historically made our mad idiot king cry, so they’ll have to be extra fawning and subservient to gain favor from the administration’s fake antitrust regulators.
For over a decade, a particular argument keeps resurfacing from well-meaning progressives: the rise of authoritarianism around the globe is a good reason to pass laws suppressing speech. The idea is that somehow, magically, without free speech, authoritarians and fascists would never come to power in the first place. This is historically illiterate. It’s also stupid. As we’ve argued for many, many years, speech suppressing laws are always eventually used by the powerful to suppress the speech of their critics.
The latest example comes from Mexico, where the current leadership has played up “press freedoms,” but at the same time, powerful politicians are using laws ostensibly passed to protect the marginalized… to imprison journalists instead. The New York Times piece makes the pattern concrete in a way that should be eye-opening to many.
Take, for example, the situation with politician Mara Chama Villa. She used a law that was passed to stop “gender-based political violence.” That sounds good, right? Most good folks would agree that “gender-based political violence” is bad. But in this case, Chama Villa claimed that a satirical radio skit mocking her for being a nepobaby candidate violated the law:
It started with a one-minute audio cartoon. Three siblings asked their influential father to buy them candidacies for the upcoming 2024 elections, squabbling over who got to run for which party.
The satirical spot broadcast on Radio Teocelo, the local community-run radio station that also produced the ad, did not mention names, actual political parties or locations.
But Mara Chama Villa, who was running to represent the area in Congress with Mexico’s Ecologist Green Party — and whose father had been the mayor of Teocelo, a coffee-producing town in the state of Veracruz, the deadliest for journalists — felt targeted. She filed a complaint against Radio Teocelo and reporters from other outlets who had previously covered her failed attempt in 2021 to succeed her father as mayor.
Their coverage, she argued in legal filings reviewed by The New York Times, minimized her career and hurt her chances to win the election.
In April 2025, a federal court found five reporters guilty of gender-based political violence because they had “minimized” Ms. Chama Villa “by subordinating her to a male figure with political power,” the court said in its ruling.
The impact of being found guilty — again, for making a satirical radio spot that would be common all over the globe — was pretty massive:
The penalties were sweeping: fines exceeding a month’s salary, mandatory public apologies, the deletion of the radio spot and all denounced articles and placement on a national registry of gender-violence offenders.
Oh, and some more chilling effects, just for fun. If you criticized the ruling? Well, you got added to a follow-on legal process:
When journalists, analysts and organizations across Mexico criticized the outcome, the dispute ballooned into a nationwide case targeting about 70 people.
This is, quite obviously, the opposite of freedom of the press or freedom of speech. And I’d argue it does not do anything positive towards stopping “gender-based political violence.” It’s just become a tool for a powerful political family to punish journalists who produced a bit of satire.
And this isn’t a one-off, as the Times highlights other cases using the same law to target activists as well:
Earlier this year, a court sanctioned Miguel Alfonso Meza, an anti-corruption activist, for gender-based political violence against Silvia Delgado, a lawyer who represented the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, best known as El Chapo. Mr. Meza had called her a “narco lawyer” when questioning her candidacy for a criminal judgeship in Mexico’s first-ever judicial election.
When the court later partly revoked the penalties on Mr. Meza, Ms. Delgado said that she would appeal that ruling. Her goal, she added in an interview, was “not to silence anyone, but to fight for dignity.”
“By describing my candidacy as highly dangerous and comparing me to other candidates investigated for drug trafficking,” she said, “he unleashed excessive attacks against me.”
The article also describes a crime reporter who was accused of “terrorism” because his reporting on local drug cartels “caused public panic” leading him to being dragged from his car and arrested (he thought he was being kidnapped). He now admits that he’s stopped chasing stories he used to chase.
The chilling effects in such a system are unavoidable.
Mexican politicians can defend these laws all they like. No one supports gender-based political violence or terrorism — and that’s exactly what makes the laws so useful to the people abusing them. A law nobody can be seen opposing is a law nobody can stop. And so a community radio station gets fined a month’s salary over a one-minute cartoon, an anti-corruption activist gets sanctioned for calling El Chapo’s lawyer a “narco lawyer,” and a crime reporter stops chasing the stories that made him a crime reporter.
This is how it always goes. Every time you hand the state a tool to punish “bad” speech, the people who end up wielding it are whoever holds power — and they get to decide what counts as “bad.”
If that still sounds like a worthwhile trade — speech restrictions now to keep the fascists out later — consider that we ran this exact experiment a century ago. Weimar Germany had hate speech laws. Prosecutors used them against Nazis, including Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer, who was convicted and jailed more than once for incitement against Jews. The laws did not stop the Nazis. Indeed, the Nazis used these prosecutions as yet more “evidence” that they were being prosecuted for their beliefs. Then, the Nazis took power, inherited those very tools, and turned them on everyone else. Streicher walked out of the courtroom a martyr and into the Reichstag. The speech laws meant to stop authoritarians became the authoritarians’ speech laws.
So here’s the only test that matters before you back a law like this: imagine the politician you distrust the most holding the pen. Because eventually, they will. And anyone who answers “with this law on the books, they’ll never get into power” is indulging in childishly naive wishful thinking — the same wish that has been losing to authoritarians for as long as there have been authoritarians.
You don’t keep bad people from power by handing the office a weapon and hoping good people get there first. You keep them out with stronger elections, stronger institutions, and an educated public that can see through them.
Not by deciding which speech to outlaw — and then praying you’re always the one holding the pen.
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It’s good news of sorts, so we’ll go with a qualified “good news!” here. There’s a little table setting that needs to be done to explain why it’s better now than it was before the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court continued ingratiating itself to race-motivated tyranny.
I realize that’s not a great pitch in terms of “good news,” but it’s all I have. When Trump first started his race war in the United States, it seemed almost inevitable that courts would shut him down. Trump advisors set goals (I’m looking at you, Stephen Miller/Happy Time Harry) that couldn’t possibly be met without violating rights. No more “worst of the worst.” It was just everyone who looked kinda brown.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, hoping that this would allow him to treat anyone of any foreign nationality the way we treated people of Japanese descent during World War II.
To be fair, courts resisted this argument. And most courts made it extremely clear that this nation has always extended constitutional rights to non-citizens who reside in the US.
But not the Fifth Circuit. The appellate circuit hosting most of Trump’s favorite detention centers ruled in February that those rights simply don’t apply to whoever this administration is seeking to get rid of. According to this decision, the government was well within its rights to detain migrants indefinitely without giving them access to their due process rights.
Consequently (and coupled with Justice Kavanaugh’s blessing of stops based on little more than skin color and/or perceived accent), detainees arrested anywhere else in the country were speedily delivered to detention centers in the Fifth Circuit to ensure they weren’t allowed to challenge their arrests or detentions.
That was February. It’s now July. And for whatever reason, the Fifth Circuit has walked back a bit of its earlier decision. Now, it says some rights apply to migrants detained by the government, but only after a rights-free waiting period.
The decision [PDF] grants the government deference it definitely doesn’t deserve. It does, however, make it clear the Constitution still needs to be respected… but not immediately.
We understand the recent interpretation in Buenrostro-Mendez that detention is mandatory for anyone who entered this country without authorization is creating enormous difficulties in district courts. Thousands of immigration detainees are filing applications for writs of habeas corpus in United States district courts. Our resolution of this case requires the executive branch to provide bond hearings through its own procedures. That shifts the location of the burden, but it leaves its size unaffected. Nonetheless, the answer to those difficulties cannot include ignoring the Constitution.
That’s the court referring to its February decision — the one in which it said the government can detain migrants without bond indefinitely, effectively denying them their 14th Amendment rights. In this case, it shifts to the Fifth Amendment. In doing so, it comes to a conclusion that seems diametrically opposed to its original ruling.
These two sets of rights are almost inseparable in this context. But that’s not the context the Fifth Circuit used to deny this right (over plenty of dissent) in the Buenrostro-Mendez case. In that one, the court pretended there was no difference between detaining people trying to illegally cross the border and detaining people who had already been in this country for weeks, months, years, or decades. It decided any migrant was basically caught in the act of illegal entry and, in doing so, were not entitled to constitutional protections.
In this case, it’s the Fifth Amendment that gets its day in court. And since it’s a different right, the court somehow manages to come to a conclusion that makes a mockery of its original (and fantastical) take on the phrase “upon entry.”
It also must be noted that the judges who handled this case weren’t the same ones who handled the previous case. The previous case was overseen by two of the most blatantly right-wing judges in the Fifth Circuit: Edith Jones and Kyle Duncan.
That — more than anything else — most likely explains why the same court has decided migrants have rights, even if it’s not willing to let migrants use them until after some weird, not-supported-by-law probationary period has passed.
After a lot of discussion of earlier cases, the government’s assertions (and admissions that many people it detains are not flight risks), and a long walk through the history of immigration law, the court somehow arrives at this conclusion:
Given the absence of any categorical justification for detention, unlike in Zadvydas (aliens who have been found to be removable) and Demore (aliens who were convicted of criminal offenses), there is no reason to lengthen the period of time during which the validity of detention can be presumed. We conclude that the Government may detain aliens under Section 1225(b)(2)(A) for ninety days but no longer without a bond hearing.
I’ve put some stuff in bold because I don’t want anyone to miss what’s being said here, even if they’re just skimming this post.
For those who may have bypassed the dry text of the court, here’s what the Fifth Circuit is saying:
The government has not provided any justifiable reason for detention (of ANY length).
Therefore, the government must limit itself to 90 days of unjustifiable detention, at which point it needs to allow detainees to access the Fifth Amendment rights they were always entitled to.
The government is allowed to violate rights for up to three months at a time. That’s not really a win. Sure, it’s better than what was decided earlier — you know, the decision that simply said migrants had no rights at all because they all could be perceived as being apprehended crossing the border, even if they weren’t apprehended until they’d already spent years in this country.
This means ICE, et al will continue to detain whoever they want anywhere in the nation and ship them out to the Fifth Circuit (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi) detention centers as soon as possible. One decision already says the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply. This one says the Fifth Amendment does apply, but only after 90 days.
The Fifth’s ruling are in opposition with the rest of nation, where hundreds of judges have ruled in thousands of cases against the administration’s constant violation of migrant’s constitutional rights. But it insists on being everything the MAGA-cooked could ask of it. That it oversees Texas and Louisiana — states home to multiple ICE detention centers — isn’t a coincidence.
Back in February, Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr launched a fake “investigation” of ABC because the network’s comedians and daytime talk show hosts hadn’t adequately kissed Republican ass.
“Since then, the ABC talk show hasn’t featured a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race, according to a Semafor analysis.”
Earlier in the year, Republicans were upset that The View hosted Texas Democratic hopeful James Talarico. That triggered an entire fake “investigation” and a threatened revocation of ABC’s broadcast licenses by Carr, who falsely claimed that the daytime talk show had violated the FCC’s dated and irrelevant “equal time” rule requiring that TV stations give equal time to political candidates from both parties.
The threat of annoying costly legal headaches were still apparently enough to scare ABC (and likely other outlets) away from hosting politicians who would be critical of Trump.
It’s a shame that ABC, which had previously started to show some a signs of life in its battle with the thin-skinned U.S. president, suddenly doesn’t really want to talk about why The View rejected requests to host NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or the democratic socialist candidates he supported for Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez:
“A spokesperson declined to provide Semafor with a comment about how the show was reacting to the inquiry but has previously said the show is a “bona fide news program” and therefore isn’t subject to the equal time rule.”
Carr, you’ll recall, also threatened San Francisco area AM radio station KCBSlate last year simply for reporting on local ICE activity, resulting in the station demoting one anchor and softening its political coverage overall. Carr also tried (and failed) to censor and fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel after the late night host made a joke about deceased right wing propagandist and racist Charlie Kirk.
That said, avoiding politics entirely for fear of losing money is fairly common across corporate media (including outlets like Semafor), resulting in no shortage of pseudo-journalism that pulls its punches, particularly when it comes to being honest about the continued Republican descent into bigotry and fascism.
As we mentioned previously, the Stop Killing Games movement has come to America and there is currently an effort to get some legislation based on the movement’s goals on the books in California. The movement hit a snag recently when the written version of the bill failed to make it out of committee on a vote of 4 in favor, 3 against, and 4 abstaining. It’s the abstaining votes that were the problem, resulting in not enough yes votes to move forward. But, importantly, the committee also left the door open to reconsider the bill at a later time.
The committee unanimously voted in favor of granting the bill reconsideration, meaning it could come back before this group of state senators. Assemblymember Chris Ward introduced the bill in February and it passed the California State Assembly 43-16 in late May.
That said, the abstentions prevented the bill’s progression for now. “Not enough yeses means the bill stops here for this session,” a volunteer with the Stop Killing Games campaign (which supported the bill) noted on Reddit. “That is the loss.”
There was active lobbying against the bill in committee hearings, primarily from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). And what is now getting a great deal of attention is the fact that ESA’s lobbyist either lied to the committee in those hearings, or else they have absolutely no fucking clue what they’re talking about. And if you need the prime example of what we’re talking about here, you need only understand that one lobbyist claimed that anyone hosting a private Minecraft server is doing “illegal piracy.” The lobbyist in question would be Jennifer Gibbons, the ESA’s VP for State Govt. Affairs.
Gibbons was responding to a comment made by California state assemblymember Chris Ward—who introduced the bill—regarding the possibility of keeping games alive with private servers. “Minecraft is currently hosted by community servers, Call of Duty [has] community servers, so it’s an option that is out there, in existence here today.”
Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”
Asked by California state senator Caroline Menjivar as to whether this was “like the black market of videogames?” Gibbons responded “Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy. We have lawsuits, two pending lawsuits, against private servers right now, and the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in their Notorious Markets Reports on counterfeiting and piracy has named some of these big private servers as a notorious market.” A notorious market refers to a market where intellectual property infringement is rife—think something like The Pirate Bay.
The ignorance here, if that’s what this is, is astounding. As PC Gamer goes on to note, it is true that select private Minecraft and COD servers have been designated as notorious markets by the USTR in some cases. Those are servers that actually do make some games playable without the otherwise required subscription. World of Warcraft servers are a common target for this sort of designation.
But to map that onto Minecraft private servers, which are not only allowed to exist, but actively encouraged in use by Microsoft directly, is insane. The way you host a private Minecraft server, to start, is by going to Microsoft’s own site to get the .jar file you need to run it. The company is making it available, knowingly and on purpose. In no sense is that piracy, copyright infringement, or illegal. Like… at all.
Given the opportunity to correct themselves, however, the ESA doubled down.
In a statement to PC Gamer, the ESA wrote that, so far as it’s concerned, “Private servers infringe on the intellectual property (IP) rights of game publishers. Publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against them.”
Private servers only infringe on the IP of game publishers if they restrict their use. That’s the entire point that the folks at Stop Killing Games are making. If publishers don’t want to keep their online games available, they could simply allow, or be compelled to allow, private servers to do the job for them. If it’s allowed, it’s not piracy. This really isn’t that hard.
I honestly have no idea whether this is ignorance or malice at work. I find it very hard to believe that someone in Gibbons position could possibly be this confused on a topic she’s been tasked with lobbying against. On the other hand, the claim is so plainly wrong that it’s an incredibly stupid lie if that’s in fact what this is.
Hopefully this sort of thing will be part of the discussion when, or if, the legislation is reconsidered in the future.
