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This is big. This is going to cause a whole lot of problems for the administration in the hundreds of ICE-related lawsuits it’s defending itself against. It’s a Perry Mason moment, albeit one that implicates the entity delivering it, rather than the other way around. (h/t Chris Geidner on Bluesky)
As we are all painfully aware, ICE operations since Trump returned to office have immediately strayed from the stated “worst of the worst” purpose to going after pretty much anyone who isn’t white. That means ICE officers are staking out any place day laborers might be hanging out, raiding any business that might employ migrant labor, roaming the streets in unmarked cars and masks to snatch up foreign-looking people, and — in what has always been extremely controversial — hanging around immigration courts to arrest migrants engaging in their court-ordered check-ins.
All of it is awful, but deliberately targeting people who are following all of the rules that allow them to remain in the US is particularly despicable. That’s what ICE and other DHS components have been doing: making the easiest, laziest arrests possible to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller’s ever-escalating arrest quota.
The administration has spent the last year claiming immigration court arrests are not only legal, but fully supported by ICE policy. Officials (and DOJ lawyers) have said this despite this never being the case before Trump’s return to office.
Now, we know it isn’t true. Bizarrely, this revelation isn’t the result of FOIA requests or court discovery orders. It comes from the DOJ itself, which delivered this unexpected twist in the mass deportation saga in a March 24 filing in a case being handled by the Southern District of New York.
Here’s the essence of the admission made by the DOJ in its letter to the court [PDF]:
We write respectfully and regrettably to correct a material mistaken statement of fact that the Government made to the Court and Plaintiffs. Specifically, this morning, counsel from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) informed the undersigned of the following: the memorandum entitled Civil Immigration Enforcement Actions in or Near Courthouses, dated May 27, 2025 – which the Government relied on in presenting its arguments in this case and referred to as the “2025 ICE Guidance” – does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”) immigration courts.
Holy shit. That’s huge. And the DOJ knows it. The letter goes on to inform the court that the DOJ will be reversing the stance it took in several filings in this case. It also acknowledges that the court opinion based on its previous (and perhaps unknowing) misrepresentations will need to rescinded and re-briefed.
The ACLU’s response to the DOJ’s filing drives the point home further:
[T]he government now concedes the May 2025 ICE memorandum—which it previously asserted authorized arrests at immigration courthouses, provided guidance minimizing the harms of such arrests, and explained the agency’s reasoning for abandoning a prior policy largely prohibiting such arrests—in fact has never applied to such arrests. Accordingly, it further concedes the government’s primary defense to Plaintiffs’ claim that the Immigration Court Arrest Policy is arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act must be “withdraw[n]…”
[…]
The implications of this development are far-reaching. In the months since the Court relied on the government’s representation to deny Plaintiffs preliminary relief, Defendants have continued arresting noncitizens at their immigration court hearings, resulting in their detention—often in facilities hundreds of miles away.
The email cited in the DOJ’s letter was issued by Liana J. Castano, the assistant direct of ICE field operations on March 19. In bold print, the memo says this:
This broadcast serves as a reminder that the May 27, 2025, Guidance does not apply to Executive Office for Immigration Review (Immigration) courts, regardless of their location. As stated in the Guidance, it also does not apply to criminal immigration enforcement actions inside courthouses.
Out of context, “does not apply” might seem like it contradicts the DOJ’s assertion. It doesn’t. Here’s the context, provided by the original memo [PDF], which has been posted to ICE’s website:
ICE officers or agents may conduct civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien(s) is or will be present at a specific location.
Additionally, civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses should, to the extent practicable, continue to take place in non-public areas of the courthouse, be conducted in collaboration with court security staff, and utilize the court building’s non-public entrances and exits. When practicable, ICE officers and agents will conduct civil immigration enforcement actions against targeted aliens discreetly to minimize their impact on court proceedings.
You can see the problem here: the original memo (issued May 27, 2025) says ICE officers can engage in enforcement efforts “in or near courthouses.” There’s a single caveat, but not one that specifically says immigration courts are off-limits:
ICE officers and agents should generally avoid enforcement actions in or near courthouses, or areas within courthouses that are wholly dedicated to non-criminal proceedings (e.g., family court, small claims court).
That doesn’t specifically exclude immigration courts, although those courts only handle non-criminal proceedings because immigration law violations are civil violations. There’s other language in the memo that further muddies the water:
Other aliens encountered during a civil immigration enforcement action in or near a courthouse, such as family members or friends accompanying the target alien to court appearances or serving as a witness in a proceeding, may be subject to civil immigration enforcement action on a case-by-case basis considering the totality of the circumstances.
This doesn’t specify whether these court appearances are criminal or civil. It just says ICE officers can take advantage of the situation to rack up some ancillary arrests.
I’m not sure what happened recently that would have prompted this clarification. Maybe there’s been an internal change of heart by ICE leadership. Maybe ICE’s legal team was unable to find a way to make these courthouse arrests legally defensible. In any event, the clarification was issued, well after tons of damage has already been done.
While it kind of looks like ICE leadership is throwing front line officers under the bus by issuing after-the-fact clarification of a vaguely worded memo issued 10 months ago, I wouldn’t worry about the ICE officers. It’s mostly an imaginary bus, since it’s almost impossible to sue federal officers and the original memo provides enough plausible deniability that qualified immunity would foreclose any lawsuit that managed to make its way past the initial Bivens barrier.
As irritating as that is, the important thing is that the DOJ has stated, in court, that pretty much any immigration courthouse arrest performed by federal officers was illegal. And that’s going to make it way easier to sue the government itself over its mass deportation program.
Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.
They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.
Carr’s latest effort: he rubber stamped Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna behind closed doors. Carr let the merged companies ignore our remaining media consolidation limits, which prevent one company from being the primary broadcast news voice for more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent).
Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS.
Carr’s been on a campaign to ensure these right-wing loyal companies have more power in their dealings with their national counterparts (remember how they helped Carr censor Jimmy Kimmel?). The efforts come as local Americans increasingly live in “local news deserts” where quality local journalism simply no longer exists.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat left at the FCC (Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), didn’t have nice things to say about Carr’s decision to ignore the public interest protections without a transparent, public vote (indicating Carr very clearly knew this would be very unpopular):
NEWS: The FCC has approved the unlawful Nexstar-TEGNA merger behind closed doors.The consequences of this rubber stamp approval will be felt in living rooms and newsrooms across the country, resulting in fewer voices, less competition, and higher costs for consumers.
As always, Carr’s order approving the merger leverages all manner of pseudo-legalistic sounding bullshit to justify ignoring Congress and the law. And he parrots a bunch of completely empty promises by Nexstar that they’ll ramp up the production of more “local news”:
“We note that Nexstar has made significant commitments in the agency’s record as well, further ensuring that this transaction promotes the public interest. To further serve its local communities, Nexstar commits to expanding its investment in local news and programming, including increasing the amount of local news it provides in acquired markets.”
Except again, by “news” we mean right wing propaganda. And Brendan Carr never meaningfully holds corporate power accountable for anything, unless it involves a comedian making fun of the president or companies not being suitably racist enough for the president’s liking.
Eight states have already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the decision. The lawsuits understandably focus heavily on the competition impacts, and the likely higher cable TV prices that will result for most of you:
“By consolidating with a major competitor, Nexstar would likely acquire the power to charge MVPDs higher retransmission consent fees for Big 4 station content. In turn, those MVPDs would likely pass on the increased retransmission consent fees, in large measure, to their subscribers in the form of substantially higher cable and satellite bills.”
California regulators attempted to slow the process down by proposing a standard timing agreement with Nexstar, where the company would suspend its acquisition of Tegna until the state completed its investigation.
But something of particular note: on pages 16-17 of the states’ amended complaint, it becomes clear that Nexstar completely ignored the State AGs for 8 days, then ignored their lawsuit for another 18 hours, and then told the state AGs “The relief sought in your Complaint is no longer available.”
In other words, what passes for some of the only real antitrust enforcement we have (a scattered coalition of states) have to fight both consolidated corporate power and the authoritarian, corrupt government simultaneously to make any inroads in the public interest.
“This is completely unprecedented,” Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss troll farm) Research Director S. Derek Turner told me via email. “Nexstar and the Trump DOJ and FCC seem to have acted in concert to deprive the citizens of of these 8 states their rights to have our AG enforce the antitrust laws on our behalf.”
If Carr succeeds here, I suspect it won’t be long before you see Sinclair and this new combined company merge. Carr is also fielding requests by the big four national broadcasters to eliminate restrictions preventing them from merging as well (one of many reasons they’ve been so feckless). After that, you’ll likely see more consolidation across telecom, tech, and media.
It is, just in case we’ve forgotten, the complete opposite of the “antitrust reform populism” Trump, and a long line of useful idiots, promised last election season.
While this is certainly an act of some desperation (less than 20% of all U.S. TV viewing is now broadcast), claiming this doesn’t matter because this is “just local broadcasting” and the “future is the internet” (something I see often) is a violent misread of the dire stakes of the situation. This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).
This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate. Right wingers will continue to engage in this quest to dominate the entirety of U.S. media (following in the steps of Victor Orban in Hungary) until they run into something other than the political and policy equivalent of soft pudding.
I’m going to trust that most of our audience will have some idea of what McCarthyism was in the 1950s. To summarize very briefly, it was an anti-communist campaign that spread into becoming equally anti-leftist throughout the country, with a specific focus on driving the supposed communist influences out of major media in America, such as radio and Hollywood. This led to a public hyper-vigilant in looking for supposed communists everywhere, as well as plenty of cases of false accusations of communist activity purposefully foisted upon people for personal reasons. This rabid, frothy-mouthed era of suspicion became a major stain on America in the 1950s.
I’m watching a version of this begin to take form around artificial intelligence. I know, I know: there are very real dangers and negative outcomes that could come to be from AI. That was true of communism and our Cold War enemy in the Soviet Union as well. My point is not that AI is great all the time and any pushback against it is invalid. Instead, my point is that we’re starting to see what I’ll call McPromptism, where some percentage of the public looks for AI everywhere it can and, if use is suspected, immediately decries it as terrible and demands that people not engage with the supposed user.
And just like McCarthyism, McPromptism gets its accusations wrong sometimes. You can see a version of that in the story of Aspyr’s remastering of old Tomb Raider games and the horrible outfits that were produced for the protagonist, Lara Croft.
Earlier this week we reported on fan reaction to the latest update to the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection, in which the game received a new Challenge Mode, while Lara received a suite of new outfits to wear as rewards. And oh wow, they were bad. Comically bad. So bad, in fact, that one of the remaster’s original artists posted on X to distance himself and his colleagues from the dross. Alongside all of this was the suspicion that genAI might have been involved in the fits’ creation, given just how dreadful they looked. Publisher Aspyr has now finally responded to the claims to insist no AI was used at all, instead stating they were created by “our team of artists.” Which raises more questions.
If you want to see a somewhat humorous look at the outfit textures that are the subject of public complaint, here you go.
On the one hand, for someone like me who is not into the anti-AI dogma out there, it is objectively funny for some people to point at bad video game textures and claim they’re so bad because they’re obviously created using generative AI… only to have the company that made them say, “Nuh uh! It was our human employees who made them!” It’s almost Monty-Python-esque, in a way.
But this default among some in the gaming public to be “This thing in gaming is bad, so it must have been made using AI!” is just one more kind of silly that is out there right now. Aspyr doesn’t exactly have a perfect reputation when it comes to remastering games, after all, and it built that reputation long before genAI came along.
It seems clear that this was a case of images being released to promote the remastered game that Aspyr didn’t live up to in the actual game itself. No AI, just human beings not hitting the mark. It happens all the time. Hell, there is even a chance that AI could have done a better job. Not a certainty by any stretch, but a possibility.
But the real take away from this otherwise minor episode for me was the McPromptism misfire. If you’re going to rage against the literal machine in the video gaming industry, which I think is the wrong stance to take anyway, at least let it be righteous rage.
We’ve been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he’s been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point home with a framing that cuts straight to the absurdity of it all: this fear of new ideas “corrupting the youth” is literally as old as democracy itself.
In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial before a jury of some 500 of his fellow Athenians. The indictment accused him of impiety and added, “Socrates is…also guilty of corrupting the youth.” Despite the Athenian democracy’s commitment to free and equal speech, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Two and a half millennia later, democracies are still deeply concerned about dangerous ideas corrupting the youth. This time, the target isn’t dangerous philosophy but an increase in teen mental-health issues blamed on social media.
Mchangama and Kosseff are particularly well-positioned to make this argument (and are both former Techdirt podcast guests). Mchangama’s prior book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, traced the full arc of free speech battles across civilizations, and the two of them have a forthcoming co-authored book, The Future of Free Speech, on the global decline of free speech protections. Meanwhile Kosseff’s three previous books all cover related free speech territory: The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, Liar in a Crowded Theater, and The United States of Anonymous. These are people who have spent their careers studying exactly these patterns — the recurring cycle of moral panic, political opportunism, and the quiet erosion of rights that tends to follow.
Their piece walks through the problems with both the evidence and the policy responses that have sprung from Haidt’s work. On the evidence:
In 2024, a review of the scientific literature by a committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had found that despite some “potential harms,” the review “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” A 2026 longitudinal study in the Journal of Public Health reached a similar conclusion.
We covered these studies at the time, noting that they were far from the only such studies to go hunting for the alleged evidence of inherent harms to children using social media — and coming up empty. It is amazing how little attention these studies get compared to Haidt’s book. So it’s good to see Mchangama and Kosseff call them out.
They also highlight what gets lost when you reduce this to a simple “social media = bad” story:
“Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” according to the National Academies of Science report. It also highlights the possible benefits of online access for “young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems” as well as opportunities for learning and developing interests.
That point is especially important for vulnerable teenagers whose offline environments may be isolating or hostile. This is why comparing social media to tobacco is questionable: The scientific consensus on smoking’s harms is unanimous and no one claims smoking has benefits. Neither is true for social media.
This is consistent with what experts told TES Magazine last fall — actual researchers in the field described Haidt’s work as “fear” rather than science, said they couldn’t believe a fellow academic wrote it, and pointed out basic logical flaws in his causal claims. It’s also consistent with what I found in my own detailed review of the book when it came out two years ago, where the cherry-picked data, the ignored contrary evidence, and the policy proposals based on gut feelings rather than research were all on full display.
What makes this even worse than a standard “well-meaning but wrong” situation is a study we wrote about earlier this year showing that the social media “addiction” narrative itself may be more harmful than social media. Researchers found that very few people show signs consistent with actual addiction, but every time the media amplifies stories about social media addiction, more people claim they’re addicted. And that belief makes them feel helpless — convincing them they have a pathological condition rather than habits they could simply change.
In other words, the moral panic is doing the exact same thing it accuses social media of doing: making people anxious, helpless, and convinced they can’t control their own behavior.
The cost of being wrong here is that parents, politicians, and schools ignore the real causes of teen mental health struggles: poverty, the closure of youth services, reduced access to mental health care, and the erasure of community support systems. And the cost is that kids who genuinely rely on online communities — LGBTQ+ youth, kids with chronic illnesses, kids in hostile home environments — lose a lifeline. Mchangama and Kosseff make the same point, and now we can see the policy consequences playing out in real time.
And it goes even further. As Mchangama and Kosseff note, authoritarian governments are already using the “protect the children” framework as cover for broader censorship:
Authoritarian and illiberal states provide a grim window into how the protection of children can be weaponized to suppress dissent. In 2012, Russia enacted an internet blacklist law, with the stated intention of protecting children from harmful content. The law laid the groundwork for Russia’s heavily censored “Red Web” that now entirely prohibits many foreign social-media platforms.
The same goes in Indonesia which this month announced a ban on social media for those under 16. But Indonesia is also a country that has used the pretext of child protection to block and censor gay social networking apps and content.
It’s a remarkable blind spot for those pushing Haidt’s arguments. They never seem to consider that these are the exact same tools authoritarian governments use to silence marginalized voices. You would think that politicians championing this book — particularly Democrats who claim to care about civil liberties and LGBTQ rights — might pause when they see Russia and Indonesia deploying identical justifications.
And yet politicians across the spectrum continue to treat Haidt’s book like scripture, despite an overwhelming expert consensus that his claims don’t hold up.
Mchangama and Kosseff close with what should be obvious, but apparently still needs to be said:
Democracies have always worried about dangerous ideas corrupting the young. Intellectuals and lawmakers should absolutely be concerned about how and when our children navigate social media. But they should also be concerned about whether, in our rush to protect our children, we are building an infrastructure of surveillance and censorship that will ultimately threaten the hard-won freedoms we want future generations to enjoy.
Speech is powerful. Ideas have consequences. But we protect such speech from legal liability for that very reason. The power of speech to change minds and influence people is exactly why those in power are so often afraid of it and looking to tamp it down. It’s also why Mchangama and Kosseff can tie the urge back all the way to Socrates.
Every generation gets its moral panic. Every time, someone insists “this time it’s different.” Every time, the evidence eventually catches up and the panic looks ridiculous in retrospect. The tragedy is how much damage gets done in the meantime — to kids who lose a real lifeline, to free expression, to privacy, and to the actual causes of teen suffering that never get addressed because everyone was too busy blaming the latest app.
The verdict from the people who actually study this stuff has been clear for a while now. Maybe it’s time for politicians to put down Haidt’s book and pick up the actual research.
On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take down content — how officials called and screamed and cursed — and how, going forward, he was a changed man. A champion of free expression, done forever with government demands to remove content. And a whole bunch of people (especially MAGA folks) cheered all this on. Zuckerberg was a protector of free speech against government suppression!
Twenty-four days later, he texted Elon Musk — a senior government official at the time — to volunteer to remove content the government wouldn’t like. Unprompted.
As I wrote at the time, the whole Rogan interview was an exercise in misdirection. The “pressure” Zuck kept describing was the kind of thing the Supreme Court explicitly found, in the Murthy case, was standard-issue government communication — the kind of thing Justice Kagan said happens “literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.” The Court called the lower court’s findings of “censorship” clearly erroneous. And Zuck himself kept admitting, over and over, that Meta’s response to the Biden administration was to tell them no. He said so explicitly:
And basically it just got to this point where we were like, no we’re not going to. We’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous…
In other words, the Biden administration asked, Meta said “nah,” and that was that. The Supreme Court agreed this fell well short of coercion. Indeed, the only documented instance of the Biden administration making an actual specific takedown request to a social media platform was to flag an account impersonating one of Biden’s grandchildren. That was it. That was the “massive government censorship operation.”
But Zuck milked it beautifully on the podcast, and Rogan ate it up. The narrative was established: Zuckerberg, defender of free expression, standing tall against the censorious government, vowing to never again let officials dictate what stays up and what comes down on his platforms.
That was January 10th.
On February 3rd, Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk:
Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.
So the man who spent three hours performing righteous indignation about government censorship proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”
A guy who spent three hours on the biggest podcast in the world performing righteous indignation about government censorship pressure — then, weeks later, volunteered exactly that kind of service, unprompted, to the same government. Just with a different party in power.
The Biden administration’s alleged “coercion” amounted to strongly worded emails that Meta freely ignored, and its only documented specific takedown request was for an account literally pretending to be the president’s grandchild. Zuckerberg’s response to that: three hours on the world’s biggest podcast denouncing government censorship. His response to Musk’s DOGE operation: a proactive late-night text offering to suppress information identifying the federal employees doing the dismantling.
And Zuck’s framing of “doxxing” is doing a lot of work here. The DOGE staffers whose identities were being shared on social media were federal employees exercising enormous government power — canceling grants, accessing sensitive government databases, making decisions that affected millions of Americans. The administration went to great lengths to hide who these people were, precisely because what they were doing was controversial and, in many cases, potentially illegal. Identifying who is wielding government power on your behalf has a name, and that name is accountability, not “doxxing.”
Notably, the Zuckerberg text came the day after Wired started naming DOGE bros. Which is reporting. Not doxxing. Doxxing is revealing private info, such as an address. A federal employee’s name is not private info. It’s just journalism.
Also notice how Zuckerberg bundles “doxxing or threatening” — conflating two very different things. Removing credible threats of violence is something every platform already does; it’s in every terms of service. But by packaging the identification of public servants alongside actual threats, Zuck makes the whole thing sound like a routine trust-and-safety operation rather than what it actually was: volunteering to help the government hide its own employees from public scrutiny.
Compare the two scenarios directly. The Biden administration flagged a fake account impersonating a minor family member of the president — a clear-cut case of impersonation that every platform’s rules already cover. In other cases, they simply asked Facebook to explain its policies for dealing with potential health misinformation in the middle of a pandemic. Zuckerberg’s response, per his Rogan narrative, was to tell them to pound sand, and then go on a podcast to brag about it. Meanwhile, when it came to Musk and DOGE, it looks like Zuck didn’t wait to be asked. He texted Elon Musk at 10 PM on a Monday night to let him know the teams were already mobilized. He closed with “let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help,” which is really more “eager intern” energy than “principled defender of free expression” energy.
It’s also worth noting the broader context of the relationship here. These two were, at least publicly, supposed to be rivals. Remember the whole cage match fiasco? The very public trash-talking? And yet here’s Zuck texting Musk late at night, opening with flattery (“Looks like DOGE is making progress”), offering content suppression as a gift, and then — in literally the next breath in the text exchange — Musk pivots to asking Zuck if he wants to join a bid to buy OpenAI’s intellectual property.
“Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?” Musk asked. Zuck suggested they discuss it live. Just a couple of billionaires doing billionaire things at 10:30 PM after one of them volunteered censorship services to the other’s government operation.
We only know about any of this, by the way, because of Musk’s quixotic lawsuit against OpenAI. These texts were designated as a trial exhibit by OpenAI’s lawyers. Musk’s team is now trying to get them excluded from evidence. The motion seeking to suppress this evidence opens with one of the more entertaining paragraphs you’ll find in a legal filing:
President Trump. Burning Man. Rhino ketamine. These are all inflammatory and highly irrelevant topics that Defendants are trying to improperly make the subject of this litigation. Throughout fact discovery, Defendants have gratuitously probed these topics, and their trial evidence disclosures make clear that they intend to use the same scandalizing tactics at trial. Defendants should not be allowed to exploit Musk’s political involvement, social or recreational choices, or gratuitous details of his personal life at trial. As detailed below, Musk is the subject of daily, often-fabricated media scrutiny.
The filing goes on to argue that the Zuckerberg text exchange has “nothing to do with Musk’s claims” and amounts to an attempt to “stoke negative sentiments toward Musk because of his association with Zuckerberg.” Which is a fun way to describe a text message in which a tech CEO volunteers content moderation favors to a government official. Musk’s lawyers aren’t wrong that it’s embarrassing — just not for the reasons they think.
The hypocrisy, though, is almost beside the point. The entire Rogan performance was designed to establish a narrative: that the Biden administration engaged in some kind of unprecedented censorship campaign, and that Zuckerberg was bravely standing up to it. That narrative was then used to justify Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programs and loosen its content policies — framed as a return to “free expression” principles.
But the Zuck-Musk texts show what those “free expression” principles actually look like in practice. Zuck is more than happy to suppress speech when he supports the person in the White House. It’s only when he doesn’t like the person in the White House that he gets to pretend he’s a free speech warrior.
This has nothing to do with free expression. It’s about power. Who has it, who Zuckerberg thinks he needs to stay on the right side of, and who he thinks he can safely perform outrage against. The Biden administration was on its way out the door when Zuck did the Rogan interview, making them a perfectly safe target for his “never again” act. Musk was ascendant, running a government operation backed by a president who had directly threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison.
So the principled free speech stance lasted less than a month before Zuck was back to volunteering content suppression — this time without even being asked, for the people who actually had the power to hurt him. And that’s just the text message that surfaced in an unrelated lawsuit. The rest of the ledger isn’t public.
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Before we get to the lie exposed here, let me just offer a correction of my own. As many, many, far too many people pointed out in my last post on ICE being sent to airports, people do actually guard airport exits. My assumption was based on my own experience on wishing to remain in airports until I had boarded my plane, so I never went looking to see if TSA agents were posting up at exits. So much for the universal experience, by which I mean I felt my experience was the universal experience.
Moving on…
Sending ICE to replace TSA agents who left the job after they stopped receiving paychecks was never going to solve the problem. In fact, it was going to introduce new ones. First and foremost, “border czar” Tom Homan said specifically that ICE wasn’t there to replace TSA agents:
“We’re simply there to help TSA do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise, such as screening through the X-ray machine. Not trained in that? We won’t do that,” Homan told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
So, if they’re not trained to do TSA work (and there’s no reason to believe they are, considered they’re probably not even trained to ICE work), there’s really not much they can do to expedite the boarding process. What are they actually doing at airports? Well, it’s tough to say. A lot of photos and videos show ICE officers leaning against walls or standing around while the lines remain as long as they were before Homan sent officers to airports. (There are also photos of ICE officers doing things I assume they aren’t actually trained to do, unless they consider a 10-minute handoff by a departing TSA agent “training.”)
Here’s another thing ICE officers aren’t doing while hanging around airports facilitating absolutely nothing in terms of expedited security screenings: wearing masks.
President Trump claims he “asked” ICE officers to not wear masks while working in airports, which is definitely yet another thing That Never Happened.
Trump on ICE: They were wearing masks. I said, do you mind taking off your masks in the airport? And they took them off. And people said wow, these are nice guys. People are starting to say, ICE, you are nice guys.
They were wearing masks. I said, do you mind taking off your masks in the airport? And they took them off. And people said wow, these are nice guys. People are starting to say, ICE, you are nice guys.
A. He never said this to ICE officers. B. Nobody actually thinks simply removing a mask converts an ICE officer into a “nice guy.”
But everywhere you look, there are ICE officers operating out in the open without feeling the need to mask up:
So unmasking ICE isn’t a problem, then? Whether at the airport or on our city streets, it’s the same ICE. #unmasked
Who apparently looked like this, prior to being sent to LaGuardia:
And that demonstrably counters the narrative pushed by Homan himself, who has constantly claimed demanding ICE officers remove their masks will immediately subject them to violence, doxxing, and whatever else can added to his clown car parade of horribles:
White House border czar Tom Homan on Sunday defended the use of masks and other facial coverings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as necessary to protect agents from a rise in assaults and violent threats reported by the Department of Homeland Security.
“I don’t like the masks, either,” Homan said in an interview Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” Still, he said, “these men and women have to protect themselves.”
Point of order: I’m sure Homan actually likes the masks. In addition, the only thing these officers are protecting themselves from is accountability. That’s why they’re fine standing around airports without masks but definitely need them when they’re jumping out of unmarked cars to kidnap people on public streets.
It was never about protecting ICE officers from the public. It was always about shielding officers from the consequences of their own, often-illegal actions. This shutdown has exposed yet another administration lie.
Border czar Tom Homan said Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would remain at airports until TSA officers are able to resume normal operations.
“We’re going to continue an ICE presence there, and until the airports feel like they’re in 100%, you know, in a posture where they can do normal operations,” Homan said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “So if less TSA agents come back, that means we’ll keep more ICE agents there.”
ICE currently has the largest budget of any federal law enforcement agency. I’d imagine the $50,000 signing bonus, along with the guarantee that your paychecks will continue to arrive no matter howlong the government is shut down, looks far more attractive to ex-TSA agents than returning to their prior positions. ICE will remain for the foreseeable future. And once the officers are there long enough, the administration will conveniently forget this was supposed to be temporary.
We’ve repeatedly noted how the Ellison family’s acquisition of Warner Brothers (after their recent acquisitions of CBS and a part of TikTok) would be very bad for a long list of reasons. The gargantuan debt load will result in unprecedented layoffs and price hikes. And the Saudi funding, and Larry’s anti-democratic interests, raise no limit of propaganda and foreign influence concerns.
It’s also worth noting that absolutely nobody in charge of this new Paramount appears to be competent.
But because our federal government is currently too corrupt to function, there’s zero real hope this merger gets blocked on the federal level. That leaves a fleeting coalition of states, who’ll likely have to band together to file a long-shot lawsuit to try and scuttle the deal.
To get out ahead of such a lawsuit, Larry Ellison’s nepobaby son David, freshly gifted not one but two giant Hollywood studios, has been making the rounds in California insisting to everyone that the merger will be great for Hollywood and for jobs. This was what he said in a response to California lawmakers about the precarious nature of the deal:
“I firmly believe that uniting Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery presents a unique opportunity to build a true champion for the creative community, one that can and will bring more stories to life, support filmmakers and talent with real scale, and compete effectively on the global stage as an independent media leader,” Ellison said in response to a question about the merger’s impact on California and Hollywood specifically. “That is the true legacy of Hollywood, and my promise to you is to build a stronger Hollywood, by keeping both of these legacy studios operating separately, thereby preserving and potentially increasing jobs.”
None of that, to be very clear, will be happening. And outside of some (more) tax incentives thrown at the already rich, neither California Sen. Adam Schiff nor Rep. Laura Friedman (who peppered the Ellisons with some light performative questioning), can or will do anything meaningful to thwart the consolidation or hold the new, bigger company accountable for false pre-merger promises.
Any real hope rests with a handful of state AGs, and their road will be a very rocky one now that the federal government has rubber stamped the deal.
Hollywood is already rocked and reeling from COVID, previous pointless consolidation, and massive migration of production overseas. You’ve got numerous high level technically skilled production folks resorting to driving Ubers amidst historic layoffs.
Enter Warner Brothers, a company that’s been acquired four times in the last two decades, with each acquisition being more pointless and devastating than the one that preceded it. With this merger having just unprecedented levels of debt at a very precarious time for traditional TV:
“Look, there is incredible IP sitting inside of Warner Bros. Now, the flip side is, you paid a lot for it. You also leveraged up to seven times. Seven times debt to EBITDA leverage; that’s a lot of debt that you’ve got to work off over the course of the next five years. Plus, you got a lot of linear TV, and like we were just talking about earlier on the podcast, nobody’s watching linear TV. And so you spent a lot of money to get assets that are in secular decline.”
That debt does not get paid off by Larry Ellison or the Saudis, or by a massive boon in badly-automated AI batman slop.
It gets paid off by brutal layoffs, corner cutting, production cuts, and consumer price hikes. That’s not up for debate. There’s also zero indication that the kind of folks leading CBS and Paramount are any more competent than the kind of folks we saw at AT&T who loudly and repeatedly demonstrated they had no idea what they were doing.
The accumulated debt from the CBS and Warner Brothers mergers, combined with Larry Ellison’s precarious footing atop the AI bubble, combined with a potential economic collapse at the hands of our bumbling kakistocracy, together form a super unstable cocktail that could result in this merger being one of the more disastrous “business” exercises conceived by modern man.
Every single time Warner Brothers changes hands the press and public are peppered with claims that this will unleash vast new innovation and jobs, and every single time that winds up being a lie. Anybody claiming this time will magically be different is either lying or not particularly bright.
