One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty. A post on the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) site from 2017 has a good summary of what the treaty is about, and why it is important:
It sets out exceptions and limits to copyright rules so that people unable to use print media (including blind, visually impaired, and dyslexic people) can access a far greater range of books and other written materials in accessible formats. These exceptions to copyright law are important in helping to combat the ‘book famine’ for print-disabled readers. The Marrakesh Treaty is particularly important in global south countries where the range of materials in an accessible format – usually expensive to produce and disseminate – can be extremely limited.
Its importance was recognised long ago, as indicated by a timeline on the Knowledge Economy International (KEI) site:
In 1981, the governing bodies of WIPO and UNESCO agreed to create a Working Group on Access by the Visually and Auditory Handicapped to Material Reproducing Works Produced by Copyright. This group meeting took place on October 25-27, 1982 in Paris, and produced a report that included model exceptions for national copyright laws. (UNESCO/WIPO/WGH/I/3). An accessible copy of this report is available here.
And yet it was only in 2013 – 31 years after the original report – that the treaty was finally agreed. The reason for this extraordinary delay in making it easier for the visually impaired to enjoy even a fraction of the material that most have access to is simple: copyright. As KEI’s director, James Love, told Walled Culture in an interview three years ago: “the initial opposition was from the publishers, and the publishers did everything you can imagine to derail this [treaty]”. The CEO post explains why:
Industry’s lobby efforts have attempted to re-frame the Marrakesh Treaty away from being a matter of human rights, education, and social justice, towards a copyright agenda by portraying it as a threat to business’ interests.
Indeed, even industries well outside publishing lobbied hard against the treaty. For example:
Caterpillar, the machinery manufacturer, joined the campaign to oppose it, apparently convinced that the Treaty would act as a slippery slope towards weaker intellectual property rules elsewhere.
As the CEO article noted, after the Marrakesh Treaty was agreed, several EU member states insisted on it being watered down further:
contrary to the obvious benefits of the ratification and implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty for the 30 million blind or visually-impaired people in Europe (and 285 million worldwide), several EU member state governments have instead bought the business line that these issues should be viewed through the lens of copyright.
That was eight years ago. And yet – incredibly – the pushback against providing the visually impaired with at least minimal rights to convert print and digital material into forms that they could access has continued unabated. A recent post on the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) blog analyses the ways in which the already diluted benefits of the Marrakesh Treaty have been diminished further:
it has become clear that there are a number of ways in which it is possible to undermine the goals and intent of the Marrakesh Treaty, ultimately limiting the progress of access to information than would otherwise be possible.
This article highlights examples from countries that are arguably getting Marrakesh implementation wrong. The list below illustrates provisions (or a lack of provisions) to avoid because they undermine the purpose of the treaty and create barriers to access for people with disabilities.
One extraordinary failure to implement the Marrakesh Treaty properly, a full 40 years after it was first discussed, is “where laws have set out that authorised entities need to be registered in order to use Marrakesh provisions, but then there is no way of registering.” According to the IFLA this is the case in Brazil and Argentina. Just slightly better is the situation where “only certain institutions and libraries should count as authorised entities.” Clearly, this “may have the effect of limiting the number of service providers, and place an additional burden on institutions.” Another problem concerns remuneration:
The Marrakesh Treaty includes an optional provision for remuneration of rightholders. This non-compulsory clause was added in order to secure support during negotiations, but undermines the Treaty’s purpose by allowing the payment of a royalty for an inaccessible work, and creates a financial and administrative burden, ultimately drawing resources away services to persons with disabilities.
Germany is a disappointing example of how new barriers can be placed in the way of the visually impaired by adding unjustified and exorbitant costs:
a fee of at least €15 is charged for each transfer of a book for each individual format. Fees (approx. 15 cents) are also charged for each download or stream of a book. Additionally, fees are charged for obtaining books from other German-speaking countries and for borrowing them. This leads to considerable costs, which inevitably result in a decline in purchases and the range of services offered.
Another obstacle is the requirement in some countries for “a commercial availability check for a work in an accessible format, when the very purpose of the Marrakesh Treaty was to address a market failure.” As the IFLA post rightly points out:
A commercial availability check is unnecessary – libraries will buy books in accessible formats where they can, as it is far more cost effective to purchase the work than produce it in accessible format. Yet Canada has introduced such a provision, and indeed even requires a second check when exporting books. It is burdensome to expect a library to conduct a search in a foreign market and be 100% sure that a book is not available in a given format there. Often the information simply is not available. Such provisions therefore create unacceptable liability, chilling the sharing of books.
Finally, there are countries that have joined the Marrakesh Treaty, but have done little or nothing to implement it:
a recent piece from Bangladesh highlights how delays in reforming domestic copyright laws, coupled with underinvestment, have meant that three years on from ratifying the Treaty, persons with print disabilities are still waiting for change. Similarly in South Africa, despite a judgement from the Constitutional Court, the necessary reforms to implement the Treaty are still being held up.
The Marrakesh Treaty saga shows the copyright industry and its friends in governments around the world at their very worst. Unashamedly placing copyright’s intellectual monopoly above other fundamental human rights, these groups have selfishly done all they can to block, hinder, delay and dilute the idea that granting the visually impaired ready access to books and other material is a matter of social justice and basic compassion.
Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.
Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.
USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. Here’s how USDS described itself two years in:
In the early days, we worried if more than ten people would apply to join the team. Two years later, folks from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes have joined to put their skills towards helping Veterans, students, small businesses, and all Americans.
That institutional knowledge, that decade of learning what works and what doesn’t, that careful balance between public service and private sector expertise? All gone. Torched by Musk as part of his faux “efficiency” crusade earlier this year.
And now they’re reinventing it. Badly. I used to joke that the Elon Musk Twitter era was all about throwing out all of Twitter’s carefully thought out ideas and then bringing them back in a dumber, more dangerous way. This seems like that, but in the federal government.
The United States Tech Force, announced Monday, is meant to source the artificial intelligence talent the government needs to win the global AI race and modernize the government, the administration says. The goal is to recruit an initial cohort of around 1,000 technologists who will be placed in agencies for two-year stints, potentially as soon as March.
“We need you,” said Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. “The U.S. Tech Force offers the chance to build and lead projects of national importance, while creating powerful career opportunities in both public service and the private sector.”
Welcome to Temu USDS, everyone.
Same basic concept—rotate tech talent through government—but stripped of all the institutional knowledge about what actually works, run by political operatives instead of civil servants, and riddled with conflicts of interest that the original programs were specifically designed to avoid.
The especially galling part? Watching the same tech bros who helped destroy USDS and 18F now celebrate “Tech Force” as some brilliant innovation:
These are the people who either stayed silent or actively cheered when Musk gutted the actual working programs. Now they’re acting like this is some breakthrough moment of government-tech collaboration. Looking through the boosters, it looks like every partner at A16Z felt the need to support this. None of them seem to mention how this only came after the destruction of the programs that were doing such great work over the past decade (including during the first Trump administration).
Again, conceptually, there is merit to the idea of bringing in techies to help make government work better for the public. But it seems pretty obnoxious for these tech bros to jump into this without acknowledging (1) this existed and worked really well for over a decade until (2) they and their tech bro buddy Elon went in and destroyed it all. Also, given how the Trump admin has acted towards the public for the past 11 months, pretty rich to assume anything done by this new “Tech Force” will be in the interest of the public.
The one actual “innovation” in Tech Force creates a corruption vector that should alarm anyone who cares about government integrity: companies are guaranteeing participants can return to their old jobs after their tour of duty.
USDS never needed this because it wasn’t a problem—people could always go back to industry if they wanted. What this guarantee does is fundamentally change the incentive structure. Now you have engineers building government systems who know exactly where they’ll be working in two years, and whose interests they’ll be serving. They won’t divest from their stock. They won’t sever ties with their employer. They’ll just be on “leave” while accessing sensitive government data and making technology decisions that could directly benefit their future (and current) employer.
As the NextGov piece notes, this should set off every alarm:
“My first question with any programs like this are, ‘What are the rules that are in place to guard against conflicts of interest?’” said Rob Shriver, former acting OPM director and current managing director of Civil Service Strong at Democracy Forward.
This is especially worthy of attention, he said, given DOGE’s approach to data — “coming in and taking over agency systems and accessing data without going through the regular procedures” — which has been at the center of several lawsuits.
Scott Kupor, who is running this is a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, who was there for 16 years (basically since A16Z started) before taking this job. And he insists that there are no conflicts, so don’t worry about that at all:
The setup may vary by company, but the managing engineers from private companies participating in the program will “effectively take a leave of absence” to become full time government employees during the program, Kupor told reporters Monday. They won’t be required to divest from their stocks.
“We feel like we’ve run down all the various conflict issues and don’t believe that that’s actually going to be an impediment to getting people here,” said Kupor. “The huge benefit to the government will be getting people who are very skilled in the private sector at managing engineering teams.”
The idea is that the participants can return to their old jobs with new skills and expertise after working for the government, he said.
“We’ve run down all the various conflict issues”—except for the part where participants will keep their stock, maintain their guaranteed employment at private companies, and have access to sensitive government systems and data. But sure, no conflicts.
The value of tech expertise in government is real. That’s why USDS and 18F existed and succeeded for over a decade. What made those programs work was their careful construction to minimize conflicts while maximizing the transfer of knowledge and expertise.
This isn’t that. This is a hastily rebuilt version of a program they deliberately destroyed, now run by political appointees from the very industries that will benefit, with explicit mechanisms that invite corruption. They gutted the institutional knowledge, fired the people who knew how to do this right, and replaced it with a system where people from private companies get guaranteed access to government data and decision-making through employees who are explicitly planning to return to those same companies.
That doesn’t seem like innovation. It seems much more like regulatory capture with better branding and a cool “force” name.
If you’ve been around a while, you might remember that Verizon used to be completely obnoxious when it came to forcing you to use their phones and their shitty apps. At one point, Verizon wouldn’t even let you use a competing GPS mapping app, locking you to Verizon’s substandard VCAST apps. The company also adored locking you into long-term contracts and expensive phone payment plans, making it expensive, annoying, or impossible to switch carriers.
Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.
Under current rules, Verizon is supposed to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. This includes both Verizon’s main brand, and its sub-brands like Straight Talk. But (correctly) confident the Trump administration won’t hold them accountable, Verizon has been refusing to unlock its phones, as Kansas resident Patrick Roach recently found out.
Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk earlier this year as a gift to his wife. He planned to pay a month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service they normally use. Under the rules, that was supposed to be possible. But Verizon blocked the attempt. So he sued them in small claims court, and won. From the October ruling:
“Under the KCPA [Kansas Consumer Protection Act], a consumer is not required to prove intent to defraud. The fact that after plaintiff purchased the phone, the defendant changed the requirements for unlocking it so that plaintiff could go to a different network essentially altered the nature of the device purchased.”
Before winning in court, Roach turned down a Verizon settlement offer for $600 because it would have restricted him from talking about his case openly:
“It’s just kind of slimy of them, so I feel like it deserves a spotlight,” he said. “I’m not sure with the current state of the FCC that anything would happen, but the rule of law should be respected.”
Not all heroes wear capes. Again, Verizon is currently lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate these unlocking guidelines entirely; and, like everything else the telecom industry asks of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, they’re very likely to get it, shifting the wireless industry back to the shittier days of old where switching carriers was annoying and expensive. You know, to make America great again.
Once again, this administration is demonstrating it has zero interest in serving the public. The administration acts together to serve a single person: Donald Trump. Anything that looks like it might benefit the public more than it benefits Trump is unacceptable. The man at the top considers everything to be zero sum. And that means he must always win, because anything else is just losing.
No administration prior to this one would even dare to suggest it shouldn’t take all reasonable steps to accommodate people with disabilities. This administration, however, will go to court to prevent even the simplest of accommodations from being put in place.
The Trump administration is arguing that requiring real-time American Sign Language interpretation of events like White House press briefings “would severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public,” part of a lawsuit seeking to require the White House to provide the services.
Department of Justice attorneys haven’t elaborated on how doing so might hamper the portrayal President Donald Trump seeks to present to the public. But overturning policies encompassing diversity, equity and inclusion have become a hallmark of his second administration, starting with his very first week back in the White House.
The National Association for the Deaf sued Donald Trump after he ditched the use of ASL (American Sign Language) interpreters during briefings and other semi-impromptu meetings with the press. The previous administration had generally tried to ensure a live ASL interpreter was on hand any time Joe Biden addressed the public. This administration has overturned decades of presidential precedent, choosing to force deaf citizens to rely on close-captioned recordings or, if attending any of these events in person, doing their best to read lips.
The DOJ’s filing [PDF] says some stupid and disturbing stuff about Trump and his “image.” In a filing that should have simply been a concession to the norm and the end of this litigation, the administration instead says this:
Most problematically, the preliminary injunction would severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public.
Do what now?
If there’s anything “problematic” about the complaint, it’s the faint suggestion that the White House would need to ignore logistics issues if, say, the president decides to address reporters while boarding Air Force One. Adding an ASL interpreter to the traveling staff may present difficulties that should not immediately be considered an active effort to keep deaf people out of the national conversation, but this statement from the DOJ says something else entirely. It says the president should be allowed to “control his image,” which is something that’s impossible even when not actively trying to prevent a certain percentage of the population from engaging in real-time dissemination of information by the White House.
The president can certainly try to “control his image,” but those efforts are not allowed to circumvent the First Amendment right of access. And the president’s “image” belongs to the public, because it’s naturally subjective. Trump may want to portray himself as the god-king tasked with saving the nation, but everyone else is allowed to bring their own opinion to the party.
What this absolutely looks like is Trump (and his obedient “handlers”) choosing to treat people with disabilities the same way Trump does: with disdain. We all know Trump considers anything from chronic conditions to being a prisoner of war [click through for additional hilarity] to be a sign of weakness. The only way to impress Trump is to be born into generational wealth and leverage that inability to fail into a career filled with slum-lording and strategic bankruptcies. This is a man who considers people who sign up for military service to be “losers” because they gave up their lives in exchange for the satisfaction of truly serving their country.
So, it’s completely understandable that the Trump administration wants to say “fuck you” to the deaf, albeit without being forced to display the internationally recognized non-ASL “fuck you” hand signal.
It’s also something even more pathetic than this lazy volley into the court — one that relies on rulings by Judge Boasberg to support its counterarguments. Lest we forget, the current Trump administration wants Boasberg removed (or impeached) because he’s called bullshit on the DHS’s illegal deportation efforts. But now that it wants to allow Trump to say to a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy” without it immediately being made available to deaf Americans, it needs Boasberg’s previous opinion on this issue that was delivered during Trump’s first term in office.
But we all know what this is really about, don’t we? Controlling an image only matters to someone so insecure he thinks ASL interpreters might be secretly making fun of him. Trump can’t have anyone else translating for him because there’s a slim chance they might not portray him exactly as he sees himself in his head.
All the administration really needed to do is bring back ASL interpreters whenever possible. Instead, it has gone on the record with an extended middle finger no deaf person — even in the back rows — will have any trouble interpreting. These are the acts of small, hateful people who have chosen to prostrate themselves in front of someone even smaller and more hateful. Fuck them all.
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If you’re wondering what independent journalism that won’t bend to White House pressure looks like,you’re looking at it.
On Sunday night, CBS News’ newly imported “editor in chief,” Bari Weiss, killed a 60 Minutes story about Trump’s illegal deportations to a Salvadoran concentration camp—hours before it was set to air. Why? Because it might upset the White House. And because Weiss apparently doesn’t understand how television production works, she waited so long to kill it that it still got sent to foreign partners, meaning the story she tried to bury spread all over the internet anyway.
A perfect Streisand Effect, and a perfect illustration of what happens when you hand editorial control to someone more interested in protecting power than challenging it.
Supporting Techdirt means supporting a news organization that won’t kill stories to please anyone in power. Not now, not ever.
The story itself was pretty typical 60 Minutes fare, and in some ways quite similar to a PBS Frontline piece, Surviving CECOT, that was released a few weeks earlier. The main new ground in the 60 Minutes story was that only about 3% of those Venezuelans illegally sent to CECOT actually had violent criminal records (contrary to what the administration claimed). There was also some further evidence showing that CECOT almost certainly violated the human rights of everyone in the concentration camp.
Here at Techdirt, we’ve been covering the story of the illegal and unconscionable actions of the Trump administration, shipping these men to a concentration camp in El Salvador from the beginning.
While some have demanded that we “stick to tech” when an administration ships human beings to a modern torture camp based on nothing more than having tattoos, that’s everyone’s story to cover. If you want to “stick to tech,” feel free to go elsewhere. And if you want to get White House approved talking points and “view from nowhere” reporting, apparently CBS News is now there for you.
But if you want to know what all of this actually means and why it’s important, stick around.
Here’s the difference between us and CBS News: Techdirt has been around for nearly 30 years precisely because we don’t have a Bari Weiss. We don’t have millions in venture capital or billionaire backers telling us what we can and can’t say. We’re nimble, we’re independent, and we answer to our readers—not to power.
But that independence comes at a cost. The price of a single 30-second TV commercial on 60 Minutes could fund Techdirt for months. And right now, organizations that used to sponsor our work are backing away—not because they disagree with our reporting, but because they’re afraid Trump will come after them for supporting it.
So if you want independent reporting that won’t bend to White House pressure, we need your support. Back us at $100 or more between now and January 5th, and we’ll send you Techdirt’s first-ever challenge coin—commemorating 30 years of Section 230, the law that makes comment sections and social media sharing possible, and which is under constant attack from the very people we’re covering.
Or hell, do it to spite the people who think journalism should serve power instead of challenging it. Either way works for us.
We promise we’ll put it to better use than any of the billionaire owned and controlled media orgs out there.
Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress last week for some light questioning about all the terrible, illegal bullshit he’s been up to. While the hearing mostly focused on FCC independence and Carr’s failed bid to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel, it didn’t touch on the other extremist nonsense Carr’s been up to, including his assault on public media and destruction of consumer protection.
While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.
As our already struggling, highly consolidated, and under-funded media outlets tend to do, KCBS immediately folded under federal existential threat, just as Carr hoped:
“KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.”
When staffers did try to cover more political fare, they say the tone was heavily scrutinized and the content was watered down to a bland gruel to avoid upsetting Republicans:
“Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.
“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.”
As Carr was distracted by his other extremist projects, like failing to censor Kimmel, some of the scrutiny eased and the station regained the confidence to at least report on things like the No Kings protest. But the bullying appears to have had its intended effect. At one point, a KCBS reporter says he was denied the opportunity to interview Katie Porter because management felt it would upset Donald Trump:
“In the weeks after the immigration story, Seelig asked Sovern to cancel an interview he had set up with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter out of fear she would say something negative about Trump, he said.”
For its part, feckless station management is trying to pretend that nothing happened:
“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”
Carr first targeted KCBS with a letter of inquiry, which prompted the station’s corporate owner, Audacy, to immediately shift into CYA mode, reviewing the political statements and social media posts of reporters for any hint of “political bias” (by which they of course mean criticism of right wing ideology and policy).
It’s another example of how journalism doesn’t really align particularly well with the goals of consolidated corporate power, which in turn weakens it to exploitation by bad actors (like, oh, authoritarians). That’s a major reason why the U.S. desperately needs independent media, worker-owned media, and publicly-owned media, the latter of which Carr is also trying to destroy through sham investigations.
Again, it’s important to step back and view this all as an incredible, generational, and extremely successful right wing and corporate joint project to dismantle real journalism, accountability, and informed electoral consensus. This isn’t something that just popped up with Trump, though it did help enable Trumpism.
None of it has been remotely subtle, and the campaign results in a U.S. press that’s utterly and comically incapable of being honest with itself (or its audience) about what’s actually happening. This is, to be clear, the exact trajectory seen in countries like Russia or Hungary that stumbled face-first into permanent autocratic rule.
I guess I’m a masochist, so here we go. In my recent post about Let It Die: Inferno and the game developer’s fairly minimal use of AI and machine learning platforms, I attempted to make the point that wildly stratified opinions on the use or non-use of AI was making actual nuanced conversation quite difficult. As much as I love our community and comments section — it’s where my path to writing for this site began, after all — it really did look like some folks were going to try as hard as possible to prove me right. Some commenters treated the use of AI as essentially no big deal, while some were essentially “Never AI-ers,” indicating that any use, any at all, made a product a non-starter for them.
Still other comments pointed out that this studio and game are relatively unknown. The game was reviewed poorly for reasons that have nothing to do with use of AI, as I myself pointed out in the post. One commenter even suggested that this might all be an attention-grabbing thing to propel the studio and game into the news, so small and unknown as they are.
Larian Studios is not unknown. They don’t need any hype. Larian is the studio that produces the Divinity series, not to mention the team that made Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most awarded and best-selling games of 2023. And the studio’s next Divinity game will also make some limited use of AI and machine learning, prompting a backlash from some.
Larian Studios is experimenting with generative AI and fans aren’t too happy. The head of the Baldur’s Gate 3 maker, Swen Vincke, released a new statement to try to explain the studio’s stance in more detail and make clear the controversial tech isn’t being used to cut jobs. “Any [Machine Learning] tool used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft,” he said.
He was responding to a backlash that arose earlier today from a Bloomberg interview which reported that Larian was moving forward with gen AI despite some internal concerns among staff. Vincke made clear the tech was only being used for things like placeholder text, PowerPoint presentations, and early concept art experiments and that nothing AI-generated would be included in Larian’s upcoming RPG, Divinity.
Alright, I want to be fair to the side of this that takes an anti-AI stance. Vincke is being disingenuous at best here. Whatever use is made of AI technology, even limited use, still replaces work that would be done by some other human being. Even if you’re committed to not losing any current staff through the use of AI, you’re still getting work product that would otherwise require you to hire and expand your team through the use of AI. There is obviously a serious emotional response to that concept, one that is entirely understandable.
But some limited use of AI like this can also have other effects on the industry. It can lower the barrier to starting new studios, which will then hire more people to do the things that AI sucks at, or to do the things where we really don’t want AI involved. It can make Indie studios faster and more productive, allowing them to compete all the more with the big publishers and studios out there. It can create faster output, meaning adjacent industries to developers and publishers might have to hire and expand to accommodate the additional output.
All of this, all of it, relies on AI to be used in narrow areas where it can be useful, for real human beings to work with its output to make it actual art versus slop, and for the end product to be a good product. Absent those three things, the Anti-AI-ers are absolutely right and this will suck.
But the lashing that Larian has been getting is divorced from any of that nuance.
Vincke followed up with a separate statement on on X rejecting the idea that the company is “pushing hard” on AI.
“Holy fuck guys we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI.
We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more. The art they create is original and I’m very proud of what they do. I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn’t say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world class artists.
We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.”
Yes, exactly. There are uses for this technology in the gaming industry. Pretending otherwise is silly. There will be implications on the direct industry jobs at existing studios due to its use. Pretending otherwise is silly. AI use can also have positive effects on the industry and workers within it overall. Pretending otherwise is silly and ignores all the technological progress that came before we started putting these two particular letters together (AI).
And, ultimately, this technology simply isn’t going away. You can rage against this literal machine all you like, it will be in use. We might as well make the project influencing how it’s used, rather than if it’s used.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.
UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. “Thankfully, they’ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,” said one UC insider privy to the system’s thinking.
To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn’t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests.
Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by “JB,” has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. “There’s nothing like this time,” he said. “This is singular. It’s the toughest.”
On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration’s actions against UCLA had “flouted” legal requirements and ordered it to cease all “coercive and retaliatory conduct” against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA’s $584 million in frozen grant funding.
But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. “Even if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,” said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. “They have not made it a secret what they wish to do.”
In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research.
One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump’s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. “These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he told us. “It looks like we’re being used.”
For Trump’s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start.
With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state — one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump’s most prominent foes.
Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it’s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Some of Trump’s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was “a national embarrassment” over its handling of “criminal antisemitic conduct.” Dhillon and Terrell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring “zealous advocacy” for Trump’s executive orders, attacks on all forms of “illegal DEI” and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division’s chief focus, were largely abandoned.
On Feb. 28, Terrell’s task force announced plans to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess “whether remedial action is warranted.”
But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.
In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in “the entire UC system” were “being harassed because of antisemitism.” The administration planned to “sue,” “bankrupt,” and “take away every single federal dollar” from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.
A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn’t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of tolerating antisemitism.
Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.
In this case, the Justice Department’s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time — initially, a single month.
Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn’t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, “North” and “South” teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.
“The incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,” Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice’s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. “The end goal was to file a damn complaint — or have something to threaten the university.”
Trump’s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help “win this country back.” “You guys have found a hostile work environment, right?” lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.
“He seemed upset we were spending so much time investigating,” Dena Robinson, a senior trial attorney, told us. “He didn’t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued.” In an email about six weeks in, Gates suggested there was easily enough in the public record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses — a notion that horrified the career lawyers. “Why did we even go out there if you’d already made up your mind?” another member of the UC team recalled thinking. Gates, who left the DOJ in November after just 11 months, declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle.
Lawyers on the team say it soon became apparent that there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination case against UC Davis, UC Berkeley or UCSF, much less the entire UC system. Fearful for their jobs, they agreed on a strategy to “feed the beast,” as one attorney put it: to focus on UCLA, which had experienced the most troubling, and publicly explosive, episodes of antisemitism.
Like many colleges across the country, UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel’s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents, including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading “Free Palestine, Fuck Jews.” Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic.
Starting in late April 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus. Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement, UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week, disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings. Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism.
On the night of April 30, masked counterprotesters, armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks, stormed the encampment, triggering a three-hour melee before police were finally brought in. Dozens of people were injured. It took until 6 a.m. May 2 for Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies to empty the site.
Before Trump even took office, however, UCLA — and the federal government — had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school.
Most significantly, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement with the Department of Education resolving investigations into student complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA and on four other campuses.
The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus’ handling of discrimination complaints. Government monitoring was to continue until UC “demonstrated compliance” with “all the terms of this agreement.”
The Trump administration disregarded all that. Even as the employee investigation was underway, it launched a new investigation of the same student complaints in early May.
On May 27 on Fox News, Terrell, the head of the antisemitism task force, once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ’s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded. “Expect massive lawsuits against the UC system,” he declared. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. …We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially.”
At the time, the lawyers working on the UC employment investigation were still racing to complete their recommendation. They were focused solely on UCLA, having determined there wasn’t adequate evidence to pursue cases at other campuses. Many had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that case. “This was not something we would usually litigate,” one lawyer on the team said in an interview. “But everyone understood the front office was demanding this.”
By then, most of the remaining members of the UC team, amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division, were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration’s deferred-resignation offer. “It was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint,” the lawyer said.
In the 47-page recommendation memo the UC team sent on May 29 to Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights, the lawyers spelled out their concerns. “We simply do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring 2024 are ongoing” — typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint, the memo acknowledged. Some of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech. And because, “as has been frequently noted,” the investigation had been “truncated” to three months, there hadn’t even been time to review some of the documents UC produced, the memo said.
To shore up potential weaknesses in the case, the memo suggested an unusual “hybrid complaint” strategy that would rest partly on new allegations about the ineffectiveness of the university’s complaint process (which was ongoing) and partly on three older faculty grievances.
One of the grievances cited was that of Astor, the professor of social welfare, who describes himself as both a Zionist and a “pro-peace researcher.” His academic work, much of which takes place in Israel, involves studying ways to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist. But after he signed an open letter from Jewish faculty criticizing some pro-Palestinian protesters’ calls for violence, they accused him, in a widely circulated letter of their own, of supporting genocide. When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students, he told us, a masked protester asked whether he was a Zionist. After he said he believed in Israel’s right to exist, he was blocked from entering or crossing through the central campus.
Astor was targeted again last November, he said, when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he’d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class. “A bunch of students got up and showed pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn’t let us talk,” he recalled. Later heckled on his way to his car, he said he felt threatened and depressed. He lost more than 60 pounds and was granted permission to work from home, but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere.
Astor’s complaints, the employment-section attorneys believed, would support their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA. Even so, they warned that their case might not hold up in court. In the memo, they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint.
With that message delivered, most of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department.
On the morning of July 29, two days before Milliken’s interrupted golf game, the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the 2024 encampment debacle: It announced a $6.45 million settlement of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who said protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings, creating a “Jew exclusion zone,” and that the university did nothing to help them. UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions, and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and support the UCLA Jewish community. The steps the university had taken, a joint statement declared, “demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism.”
The Trump administration had a different view. That afternoon, it announced that it had sent UC a notice letter saying the Justice Department had found UCLA’s response to the encampment had been “deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Bondi warned in a press release that UCLA would “pay a heavy price” for “this disgusting breach of civil rights.” The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the investigation had begun.
The letter, which acknowledged that it relied significantly on “publicly available reports and information,” ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of 2024 to rest.
“The violations they described all predate the December agreement,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department under the Obama and Biden administrations. “They’ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward.”
The July 29 letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no “reasonable certainty” of reaching an agreement.
Instead, the next day, the Trump administration began freezing UCLA’s research money from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Defense Department. The agencies cited the campus’ handling of antisemitism as well as “illegal affirmative action” and allowing transgender women in women’s sports and bathrooms.
UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions, but the first public institution.
David Shackelford, whose medical school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer, said his phone “blew up” when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders. Three NIH grants, totaling $8 million over five years, had supported the lab’s work. “These are experiments and animal models that take years to develop,” Shackelford said. “It’s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away.” He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running “on fumes,” vowing “to go down swinging.”
Elle Rathbun is not sure she’s up for the fight. A 29-year-old sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to study how brains recover from strokes when she got the news: Her $160,000 award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants.
She found substitute funding for some of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress. Like hundreds of her colleagues, she’d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant, only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream, a move she called “incredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful.”
A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them. But even after those victories, the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle. In a July 30 email later introduced in court, the National Science Foundation’s acting chief science officer wrote that, in addition to freezing existing grants, he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA.
In nearly 500 pages of personal statements to the court, some faculty members said they’re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university. Amander Clark, a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center, no longer talks about the ways her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people. “I am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight, 20 years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen,” she wrote.
In selecting Milliken as their new system president, the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large public university systems with vastly different political climates, ranging from the City University of New York, which he ran from 2014 to early 2018, to the University of Texas system, which he led from late 2018 until May 2025.
At UT, Milliken had championed some progressive steps, including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure, but he had also quickly shut down the system’s 21 offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law. “He knows what is a winning hand and what is not,” said Richard Benson, who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas.
On Aug. 1, his first day on the job at UC’s system office in Oakland, Milliken issued a measured public statement that addressed the “deeply troubling” UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC’s “life-saving and life-changing research.”
That same week, the Justice Department, days after Bondi’s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students, delivered a second notice letter, declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the “hybrid” lawsuit that the DOJ’s UC team had recommended in May.
Eager to turn up the pressure on UC, political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings, according to former agency officials. But Kacie Candela, a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration’s UC investigations, warned that under federal law, it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit. After a heated dispute, her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced. She was terminated days later. (Candela, who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing, declined to discuss the matter for this story. DOJ officials didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode.)
After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters, Milliken quickly affirmed UC’s willingness to “engage in dialogue” with the administration. But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later: the Justice Department’s $1.2 billion settlement demand, which also asked for policy changes in areas where there’d been no findings of wrongdoing, including admissions practices, screening of foreign students and transgender students’ access to bathrooms. Within hours of UC’s receipt of the 27-page demand letter on Aug. 8 — which the DOJ had marked “confidential” — CNN, The New York Times and Politico had all posted stories saying they’d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter, which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private.)
All this was without precedent, due process or clear legal justification, civil rights experts noted. Agreeing to the DOJ’s demands, the Aug. 8 letter said, would release UC from claims that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students, employees and women, and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud. “They were trying to overwhelm,” said Swedish, the former civil rights deputy section chief. “They were spraying the fire hose at the university.”
Strangely, Justice demanded another $172 million for employees who’d complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at $300,000.
Former U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said a possible rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that, under Trump, the DOJ is experimenting with using the False Claims Act in civil rights cases. This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers, who would share in any financial recovery. “It’s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from,” Cunha said of the administration’s settlement demands. But “if there’s a pattern that’s emerged thus far, it’s that every tool in the toolbox is on the table.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump, acknowledged that the government has pursued “eye-catching” penalties “with a speed that suggested” normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures “have not been utilized.” But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the “national crisis” of antisemitism. “When a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented,” he said, “the response needs to be as well.”
In media interviews, officials in the Trump administration acknowledge that its “whole-of-government” attacks on universities seek to bypass normal, slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the government is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing, seemingly arbitrary fines. “Having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention,” former White House deputy May Mailman, a key architect of the administration’s higher education strategy, told The New York Times.
This approach is “flagrantly unlawful” and “incredibly dangerous,” said Lhamon, the former assistant education secretary, who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school. “There’s a long set of steps that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated.”
Lhamon said the Trump administration was operating “like a mob boss.”
“That is not the federal government doing civil rights work,” she said.
Milliken has found himself caught between the Trump administration’s demands and those of his new constituency in California, which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation.
Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has threatened to sue the federal government, calling its demands “extortion” and vowing to “fight like hell” against any deal.
The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school. “The university should have immediately gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,” he told ProPublica and the Chronicle. “I wanted the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit. I didn’t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating.”
But Milliken, backed by the UC regents, resisted calls for confrontation, wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under investigation. The damage to date at UCLA is “minor in comparison to the threat that looms,” Milliken noted in a mid-September statement. “We are in uncharted waters.”
So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the government. According to a person familiar with the matter, it has retained William Levi, who served in Trump’s first administration as a special assistant to the president, counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department, to lead the talks.
If UC’s leaders have preached restraint, its faculty has opted for open defiance. In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge, Lin, to restore UCLA’s frozen research grants, a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration’s entire assault on UC. At a hearing on Nov. 6, the government’s lawyer acknowledged that the administration’s “hodgepodge” of actions against the system hadn’t followed established civil rights procedures but said the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration’s “policy priorities.”
Lin didn’t buy it. A week later, in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction, she barred all of the Trump administration’s actual and threatened moves to punish UC, including the $1.2 billion payment demand. The Trump administration’s “playbook,” she wrote, citing comments by Terrell and others, illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”
Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC, approvals were slow to resume. In public remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov. 19, Milliken said that more than 400 grants across the system remained suspended or terminated, representing “more than $230 million in research activity on hold.” He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system’s pathway to new grants will be blocked.
In our interview, Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration, saying the university has held its ground on its governance, mission and academic freedom.
“We recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal government,” he said. “Our efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans.”
You generally don’t see criminal charges filed against judges at any level of the court system. If it does happen, it’s used to address egregious and constant criminal activity by sitting judges. The most common path towards discipline relies on the court system itself, which allows courts to punish judges for misbehavior and, in rare cases, have them removed via internal processes.
But this is no ordinary US. This is Trump’s United States, where anyone who displeases the man who wishes he could be king is subjected to vindictive prosecutions. What happened to New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey (prosecutions currently paused due to Trump administration fuckery/fuck ups) can happen to anyone.
So here’s what happened to Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. After being made aware of the fact that DEA and ICE agents were hanging around outside of her courtroom in hopes of arresting migrants who were doing nothing more than reporting for their court-ordered check-ins, Dugan decided to let the migrant whose criminal case she was currently handling slip out a side door, rather than go out the main door and directly into the hands of loitering federal officers.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Kash Patel’s FBI — something he celebrated on X briefly before deleting his post — this meant agents had to move quickly across nearly an additional 50-100 feet to arrest this person. A sworn affidavit by FBI special agent made it clear this was way too much stuff for officers to be doing, especially one with [checks affidavit again] seven years experience as a CPA[??][!!].
The federal government said this added up to obstruction. And it chose to criminally charge Judge Hannah Dugan rather than allow the Wisconsin court system to handle this on its own. There’s precedent for this, of course. The last time a judge faced criminal charges for acts that would normally be handled by the court system’s internal disciplinary procedures was in 2019 during Trump’s first term as president.
Hannah C. Dugan, a Wisconsin state judge, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents, a high-profile victory for the Justice Department in a prosecution of a judge who it said was illegally aiding an undocumented immigrant.
Judge Dugan faces up to five years in prison and, as a person who has been convicted of a felony, she is likely ineligible to continue to hold office as a judge in Wisconsin, according to the State Constitution.
This wasn’t the end result of a lengthy investigation or the culmination of numerous complaints against Judge Dugan. This is nothing more than some federal agents bitching that they were momentarily inconvenienced and getting all the vindictiveness they wanted from Trump’s DOJ and Kash Patel’s FBI.
This isn’t over. This conviction can be appealed. And it appears the court handling this thinks there’s a case to be made. Normally, jury guilty verdicts are accompanied by sentencing dates. That didn’t happen here, which seems to indicate the judge handling the case isn’t necessarily convinced Judge Dugan’s actions rise to the level of a federal felony. But no matter how this ends up playing out, everyone should be on notice that Trump thinks “justice” and “revenge” are the same word.
