Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.
What was supposed to set the venture apart was a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone.
To pitch the phone to unsuspecting rubes, the original press release had a badly photoshopped rendition of the device, peppered with claims the phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”
“Let’s say I don’t fully trust the Trump Organization to be great stewards of my credit card information, so I used a virtual number provided by my bank. Once I’d handed over the virtual money, I got this message: “Thank you for your order of a Physical SIM, we’ll ship next business day via First Class USPS mail, no separate tracking number will be sent.” Just what I was looking for with my wireless service: a sense of mystery! Fast-forward two weeks, and that SIM card is still on its way.”
Customer service appears to function (The Verge did manage to get a refund), but again, this is likely just outsourced to the support centers for existing MVNOs, since “Trump Mobile” technically doesn’t really exist.
NBC journalists pre-ordered the Trump phone, and have found themselves strung along for weeks now, with one call center rep blaming the government shutdown. Despite this effort clearly having nothing to actually do with the government:
“That date passed without an update, and when NBC News followed up with the call center, an operator said the delivery would now be in the “beginning of December,” with no specific date.
The operator cited the government shutdown as a reason for the delay, without further explanation.”
One gets the sense that, like most things the Trump Organization does, there wasn’t much thought put into this whole affair. It was just another in a long line of lazy lifestyle branding cash grabs attempting to monetize the presidency, that nobody in Trumpland put much thought into.
In that sense, it’s perfectly representative of Trump and his supposed business acumen. Just a lazy, hollow simulacrum of a real thing, targeting an audience that’s consistently too dim to notice the difference.
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage of RFK Jr., for instance. Recall all the topics on him alone that we’ve covered: his anti-vaxxer stances, his failures to advocate for his staff at HHS and its child agencies, his war on Tylenol, his swimming in a creek rife with human waste, his thoughts on sperm counts, his thoughts on circumcision, his hiring and firing practices at HHS, measles, ACIP, and goddamned chemtrails. How are you supposed to focus on anything meaningful in that cornucopia of chaos?
The problem is that it’s all interrelated. The overarching theme is that Kennedy is an anti-science ignoramus who espouses eugenic tendencies and puts his beliefs into practice as a matter of public policy and/or guidance, all of which leads to adverse impacts on the American public.
Let’s put some examples to that theme. We talked recently about how the CDC changed its webpage advising the public on concerns about vaccines and autism such that it now informs the public that there may indeed be a link. Its stated reason for doing this is, essentially, because a link between the two has not been “disproven”. As I mentioned in my post, that isn’t how science works. You don’t have to prove a negative in science. The onus of evidence is on the party making a claim. If there is no valid evidence to support a claim, the default is null, or to behave as if the claim is not true.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, he told The New York Times in an interview published Friday.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday.
Again, this isn’t how science works. It’s not a “determination” that’s been made. It’s that the claim that autism and vaccines are linked has not been demonstrated through evidence and science and therefore is not considered a valid claim. If researchers want to do more peer-reviewed research, following good scientific methodology, have at it. More good data is always good. But we no more have to make a “determination” that vaccines don’t cause autism currently than we would need to make a “determination” that chocolate milk causes autism. A link has simply not been established, so we behave as though there is no link. That’s how this works.
Couple that with the even more recent news that Kennedy’s new Deputy Director of the CDC is Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham. Abraham himself has espoused many of the anti-vaxxer views that he shares with Kennedy.
Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.
While he doesn’t support lifesaving vaccines, he is a big fan of using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite studies finding both ineffective against the viral infection. In his newsletter, Faust notes that in 2021, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin out of 12,000 practicing physicians in the state. This fits with his longer record of troubling prescriptions. In 2013, he was one of the top opioid prescribers.
So, Kennedy publicly puts anti-vaxxer talking points on display as public guidance via the CDC website, not to mention all the words that manage to tumble from his mouth, and continues to put anti-vaxxer and anti-medicine officials to lead HHS and its child agencies. What’s the result? Pertussis is on the rise. America is about to lose its elimination status of measles.
And, if you want to put a local lens on all of this, communities in South Carolina, that have essentially behaved as Kennedy would wish, are suffering from outbreaks of measles and still people won’t get vaccinated.
South Carolina’s measles outbreak isn’t yet as large as those in other states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas. But it shows how a confluence of larger national trends — including historically low vaccination rates, skepticism fueled by the pandemic, misinformation, and “health freedom” ideologies proliferated by conservative politicians — have put some communities at risk for the reemergence of a preventable, potentially deadly virus.
“Everyone talks about it being the canary in the coal mine because it’s the most contagious infectious disease out there,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “The logic is indisputable that we’re likely to see more outbreaks.”
10% of children enrolled in Spartanburg County do not meet the vaccination requirements, including for the MMR vaccine. Many have religious exemptions, which are laughably easy to obtain and don’t require any affirmative description of what religion we’re even talking about. And the drop from 95% vaccinated status, the percentage in which a community will obtain herd immunity, happened in the last five or so years. Right when Kennedy became a nationally public figure. Go back a decade and its even worse.
The number of students in South Carolina who have been granted religious exemptions has increased dramatically over the past decade. That’s particularly true in the Upstate region, where religious exemptions have increased sixfold from a decade ago. During the 2013-14 school year, 2,044 students in the Upstate were granted a religious exemption to the vaccine requirements, according to data published by The Post and Courier. By fall 2024, that number had jumped to more than 13,000.
Public health officials are putting on mobile vaccination clinics in the area, but very few people are showing up. Misinformation, it seems, is more powerful than watching your fellow neighbors get infected with measles.
This all looks like chaos. And to a large degree it is chaos. But you can draw a straight line between the national bullshit that Kennedy and his cadre of sycophants are engaging in and the illness that is taking hold in places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Do not mistake one as being separate from the other. They are in direct relation.
Unlike the many causes Kennedy has claimed for autism.
Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States.
“The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Tate posted on X before the trip in February — one of many times he has sung the president’s praises to his fans.
But when the Tate brothers arrived by private plane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they immediately found themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement once more, as Customs and Border Protection officials seized their electronic devices.
This time, they had a powerful ally come to their aid. Behind the scenes, the White House intervened on their behalf.
Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.
In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House.
The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Since entering office for a second term, Trump has urged the Justice Department to go after elected officials who investigated him and his businesses, and he pardoned a string of political allies. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. And news of the White House intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers comes as Trump is under fire over his ties to notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s recent efforts to stop the public release of the so-called Epstein files.
Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials.
One official who was involved and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid facing retribution said they were disgusted by the request’s “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”
“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person said. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”
It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident.
But law enforcement experts said it is highly unusual for the White House to get involved in particular border seizures or to demand authorities give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.”
Tobon said that even if authorities resisted the request from Ingrassia, knowledge that the White House opposed their actions could cause them to be less aggressive than they would normally be: “Anytime somebody feels intimidated or as if they’re not free to follow procedure, that’s going to stay in the back of their mind because of the consequences. In this administration the consequences are different, people are getting fired.”
Samuel Buell, a Duke University law school professor and former federal prosecutor, called the pressure on behalf of the Tates “another data point” in the White House politicizing law enforcement.
“This is not something that would have been viewed as appropriate or acceptable prior to 2025,” Buell said. “There’s a pattern here of severe departure from preexisting norms … that are being tossed aside left and right.”
The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, said he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. He said it’s unclear whether any investigation into their contents is continuing.
His clients, he said, are innocent and there were no illicit materials on their electronics. “There have been multiple investigations against them and nothing has come of it,” McBride said.
Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House, and McBride acknowledged speaking “to Paul from time to time” but couldn’t recall discussing the seized devices with him. Ingrassia, he said, has never given the Tates special treatment since joining the Trump administration.
The White House declined to answer questions about whether Ingrassia was acting on his own or representing the White House’s wishes.
In a brief interview with ProPublica, Ingrassia denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.”
Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.”
When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked authorities to return the devices, even if he did not order them to, Paltzik declined to comment, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because it is meaningless in this context. He either ordered something or he didn’t. And as I said, he did NOT order anything.”
A DHS spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the intervention or any impact it might have had on an investigation, only saying in a statement that Customs and Border Protection “performed a 100% baggage examination and detained all electronic media devices when the Tate Brothers entered the country. Electronic media devices were detained and turned over to Homeland Security Investigators for inspectional purposes.”
Ingrassia’s work at McBride’s small New York law firm included helping to represent the Tate brothers. He has praised Andrew Tate’s “physical prowess” on social media along with his “willpower and spirit,” calling him “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence.”
Ethics experts said when government officials take actions to benefit former clients, it undermines public trust.
“The rule of law cannot be carried out if it depends on cronyism,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in the administrations of both parties. “To have a member of the White House interfere when they’ve had a prior client relationship and some sort of personal relationship, that gives rise to questions of impartiality.”
Trump had nominated Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but the 30-year-old lawyer’s chances for Senate confirmation imploded after Politico reported that he had sent a string of racist text messages to fellow Republicans and described himself as having “a Nazi streak.” Paltzik, his lawyer, raised doubts about the authenticity of the texts but said “even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor.”
In a post on X announcing he was withdrawing from his Senate confirmation hearing because not enough Republican lawmakers were supporting him, Ingrassia said he would “continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again.”
Last month, Ingrassia announced he was moving to a new role within the administration, after Trump called him into his office and asked him to serve as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.
It’s unclear what prompted authorities to seize the Tates’ property, but the bar for searching electronic devices is significantly lower for those entering the U.S. compared with those already in the country, even if they are citizens.
After the seizure, the contents were examined by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, according to the official involved. A Homeland Security official, who asked for anonymity because they didn’t have permission to speak publicly, confirmed that HSI agents scrutinized the contents.
The Tates left the United States in late March.
No criminal charges have been filed against the brothers in the United States, though a lawyer representing four anonymous defendants sued by them in Florida filed court papers this year suggesting that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were investigating the pair. No other details have become public, and a spokesperson for the prosecutors’ office declined to comment.
In an interview with conservative podcaster Candace Owens soon after landing in Florida, Andrew Tate revealed his devices had been seized, saying they were taken after he refused to give customs officers his passwords.
Tate, who was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Britain before moving as an adult to Romania, complained that his rights were violated, calling himself “one of the most innocent people on the planet.”
And he said law enforcement officials wouldn’t find anything on his devices: “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence? You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.”
In that interview, Tate made no mention of a White House official intervening on his behalf and seemingly misidentified state authorities in Florida as responsible for taking his devices.
Shortly after the Tates landed on Feb. 27, Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that Florida authorities had launched an investigation into the brothers. Uthmeier said his office had “secured and executed subpoenas and warrants” and called the brothers’ behavior “atrocious.”
“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to accept it.”
The status of the Florida investigation is unclear. A spokesperson for the Florida attorney general declined to comment for this article.
Allegations of sexual abuse and violence have swirled around Andrew Tate for almost as long as he’s been in the public eye. In 2016, Tate was booted off the cast of the British version of the “Big Brother” reality series around the time a video emerged of him whipping a woman with a belt. Tate said he and the woman were joking.
Tate’s profile only rose afterward, and he began amassing a following as a self-help guru for young men. He quickly aligned himself with Trump’s then-young MAGA movement.
“The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” he posted on social media after meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2017.
Tate moved to Romania a year after his brief foray in reality TV, in part, he said, because he believed authorities there investigate sex crimes less aggressively.
“I’m not a … rapist but I like the idea of being able to do what I want,” he said.
But in 2023, prosecutors in Romania accused the Tates of operating a criminal group that trafficked women, including some who alleged the brothers led them to believe they were interested in relationships but instead forced them into filming online pornographic videos. Prosecutors also said they were investigating allegations that the Tates trafficked minors. Andrew Tate was charged with rape. The Tates have denied the allegations, and the initial charges against them were sent back to prosecutors by a court because of procedural issues.
The Tates face similar allegations in Britain. Authorities there authorized a raft of charges against the brothers, including rape and human trafficking, based on allegations from three women. In 2024, arrest warrants were issued for the brothers, who have denied wrongdoing, but authorities said they would not be extradited to the United Kingdom until criminal proceedings in Romania were completed.
A woman has also sued the Tates in Florida, accusing them of luring her to Romania to coerce her into sex work. The Tates have denied the allegations, and last month a judge dismissed most of her claims but allowed for her to refile.
This year, Tate derided the allegations against him and compared himself to Trump on X. “Romania? No case UK? No case USA? No case,” he posted on X. “Lawfare? – Im one of the most mistreated men in history beside president Trump himself.”
The intervention on behalf of the Tates was not the first time those around Trump took an interest in legal issues involving the brothers.
In February, Romania’s foreign minister said that presidential envoy Richard Grenell told him at an international security conference in Germany that he remained interested in the fate of the Tates. “I did not perceive this statement as pressure,” the foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, said, “just a repeat of a known stance.” Grenell told the Financial Times that he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu but supported “the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his way, enriching his allies, and dismissing any consequences with a wave of his hand.
The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story:
The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.
But, of course, most of this is just semantics, just as the “DOGE” name has always been semantics as well. The idea was, from the very beginning, a smash-and-grab job, in which Elon would get access to the fundamental (traditionally highly guarded) systems of the US government and wreak havoc, Twitter-style, in which anything he and his suck-up compatriots didn’t understand would be deemed “bad” and anything that helped enrich him and his friends would be deemed “good,” and any consequences (including destroying life-saving programs around the globe) would be dismissed with the wave of a hand, and no culpability.
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for.
But the bigger story may be now that they’re scattered across the bureaucracy without Elon as their shield, some of these DOGE operatives are starting to realize they might actually face legal consequences for the very real and very serious damage they caused. A recent Politico report noted that the younger members of the crew are getting genuinely worried about how this ends:
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering.Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system.
Elon Musk, least of all. In recent interviews, he’s still rejecting the claims that the projects he gleefully cut resulted in any real world harm:
In an interview with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on hisWTF Ispodcast, Musk denied that DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts and its mandate totarget federal “waste”included “stopping essential payments to needy people” in Africa.
“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.
“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ OK. Well, how do we know it’s going to the pandas?”
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon.
What’s quite clear now is that DOGE did nothing to reduce government inefficiency. If anything, it created much greater inefficiency by forcing the federal government to try to reestablish essential programs (and rehire haphazardly fired experts) in a mad dash to keep certain aspects of the government from completely falling over. And that’s not to mention all the deaths. As Atul Gawande noted in the New Yorker:
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respectedtracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustainthe programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build. Those DOGE members nervously telling each other to “get your own lawyer”? They should be.
Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations.
That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the administration to halt flights to El Salvador and to return immigrants who hadn’t been given access to their due process rights. The government went on to pretend this had never happened. It did at least not continue to send planes to El Salvador, but it refused to order those already in the air to turn around and return to the United States.
Thanks to a filing by the DOJ, we now know who made the final call to say “fuck you” to Judge James Boasberg, who issued both a verbal and written order demanding the flights to El Salvador be halted.
This is the angle the administration is taking to pretend it didn’t need to recall flights it had hastily sent aloft in anticipation of Boasberg’s ruling:
At approximately 6:45 PM on March 15, 2025, the Court orally directed counsel for the Government to inform his clients of the Court’s oral directives at the hearing, including statements directing that any removed class members “need to be returned to the United States.” By that point, two flights carrying individuals designated under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) had already departed from the United States and were outside United States territory and airspace.
At approximately 7:25 PM, the Court memorialized its temporary restraining order in a written order, as the Court had indicated at the hearing it would do. The written order enjoined Defendants “from removing” class members pursuant to the AEA. The written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.
A government acting in good faith might have taken steps to return the planes already in the air as a precautionary step to avoid generating contempt of court allegations. This government never acts in good faith. It allowed the planes to continue heading towards El Salvador even though it had received a verbal order “directing that any removed [migrants] need[ed] to be returned to the United States.”
It instead let the planes continued to fly until it had received a written order, which it then decided to interpret as permission to allow these flights to continue.
But someone had to make the final call to blow off Judge Boasberg’s first order and pretend the second order wasn’t meant to be read in the spirit of his first order. And that person would be Kristi Noem, who is now defending her actions with the usual Trump admin horseshit about keeping America safe from dangerous brown people:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed that she instructed the federal government to carry out the deportation and transferring Venezuelan detainees to El Salvador despite a court order halting the flights.
“The decisions that are made on deportations, where flights go, and when they go are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “And we will continue to do the right thing and ensure that dangerous criminals are removed.”
Bullshit. That was never the case. The Trump administration doesn’t care whether or not the migrants it’s ejecting as as fast as it can are actually “dangerous criminals.” The latest data shows only 5% of those detained by ICE have criminal records that contain violent crimes. 73% of those detained have no criminal record at all.
Rather than err on the side of caution when confronted with a discrepancy between what was said and what was written by the judge, Kristi Noem signed off on the interpretation that allowed the administration to do what it was always going to do anyway. And in doing so, she’s made it clear this government will engage in actionable contempt that springs from its literal contempt for the system of checks and balances.
Boasberg previously found probable cause to start contempt proceedings over the administration’s deportations, an action that was paused for months until an appeals court last week cleared the way for him to charge forward.
This is something, at least. Its usefulness in forcing the administration to play by the rules has yet to be seen. So far, nothing really has had any deterrent effect on an administration that continues to expand the boundaries of executive power on a daily basis.
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“Senior White House officials recently discussed antitrust concerns surrounding Netflix’s interest in acquiring the Warner Bros. studio and the HBO Max streaming service – raising doubts whether such a deal would give Netflix too much power over Hollywood, The Post has learned.
The high-level meeting that took place about 10 days ago hasn’t been previously reported. Several White House officials also suggested during the sitdown that a broader investigation is necessary focusing on Netflix’s market power, a government official who attended the confab said.”
Most media coverage of these rival bids won’t have the backbone to make it clear that while Netflix ownership of Warner Brothers would most certainly probably be bad for the market, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about that. It cares about helping billionaire allies and punishing “woke” companies that platform too many minorities and gay people for their liking.
Netflix ownership of HBO likely wouldn’t be good for the brand, but it’s not like Warner Brothers Discovery or AT&T were good for the brand (or market health) either. David Zaslav has been notorious for mismanaging the home of CNN and HBO. And Netflix, as the New York Times noted last September, is possibly the least overtly compromised of the three companies when it comes to kissing MAGA ass (which isn’t saying much, and certainly isn’t guaranteed to last).
In this case, the options here are all bad. The other bidders for Warner Brothers, HBO, and CNN include Comcast (NBC Universal) and Larry Ellison (CBS). Neither would be good stewards of the HBO brand, clearly don’t give much of a shit about healthy market competition, and have shown they’re more than willing to throw any remaining principles in the trash to curry favor with the administration.
The best and correct play for a government that actually cared about antitrust reform, consumer protection, and healthy markets would be no additional consolidation at all. But good faith media reform is not, and has never been, what the Trump administration is after.
I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole “the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face” cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this all is.
Jose Ceballos, who now goes by Joe Ceballos, is the Mayor of Coldwater, Kansas. By all accounts, he is an American success story. He was brought to America, undocumented, when he was four years old. As a student later in life, he was asked while on a field trip for school if he’d like to register to vote. At that point, he had obtained a green card, which denotes at the top of the card that he is a “PERMANENT RESIDENT.”
Reportedly, Ceballos misunderstood the meaning of that residency and thought he was authorized to register to vote. And vote he did, in several elections, and always as a staunch Republican. He voted for Donald Trump in all of the last three Presidential elections. He believes he also voted for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach all four times he ran for election in the state as well. But holding a green card does not authorize him to participate in voting and now the 54 year old is facing both felony charges for fraud brought by Kobach himself, as well as deportation from the Trump administration that he and most of his town voted into office.
An honest mistake, he said. But now he’s found himself in legal trouble that threatens to upend the life he’s spent half a century building. What’s worse than Kobach’s charges, he said, is that the Department of Homeland Security is now threatening him with starting that legal process called deportation.
“I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four,” Ceballos said. “I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported it would wreck my life.”
The leopard has come to eat Ceballos’ face, it seems.
To be clear, I take no pleasure in this. People are allowed to vote Republican, obviously. They are allowed to have voted for Donald Trump, equally obviously. I have family and friends that did likewise and doing so doesn’t mean that I want their lives upended or, frankly, even moderately inconvenienced as a result. But it’s long past time that people understand precisely what they’re voting for because Trump and Republicans are simply not fucking around when it comes to visiting cruelty upon their perceived enemies and it won’t stop with some small subset of people the way people seem to think it will.
Ceballos is beloved in his community. The same town that voted for exactly this sort of thing is now very pissed off that it’s happening.
“If deportation happens, I can tell you that Kobach will have trouble showing up here, especially if he asks to stay with us for a while,” said Dennis Swayze, an 80-year-old Comanche County rancher and a Republican voter. Swayze decades ago took Joe under his wing to hire and mentor him as a mostly penniless but eager calf-roping kid ranch hand. And he says he’s partly to blame for Ceballos’s trouble.
And it’s real trouble. In that news conference on Nov. 5, Kobach said Ceballos could spend as much as five and a half years in prison and pay a $200,000 fine — for voter fraud and election perjury, all felonies.
Ceballos said he now understands that he broke the law — but he and others in his community wonder what’s a fair consequence. The town of 693, in southwest Kansas, might lose their mayor. After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.
He’s so popular in Coldwater, in fact, that his defense attorney is practically begging for this to go before a jury, believing that no jury in town will convict him. I expect Kobach to try some trickery for a trial more favorable to his preferred outcome, because it’s very clear that he plans on digging his heels in.
“Voting by noncitizens, including both legal and illegal aliens, is a very real problem,” Kobach said in his written statement on Nov. 5. “It happens. Every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out a U.S. citizen’s vote.”
And: “This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Homeland Security officials said in a statement on Nov. 13. “If convicted, he will be placed in removal proceedings.”
Coldwater voted for this. Kansas voted for this. And even if a jury essentially engages in nullification, given that Ceballos very much broke the law in his naivete, that not guilty verdict wouldn’t preclude DHS from deporting him anyway.
This only goes one of two ways. The slightly less likely way, I believe, is that DHS deports Ceballos whatever the outcome of his case is. If that happens, the Trump administration will have solidified the point that cruelty is the only meal on the menu, the desire of the serfs be damned. The slightly more likely outcome is that Trump gets wind that Ceballos was a staunch Republican voter and, more importantly, a Trump voter/supporter, and will figure out a way to not enforce the deportation order that, by all rights, should be carried out based on all the things that this administration has said about illegal immigrants and its plans for them.
And if that happens, it puts the lie to all of Trump’s bullshit. It won’t be about law, and it sure as shit isn’t about order. It will purely be about who is willing to bend the knee to the mad king and who is not.
And then we’ll see if the leopard allegory holds true, because leopards don’t actually care who thinks they’re pretty and who does not. In the leopard’s place will be something much, much worse.
One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words “First Amendment” are not uttered even once—unless, of course, someone like Justice Alito has something to say about it, because he was basically the only justice whose questions addressed the practical effect on people’s ability to speak online should Sony’s arguments prevail. (“That doesn’t sound workable to me,” he said at one point, recognizing how many people would effectively end up losing their Internet access if Sony were right and providers were required to terminate accounts upon receiving an infringement notice.)
This case is one where Cox—and, by extension, EVERY Internet platform and provider—faces showstopping liability for how its users are alleged to use their Internet service. As we pointed out in the Copia Institute’s amicus brief, the rule that comes out of this case, governing whether Cox can be secondarily liable for its users’ alleged wrongdoings, is by no means limited to just copyright liability. But that was the form of liability at issue here, because Cox’s users were alleged to have fileshared works infringing copyrights Sony claimed the right to enforce. Sony has argued that Cox should share in that liability because it did not do anything to stop those users from filesharing, and, indeed, let these users keep using their service even after allegedly being told they were infringing—although, as Cox argued, it’s not clear that Cox actually had enough knowledge of actual infringement to act on, because there were never any notices alleging that any specific person had committed any specific wrongful act (and, as we also noted in our brief, there was never any judicial finding that such wrongfulness had indeed been committed; at most there were accusations, which, as this overall litigation revealed, were often unfounded).
Cox, for its part, opted to litigate this case essentially as a pure tort case: what are the rules for when a third party can be liable for the actions of another? And it’s possible that this strategy might pay off because the justices did not seem comfortable with the idea that secondary liability could be picked up too casually, in any context. What they will wrangle with is whether knowing that someone they are providing a tool to is using it for bad purpose is enough to share in liability, or whether there needs to be something more, like an intent that the tool be used for that bad purpose. (“Intent” and “purpose” were terms that came up a lot; expect the decision to invoke them, even if the result is a remand back to the Fourth Circuit to reconsider Cox’s liability under a standard referencing them.) Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh also expressed concern that because the copyright statute itself did not create a cause of action for secondary liability the Court should be wary about creating such liability itself when the decision whether or not to do so, or how, should be in Congress’s purview.
But it also was a big risk to be so singularly focused on this argument, because it obfuscated what’s really at stake.
Part of the problem with Cox’s strategy is that this was a copyright case, and copyright tends to make otherwise reasonable people lose their minds. Which is how the Supreme Court managed to produce a decision in the Warhol case where even though it was a fair use case, and fair use is all about protecting expression from copyright’s power, the decision never even mentioned, let alone grappled with, how the First Amendment and copyright law need to play together. That decision was written by Justice Sotomayor, who seemed to have the coldest reception to Cox’s arguments here. After all, she seemed to think, Cox had reason to know their users were filesharing! How can it be fair they escape trouble for that???
The answer: because of what would happen to all their user expression if they had done what Sony wanted and terminated the accounts it had accused, or if it could even have been liable for simply having provided a service all their users needed for all their online activities—including their completely innocent and expressive ones. As we pointed out in our brief, there are a number of threats to free expression if Sony’s legal theory could succeed: it would (1) leave online expression subject to prior restraint, which the First Amendment forbids, by giving an un-adjudicated infringement notice the power to cause speech (and speakers) to be removed; (2) make online speakers subject to being kicked off the Internet, which the Supreme Court said was not Constitutional in the earlier Packingham v. North Carolina case; and (3) make it possible to censor speakers by pressuring the intermediary providers they depend on, which the Court itself quite recently pointed out is not something the First Amendment allows in the NRA v. Vullo case.
Yet, strangely, none of these issues really made it into the oral argument, save for a bit mumbled by the Solicitor General, also arguing on the side of Cox, who tried to point out (before largely being cut off by Justice Sotomayor) that it would be inequitable to ban someone from using the Internet as a penalty for filesharing. But, for some reason, Cox itself steered clear of these issues, even though it made Cox stand alone, and despite the fact that its fate here will shape the fate of every other Internet platform, and even though making the stakes so apparent would be likely to help Cox, especially if some of the justices do not like some of the facts specific to Cox (like its infamous “f__ the DMCA” email produced during discovery in an earlier round of this litigation). The more the Court thinks this case is just about Cox, the worse off everyone will be, because it is a case that impacts everyone who uses the Internet, for any purpose, including all those that are expressive and innocent.
And even though these free speech issues provide the antidote to the very copyright exceptionalism that prompts people to want to throw the book at them for what their users allegedly had done. How dare people disrespect the rights of others, that thinking goes. But that’s exactly the problem: it’s the rights of others, including their constitutionally-protected rights to express themselves, that are what is truly being threatened by law that unduly protects the power of others to silence them.
It was important to make clear to the justices that what is at stake is not just a run-of-the-mill tort case. No, providing Internet access is not just like providing someone a gun, as Justice Sotomayor analogized. We’re talking about the very ability for the Internet to work as a communications medium by making it legally and practically possible for platforms to provide the technical ability for users to express themselves online, in any of the infinite ways they might do so. That the fundamental ability of the Internet to continue to operate was at stake should have been the headline in this case, but it was barely an afterthought, if that.
Instead we got to see Justices Sotomayor and Jackson display a very dubious grasp of the statutory history of the DMCA. They seemed to read it as a law that was designed to ensure that platforms would have liability for what their users did, instead of as a statute designed to do the exact opposite and make sure we didn’t crush the nascent Internet by making it legally impossible for platforms to provide services to their users. They also couldn’t seem to understand what incentive platforms would have to respond to infringement notices if they couldn’t be liable for secondary liability anyway. But as we also noted in our amicus brief, the Shelter Capital case illustrates the incentive, because there the Veoh Network platform got financially bled into bankruptcy in the process of successfully winning its liability case. The DMCA is intended to protect platforms from obliteration-by-litigation because when they disappear, so do the avenues people need to speak online. Wouldn’t it be nice if we still had Veoh Networks as an alternative to YouTube? Too bad, the copyright industry sued them out of existence, even though it turned out they weren’t liable after all.
What the DMCA is for, and why it needs to not be stripped from platforms like Cox (or Veoh) so easily, is to make sure such injustice doesn’t happen and online expression isn’t harmed as a result. Because that is what is at stake in this case: if Cox can be held liable for its users’ online activities by simply having provided them the means for engaging with them, or even simply have to answer a case raising the prospect of liability, then it will not be possible for any platforms to ever provide anyone the means to engage online, no matter how expressively and innocently. That silenced future is what will arise if Cox were to lose, and we can only hope at least five justices see it and choose for us all another path.
