We’ve written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE’s So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the rulings and the concerns they raise, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.
Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you believe this guy built a billion-dollar company with AI? Why haven’t you done this?” The story is making rounds, and giving people the impression that with a ChatGPT account and a little bit of marketing know-how, you too could be raking in millions every month.
The problem is that most of the story is utter nonsense.
Let’s start with the headline number itself. The NYT admits — buried deep in the piece — that Medvi “has not raised outside funding” and “has no official valuation.” A company’s value is typically established by investors, an acquisition offer, or public market pricing. Medvi has none of those. What it has is a revenue run rate — a projection based on early-2026 sales extrapolated across a full year. Calling that a “$1.8 billion company” is like calling someone who found a twenty on the sidewalk a “future millionaire.” Any business reporter should know the difference. Even the NYT tips its hand:
Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion company, since Mr. Gallagher hired his brother and has some contractors. The start-up, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation.
“Technically not” doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.
But the misleading valuation is almost the least of it. Even if you accept revenue as the relevant metric, how sustainable is that run rate for a company that just got an FDA warning letter, is facing a class action lawsuit for spam, has a key partner being sued over allegations that a major product doesn’t actually work, and is operating in an industry that regulators are actively trying to rein in?
Oh, wait, did the NYT forget to mention all of those things? They sure did! Not to mention the legions of fake, apparently AI generated doctors and patients who keep showing up in Medvi advertisements. Yes, the NYT eventually alludes to some of that, but it claims these were mere “shortcuts” that were fixed last year (they weren’t).
That said, you can feel the pull of the narrative that seduced the NYT: a scrappy founder with a rags-to-riches backstory, two brothers taking on the world, AI tools stitching it all together, Sam Altman himself anointing the achievement as proof that his prediction of a “one man, one billion dollar company, thanks to AI” was correct.
It’s a hell of a story. The problem is that almost none of it holds up to even the most basic scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times — the New York Times — fell for it (or worse, didn’t care) is an embarrassment. As much as I’ve made fun of the NYT for its bad reporting over the years, this is (by far) the worst I’ve seen. They didn’t just misunderstand something, or try to push a misleading narrative, they got fully played on a bullshit story that any competent reporter or editor should have realized from the jump. This one stinks from top to bottom.
Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.
Let’s start with what the NYT actually published. Reporter Erin Griffith’s piece reads like a press release that the NYT re-formatted as a newspaper article:
Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.
From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.
His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.
Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.
A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.
And then, because no AI hype piece would be complete without the requisite papal blessing from San Francisco:
In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech C.E.O. friends over when such a company would appear, and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.
Altman “would like to meet the guy.” Well of course he would! The NYT hand-delivered him the perfect anecdote for his next AI hype session. The reporter seemingly solicited that quote to validate a pre-existing thesis: “Sam Altman was right about one-person billion-dollar AI companies.” The fact that the company is a dumpster fire of regulatory violations and consumer fraud was, apparently, a secondary concern to the “Great Man and A Great AI” narrative of innovation. This piece was built around a thesis — Sam Altman was right — and then a company was located to prove it.
To its minimal credit, the NYT does kind of acknowledge — eventually, if you make it past the thirtieth paragraph — that things weren’t entirely on the up and up:
Medvi’s initial website featured photos of smiling models who looked AI-generated and before-and-after weight-loss photos from around the web with the faces changed. Some of its ads were AI slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and The Times when it had merely advertised there.
I mean… shouldn’t that have raised at least one or two red flags within the NYT offices? Medvi’s website featured a scrolling ticker of media logos — including the New York Times logo — to make it look like these outlets had written about the company, when they hadn’t. A year ago, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré had even called this out directly (along with Medvi’s penchant for bullshit AI slop advertising).
Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications.
…. But… there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned.
And then, despite this, the New York Times went ahead and wrote the glowing profile that Medvi had been falsely claiming existed. The paper of record became the validation that the fake credibility ticker was trying to manufacture.
And the NYT frames all of what most people would consider to be “fraud” as mere “shortcuts” that the founder later “fixed.” Eighteen paragraphs after burying the admission, it reports:
That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers.
“Shortcuts.” Using deepfake technology to steal strangers’ weight-loss photos from across the internet, alter their faces with AI, give them fake names and fabricated health outcomes, and pass them off as your own satisfied customers — that’s a “shortcut.” Ctrl-F is a shortcut. This sounds more like fraud.
And it turns out those “shortcuts” hadn’t actually been fixed at all. As Futurism’s Dupré reported in a follow-up piece published after the NYT article:
As recently as last month, nearly a year after the NYT said that Medvi had cleaned up its act, an archived version of Medvi.org shows that it was again displaying before-and-after transformations of alleged customers. They bore the same names as before — “Melissa C,” “Sandra K,” and “Michael P” — and again listed how many pounds each person had purportedly lost and the related health improvements they apparently enjoyed.
Even though they had the same names, these people that the site now called “Medvi patients” now looked completely different from the original roundup of Melissas, Sandras, and Michaels. Worse, some of the images now bore clear signs of AI-generation: the new Sandra’s fingers, for example, are melted into her smartphone in one of her mirror selfies.
They kept the same fake names and the same fake weight-loss numbers but swapped in entirely different fake people. What the NYT claims was “fixing shortcuts” appears to actually be just “updating the con.”
In a great takedown video by Voidzilla, it’s revealed that at least one set of original images appeared to have been sourced from Reddit forums on weight loss having nothing to do with Medvi, and even with the modified images it used, it massively overstated how much weight the original person claimed to have lost. And while Medvi later switched out the photos with someone totally different, they kept the same name and same false weight loss claims.
And again, all of this was publicly known information that Griffin or her editors could have easily found with some basic journalism skills. We already mentioned that Futurism article from May of 2025, nearly a full year before the NYT piece ran. That investigation traced the deepfaked before-and-after photos back to their real sources, found that a doctor listed on Medvi’s site had no association with the company and demanded to be removed, and documented the AI-slop advertising. That investigation was widely available. A Google search would have found it.
But the fake photos and fraudulent branding are almost quaint compared to what the NYT chose not to mention at all. Six weeks before the NYT piece was published, the FDA sent Medvi a warning letter for misbranding its compounded drugs. The letter admonished Medvi for marketing its products in ways that falsely implied they were FDA-approved and for putting the “MEDVI” name on vial images in a way that suggested the company was the actual drug compounder. The letter warned:
Failure to adequately address any violations may result in legal action without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.
The NYT did not mention this letter. And yes, Gallagher now insists that the FDA letter was targeting an affiliate that was using a nearly identical name, and it was that rogue affiliate that was the problem. But the letter is addressed to MEDVi LLC dba MEDVi, which is the name of his company. If he’s allowing affiliates to use his exact name, then that alone seems like a problem. Indeed, it certainly seems to highlight how this is all just, at best, a pyramid scheme of snake oil salesmen, where Gallagher has affiliates willing to deceive to sell more snake oil.
Separately, on March 20, 2026 — thirteen days before the NYT piece ran — a class action lawsuit was filed against Medvi in the Central District of California alleging that the company uses affiliate marketers to blast out deceptive spam emails with spoofed domains and falsified headers. The complaint alleges Medvi is responsible for over 100,000 spam emails per year to class members. The lawsuit seeks $1,000 per violating email.
The NYT did not mention this lawsuit either, even as it was yet another bit of evidence that either Medvi is up to bad shit, or it has a bunch of out of control affiliates potentially breaking laws left and right to increase sales.
A Drug Discovery & Development review conducted on April 3 of MEDVi’s website, Facebook advertising and public records found a pattern of apparent AI-generated personas, including some presented with medical titles, alongside marketing practices that appeared to go beyond the issues identified so far by regulators. A search of Meta’s Ad Library for “medvi” returned more than 5,000 active ads, many of them running under fabricated physician personas. One Facebook page for “Dr. Robert Whitworth,” which ran sponsored ads for MEDVi’s QUAD erectile dysfunction product, was categorized as an “Entertainment website” and listed an address of “2015 Nutter Street, Cameron, MT, 64429,” a location that does not appear to exist. Other ads ran under names including “Professor Albust Dongledore” and “Dr. Richard Hörzgock,” used AI-generated video testimonials and recycled identical scripts across multiple fabricated personas. In several cases, the page displayed a doctor headshot while the ad itself featured an unrelated person delivering a patient testimonial.
After public scrutiny following the article, those fake doctor accounts started disappearing. In fact, Medvi’s own website fine print acknowledges the practice:
Individuals appearing in advertisements may be actors or AI portraying doctors and are not licensed medical professionals.
Seems like maybe something the NYT should have noticed?
Oh, and that same Drug Discovery and Development article highlights how other snake oil sales sites are using the same named doctors… but with totally different images.
Same names… different people. Drug Discovery and Development has a bit more info about Drs. Carr and Tenbrink:
MEDVi’s current site lists two physicians: Dr. Ana Lisa Carr and Dr. Kelly Tenbrink. Both are licensed doctors who work together at Ringside Health, a concierge practice in Wellington, Florida, that serves the equestrian community. Neither is identified on MEDVi’s site as being affiliated with Ringside Health. On MEDVi’s site, Dr. Tenbrink is listed under “American Board of Emergency Medicine.” Dr. Carr is listed under St. George’s University, School of Medicine, her medical school. The Florida Department of Health practitioner profiles for both physicians state that neither “hold any certifications from specialty boards recognized by the Florida board.” A search of the American Board of Emergency Medicine‘s public directory, which lists 48,863 certified members, returned no current affiliation for Dr. Tenbrink.
Did the NYT do any investigation at all? Serving the equestrian community?
Even the few real doctors Medvi claims to work with turn out to be questionable. From Futurism’s article from last May (again, something the NYT should have maybe checked on?):
We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and “[needs] to have them remove me from their sites.”
Then there’s what a class action lawsuit filed last November against Medvi’s main partner, OpenLoop Health, alleges about the actual products being sold. The NYT frames OpenLoop as basically making what Gallagher is doing possible, noting that while Gallagher has his AI bots creating marketing copy OpenLoop handles: “doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance.” You know, the actual business.
So it seems kinda notable that way back in November of last year, this lawsuit was filed that claims that the compounded oral tirzepatide tablets — one of Medvi’s key offerings — are essentially pharmacologically inert when delivered as a pill. Tirzepatide (marketed as Zepbound by Eli Lilly) is an FDA approved weight-loss drug as an injectable. But OpenLoop and Medvi have apparently been selling it in pill form. And Eli Lilly says that there are no human studies, let alone clinical trials, involving any tirzepatide pills.
All of that seems like the kind of thing reporters from the NYT should point out.
What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.
Being good at deceptive marketing while selling weight-loss and erectile dysfunction drugs online has been a thing since the dawn of email spam. The only novelty here is the tools used to do it. The New York Times just wrapped that up in a neat bow and presented it as the proof of Sam Altman’s big promises for AI.
For what it’s worth, Gallagher has been whining about all this on X, per Futurism’s Dupre:
Though Medvi has yet to respond to our questions, the company’s founder, Gallagher, has spent the last few days on X defending his company. He complained in one post — seemingly in reference to criticism — that “the most low t [testosterone] guys” are “the loudest online” and the “Karens of the internet.” In another post, he wrote that it’s “actually a little crazy the number of people who form a whole opinion from a headline and then publicly wish horrible things will happen.”
Ah yes. The guy complaining about “low t guys” and “karens on the internet” for questioning his “AI business” skills, sure is a trustworthy kind of business person that deserves a NYT puff piece.
The real issue now is what the New York Times plans to do about this. A standard correction noting a few missing details won’t cut it. The entire premise of the article — that this company represents the exciting realization of AI’s business potential — is nonsense. Every element of the narrative is tainted: the growth story is built on deceptive marketing, the product claims are contradicted by the FDA and the manufacturers of the actual drugs, the “$1.8 billion” figure is a projection with no valuation to back it up, and the company is currently facing legal action on multiple fronts. The entire article should be retracted.
The NYT says it “was given access to Medvi’s financials to verify its revenue and profits.” Great. They verified that a company engaged in widespread deceptive practices was, in fact, making money from those deceptive practices. Congrats to the NYT for auditing a snake oil salesman and presenting your findings as if he were an upstanding pharmaceutical salesman.
So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.
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Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law.
The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon’s resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. It’s only fitting that the only president to challenge this law is someone who makes Nixon’s corruption look semi-competent.
No one was asking — at least outside of the White House — for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to weigh in on this law. But weigh in it did, tipping the scale heavily towards “Let Trump do whatever he wants,” despite Supreme Court precedent to the contrary. (h/t Jamal Greene)
The OLC issued this opinion [PDF] last Thursday. It basically says Trump isn’t obligated to turn over records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) following his second term as president. Presumably, the opinion is also retroactive, which would prevent NARA from continuing to demand records from his first presidency — something that has led to a lot of the litigation Trump engaged in following his 2020 loss, much of which is quoted by the DOJ OLC in support of elevating Trump above the law yet again.
I’m sure the Supreme Court — the one “stacked” by Trump himself — has inured itself Trump’s steady stream of verbal abuse at this point. But I’m pretty sure the OLC telling the Supreme Court its own precedent is invalid isn’t going to win the DOJ any friends when it comes time to defend this legal opinion in court.
Nonetheless, that’s what the OLC does here. Repeatedly.
Nixon v. Administrator is not only distinguishable. It was also wrong in concluding that the PRMPA’s “regulation of the disposition of Presidential materials within the Executive Branch” was not “a violation of the principle of separation of powers.”
[…]
Nixon v. Administrator was also mistaken in reasoning that the PRMPA was not “unduly disruptive of the Executive Branch” […]
[…]
Nixon v. Administrator was wrong to suggest that the executive privilege provisions of the PRMPA avoided separation of powers concerns, and those concerns apply even more strongly to the PRA.
That’s the sort of thing that only a true Trump acolyte could write. That acolyte would be T. Elliot Glaser, assistant attorney general, who was previously best know for this:
In 2020, Gaiser worked as legal counsel for Donald Trump‘s 2020 presidential campaign.[14] White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that she considered him an expert on constitutional law. Gaiser worked on election litigation after the 2020 presidential election and produced a speech that rejected the results of the election. According to McEnany, the speech appeared similar to one Trump later delivered, and Gaiser “mentioned in passing” the theory that vice president Mike Pence could refuse to recognize electors from certain states.[4]
It’s great to know that yet another election denier is in a federal position of power, especially with mid-term elections only months away. Prior to this, Gaiser clerked for three federal judges: Edith Jones, Neomi Rao, and (of course) Justice Samuel Alito.
Expecting Gaiser to do anything else but propel forward the administration’s presidents-are-kings-actually theory of executive power is delusional. So is Gaiser’s opinion, which simply says everything prior to this legal memo — including Supreme Court precedent regarding a law that’s nearly 50 years old — is wrong.
Either the administration is certain there will never be another regime change or it’s too stupid to realize Democratic Party presidents will have access to the same theory of power being pushed here, which is going to make them look like idiots when it’s being used against them. Neither option is preferable, and there’s a good chance it’s a 50/50 blend of both.
The silver lining is that this isn’t enforceable in any way. But it will have immediate negative effects. It will make freeing up documents from Trump’s term more difficult. And it will keep NARA from attempting to archive anything its does manage to obtain until the (completely illegitimate) legal questions are settled.
MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony “America first!” rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers.
The Wall Street Journal (Reuters non-paywalled alternative) indicates that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has finalized plans to provide roughly $10 billion to help fund the deal, with another $14 billion split between Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding. China’s Tencent is also expected to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Ellison’s media play.
Because the Trump administration is a corrupt, pay-to-play kakistocracy subservient to the interests of global oligarchs and autocrats, Paramount executives don’t expect any meaningful regulatory review, despite the obvious competition, labor, and foreign influence issues that plague the major deal:
Paramount executives do not expect the funds’ involvement to trigger a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or Federal Communications Commission, the Journal said.
That’s before you even get to the problems with having Middle East countries back the ongoing Republican plan to dominate consolidated corporate media and destroy what’s left of U.S. journalism. Democrats have performatively urged FCC boss Brendan Carr to investigate, but that’s obviously not happening, despite Carr’s history of phony outrage at foreign government meddling.
This has all been a pretty standard road map for autocracies around the world, including Orban’s Hungary. Party-friendly oligarchs buy up all the media, which then gets to work pummeling the public with right wing propaganda while the government strangles independent journalism just out of frame.
It will continue to accelerate here in the States until the public reaches critical mass and our so-called “opposition party” develops an actual, functional backbone and cultivates more ruthless leadership.
Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.
So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.
Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.
That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.
The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”
You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.
As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:
“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”
Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.
And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.
Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.
So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.
This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.
They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.
The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.
You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.
This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.
It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.
But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.
Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.
Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.
Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.
The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.
But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.
The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.
What was the last vote about?
On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173.
Instead, the Commons proposed its own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide.
Who does this give powers to?
The Commons proposal redirects power from the UK Parliament and the UK’s independent telecom regulator Ofcom to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, currently Liz Kendall, who will be able to restrict internet access for young people and determine what content is considered harmful…just because she can. The amendment also empowers the Secretary of State to limit VPN use for under 18s, as well as restrict access to addictive features and change the age of digital consent in the country; for example, preventing under-18s from playing games online after a certain time.
Why is this a problem?
This process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks. And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles.
We know from other jurisdictions like the United States that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some “sexual material harmful to minors,” which has historically meant explicit sexual content. But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that “sexual material harmful to minors” could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies.
How will this impact young people?
The internet is an essential resource for young people (and adults) to access information, explore community, and find themselves. Beyond being spaces where people can share funny videos and engage with enjoyable content, social media enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their in-person realm, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse or their sexuality. In severing this connection to people and information by banning social media, politicians are forcing millions of young people into a dark and censored world.
How did each party vote?
The initial push to ban under-16s from social media came from the Conservative Party, who have since accused the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “dither and delay” for not committing to the ban. The Liberal Democrats have also called this “not good enough.” The Labour Party itself is split, with 107 Labour Party MPs abstaining in the vote on the House of Lords amendment.
But we know that the issue of young people’s online safety is a polarizing topic that politicians have—and will continue to—weaponize for public support, regardless of their actual intentions. This is why we will continue to urge policymakers and regulators to protect people’s rights and freedoms online at all moments, and not just take the easy route for a quick boost in the polls.
How does this bill connect to the Online Safety Act?
The draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that came from the Lords provided that any regulation pertaining to the well-being of young people on social media “must be treated as an enforceable requirement” with the Online Safety Act. The Commons amendment, however, starts out by inserting a new clause that amends the Online Safety Act.
For more than six years, we’ve been calling on the UK government to pass better legislation around regulating the internet, and when the Online Safety Act passed we continued to advocate for the rights of people on the internet—including young people—as Ofcom implemented the legislation. This has been a protracted effort by civil society groups, technologists, tech companies, and others participating in Ofcom’s consultation process and urging the regulator to protect internet users in the UK.
The MPs amendment essentially rips this up. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently said that ministers intended to go further than the existing Online Safety Act because it was “never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.” But when this further action is empowering herself to make arbitrary decisions on content and access, and banning under-18s from social media, this causes much more harm than it solves.
Is the UK alone in pushing legislation like this?
Sadly, no. Calls to ban social media access for young people have gained traction since Australia became the first country in the world to enforce one back in December. On 5 March, Indonesia announced a ban on social media and other “high-risk” online platforms for users under 16. A few days later, new measures came into effect in Brazil that restricts social media access for under-16s, who must now have their accounts linked to a legal guardian. Other countries like Spain and the Philippines have this year announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, with legislation currently pending to implement this.
What are the next steps?
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Lords on 25 March for consideration of the new Commons amendments. The bill will only become law if both Houses agree to the final draft.
We will continue to stand up against these proposals—not only to young people’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, especially not through a ban, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online, not this lazy strategy that causes more harm than it solves.
We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, not what is easy, and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms.
The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies.
Let that sink in for a bit. The operative term here is probably “white,” but Trump has been embraced by the evangelical community, despite his being about as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as their arch-nemesis, trans people the Devil. (And let’s not forget I’m talking about the ideals, which are often preached but rarely practiced.)
Here’s how Trump handled Easter morning, one of the holiest (no pun intended) holidays observed by the people most likely to support him no matter what:
President Trump: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
In Trump’s own words, at 5:03 am on Easter Sunday:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Now, I have to admit that when I first read this, I thought Trump was announcing some new celebration of US infrastructure before derailing his own train of thought. But it’s definitely not that.
Both sides have threatened and hit civilian targets like oil fields and desalination plants critical for drinking water. Iran’s U.N. mission on social media called Trump’s threat “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.”
Iran’s military joint command warned of stepped-up retaliatory attacks on regional oil and civilian infrastructure if the U.S. and Israel attack such targets there, according to state television.
The laws of armed conflict allow attacks on civilian infrastructure only if the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It’s considered a high bar to clear, and causing excessive suffering to civilians can constitute a war crime.
While it looks like both sides in this war are willing to strike civilian infrastructure, the United States should be trying to take the high road (the one without war crimes). And if it can’t be bothered to do that, the administration should — at the very least — try to keep the president from publicly saying we’re going to commit war crimes.
But, alas, there’s no one willing to stop him. Pete Hegseth is definitely relishing his unearned role as the Secretary of Defense (“Back to the Stone Age.”) And he appears to be firing anyone who disagrees with things like drone-killing people in international waters and, you know, engaging in war crimes.
Shamefully, they won’t see a drop in support despite Trump threatening war crimes, dropping an F-bomb, and promising to send people halfway around the world to hell, as if he were a god himself. And that’s a damning indictment of an entire segment of Americans who choose to treat their religion as a weapon and want the world to be remade in their own image — something they often accuse Muslims of doing. The irony is lost on them, along with the man they’ve chosen to treat as God’s appointed leader.
We’ve had a lot of low points as a nation, but usually we’ve at least tried to improve. That’s no longer the case. We’re under the rule of people who debase and abuse the nation they claim to love. Happy Fuckin’ Easter, you crazy bastards. Welcome to Hell.
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