The “appearance of impropriety” doesn’t bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room.
There are no adults left. If they haven’t been fired, it’s because they were never invited to participate in the first place. His cabinet is stocked with Fox News commentators. Trump’s personal lawyers are now holding top-level DOJ positions. Another of his lawyers is now an appeals court judge.
The DOJ is bleeding talent. This is deliberate. The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.
Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.
It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.
Todd Gilbert seemed like an unlikely target for Trump’s vindictiveness. He was a career GOP legislator before being elevated to the position of US Attorney in Virginia. But he made a fatal mistake: he refused to pretend there was anything to get prosecutorial about when it came to the 2016 FBI investigation into possible election interference by Russia.
Two people better known for their podcast antics than actual investigative expertise (FBI director Kash Patel and his loyal assistant, Dan Bongino) demanded more action on this front. Gilbert refused to play along, resulting in him being fired less than three months after Donald Trump installed him in office.
After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.
[…]
Pressed to further sideline or remove Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilbert refused, these people said. Department officials then informed Mr. Gilbert that he would be fired, and he resigned shortly afterward, posting a GIF on social media with a joke from the movie “Anchorman,” in which the lead character exclaims, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”
This administration knows nothing else but increasingly speedy escalation. It moves fast not just because it wants to break things, but because it’s so often in the wrong it needs to constantly correct course. Anyone who isn’t immediately and usefully subservient is expendable. The pattern will continue until Trump is surrounded only by people willing to indulge his worst impulses without entertaining any of their own second thoughts… or even first thoughts. They’ve installed a king in the Republic, making a mockery of their claims to love America and everything it stood for before they regained power.
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There are levels of corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell this is.
Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now the judge, and the judge gets to decide how much the state pays you and you get to approve it all, and somehow this is all legal because we’ve apparently given up on the concept of shame.
The New York Times reports that Trump has filed what’s known as administrative claims demanding approximately $230 million in compensation from the Department of Justice for two federal investigations, including one that led to indictments—investigations that only stopped because he won the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer andsaid at his confirmation hearingin February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is not normal. This has never been normal. This will never be normal. Although at this point, “normal” is doing a lot of work there, given that we’re living in a timeline where a business failure reality TV host became president, tried to overturn an election, got indicted for stealing classified documents, got re-elected, embraced every authoritarian instinct, and is now suing the government for having the audacity to notice.
According to the Times, Trump submitted two separate administrative claims through a standard government process that typically precedes lawsuits, but can also be used to “negotiate” a settlement. The first claim, filed in late 2023, seeks damages for the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller’s well-publicized (though often misrepresented) probe into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.
The second, filed in summer 2024, targets the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent prosecution for mishandling classified documents—you know, the prosecution where Trump was literally caught on tape discussing how he couldn’t declassify the documents he was showing people, and where there were famously boxes of sensitive documents stored in places like a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
The second claim accuses the government of “malicious prosecution” intended to sway the election:
Attorney General Garland FBI Director Wray and Special Counsel Smith’s targeting indictment and harassment of President Trump has always been malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent President Trump from being re elected This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation
By this logic, every criminal defendant should be able to bill taxpayers for their legal fees. And the FBI Director supposedly orchestrating this “harassment”? Christopher Wray, whom Trump personally appointed after firing James Comey. Why would he want to go after Trump?
But let’s get back to the craziest part: Trump’s former personal lawyers, now in government positions specifically because Trump appointed them, get to decide whether the government should pay their former client (and current boss) hundreds of millions of dollars for prosecuting him.
As legal ethics professor Bennett Gershman told the Times:
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
This is amazing for multiple reasons, including that the NY Times did its usual “view from nowhere” cop-out of trying to find an expert to give them a quote because the NY Times house style is never to directly call out bullshit for being bullshit. And even that guy is like “dog, you don’t need an expert. Literally everyone can see this is the most corrupt bullshit imaginable.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump directly about the claims. His response is worth reading in full because he essentially admits everything:
COLLINS: The NYT is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own DOJ now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don't even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money. They rigged the election.
COLLINS: The NY Times is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own Justice Department now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?
TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don’t even know what the numbers… I don’t even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money, but I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something…. But look, they rigged the election.
“They rigged the election.” There it is. Trump’s entire justification for demanding a quarter billion dollars from taxpayers rests on his repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The same lie that led to January 6th. The same lie that has been rejected by every court that examined it, including judges Trump himself appointed. The same lie that even his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, said was “bullshit.”
Trump then tries to bolster his case by pointing to recent settlements:
As you know, in one case, 60 Minutes had to pay us a lot of money. George “Slopadopulous” had to pay us a lot of money and they already paid. You know, they paid me a lot of money.
Let’s be clear about those “settlements”: ABC and CBS didn’t settle because Trump’s claims had merit. They settled because fighting Trump—who controls the federal government and has repeatedly threatened to use that power against media companies—became too expensive and risky. And, in the case of 60 Minutes, it happened because Shari Redstone needed FCC chair Brendan Carr’s approval to sell Paramount, and everyone knew that wouldn’t be approved without paying Trump. Those settlements aren’t vindication; they’re protection money. They’re evidence of the exact kind of corrupt pressure campaign Trump is now trying to formalize by demanding payment from the government itself.
But then—and I want you to really appreciate this—he just admits the whole scam on camera:
Now, with the country, it’s interesting. Because I’m the one that makes the decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk.And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.[Turns to look over his shoulder]. Did you have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?
No, Donald. It’s not “interesting.” It’s a conflict of interest. “Interesting” is when you learn that octopuses have three hearts. This is just corrupt. It’s bad. You’re not supposed to be in a position where you’re both the plaintiff demanding money and the defendant deciding whether to pay it out of the coffers of the US Treasury.
And it’s even worse, though he never acknowledges this, because it’s him deciding how much of the taxpayers’ dollars he gets to transfer to his own bank account. By himself. It’s horrifically corrupt, as anyone can see.
He tries to salvage this with a throwaway line about charity:
But I was damaged very greatly and any money that I would get I would give to charity.
Sure you would. This is the same Donald Trump whose charitable foundation was shut down in 2018 after a lawsuit found it had engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality” including using charitable funds to settle business disputes, buy portraits of himself, and make illegal campaign contributions. The same Donald Trump who admitted in that case to misusing charitable funds and was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. The same Donald Trump who appears constitutionally incapable of doing anything that doesn’t personally enrich him.
But even if we believed him—even if he pinky-swore to give every penny to charity—the entire premise is corrupt. If the money should go to a good cause, how about leaving it in the federal treasury? You know, the one that’s currently empty because the government is shut down and can’t pay its bills?
Let’s zoom out for a moment, because the specific details of Trump’s grift can obscure just how unprecedented this is.
The government almost never pays compensation to people it prosecutes, even in cases of actual wrongful prosecution. When someone is exonerated after being wrongly convicted, many states don’t provide any compensation at all, and those that do typically cap it at levels far below what Trump is demanding. The idea that you deserve compensation simply for being prosecuted—when the prosecution was based on actual evidence of actual crimes you actually committed—is lunacy.
The Russia investigation that Trump claims he deserves compensation for resulted in 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five people sentenced to prison. The special counsel’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, instead noting that if they had confidence Trump didn’t commit a crime, they would have said so. The investigation was not “malicious prosecution”—it was a legitimate investigation into serious matters of national security.
Did some people exaggerate the extent of what Mueller would find? Sure. But there remains no evidence that the investigation itself was improper. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. The investigation was done, it found some clear evidence of law breaking, and that resulted in some people going to prison.
The classified documents case was even more clear-cut. The FBI found over 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite Trump’s lawyers claiming they’d returned everything. The evidence included surveillance footage showing Trump’s employees moving boxes of documents around to hide them from investigators. Trump was literally recorded discussing how he couldn’t declassify documents but was showing them to people anyway. This wasn’t a witch hunt—it was an open-and-shut case that only ended because Trump won an election.
And now he wants taxpayers to pay him for it.
Perhaps most disturbing is what Trump’s own comments reveal about how thoroughly he’s corrupted the Justice Department. When asked about the claims, he said, “I don’t even talk to them about it”—implying that his subordinates are pursuing this on his behalf without his direct involvement. This is almost certainly false (Trump has never been shy about directing his personal legal affairs), but even if it were true, it would mean the Justice Department is so thoroughly captured that officials are proactively working to enrich the president without being asked.
The Times notes that “administrative claims are not technically lawsuits” and that “such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department… to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court.” In other words, this is all happening behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny, no judicial scrutiny, and the Justice Department has the discretion to simply cut Trump a check.
Oh, and also this:
The Justice Departmentdoes not specifically require a public announcement of settlementsmade for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Trump could pocket hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, approved by his own lawyers, and there might be no public record.
And if you think that there’s some sort of ethics rules in place to stop it, Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to have made sure nothing stands in the way here:
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either of those top officials would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
Trump seems to have taken the joke “no conflict, no interest!” to heart.
Look, we’ve become numb to Trump’s corruption. Every day it’s a new batshit thing, and honestly, I’m exhausted. But this one deserves to break through the noise because it’s not complicated.
The President is demanding the government pay him $230 million for investigating his crimes and prosecuting him. His own lawyers get to approve it. He’s justifying it with the Big Lie. The government is shut down and can’t pay its bills, but sure, let’s cut Trump a check. And he’s doing all of this while admitting on camera that it’s “interesting” he gets to decide how much to pay himself.
This is just theft. The president is looting the treasury, and the only people who can stop him are the Justice Department he controls, the Congress that won’t hold him accountable, and the Supreme Court that already gave him immunity for crimes.
So yeah, he’ll probably get away with it. Because we’ve built a system where the most powerful person in the country can openly steal from us and face no consequences. Trump didn’t break the system—he just realized it was already broken and decided to take advantage.
And honestly? The fact that he can admit all of this on camera and still expect to cash the check is perhaps the most depressing part of all.
I recognize that this is like the fourth impeachable thing he’s done in the past week alone, and with each new horror the old one slides off the front pages, but really, this one deserves extra attention. At a time when the government is shut down, prices everywhere are rising, and the economy is stalling, Donald Trump is looking to personally enrich himself with a quarter of a billion dollars from the US Treasury.
This is a shockingly brazen level of corruption, even for Donald Trump. And we shouldn’t let it just slide away.
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn’t his engineering or business savvy. It’s probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless online businesses. The impact was fairly universal.
And, ever the opportunist, Musk was quick to leverage the outage to unfairly smear a potential competitor and promote his own, shittier alternative.
Musk, however, took the opportunity to exploit the outage to criticize Signal over at his right wing propaganda and crypto grifter website:
Why would Musk do this? He’s trying to promote his own, shittier encrypted chat software beta, the creatively named X Chat. X Chat is part of Musk’s quest to turn what was once Twitter into an “everything app,” despite the fact he’s shown little real indication he’s innovative enough to actually make X useful for anything outside of sports chat and fighting with racist crypto grifter bots.
While Signal isn’t perfect and certainly has some dependencies on centralized infrastructure, the AWS outage didn’t create any specific risk issues related to encrypted Signal communications. Musk simply saw an opportunity to exploit the outage to market his barely-used beta software. Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk by noting that Signal was at least transparently open source:
But because every brain fart Elon Musk has somehow warrants its own clickbait news cycle, what’s left of the U.S. press couldn’t help but amplify Musk’s criticism of Signal and parrot his attacks mindlessly:
Much like Trump, Musk’s real skill set has absolutely nothing to do with engineering.
His real skill set revolves rank opportunism (like cozying up to talented engineers and taking singular credit for their work) and exploiting America’s very broken press for attention and marketing. In this case, trying to convince people to migrate from a trusted, open source, secure messaging app to a closed source app run by an erratic white supremacist ideologically aligned with the planet’s shittiest people.
Look, folks, I’m sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I’m very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn’t actually funny.
At this point I don’t think it makes sense to write up an intro to the post about how batshit crazy RFK Jr. is, how awful it is that he is currently running HHS, and how dangerous his policies and ramblings are. I’ve said it all before many, many times. He sucks, you get it, let’s move on.
Kennedy is very interested in your teenager’s sperm. He’s been talking about it for nearly a year now, typically as it relates to his claims that today’s teenage boy has a lower sperm count than men in their sixties and seventies. He growled out this claim once again at a recent White House presser.
RFK Jr: "Today the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone of a 65 year old man. Our girls are hitting puberty 6 years early … our parents aren't having children."
Let’s focus in real hard on the claim about teenagers’ sperm count. You know, like putting it under a microscope, as you would do to analyze the sperm concentration in a sample! But not a teenage boy’s sperm count, because, like… why are you even collecting that in the sort of significant numbers that would be required for a proper sample size in a study?
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims, sperm counts decline with age, so young men have much higher counts than older men. And data about sperm counts in teen boys largely does not exist.
Well, of course it doesn’t exist. Why would it? Why in the absolute hell would the parent of a 15 year old be getting that child’s sperm concentration medically tested? Generally, this just isn’t a thing.
This is the hallmark of an RFK Jr. claim. You take outlier studies in unsettled science and declare the minority position conclusively right, so long as it aligns with some larger philosophy you have. In this case, two philosophies of Kennedy’s: a war against environmental chemicals like pesticides and a sort of man-dominated fascism in which hyper-masculinity is of high value.
And here is where I’d like to coin a term: masculofascism. Yes, hyper-masculinity has long been a tenant of fascism generally, but this is, I think, differently emphasized in America’s modern day version. Masculofascism isn’t a word currently — Hi, Webster’s Dictionary! Feel free to adopt this one! –, but I asked Google to tell me what it thinks it would mean on a lark
I mean, come on comrades and friends, I might as well have asked Google to describe RFK Jr. to me.
Anyway, back to sperm. Are sperm rates for teenagers falling? How about for young men, or even men generally? Is this even a thing?
Well, like all manner of health-related topics, it’s complicated.
“This is a very contentious issue in our field, and for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there’s another paper that says that the numbers aren’t changing, and that there’s no cause for concern,” said Dr. Scott Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
In fact, this is a topic and debate that goes back decades. Studies have been coming out since the early 90s suggesting that sperm counts in men were in decline compared with their male counterparts in decades past. In fact, the 50% reduction line is just as old.
In 1993, scientist Louis Guillette shocked Congress when he testified at a hearing that “every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was.”
Guillette was referring to a generational decline in sperm count. A year before his testimony, a review of papers published from 1938 to 1991determined that the average sperm count had fallen around 50%.
As Dr. Lundy indicated earlier, there are other studies that show no decline, too. More of those, actually. Following that hearing, in follow up studies, 35 more studies were done on this topic analyzing historical data, and 27 of them either showed no change or an increase in sperm count (21), or had inconclusive data (6). Only eight of them showed any kind of decline in sperm count or semen quality, a minority position. It’s the minority position.
Oh, and that study’s methodology was heavily disputed.
“The paper was widely, wildly cited,” but “the statistics were not solid,” said Dolores Lamb, who researches male infertility at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
I’ll just add to all of that the simple fact that the American population in 1990 was 248.7 million people. In 2023 it was 336.8 million. Somehow, amidst all this drop in sperm count and fertility, the population grew 35% in 30 years.
But we’re not done. More recently, in 2021, Shanna Swan wrote the book Count Down. Swan is a reproductive epidemiologist and argued that sperm counts had fallen by 52% (man, that number keeps coming up) across several continents from 1973 to 2011. In that same book, she argued that the median sperm count would reach null in 25 years. That would essentially end the human race as we know it, of course, which sounds quite alarming. And Swan, to be clear, is well-credentialed.
But it’s very difficult to square her claims with the fact that the population in most if not all of the continents she studied over that same time period has increased, not decreased. Here’s the North American population chart since 1950. If you can spot any sort of real cause for concern, feel free to point it out.
But men’s groups lost their minds over her paper. They argued that something was going on that was causing men to lose their masculinity. That’s the theme here. No longer are men real men. We’re something less than that now and you can tell because we don’t produce as many DNA missiles as we used to.
Unfortunately for all this testicle-wringing, Swan’s methodology was also questioned. As was the analysis based on point in time sperm samples generally.
Lamb said the analyses from Swan and her co-authors had a major weakness in their methodology. They assumed that laboratories in different parts of the world were collecting and testing semen in the same way, she said, when in fact the methods likely varied.
Swan stood by her team’s results, saying in an email that they accounted for differences in methodologies across studies, as well as the challenges of getting accurate sperm counts.
Lundy, of the Cleveland Clinic, said measuring sperm counts can be hard to do consistently. The count itself can go up and down depending on the frequency of ejaculation, time of year, or whether someone is injured or has a fever.
His analysis last year found a subtle decline in sperm count among men in the U.S. from 1970 to 2018 but one that most likely wouldn’t affect fertility in real life.
And, of course, there are a ton of potential mitigating factors to account for that could also impact a point in time sperm sample. Smoking effects sperm vitality. While smoking is largely on the decline (probably also seen as a decline in masculinity), there’s no indication a smoking status was accounted for in the samples analyzed for these studies. Alcohol also lowers sperm count and I really hope we aren’t going to argue that America saw a steep decline in alcohol consumption from 1970 to the 2010s (yes, there is currently a trend in America for reduced alcohol consumption, but that’s too new to show up in this data).
And, hey, I’ll give Kennedy some credit: studying pesticide effects on human reproduction, as well as many other healthcare factors, is a worthy area of study. But he undermines his own position when he takes the minority view of a scientific endeavor or area of study and simply declares that view dispositive. And he does this all the time.
And it’s often hypocritical. You know what else vastly decreases sperm count?
Testosterone replacement therapy — a treatment that has exploded in popularity among young men looking to feel more energized or to increase their sex drive — can also shut off sperm production entirely.
“Men on testosterone are almost uniformly azoospermic and totally infertile, and sometimes that is only partially reversible if they’ve been on high-dose testosterone for many years,” Lundy said.
Kennedy himself told Newsmax in 2023 that he takes testosterone replacement as part of an “anti-aging protocol.”
And, of course, there is vastly more to human fertility, or even male fertility, than sperm count. Nuance is what is at play here, not simple answers to complex issues. Or non-issues, as is likely in this context.
But you won’t get that out of Kennedy. Instead, you get that fourth bullet in Google’s interpretation of masculofascism: a devaluation of critical thinking and a preference for quick and simple action in lieu of intellectual discourse.
A more perfect description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I cannot find.
Just days after we wrote about the EU’s renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important “no” vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany’s opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal’s momentum and remove it from this week’s agenda for EU justice ministers.
But it wasn’t just a procedural objection—Germany’s Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig delivered a statement that drew a very clear and very important line regarding encryption:
“Private communication must never be under general suspicion,” she said, adding that “the state must also not force messengers to scan messages en-masse for suspicious content before sending them.”
This is exactly the kind of clear-eyed recognition of fundamental rights that’s been missing from much of the chat control debate. Hubig didn’t mince words about the broader principle at stake, calling chat control something that “must be a taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.”
The proposal that Germany torpedoed would have required messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to scan messages and check for images, videos, and URLs that might contain child abuse content—including scanning through end-to-end encrypted communications.
Basically: government mandated spyware. You can understand why a country like Germany, with its history, might be quick to push back on such a thing.
The Netherlands joined Germany in opposition, so it wasn’t just Germany standing up on its own:
The Dutch government said in a letter to parliament late September that the current proposal failed to address its concerns about the protection of fundamental rights at stake, “particularly in the areas of privacy and the confidentiality of correspondence and telecommunications, and the security of the digital domain.”
What’s encouraging here isn’t just that the proposal failed—it’s how it failed. Rather than getting bogged down in technical debates about implementation details or carved-out exceptions, Germany and other opponents focused on the core principle: mass surveillance of private communications is incompatible with fundamental rights, full stop.
This stands in sharp contrast to the usual policy dance where politicians try to thread impossible needles, claiming they can somehow protect both privacy and enable mass scanning. Germany’s position recognizes what anyone with any knowledge of how encryption works has been saying for years: you can’t have secure communications and government backdoors at the same time.
Hopefully, that means countries will continue to take a hard line against chat control and other similar proposals that attack encryption.
The proposal isn’t dead—Denmark could put forward a revised version, and supporters like Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Ireland haven’t given up (it’s kind of amazing how bad France tends to be on this stuff). But Germany’s principled stance, backed actually understanding what this would mean for privacy, makes it much harder for chat control advocates to claim they’re just fine-tuning the details.
Germany’s opposition sends a clear message: some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even with good intentions. Here’s hoping other EU countries are paying attention.
As you know, we talk a lot about decentralization and protocols over platforms. When it comes to decentralized social media in particular, one person who has been working on it since the earliest days is developer Rabble, who was around at the very beginning of what would become Twitter and has worked on many decentralized social media efforts, and recently proposed a new Social Media Bill of Rights in a post here on Techdirt. This week, Rabble joins the podcast to talk all about the history and present state of decentralized social media.
The Party of Free Speech Snowflakes is at it again. Despite Charlie Kirk not actually being a member of the administration or, indeed, a political leader of any sort, the Trump Administration continues to act as though one of its own has been assassinated, rather than just another podcaster who happened to be more popular (for all the wrong reasons) than most.
The State Department has made a big deal in recent months about refusing/stripping visas over what’s normally considered to be protected speech in the United States. That’s because it’s headed by DEI hire Marco Rubio, who is prized not only for his ability to follow orders but his willingness to sit and not speak unless spoken to during diplomatic summit meetings.
Rubio — and his deputy Christopher Landau — are the gatekeepers of the Nazi Bar that is America. And if you can’t be bothered to cry your eyes out for a guy who’d never shed a tear for you, you’re not allowed to hang out in a country where you’ll probably just end up arrested during another untargeted ICE sweep.
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the state department said in a statement posted on X. “The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
The state department then listed six “examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the US” in a thread on the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the Trump donor who called himself “a free speech absolutist” before buying the site formerly known as Twitter.
If you can stomach it, the X thread contains a list of supposed offenders of this brand new rule about temporarily residing in the United States. As is to be expected, those singled out for their refusal to treat Kirk’s death with the respect it doesn’t deserve are from countries this bigoted administration considers to be unworthy of rights or basic human respect, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay. Somehow, a couple of social media posts from people in Germany and South Africa make it into the mix.
This is the end result of a witch hunt deliberately started by the deputy secretary of the State Department:
Last month, a deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, urged social media users to send him posts critical of Kirk, saying he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action”.
And there it is: the party that thinks free speech should only protect their hatefulness towards others, but should never be extended to speech it doesn’t like. While Charlie Kirk may have occasionally provided advisor-esque input to the Trump administration, he was never a politician nor a member of Trump’s cabinet. To elevate him posthumously into Someone Who Cannot Be Criticized is fucking disgusting. He was just another white dude with a bunch of biases who was blessed enough to make a bunch of money by taking advantage of the Trump administration’s embrace of white Christian nationalism ideals.
A person’s temporary residency in another country should never be based on whether or not they agree with the current government’s ideals nor the internet randos the government has decided are more equal than the rest of us. America was built on dissent. Now, it’s being destroyed by someone who seems to think he’s the second coming of King George.
Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them?
Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve been doing this since 1997.
Here’s the thing that’s particularly amusing about the great newsletter “revolution” of the past few years: it’s being hailed as some brilliant innovation that will save media from the tyranny of social media algorithms and platform dependency. Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly proving that exact point for almost three decades.
Back when Techdirt started, it literally was a newsletter. Email was the primary way we distributed things for the first couple of years. But somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot to mention that we still send out a daily email with the full text of every single post. We just had a tiny email logo in the upper righthand corner, and many thousands of you actually subscribed to get those full text daily newsletters.
Not excerpts. Not teasers designed to drive clicks. The entire damn thing, delivered to your inbox every day.
While everyone else spent the last few years “discovering” that newsletters are the future of media (again), we just kept quietly sending ours out to all of you who had subscribed, but never once mentioning its existence in the past couple of decades.
We’ve finally updated the tools we use to manage and send the newsletter, which means we now have actual flexibility to do more interesting things with it. Previously, our newsletter was essentially “here’s today’s posts in email form”—which, to be clear, is still exactly what it is today. We made sure that step one was just recreating what we already had been sending, because why fix what isn’t broken?
But now we have the infrastructure to potentially experiment with different formats, frequencies, or focus areas if that’s what you want.
The core offering remains the same: subscribe, and every day you’ll get the full text of everything we published, delivered to your inbox.
Now that we have better tools, we’re curious about what else you might want to see from our newsletter. Weekly roundups? Deep dives into specific topics? Digest emails instead of full text?
We’ve got some ideas, but we’d rather hear from you. Drop a comment below and let us know what would make a Techdirt newsletter more valuable to you. Do you want more analysis, different formatting, or just more reminders of all the crazy stories we cover?
We’d like to hear from people who receive the current email with all our posts (are there other supplementary newsletters you’d want to sign up for as well?) and from those who aren’t interested in the current email (is there something else you would want to receive?)
For now, though, the main thing is this: if you want Techdirt delivered to your inbox every day, you can do that now, and it’s easier than before when you had to hunt around the site for that tiny email icon.
You can subscribe from this page, or by using the widget at the bottom of this post, or via the signup form in the right-hand navigation bar at the top of any page. It’s free, it’s daily, and it’s the full text of everything we publish.
And yes, we realize the irony of writing a blog post to promote our newsletter that will then be included in our newsletter. But let’s not get too deep in the weeds on that.
Now, what other newsletter features would actually be useful to you?
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