Some background: last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring free Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses and libraries, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny extra. It was a popular, no brainer, bipartisan effort to make internet access easier for the most disadvantaged, many of them living in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the belief he’d make their lives better.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Brendan Carr joined forces to try and destroy that effort. Big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the precedent of government offering free broadband when poor people might otherwise be forced to overpay for expensive cellular. AT&T also doesn’t want government Wi-Fi initiatives to imperil the company’s longstanding practice of defrauding school subsidy programs.
Killing this program is about protecting the interests of giant, shitty telecom monopolies. But Cruz and Carr couldn’t openly say that, so they lied and claimed the program was illegal (false), that they were looking to save taxpayers money (false), and the program “censored Conservative viewpoints” (insane and false, we debunked and explained this claim way back in January).
Carr’s facing some moderate blowback from a few Senators like Ed Markey, who fired off a polite letter. Carr’s also facing light pushback from advocacy groups including the American Library Association (ALA) and the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB). All of them say Carr’s dumb policy choices are making it harder for schoolkids (Republican and Democrat alike) to connect to the internet:
“Rolling back the E-Rate hotspot and school bus decisions would undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity and would reverse progress in closing the ‘Homework Gap.’ For millions of students, especially those from low-income households, internet access outside of school walls is not a luxury but a prerequisite for academic success.”
Spoiler: Carr doesn’t care. Polite letters aren’t going to be enough to deter him from his plan to effectively butcher every last part of the FCC that doesn’t serve AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon’s quarterly revenue goals (his inevitable future employers). The press barely finds this stuff worth covering.
Again, this particular program was built with broad, bipartisan support. It helped children do their fucking homework. It wasn’t controversial. Carr and Cruz targeted not just because it imperiled incumbent telecom monopolies revenues, but because they’re inherently shameless; gleefully engaged in a scorched-Earth war against the very people they pretend to represent.
I think there’s a lot of “Libertarian free market” think tank guys, companies, and extraction-class folks who would very much like it if the focus remained exclusively on the aspects of Carr they don’t support (primarily free speech), but the harm he’s causing to issues like consumer protection, public safety, and affordable connectivity simply can’t be overstated.
It’s unlikely his rollback of a popular plan to help rural schoolkids do their homework will see much press coverage. And what coverage there is will likely either downplay the harm or parrot Carr’s false claims unskeptically. But it’s important to not let Carr’s terribleness on free speech overshadow his other, equally terrible, policies that will reverberate for decades to come.
It’s crazy how universal healthcare free at the point of use is so popular, it’s even the dream policy of the stupidest supporters of the party most opposed to it.
You already covered Journalism 101 in the article, so here’s Journalism 102: It’s also a journalist’s job to report which one of the two lied about the weather.
“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
What do you mean it isn’t efficient? This is a very efficient way to waste money and lose top talent at the same time. That’s very efficient.
We’ve already had the second place double-winner above, so we’ll move on to editor’s choice, starting with another comment from Thad, this time about the ongoing failures of journalism:
Reminds me of one of my favorite headlines, “Something Went Wrong in Plane Crash, Experts Say.”
After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.
Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable.
In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.
The attorney general’s office took no further action.
“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II.
The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general.
As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left.
Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.
Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in various roles on his staff.
Bailey’s actions as attorney general, according to legal observers, stood apart from the office’s core, nonpolitical duties: defending the state against lawsuits and handling felony criminal appeals. That work, by most accounts, continued as usual.
His Republican predecessors, Schmitt and, before him, Josh Hawley, also used the position to advance conservative causes, wage fights against progressive ones and raise their national profiles.
During his stint as attorney general, Hawley — like Schmitt now in the U.S. Senate — delivered a speech in which he claimed the elimination of social stigmas to premarital sex and contraception during the 1960s had degraded the treatment of women and promoted sex trafficking. And he fought to uphold state restrictions that threatened to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics four years before Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
In 2022, he joined a small group of conservative attorneys general in withdrawing from the National Association of Attorneys General, a bipartisan group that had long coordinated multistate investigations in cases against industries ranging from tobacco to opioids. In a letter posted to the social media platform now known as X, Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in arguing that NAAG had taken a sharp “leftward shift” and that continued membership was intolerable. Neither Hawley nor Schmitt, through their spokespeople, responded to requests for comment.
Chris Toth, the executive director of NAAG who retired from the organization weeks after the letter became public, said in an interview that the claims in the letter were “completely unsupported by facts.” Republicans, he added, were involved “in every facet of the organization.”
The move reflected a broader shift in how many attorneys general now use their offices — not only to defend their states in court, but to score political points on the national stage. Few have embodied that strategy more than Paxton, who has often been described as focusing on culture war issues as attorney general.
Paxton’s office has said most of the instances when it declined to represent a state agency were due to practical or legal limits — some agencies chose their own attorneys; others were barred by statute. He’s also argued that certain cases would have required reversing earlier positions or advancing claims he viewed as unconstitutional. He’s defended hiring outside law firms, saying his office lacks the resources to take on powerful industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.
Bailey, though far less prominent nationally, fit squarely within this mold. Before leaving for the FBI, he spoke openly about protecting Missourians from what he called “woke” ideology and lawlessness from the left.
A former U.S. Army officer, he has often framed his mission in combat terms. In a podcast interview this year, he said that while conservative states generally try to limit the power of their attorneys general to “maximize freedom,” blue states have weaponized their offices.
“I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her general assembly can give her,” he said in the podcast interview. He said she uses them “to mess with people’s lives, to prosecute President Trump, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets.”
“Missouri is uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state,” he said, “so it’s like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons and we’re picking them up and learning how to use them against them.”
A spokesperson for James’ office said that “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American” and that it stood behind its litigation against Trump’s business and would continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.
Bailey said in the podcast interview that he supported all efforts to investigate President Joe Biden, his family and his administration, and to uncover what Bailey called the truth behind the COVID-19 vaccine, which he said “seems to not be a vaccine at all.”
Bailey used his office to investigate the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America after it reported that corporate ads were appearing next to extremist content on the social media platform X.
Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump in his first administration, posted that conservative state attorneys general should investigate; Bailey quickly responded that his team was “looking into the matter.” Weeks later, he issued a “notice of pending investigation” to Media Matters and ordered it to preserve records. He later accused the group of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians to bully advertisers out of pulling out of X, and demanded internal records and donor information under Missouri’s consumer protection law. In a June 2024 interview with Donald Trump Jr., Bailey described the probe as “a new front in the war against the First Amendment” and tied it directly to the 2024 election, accusing Media Matters of trying to silence conservative voices.
Media Matters sued and a federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliatory. In early 2025, Bailey dropped the case in a settlement and said he had not found evidence of financial or other misconduct by Media Matters. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.
When Trump was awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a New York court of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star, Bailey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a gag order on the former president and delay his sentencing until after the 2024 election, arguing the restrictions kept Missouri voters from hearing Trump’s message. The Supreme Court rejected his request in an unsigned one-page order without explanation. A New York judge later postponed the sentencing until after the election, writing that he wanted to avoid the appearance, however unwarranted, of political influence.
Trump could have faced up to four years in prison, but a judge issued an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction in place but sparing him any penalty or fine. Trump said the conviction was a “very terrible experience” and an embarrassment to New York. He is appealing.
Bailey also fought to keep a woman in prison even after a state court judge declared her innocent. Even after the state Supreme Court ordered her release, Bailey’s office told the prison warden to ignore the court’s order. A state court overseeing the case scolded Bailey’s office in a hearing, saying, “I would suggest you never do that.”
Legal experts and other observers of the office said state attorneys general traditionally didn’t act primarily as partisan warriors. Most were focused on defending the state in court and protecting consumers.
Scott Holste, who served as a spokesperson for Jay Nixon, a moderate Democrat who served as the Missouri attorney general from 1993 to 2009, recalls a starkly different approach from Bailey’s. For example, in late September 2008, the top headlines on Nixon’s website focused on robocall rules, lawsuits over mortgage fraud and consumer tips for students.
“We were stridently apolitical in our news releases and in the way we operated,” Holste said. “Our job was to serve all Missourians, not to make political points.”
In the days before the August 2024 Republican primary, two of the three stories featured on Bailey’s homepage targeted the Biden administration over immigration and protections for LGBTQ+ students. The third highlighted a consumer-fraud prosecution.
To his supporters, Bailey is fulfilling campaign promises — a conservative acting like a conservative, said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson.
Voters see a leader defending their freedoms by fighting policies such as diversity and equity, which they often equate with racism, and mask mandates, which they view as government overreach, Seitz said. “And,” he added, “we have a populist president who appreciates that.”
Toth, the retired head of the national AGs association, traced the shift in how state attorneys general act to the 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry, when nearly every state joined a landmark deal that required cigarette makers to pay more than $200 billion, curb advertising aimed at children and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also showed attorneys general how much power they could wield.
Over time, the newfound power has raised the profile of attorney general offices across the country, turning them into a springboard for higher office. That higher profile has fueled politicization.
Democratic attorneys general are no strangers to using their offices to fight political battles. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, has filed numerous lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump administration on immigration, environmental regulations and federal funding. While Bonta maintained these suits were based on the law, critics characterized the coordinated legal action as politically motivated resistance.
Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, said that as the state has shifted to the right, the GOP primary, rather than the general election, is now the real contest for statewide office.
He pointed to actions such as Schmitt opposing critical race theory and reviewing public school textbooks. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” Ponder said, “but now you can’t lose because you’re fighting the quote-unquote good fight.”
Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that from the time of Bailey’s appointment to the position in January 2023, he probably had only two audiences. The first were voters he needed to defeat Will Scharf, a candidate already in Trump’s orbit, in the 2024 Republican primary for attorney general.
“And then once he secured his election, then I think his audience was really Trump,” Squire said.
Former Missouri Republican Party Chair John Hancock said voters seemed to reward Bailey’s approach. Bailey got nearly as many votes as Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe in the 2024 general election — and more than Hawley or any of the Republicans who won the offices of lieutenant governor, treasurer or secretary of state.
“So obviously the work he was doing in that office was supported,” Hancock said. “I don’t take terrible shock when politicians do political things.”
Kehoe has appointed Catherine Hanaway, a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney, to succeed Bailey as attorney general. Hanaway has said she intends to run the office in a different style. She told the Missouri Independent she had more interest in Medicaid fraud, consumer protection and violent crimes.
Her office said she was not available for an interview with ProPublica.
Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
What happened next should be the biggest story in America.
Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.
Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.
Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”
Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”
Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.
Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.
This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.
And we’ve already moved on to the next story.
Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.
They suffer while evils are sufferable.
And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.
The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself.
The Founders didn’t rebel over abstract principles. They rebelled over specific violations that made daily life under British rule intolerable. And high on that list of grievances was the British use of general warrants—legal instruments that allowed authorities to search anyone, anywhere, without specifying particular suspects or probable cause.
General warrants gave British soldiers the power to enter colonists’ homes, demand papers, detain occupants, and search property based on nothing more than broad authorization to look for contraband or fugitives. You didn’t need to be suspected of a crime. You just needed to be in the wrong place when authorities decided to exercise their power.
The colonists considered this an abomination. It violated what they understood as the fundamental right to be secure in one’s home against arbitrary government intrusion. The rage against general warrants fueled revolutionary fervor and shaped the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.
What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.
This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
And America yawned.
Let me say this clearly: nobody in this country is safe.
The justification for what happened in Chicago? The building was “known to be frequented by” suspected gang members. Not “we have warrants for specific individuals.” Not “we have probable cause to believe these particular residents committed crimes.” But proximity to suspected criminals now means everyone loses their Fourth Amendment rights.
This is collective punishment—the logic of occupation, not policing in a constitutional republic.
And it gets worse.
This is part of a pattern we’re watching unfold in real time. The government is selecting targets—cities, communities, people it doesn’t like—and then deploying federal agents to find crimes. Not investigating crimes and following evidence to perpetrators. Choosing perpetrators and then searching for crimes to justify their detention.
This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.
In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.”
And so far? We’re accommodating.
Federal agents are conducting warrantless mass detentions of American citizens, and the response from most of the country is a shrug. Some actively celebrate it—finally, someone willing to get tough on crime, to do what needs to be done, to stop worrying so much about rights and procedures and just deal with the problem.
This is how it happens. This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism. Not through some dramatic coup or overnight transformation, but through the steady normalization of violations that people are “more disposed to suffer.”
Why are we accommodating this?
The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.
Because it’s sufferable.
This is the logic that makes tyranny possible.
Every authoritarian regime in history has relied on this same human tendency to accommodate violations of other people’s rights while trusting that “it won’t happen to me.” Every descent into authoritarianism proceeds through exactly this pattern: define an enemy (gangs, immigrants, terrorists, dissidents), suspend normal legal protections in the name of fighting that enemy, expand the definition of who counts as the enemy, repeat.
The architecture is always the same. Only the specific targets change.
And here’s what people still don’t understand: once you normalize the suspension of constitutional rights for one group, you’ve eliminated the principle that protects everyone. Once you accept that the government can detain entire buildings full of people without individualized probable cause because “bad people might be there,” you’ve conceded the logic that makes your own rights contingent on someone else’s judgment about whether your neighborhood, your building, your home might harbor someone the government wants.
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect gang members. It protects Pertissue Fisher, standing in her nightgown with a gun in her face. It protects Alicia Brooks, grabbed at her own door. It protects those children, zip-tied and terrified.
It protects you.
Or it did. Until we collectively decided that protecting those people was too much trouble.
President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?
This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been… silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil.
Jefferson understood that humans will endure almost anything rather than face the terrifying work of resistance. He understood that experience teaches accommodation, that habit makes tyranny bearable, that people will suffer injustice until the moment it becomes absolutely insufferable.
What he couldn’t tell us—what no founder could tell us—is where that line falls for any particular generation. When does the sufferable become insufferable? When do people finally stop accommodating and start resisting? When does the evil grow too large to ignore?
I don’t know. But I know this: we’re not there yet. And that should terrify you more than anything else in this essay.
Because we are falling now.
Not metaphorically. Actually. The constitutional order that prevents arbitrary government power is collapsing in real time, and most Americans are scrolling past the evidence on their way to something more entertaining.
The wire is breaking. The center cannot hold. And the ground approaches.
You can feel it if you’re paying attention—that sickening acceleration, that sense that things are moving faster than our capacity to process them, that each new violation makes the previous one seem almost quaint in retrospect. Warrantless mass detentions. Children zip-tied. American citizens sorted by race. American cities as military training grounds.
Each accommodation makes the next violation easier. Each shrug gives permission for something worse. Each time we decide that this particular evil is sufferable, we lower the threshold for what becomes acceptable.
This is how it happens. Not all at once, but through a series of choices—individual and collective—to look away, to accommodate, to suffer what seems survivable rather than risk the unknown consequences of resistance.
Jefferson knew. The Founders knew. They built constitutional protections precisely because they understood how easily liberty dies—not through conquest, but through accommodation. Not through force alone, but through the steady erosion of principle that occurs when good people decide that defending rights is too much trouble.
History will not wake you from your ignorant slumber gently.
It will not tap you on the shoulder and give you time to prepare. It will not announce itself with clarity and give you the comfort of knowing exactly when to act.
History wakes us with the impact. With the moment when sufferable becomes insufferable and we realize—too late—that we accommodated our way into something we can no longer escape.
The ground approaches. You can choose to notice. You can choose to care. You can choose to say “this far and no further.”
Or you can scroll past. You can shrug. You can decide this particular evil is still sufferable, that someone else will hold the center, that surely it won’t come to your door.
All experience hath shewn which choice most people make.
But you are not most people. You are you—conscious, capable, still free enough to choose what you will accommodate and what you will resist.
Federal agents detained American citizens without individualized probable cause this week. They handcuffed children. They sorted people by race. They treated an American city like occupied territory.
This happened.
The question isn’t whether it happened. The question is whether you’ll decide it’s sufferable.
Because that choice—your choice, made right now, in this moment—is what determines whether we land or crash.
The ground approaches.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Fourth Amendment means nothing if we collectively decide it’s too much trouble to defend.
Hold the center. Or watch it collapse.
There is no third option.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington (1788)
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
The Hatch Act of 1939 is a beautiful piece of legislation. It disallows all kinds of things, like bribing voters with jobs to vote a certain way, as well as limiting any campaign activity by federal workers. Another thing it does is to prohibit partisan political activity in the course of a staff member’s federal employment duties. An IRS agent, for instance, can’t tell someone going through an audit that their taxes are so high because “the Democrat or Republican party sucks and they hate you.” The idea is that we want federal employees carrying out their duties in a non-partisan manner.
Well, Donald Trump’s administration just took a big old dump on the Hatch Act. As you’ll know, the federal government is currently in a shutdown due to Congress collectively being unable to pass a funding bill to keep it open. As is typical, both parties have rushed to play the blame game and label the shutdown as the other party’s responsibility. It’s dumb, because they are both responsible to one degree or another, but c’est l’amerique. Well, the administration has apparently been telling its various departments, and in some cases forcing it upon them, to alter web banners and out of office messages to specifically blame Democrats for the shutdown.
We’ll start with the away messages.
But some departments have pressed their employees to change these “out of office” notices to explicitly blame Democrats for the shutdown. At the Department of Education, things have apparently gone even further, with numerous employees complaining on social media that their out-of-office messages were changed, without their consent, to this:
Thank you for contacting me. On September 19, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse in appropriations I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume.
CNN talked to one Department of Education employee who “said they went into their email system twice over the last 24 hours to change the automatic message to a generic one, but it was reverted back to the message blaming Democrats.”
That right there? That’s a Hatch Act violation. Plain as day, we don’t have to argue about it, there’s no nuance to consider. It’s just a Hatch Act violation foisted upon federal workers that are already being furloughed because the man-child currently running our government wanted it done.
And this isn’t just the DoE. HHS and the SBA, and I’m certain many others as well, also have these away messages that include partisan criticism of one party at the demand of the other. And bullshit explanations like this are completely invalid.
When asked about its suggested out-of-office message blaming Democrats, the Department of Health and Human Services told CNN that yes, it had suggested this—but added that this was okay because the partisan message was accurate.
“Employees were instructed to use out-of-office messages that reflect the truth: Democrats have shut the government down,” the agency said.
Pure, frontier gibberish. I can’t stress this enough: this isn’t complicated. This is an open and shut violation of the Hatch Act.
As is what the administration splashed all over government agency websites, as well.
Department websites have also gotten in on the partisan action. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s site now loads with a large floating box atop the page, which reads, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.” When you close the box, you see atop the main page itself an eye-searingly red banner that says… the same thing. Thanks, I think we got it!
Over at the Small Business Administration, a banner atop the main page really makes sure to drive the partisanship home by blaming Democrats twice and praising Trump once:
Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill (H.R. 5371), leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) from serving America’s 36 million small businesses. Every day that Senate Democrats continue to oppose a clean funding bill, they are stopping an estimated 320 small businesses from accessing $170 million in SBA-guaranteed funding…
As soon as the shutdown is over, we are prepared to immediately return to the record-breaking services we were providing under the leadership of the Trump Administration.
Somewhat hilariously, a similar banner is shown over at the site that specifically instructs DOJ employees to adhere to the Hatch Act as it applies to them.
As if irony isn’t already dead, the Hatch Act violation on the DOJ website, which blames Democrats for the shutdown, appears on the page advising DOJ employees they are subject to the Hatch Act. joycevance.substack.com/p/a-note-abo…
That’s the sort of thing that would make even Orwell blush. And, ultimately, this shit isn’t funny. The Hatch Act exists for a reason and the erosion of it isn’t to be sneezed at. If this administration can get away with violating the portion of the law that prohibits partisan preaching from the workplace, why not the part about bribing voters? Republican kind of tried to do something like that already, if you’ll recall. Or how about the part about campaigning for a specific party or candidate while on the job? What will prevent the administration from making it a work requirement for every federal worker to vocally support one party in the midterms?
It’s going to be really important to see who, and how, those in the other branches of our government demand accountability for this flagrant violation of law.
For years now, the MAGA crowd has been absolutely convinced that the Biden administration engaged in the most egregious censorship campaign in American history. They’ve waved around the Murthy v. Missouri case as proof that Biden officials illegally pressured tech companies to remove content (even as the Supreme Court concluded there wasn’t even enough evidence of any coercion to give any of the plaintiffs standing). Just last week, Rep. Jim Jordan was wildly celebrating what heclaimedwas Google’s admission that the Biden administration forced YouTube to censor people (which wasn’t actually what Google said at all, but reading comprehension has never been Jordan’s strong suit).
But now we have an actual, crystal-clear example of government officials using direct threats to pressure a tech company into removing disfavored speech—and suddenly, the free speech warriors have gone mysteriously quiet.
404 Media has the story of Apple removing the ICEBlock app from its App Store on Thursday after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. The app, which allows people to crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, was pulled following what Fox News described as the DOJ “reaching out” to Apple and “demanding” the removal.
Aaron provided 404 Media with a copy of the email he received from Apple regarding the removal. It says “Upon re-evaluation, we found that your app is not in compliance with the App Review Guidelines.” It then points to parts of those guidelines around “Objectionable Content,” and specifically “Defamatory discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.”
The email then says “Information provided to Apple by law enforcementshows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
And Bondi herself was quite explicit about the government’s role in this censorship:
Bondi told Fox “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they removethe ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi added according to the Fox report.
Now, some will inevitably argue that Apple made an independent decision based on its own guidelines. But the MAGA crowd refused to accept that exact same argument when it was made in defense of what happened during the Biden administration. When companies explained that their content moderation decisions were based on their own policies, not government pressure, the MAGA crowd dismissed those explanations as irrelevant. They’ve spent years refusing to acknowledge the difference between government persuasion and government coercion.
In all of the communications from the Biden administration that were revealed in Murthy v. Missouri, officials never demanded removal of content. They did request reviews against existing policies (which is why companies rejected over 60% of flagged content) and occasionally suggested policy changes (which were mostly ignored). Even when companies did take action, they consistently maintained it was based on their own policy determinations.
But here? Bondi explicitly states she demanded Apple remove the app. There’s no ambiguity, no gentle suggestion, no “request for review.” It’s a direct government demand for censorship that was immediately complied with.
So let’s be clear about what happened here: A government official made a demand to a private tech company to remove an app based on the content of that app, and the company complied. This is exactly—and I mean exactly—what Jordan, Trump, and the entire MAGA ecosystem have been claiming (falsely) was the greatest violation of the First Amendment in modern history when they imagined Biden officials did it.
But somehow, I doubt we’ll see Jordan holding hearings about this. I doubt we’ll see breathless segments about government censorship. I doubt we’ll see any of the usual suspects who spent years screaming about the Biden administration’s supposed “jawboning” saying a single word about this actual, documented case of government officials pressuring a tech company to remove content.
Now, to be fair, ICEBlock has legitimate issues that have been well-documented. Security researcher Micah Lee has written extensively about how the app is “activism theater” that wasn’t developed with input from actual immigrant defense groups and spreads unverified information that can cause panic rather than provide useful protection. He also documented serious security vulnerabilities in the app’s infrastructure that the developer ignored for weeks. These are legitimate concerns about the app’s effectiveness and security.
But here’s the thing: the quality or effectiveness of the app is irrelevant to the First Amendment question. The government cannot pressure private companies to remove apps based on the content of those apps, regardless of whether that content is high-quality, low-quality, effective, or ineffective. As we documented earlier this year, ICEBlock and similar apps serve a purpose that many people find valuable—providing early warning systems for ICE activities in local communities at a time when people (for good reasons!) are quite concerned about ICE’s abusive tactics.
The Supreme Court made this distinction crystal clear in both the Murthy and Vullo cases. In Vullo, the Court explicitly stated:
A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others.What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression….
Bondi didn’t just share her views or criticize the app. She explicitly used the power of the state by “demanding” Apple remove it, and Apple complied within hours. This is textbook government coercion of the type that the Supreme Court has repeatedly said violates the First Amendment.
Just last week, we had Trump supporters lying about Biden “censorship” to justify FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s explicit threats against Disney over Jimmy Kimmel’s speech. They keep pointing to Murthy v. Missouri as if it blessed government pressure on tech companies, when it actually said the opposite—that such pressure would violate the First Amendment if there was evidence it occurred.
But, as we discussed, in Murthy, the Supreme Court made it clear that explicit threats would, in fact, cross the First Amendment line. The problem in Murthy was the lack of evidence of “coercion” or “significant encouragement” to suppress speech—the Court specifically looked for explicit demands or threats and found none (while it did find such explicit demands in the Vullo case, which they heard the same day). The majority ruling states that the conduct needs to involve coercion and “not mere communication.”
Well, here’s your coercion. Here’s your “significant encouragement.” Here’s your smoking gun in the form of the Attorney General literally telling the media she demanded the removal of an app.
Here’s the actual government censorship that Jordan and company have been claiming to fight against for years.
Where are they now?
The silence reveals something fundamental about the entire “censorship” crusade: It was never about protecting free speech or preventing government overreach. It was about creating a permission structure for their own authoritarian impulses while weaponizing victimhood narratives against their political opponents.
When faced with actual, explicit, documented government censorship—the kind they’ve been breathlessly warning about for years—they have nothing to say. Because this censorship serves their agenda, targets their enemies, and advances their political goals.
The mask has slipped completely. The “free speech” warriors have shown themselves to be exactly what critics always said they were: not principled defenders of civil liberties, but partisan actors who only care about speech when it benefits them.
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ICE just isn’t getting the job done. Despite the masked men swarming everywhere to arrest every Mexican-looking person in sight, the agency still can’t meet the 3,000 arrests per day quota that White House advisor Stephen Miller has stated is merely the baseline for his expectations.
The main reason for this is that we’re running out of immigrants to arrest. The pretense of ejecting “criminal” migrants from the nation was abandoned the first time Trump held office, due to the fact that migrants commit fewer crimes than natural-born citizens. The administration claims there have been 1.6 million “self-deportations” since Trump took office, which means there are even fewer people to arrest, no matter how aggressively ICE acts. Going after everyone and swarming the streets with federal officers and military troops hasn’t resulted in a massive increase in arrests — something ICE has recently decided to blame on a lack of officers, despite being massively over-funded.
To that end, ICE has taken the age caps off the hiring process, allowing people as young as 18 and as old as time itself to apply for open positions. It has also thrown a $50,000 signing bonus into the mix, which is now cannibalizing local law enforcement agencies who simply don’t have billions of federal dollars to throw at recruits.
ICE also enticed actor Dean Cain to remind everyone he’s still alive by producing a PSA for ICE and its hiring push. Obviously, the man who once portrayed America’s most famous immigrant (Superman) is now claiming he’s joining ICE, which is having an effect on the most irony-proof people in our nation: ICE applicants.
NPR went to a DHS hiring fair and interviewed some of the people applying for one of (allegedly) 10,000 open ICE positions. The administration needs as many boots (and masked faces) on the ground as possible if it’s ever going to come within a third of its stated goal of 1,000,000 arrests per year. Fortunately, this nation has a surplus of flunkies, some of whom shared their motivations with NPR as they applied open Gestapo-esque thug positions.
Ana Maria Vargas, 52, a correctional officer in Arizona, applied to be a deportation officer.
“I saw … the guy that played Superman on the TV series so many years ago,” Vargas said. “A lot of us still have the desire and want to serve our country, yet we don’t know how to get into it because of the age restrictions.”
Vargas said she wants to “take out the bad guys,” though she acknowledged “there are a lot of good people that are here. However, they are here illegally.”
Law enforcement officer? Check. Saw that Superman guy? Check. Thinks chasing day laborers through Home Deport parking lots is “taking out the bad guys?” Check. Says there are “good people” caught up in this mess but still thinks the “good people” should be ejected along with the “bad guys?” Check. Vargas wants to be the negative change she wishes to see in the world. And ICE might pay her $50,000 just for signing up because she’s definitely the sort of person it wants to add to its force: someone who thinks ICE is good, Superman guy is inspiring, and doesn’t have the sort of moral clarity that might result in second thoughts or immediate resignation.
Here’s another applicant interviewed by NPR:
Andrea Alexander, an attorney living in Utah, came to apply for the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, the branch of ICE that argues immigration cases in immigration court. She learned of ICE’s recruitment efforts from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s social media.
“I love Trump. I love his administration. I think he’s going to save our country,” Alexander said, adding that those applying to be deportation officers should likely believe in the mission as well. “They probably have to be true believers for the front line because they have to be ready to catch a lot of flak right now.”
Do I even need to comment? I mean, this is a person who willingly follows Stephen Miller’s X account. That person was always in the bag for bigotry and fascism. Knowing some legal terms probably helps, but just knowing some legal stuff doesn’t always make you a good fit for a job, as plenty of Trump appointees have found out while getting mowed down by federal court judges or just leaving their asses hanging all the way out when angling for unjustified indictments.
Another applicant is just the sort of opportunist someone like Trump would admire:
He said he was on the right of the political spectrum and that the hiring bonuses and increased media attention on the agency drew his attention.
“I think there’s way too many illegal immigrants here,” he said, noting that if he gets the job, he hopes he gets to deport people.
“I don’t believe in much but I have a red hat and I don’t like people who aren’t white. Also: I like money.” What a piece of shit.
Also contributing to this: a former Army officer who thinks his experience with “detainee operations” (let that one simmer for a bit…) would be useful to ICE. And another veteran who doesn’t want to do anything more than speed up the delivery of his government pension:
“I want to go back into federal service … and retire earlier than have to start a whole another career with a state or county agency,” he said, noting he is interested in Border Patrol, Secret Service and ICE.
Not everyone is the cliche you expect. One applicant was a person laid off during the DOGE purge who simply wants to get back to the government position they held before Trump returned to the Oval Office. Another person was already an immigration officer who was just hoping for a better paying job in the same field.
But, for the most part, it’s the people you expect them to be, which means they’re the people this administration wants: applicants whose motivation goes beyond the unexpected opportunity and into the general “kick all the immigrants out” mission ICE is in the process of undertaking. It’s people who haven’t thought about any of this past the brims of their MAGA hats or who can be so impressed by a Hollywood has-been they’re willing to roll the dice on a $50,000 signing bonus, even if it means “good people” will be negatively affected by their actions. And if you’re hurting people you consider to be “good” just because the pay is high enough, you have to know what that makes you. Right?
This is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.
This week Senator Ron Wyden — one of the few U.S. Senators who takes public and consumer privacy seriously — attempted to pass two bills that would have expanded privacy laws that currently only apply to government employees.
S.2850, or Protecting Americans from Doxing and Political Violence Act, would have extended restrictions on the sale of government official location and behavior data to all Americans. Meanwhile, S.2851 would have extended privacy protections for federal officials and lawmakers to state officials and their staff, in addition to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
“Members of Congress should not receive special treatment,” Wyden said of the effort. “Our constituents deserve protection from violence, stalking, and other criminal threats.”
“Cruz was the sole objecting senator, who claimed without evidence that Wyden’s bill could disrupt law enforcement, “such as knowing where sexual predators are living.”
A survey from U.S. News and World Report last year found that 84% of the public, across partisan ideologies, wants Congress to pass tougher privacy laws. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, our broken oligarchy is too corrupt to function, which has prevented us from passing even basic internet-era privacy protections or regulating dodgy data brokers who track your every click and movement.
The other reason the country doesn’t pass useful privacy laws is because the U.S. government has found it’s trivial to skip warrants and just buy domestic surveillance data from said data brokers. However, so can other international governments and bad actors, a national security hole in our logic that America, once again, has been too corrupt to functionally square.
That’s resulting in increasingly dangerous outcomes, and the country is absolutely begging for a modern privacy scandals that make all past scandals look like some sort of grade school picnic. When that day comes, of course, Ted Cruz (and all the industry-backed “think tankers” who claimed that having even baseline privacy protections would “stifle innovation”) will be nowhere to be found.
