Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.
There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:
“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”
That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.
The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.
This sort of mindless consolidation is generally just a shell game performed by the extraction class and the kind of people obsessed with scale that have no genuine, original ideas. It’s utterly senseless, extractive, and destructive, as we all saw with the disastrous AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Brothers mess (and the AOL Warner Brothers mess decades earlier).
Quick refresher: Delrahim was Trump’s DOJ “antitrust enforcer” during his first term. Delrahim “enforced antitrust” by doing things like rubber stamping Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile, which immediately resulted in more than 8,000 layoffs and an abrupt end to what passed as price competition in U.S. wireless.
These are, you’ll be surprised to learn, bad faith actors who aren’t actually interested in the public interest, product quality, happy workers, healthy markets, healthy companies, or much of anything else beyond short-term financial gains, tax breaks, control, and outsized higher-level executive compensation.
Ellison and Delrahim don’t have to worry about the Trump DOJ or FCC interfering in the deal. But their desperation suggests they are definitely nervous about negative public perception, European regulatory approval, and the hints being sent by state attorneys general that they’re cooking up a collaborative antitrust lawsuit that could either block or dramatically extend the project timeline.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.
UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. “Thankfully, they’ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,” said one UC insider privy to the system’s thinking.
To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn’t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests.
Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by “JB,” has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. “There’s nothing like this time,” he said. “This is singular. It’s the toughest.”
On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration’s actions against UCLA had “flouted” legal requirements and ordered it to cease all “coercive and retaliatory conduct” against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA’s $584 million in frozen grant funding.
But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. “Even if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,” said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. “They have not made it a secret what they wish to do.”
In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research.
One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump’s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. “These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he told us. “It looks like we’re being used.”
For Trump’s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start.
With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state — one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump’s most prominent foes.
Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it’s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Some of Trump’s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was “a national embarrassment” over its handling of “criminal antisemitic conduct.” Dhillon and Terrell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring “zealous advocacy” for Trump’s executive orders, attacks on all forms of “illegal DEI” and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division’s chief focus, were largely abandoned.
On Feb. 28, Terrell’s task force announced plans to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess “whether remedial action is warranted.”
But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.
In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in “the entire UC system” were “being harassed because of antisemitism.” The administration planned to “sue,” “bankrupt,” and “take away every single federal dollar” from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.
A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn’t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of tolerating antisemitism.
Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.
In this case, the Justice Department’s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time — initially, a single month.
Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn’t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, “North” and “South” teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.
“The incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,” Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice’s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. “The end goal was to file a damn complaint — or have something to threaten the university.”
Trump’s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help “win this country back.” “You guys have found a hostile work environment, right?” lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.
“He seemed upset we were spending so much time investigating,” Dena Robinson, a senior trial attorney, told us. “He didn’t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued.” In an email about six weeks in, Gates suggested there was easily enough in the public record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses — a notion that horrified the career lawyers. “Why did we even go out there if you’d already made up your mind?” another member of the UC team recalled thinking. Gates, who left the DOJ in November after just 11 months, declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle.
Lawyers on the team say it soon became apparent that there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination case against UC Davis, UC Berkeley or UCSF, much less the entire UC system. Fearful for their jobs, they agreed on a strategy to “feed the beast,” as one attorney put it: to focus on UCLA, which had experienced the most troubling, and publicly explosive, episodes of antisemitism.
Like many colleges across the country, UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel’s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents, including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading “Free Palestine, Fuck Jews.” Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic.
Starting in late April 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus. Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement, UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week, disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings. Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism.
On the night of April 30, masked counterprotesters, armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks, stormed the encampment, triggering a three-hour melee before police were finally brought in. Dozens of people were injured. It took until 6 a.m. May 2 for Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies to empty the site.
Before Trump even took office, however, UCLA — and the federal government — had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school.
Most significantly, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement with the Department of Education resolving investigations into student complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA and on four other campuses.
The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus’ handling of discrimination complaints. Government monitoring was to continue until UC “demonstrated compliance” with “all the terms of this agreement.”
The Trump administration disregarded all that. Even as the employee investigation was underway, it launched a new investigation of the same student complaints in early May.
On May 27 on Fox News, Terrell, the head of the antisemitism task force, once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ’s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded. “Expect massive lawsuits against the UC system,” he declared. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. …We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially.”
At the time, the lawyers working on the UC employment investigation were still racing to complete their recommendation. They were focused solely on UCLA, having determined there wasn’t adequate evidence to pursue cases at other campuses. Many had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that case. “This was not something we would usually litigate,” one lawyer on the team said in an interview. “But everyone understood the front office was demanding this.”
By then, most of the remaining members of the UC team, amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division, were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration’s deferred-resignation offer. “It was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint,” the lawyer said.
In the 47-page recommendation memo the UC team sent on May 29 to Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights, the lawyers spelled out their concerns. “We simply do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring 2024 are ongoing” — typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint, the memo acknowledged. Some of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech. And because, “as has been frequently noted,” the investigation had been “truncated” to three months, there hadn’t even been time to review some of the documents UC produced, the memo said.
To shore up potential weaknesses in the case, the memo suggested an unusual “hybrid complaint” strategy that would rest partly on new allegations about the ineffectiveness of the university’s complaint process (which was ongoing) and partly on three older faculty grievances.
One of the grievances cited was that of Astor, the professor of social welfare, who describes himself as both a Zionist and a “pro-peace researcher.” His academic work, much of which takes place in Israel, involves studying ways to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist. But after he signed an open letter from Jewish faculty criticizing some pro-Palestinian protesters’ calls for violence, they accused him, in a widely circulated letter of their own, of supporting genocide. When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students, he told us, a masked protester asked whether he was a Zionist. After he said he believed in Israel’s right to exist, he was blocked from entering or crossing through the central campus.
Astor was targeted again last November, he said, when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he’d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class. “A bunch of students got up and showed pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn’t let us talk,” he recalled. Later heckled on his way to his car, he said he felt threatened and depressed. He lost more than 60 pounds and was granted permission to work from home, but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere.
Astor’s complaints, the employment-section attorneys believed, would support their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA. Even so, they warned that their case might not hold up in court. In the memo, they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint.
With that message delivered, most of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department.
On the morning of July 29, two days before Milliken’s interrupted golf game, the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the 2024 encampment debacle: It announced a $6.45 million settlement of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who said protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings, creating a “Jew exclusion zone,” and that the university did nothing to help them. UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions, and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and support the UCLA Jewish community. The steps the university had taken, a joint statement declared, “demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism.”
The Trump administration had a different view. That afternoon, it announced that it had sent UC a notice letter saying the Justice Department had found UCLA’s response to the encampment had been “deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Bondi warned in a press release that UCLA would “pay a heavy price” for “this disgusting breach of civil rights.” The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the investigation had begun.
The letter, which acknowledged that it relied significantly on “publicly available reports and information,” ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of 2024 to rest.
“The violations they described all predate the December agreement,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department under the Obama and Biden administrations. “They’ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward.”
The July 29 letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no “reasonable certainty” of reaching an agreement.
Instead, the next day, the Trump administration began freezing UCLA’s research money from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Defense Department. The agencies cited the campus’ handling of antisemitism as well as “illegal affirmative action” and allowing transgender women in women’s sports and bathrooms.
UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions, but the first public institution.
David Shackelford, whose medical school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer, said his phone “blew up” when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders. Three NIH grants, totaling $8 million over five years, had supported the lab’s work. “These are experiments and animal models that take years to develop,” Shackelford said. “It’s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away.” He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running “on fumes,” vowing “to go down swinging.”
Elle Rathbun is not sure she’s up for the fight. A 29-year-old sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to study how brains recover from strokes when she got the news: Her $160,000 award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants.
She found substitute funding for some of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress. Like hundreds of her colleagues, she’d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant, only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream, a move she called “incredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful.”
A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them. But even after those victories, the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle. In a July 30 email later introduced in court, the National Science Foundation’s acting chief science officer wrote that, in addition to freezing existing grants, he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA.
In nearly 500 pages of personal statements to the court, some faculty members said they’re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university. Amander Clark, a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center, no longer talks about the ways her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people. “I am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight, 20 years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen,” she wrote.
In selecting Milliken as their new system president, the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large public university systems with vastly different political climates, ranging from the City University of New York, which he ran from 2014 to early 2018, to the University of Texas system, which he led from late 2018 until May 2025.
At UT, Milliken had championed some progressive steps, including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure, but he had also quickly shut down the system’s 21 offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law. “He knows what is a winning hand and what is not,” said Richard Benson, who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas.
On Aug. 1, his first day on the job at UC’s system office in Oakland, Milliken issued a measured public statement that addressed the “deeply troubling” UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC’s “life-saving and life-changing research.”
That same week, the Justice Department, days after Bondi’s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students, delivered a second notice letter, declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the “hybrid” lawsuit that the DOJ’s UC team had recommended in May.
Eager to turn up the pressure on UC, political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings, according to former agency officials. But Kacie Candela, a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration’s UC investigations, warned that under federal law, it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit. After a heated dispute, her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced. She was terminated days later. (Candela, who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing, declined to discuss the matter for this story. DOJ officials didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode.)
After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters, Milliken quickly affirmed UC’s willingness to “engage in dialogue” with the administration. But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later: the Justice Department’s $1.2 billion settlement demand, which also asked for policy changes in areas where there’d been no findings of wrongdoing, including admissions practices, screening of foreign students and transgender students’ access to bathrooms. Within hours of UC’s receipt of the 27-page demand letter on Aug. 8 — which the DOJ had marked “confidential” — CNN, The New York Times and Politico had all posted stories saying they’d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter, which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private.)
All this was without precedent, due process or clear legal justification, civil rights experts noted. Agreeing to the DOJ’s demands, the Aug. 8 letter said, would release UC from claims that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students, employees and women, and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud. “They were trying to overwhelm,” said Swedish, the former civil rights deputy section chief. “They were spraying the fire hose at the university.”
Strangely, Justice demanded another $172 million for employees who’d complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at $300,000.
Former U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said a possible rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that, under Trump, the DOJ is experimenting with using the False Claims Act in civil rights cases. This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers, who would share in any financial recovery. “It’s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from,” Cunha said of the administration’s settlement demands. But “if there’s a pattern that’s emerged thus far, it’s that every tool in the toolbox is on the table.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump, acknowledged that the government has pursued “eye-catching” penalties “with a speed that suggested” normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures “have not been utilized.” But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the “national crisis” of antisemitism. “When a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented,” he said, “the response needs to be as well.”
In media interviews, officials in the Trump administration acknowledge that its “whole-of-government” attacks on universities seek to bypass normal, slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the government is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing, seemingly arbitrary fines. “Having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention,” former White House deputy May Mailman, a key architect of the administration’s higher education strategy, told The New York Times.
This approach is “flagrantly unlawful” and “incredibly dangerous,” said Lhamon, the former assistant education secretary, who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school. “There’s a long set of steps that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated.”
Lhamon said the Trump administration was operating “like a mob boss.”
“That is not the federal government doing civil rights work,” she said.
Milliken has found himself caught between the Trump administration’s demands and those of his new constituency in California, which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation.
Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has threatened to sue the federal government, calling its demands “extortion” and vowing to “fight like hell” against any deal.
The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school. “The university should have immediately gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,” he told ProPublica and the Chronicle. “I wanted the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit. I didn’t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating.”
But Milliken, backed by the UC regents, resisted calls for confrontation, wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under investigation. The damage to date at UCLA is “minor in comparison to the threat that looms,” Milliken noted in a mid-September statement. “We are in uncharted waters.”
So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the government. According to a person familiar with the matter, it has retained William Levi, who served in Trump’s first administration as a special assistant to the president, counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department, to lead the talks.
If UC’s leaders have preached restraint, its faculty has opted for open defiance. In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge, Lin, to restore UCLA’s frozen research grants, a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration’s entire assault on UC. At a hearing on Nov. 6, the government’s lawyer acknowledged that the administration’s “hodgepodge” of actions against the system hadn’t followed established civil rights procedures but said the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration’s “policy priorities.”
Lin didn’t buy it. A week later, in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction, she barred all of the Trump administration’s actual and threatened moves to punish UC, including the $1.2 billion payment demand. The Trump administration’s “playbook,” she wrote, citing comments by Terrell and others, illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”
Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC, approvals were slow to resume. In public remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov. 19, Milliken said that more than 400 grants across the system remained suspended or terminated, representing “more than $230 million in research activity on hold.” He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system’s pathway to new grants will be blocked.
In our interview, Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration, saying the university has held its ground on its governance, mission and academic freedom.
“We recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal government,” he said. “Our efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans.”
At a time when politicians on both sides reflexively call for censorship and speech policing, it’s refreshing to see someone actually defend free speech principles—especially when it would be politically easier to cave.
That’s exactly what New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani did when NBC’s Meet the Press tried to pressure him into condemning language he’s never used. Rather than take the bait, Mamdani delivered a strong defense of free speech principles. It’s a better defense of free speech than we’ve seen from most politicians lately.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that many of the Democrats attacking Mamdani should be laser-focused on the existential threat Trump poses to democracy. Instead, they’re wasting time and energy going after someone who actually accomplished what establishment Democrats claim they desperately want: activating young people who often fail to vote. Mamdani didn’t just talk about engaging young voters—he did it, handily winning the Democratic primary by mobilizing exactly the demographic Democrats say they need. His reward? A coordinated attack campaign.
The controversy stems from demands that Mamdani condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”—language he doesn’t use but which critics insist he must denounce to prove he’s not antisemitic. It’s the kind of ridiculous purity test that marginalized politicians routinely face (but somehow, white, Christian, male politicians never do), demanding they repeatedly distance themselves from the words of others simply because they share some demographic or political similarity.
But rather than playing that game, Mamdani chose to defend the principle that government officials shouldn’t be in the business of policing speech—even speech they personally disagree with. At the same time, he used the opportunity to move from the “gotcha” kind of question to a focus on how to tackle the actual problems of racism and bigotry, beyond just focusing on specific language questions.
There’s been a lot of pressure on Mamdani to specifically criticize pro-Palestinian language used by others. And, over the weekend, he went on Meet the Press and gave, what I think, is a really strong answer to a silly gotcha question that I think others could learn from:
KRISTEN WELKER:
I want to ask you about an issue that has divided some New Yorkers in recent weeks. You were recently asked about the term “globalize the intifada,” if it makes you uncomfortable. In that moment you did not condemn the phrase. Now, just so folks understand, it’s a phrase that many people hear as a call to violence against Jews. There’s been a lot of attention on this issue, so I want to give you an opportunity to respond here and now. Do you condemn that phrase “globalize the intifada?”
ZOHRAN MAMDANI:
That’s not language that I use. The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights. And ultimately, that’s what is the foundation of so much of my politics, the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.
KRISTEN WELKER:
But do you actually condemn it? I think that’s the question and the outstanding issue that a number of people, both of the Jewish faith and beyond, have. Do you condemn that phrase, “globalize the intifada,” which a lot of people hear as a call to violence against Jews?
ZOHRAN MAMDANI:
I’ve heard from many Jewish New Yorkers who have shared their concerns with me, especially in light of the horrific attacks that we saw in Washington, D.C. and in Boulder, Colorado about this moment of antisemitism in our country and in our city. And I’ve heard those fears and I’ve had those conversations. And ultimately, they are part and parcel of why, in my campaign, I’ve put forward a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800%. I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech in the manner, especially of that of Donald Trump, who has put one New Yorker in jail, who’s just returned to his family, Mahmoud Khalil, for that very supposed crime of speech. Ultimately, what I think I need to show is the ability to not only talk about something but to tackle it and to make clear that there’s no room for antisemitism in this city. And we have to root out that bigotry, and ultimately we do that through the actions. And that is the mayor I will be, one that protects Jewish New Yorkers and lives up to that commitment through the work that I do.
KRISTEN WELKER:
But very quickly for the people who care about the language and who feel really concerned by that phrase, why not just condemn it?
ZOHRAN MAMDANI:
My concern is to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president, who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an oped. Putting them in jail for protesting. Ultimately, it’s not language that I use. It’s language I understand there are concerns about. And what I will do is showcase my vision for this city through my words and my actions.
Note what he does here. It would be easy enough to give into the framing and make statement condemning the language. And while some will (in bad faith) argue his failure to outright condemn the language is an endorsement of it, that’s bullshit. His answer is actually very thoughtful and a good way to approach such bad faith questions.
He starts out with a direct and clear denial of using that language:
That’s not language that I use.
This immediately deflates the premise that he’s somehow responsible for words he’s never spoken.
He then immediately shifts to a more positive framing of how he views what he’s focused on in his hopes of becoming mayor: human rights for all.
The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights. And ultimately, that’s what is the foundation of so much of my politics, the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.
When NBC’s Welker trots out the purity test point, demanding he condemn it, he points out that he shouldn’t be in the business of policing language, but rather is focused on actual concerns of the people he’s hoping to represent. In doing so, he makes it clear that he’s concerned about actual antisemitism and actual threats and risks, and he’s looking at what might actually help rather than policing specific language:
I’ve heard from many Jewish New Yorkers who have shared their concerns with me, especially in light of the horrific attacks that we saw in Washington, D.C. and in Boulder, Colorado about this moment of antisemitism in our country and in our city. And I’ve heard those fears and I’ve had those conversations. And ultimately, they are part and parcel of why, in my campaign, I’ve put forward a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800%.
And then he pivots to a reasonable defense of free speech, not in the misleading sense the way others view it, but rather in noting that government shouldn’t be in the business of policing speech (as Trump is doing) but focusing on where the real problems of hate and bigotry show up.
I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech in the manner, especially of that of Donald Trump, who has put one New Yorker in jail, who’s just returned to his family, Mahmoud Khalil, for that very supposed crime of speech. Ultimately, what I think I need to show is the ability to not only talk about something but to tackle it and to make clear that there’s no room for antisemitism in this city. And we have to root out that bigotry, and ultimately we do that through the actions.
After Welker desperately goes back to the “but won’t you condemn the language” nonsense, he makes it clear that speaking out on specific language choices is not productive when his focus is on dealing with the actual underlying problems:
My concern is to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president, who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an oped. Putting them in jail for protesting. Ultimately, it’s not language that I use. It’s language I understand there are concerns about. And what I will do is showcase my vision for this city through my words and my actions.
This final answer is particularly smart because it connects his refusal to condemn specific language to Trump’s actual authoritarian attacks on free speech. Rather than getting trapped in semantic debates about particular phrases, he’s defending the broader principle that government officials shouldn’t be arbiters of acceptable speech.
The contrast is stark: while the Trump regime is literally jailing people for their speech, critics want Mamdani to engage in the kind of speech policing that leads down that same authoritarian path. His refusal isn’t endorsement of problematic language—it’s recognition that the role of government isn’t to play word police.
This is exactly the kind of principled free speech defense we need more of, especially from Democrats who have too often been willing to compromise these principles for short-term political gain. While it would have been easy for Mamdani to simply condemn the phrase and move on, his more thoughtful approach actually serves the cause of free speech better.
The irony is that many of the same people attacking Mamdani are Democrats who claim to be defending democracy against Trump’s authoritarianism. Yet they’re demanding exactly the kind of speech policing that authoritarian governments excel at—forcing officials to take public positions on specific language as loyalty tests.
And yes, some could argue that simply condemning certain language is not the same as censoring it. It’s not. It’s stating an opinion. But there’s value in Mamdani making it clear he’d rather focus on the real underlying issues around bigotry and hatred than trying to say magic words to appease a media that would never ask similar questions of a white, Christian politician.
In an era where politicians routinely cave to demands for performative condemnations and symbolic gestures, Mamdani’s approach stands out. He’s more interested in actual solutions—like his 800% increase in anti-hate crime funding—than in playing the gotcha game that dominates political discourse.
This is what defending free speech actually looks like: not demanding the right to be an asshole without consequences, but refusing to let government officials become the arbiters of acceptable speech—and politely reframing the issue when the media insists on playing such a gotcha game. If more politicians followed Mamdani’s lead, we’d have a much healthier democratic discourse.
For years, the DHS has been expanding its intrusive surveillance of anyone attempting to enter this country. (It has also expanded this to include people leaving the country.)
The current onboarding procedure for US entry includes demands for account passwords and deep dives into devices carried by migrants, visitors, asylum seekers, and anyone else CBP officers can talk into letting them wander around in their digital lives.
This intrusiveness has now become an anti-wrongthink imperative under Trump during his second term in office. In addition to the reckless and needlessly cruel mass expulsions of anyone appearing to have come from a nation south of the US, there’s a new angle: the expulsion and/or denial of entry to anyone who doesn’t agree with the administration’s views on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Hence this announcement from the DHS back in April of this year:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.
In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it will “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis].”
In other words, if you spoke out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine or any of the actions it has taken during this conflict, you’re probably an antisemite and/or a terrorist. The DHS would act swiftly to ensure only migrants siding with the US’s position on this conflict were allowed into this country, and only if it couldn’t think of another reason to deny them entry.
Of course, this is all based on a deliberate misunderstanding by Trump and his administration. Disagreeing with Israel’s actions and/or supporting Palestinian independence is — and never has been — antisemitism. At best, it suggested this administration was fine with other forms of bigotry, but simply would not tolerate anyone who thought Palestinians had a right to exist.
As it turns out, it’s even more hypocritical than is considered usual for this administration. The Big Boss has bought into the conspiracy theory that there’s some sort of race war targeting white people in South Africa — something that can only be attributed to the whitest Afrikaner to ever run a dodgy government agency, Elon Musk.
Musk is a huge conspiracy theorist, and Donald Trump seemingly hasn’t met a conspiracy theorist or conspiracy theory he hasn’t liked. This brain cloud masquerading as a presidential administration is now not nearly as concerned about antisemitism… at least not when it’s being spewed by one of theirs.
One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.
Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.
So much for vetting the migrants. I guess there’s no reason to suspect a white guy might be a problem, not when there’s so many Venezuelans to send to El Salvador. Kleinhaus has since confirmed those posts came from his accounts, but not without deploying the only excuse less believable than “my account was hacked.”
[H]e insisted to the Times that he was not antisemitic and claimed to have written a post in error while on medication.
Ah, the Barr defense. And note that Kleinhaus only claimed “a” post (singular!) was written “in error” while all drugged up on whatever form of off-label self-medication is currently popular within the South African white trash community. Cue the goose meme:
I mean, the report listed at least two antisemitic tweets. And then it said this dude spent a lot of time promoting the “white men are the real victims here in post-apartheid South Africa” conspiracy theory. Blaming a single post on drug use isn’t the win Kleinhaus seems to think it is. Then again, the real win is getting a free pass to come to America to make it worse than it already is because the whole oppression thing is too hard back home.
And here’s how the DHS is handling this hypocrisy: by pretending it’s not even happening.
A senior DHS official said in a statement: “The Department of Homeland Security vets all refugee applicants. Any claims of misconduct are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action will be taken as necessary. DHS does not comment on individual application status.”
It’s a statement that says nothing one way or the other. It has all the distinctive features of a vacant apartment’s walls. It’s the color beige described in 32 words, each one more meaningless than the last.
We don’t expect honesty from our government PR reps. We certainly don’t expect it from Kristi Noem or her boss, whose eyelids and soles are far whiter than even this Afrikaner antisemite can ever hope to be. This is how things work in the United States: white is right, even when it’s wrong. The only thing that’s changed is that this administration can’t even be bothered to offer up a credible excuse for its racist policies and actions.
Though Republicans are the worse of the two offenders, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared all too much about preventing media consolidation. As a result, U.S. journalism and media has increasingly fallen into the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations and billionaires; and it’s routinely reflected in terrible journalism (especially political journalism) and bumbling companies like Time Warner.
That’s a long way of saying that Republicans historically couldn’t care less about media consolidation at the hands of rich billionaires and corporations. In fact, they routinely, actively encourage it. Unless, of course, George Soros is distantly involved, apparently.
In what would otherwise be a completely ignored deal, the FCC earlier this month voted 3-2 to approve the bankruptcy restructuring of Audacy, the nation’s second biggest owner of radio stations. Audacy was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last May due to company incompetence and an overall downturn in interest in traditional media (though Audacy is also involved in a lot of podcasts).
The bankruptcy is expected to reduce Audacy’s debt about 80% to $350 million. As part of that restructuring, the post-bankruptcy Audacy will see a 57% ownership stake by Laurel Tree Opportunities Corporation. It’s not really any sort of controversy, and the kind of restructuring that happens constantly.
But Laurel Tree Opportunities Corporation is owned by FPR Capital Holdings LLC, which in turn is managed by the Soros-funded Fund for Policy Reform. This, apparently, was enough to send Republicans and Elon Musk into an absolute tizzy over the last week. With folks like Musk lying for attention, claiming that Soros was buying the bankrupt radio company to “spread propaganda”:
Soros, as you might or might not know, is held up as a bogeyman and bizarre caricature by the right wing because he’s Jewish. Soros’ investments, like most extremely rich people, cover the gamut of industries and businesses. But because this latest investment is in media, Republicans (as per a very classy tradition) immediately jumped to seed antisemitic tropes about Jewish-control of media.
Highly-consolidated, Rupert Murdoch owned, right-wing news outlets, traditionally and quite correctly accused of spreading propaganda, got right to work pretending there was something illegal or nefarious about the FCC’s fairly routine bankruptcy restructuring vote:
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who quite simply could not give any less of a shit about propaganda (if it’s coming from right wing sources like Fox, Sinclair, OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart, or any of a million other conservative organizations pretending to do journalism), or any less of a shit about media consolidation (whether it’s Time Warner or Fox or Sinclair) also put on a little hissy fit, claiming that the FCC’s approval of the bankruptcy restructuring was somehow illegal:
The FCC, for its part, was forced to issue a polite statement that nothing about this transaction was illegal or even out of the ordinary, and that Republicans were being, well, fucking gross:
“The process we use to facilitate this license transfer is identical to the one recently used by the agency in the bankruptcy proceedings of Cumulus Media in 2018, iHeart Media in 2019, Liberman Television in 2019, Fusion Connect in 2019, Windstream Holdings in 2020, America-CV Station Group in 2021, and Alpha Media in 2021. To suggest otherwise is cynical and wrong, as this precedent clearly demonstrates. Our practice here and in these prior cases is designed to facilitate the prompt and orderly emergence from bankruptcy of a company that is a licensee under the Communications Act.”
Now it certainly is true that both parties of government have historically failed utterly to rein in corporate consolidation in radio, TV, and pretty much every other industry (with occasional exception). That’s resulted in no limit of harm to journalism and media as competition and diverse voices are forced out of the market and Americans are bombarded by a rotating crop of corporatist and partisan mush.
But as is often the case, the Republican outrage here is entirely performative.
This is a party that routinely supports unchecked corporate power, monopolization, and consolidation at every turn. The only time it even tries to pretend otherwise is either in an instance like this when they’re seeding panic about Jewish ownership, or when they’re trying to gain leverage over companies for some reason (like when they pretended to care about “antitrust reform” for a few weeks to successfully scare tech companies away from moderating right wing racist propaganda on the internet).
These are not serious people. The GOP is not a serious party. It cares about two things: the power of rich white Christian men and unchecked wealth accumulation. Everything else is performance. Ironically our highly consolidated press, more worried about maximum engagement and access than the truth, routinely fails to point this fact out to the American public, giving ignorant propaganda efforts like this one more traction and “legitimacy” than they might otherwise deserve.
The fakest “free speech absolutist” who ever lived is at it again. As you may recall, earlier this year, Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claiming that its report documenting an alleged “surge of hateful content” on exTwitter somehow violated contracts (after first threatening to sue for defamation, but not actually suing for defamation).
Apparently unhappy with how it is faring in the marketplace of ideas, X Corp. asks this Court to shut that marketplace down—to punish the CCDH Defendants for their speech and to silence others who might speak up about X Corp. in the future. Thus, X Corp. seeks “at least tens of millions of dollars” in damages based on how advertisers reacted to what the CCDH Defendants said about X Corp. in their public reports. Conspicuously, X Corp. has not asserted a defamation claim—understandably so, since it cannot allege that the CCDH Defendants said anything knowingly false, nor does it wish to invite discovery on the truth about the content on its platform. Instead, X Corp. has ginned up baseless claims purporting to take issue with how the CCDH Defendants gathered data that formed the basis for their research and publications. Each theory is flimsier and more absurd than the last….
[….]
X Corp.’s claims are riddled with legal deficiencies on their own terms. They also all share one fundamental flaw: at its core, X Corp.’s grievance is not that the CCDH Defendants gathered public data in violation of obscure (and largely imagined) contract terms, but that they criticized X Corp. (forcefully) to the public. In essence, X Corp. seeks to dodge the requirements that the First Amendment imposes on defamation claims by asserting other claims that are no less entwined with the CCDH Defendants’ speech.
What happens in that case will be interesting to follow. As we’ve noted, we’ve frequently disagreed with CCDH’s research, and think they’re prone to exaggeration and misunderstanding. But that doesn’t mean they can’t say what they want to say. The marketplace of ideas that Musk keeps pretending to support would mean that he has every opportunity to reply. But suing is using the power of the state to silence speech, and that’s what the 1st Amendment is supposed to stop.
But “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk simply cannot stand anyone criticizing him at all.
As you likely know, on Thursday, Media Matters released a report detailing how they found big name advertisers’ ads next to blatant neo-Nazi content. This came just a day after Elon wholeheartedly endorsed the ridiculous made up antisemitic “replacement theory” trope.
Soon after that happened, as we noted, IBM pulled its advertising from exTwitter. All day Friday there were more and more reports of big advertisers pulling their ads, including Apple (which has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest advertiser left on exTwitter). Also pausing ads: Disney (another big one), Comcast/NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Sony Pictures… and even the EU?
The movie studios were big advertisers on the site, so that’s gotta hurt.
But rather than trying to be better, on Friday night Elon went into typical Elon mode. He announced on exTwitter a plan to sue Media Matters first thing Monday morning (this morning):
If you can’t read that, it’s Elon posting a poorly edited document (which we’ll get to in a moment) and tweeting:
The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.
Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them …
So, um, first of all, as threatened, this is a SLAPP suit. A blatant SLAPP suit and a clearly vexatious one. Also, under what fucked up theory of liability does one get to sue Media Matters’ board and donors? This is not how any of this works.
Now, let’s get to the document in the image. Here’s what it says, broken up with some commentary:
Stand with X to protect free speech
This week Media Matters for America posted a story that completely misrepresented the real user experience on X, in another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.
Above everything, including profit, X works to protect the public’s right to free speech. But for speech to be truly free, we must also have the freedom to see or hear things that some people may consider objectionable. We believe that everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read, watch, or listen to – because that’s the power of freedom of speech.
Despite our clear and consistent position, X has seen a number of attacks from activist groups like Media Matters and legacy media outlets who seek to undermine freedom of expression on our platform because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters. These groups try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X.
Hey, free speech absolutist: activists using their free speech to criticize you is free fucking speech too. It’s hilariously hypocritical that Musk says here that “for speech to be truly free, we must also have the freedom to see or hear things that some people may consider objectionable”… in an announcement of a plan to sue an organization for speech Musk personally finds objectionable.
Similarly you do not actually “believe that everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read, watch, or listen, to” when you are making that claim in a document about how you are going to sue an organization to remove them from that marketplace of ideas, such that people are not, in fact, able to make up their mind. You’re seeking to silence someone for their speech.
Here are the facts on Media Matters’ research:
To manipulate the public and advertisers, Media Matters created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts. These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.
Once they curated their feed, they repeatedly refreshed their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow. Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user.
Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article.
For one brand showcased in the article, one of its ads ran adjacent to a post 2 times and that ad was seen in that setting by only two users, one of which was the author of the Media Matters article.
For another brand showcased in the article, two of its ads served adjacent to 2 posts, times, and that ad was only seen in that setting by one user, the author of the Media Matters article.
Media Matters’ article also highlights nine posts they believe should not be allowed on X. Upon evaluation, only one of the nine organic posts featured in the article violated our content policies, and we’ve taken action on it under our Freedom of Speech, Not Reach enforcement approach.
So, in a true “marketplace of ideas” you present those points, and then you let everyone “make up their own minds” about what to believe. You don’t sue. Suing over such speech is anti-free speech.
But, here’s the real kicker: in this post, Musk admits that what they published was in fact what happened. The fact that they may have set up a special account and tried to just follow sketchy accounts does not change the facts. They saw blatant neo-Nazi content on the site and it had ads next to it from big name advertisers.
In other words, in this screed, Elon is flat out admitting that Media Matters’ report was factually accurate. He’s only disputing their interpretation of those facts. And… that’s not defamatory.
Also, admitting that 8 out of the 9 neo-Nazi posts they called out are fine under your policies is not quite the claim you think it is.
Here’s a summary on this all:
1. X will protect the public’s right to free expression. We will not allow agenda-driven activists, or even our own profits, to deter our vision.
Except if that public points out things that make Elon mad. Then, free expression is out the window. What a fucking hypocrite.
2. Everyone has a choice on X. User and brand control on X is superior to a year ago.
Everyone, that is, except for activists who criticize you. Those people get sued with a SLAPP suit designed to silence them.
3. Data wins over allegations. Media Matters does not reflect the user experience on X.
The data shows that their report was accurate. You just disagree with their interpretation. Which, again, is free speech.
As we’ve seen in some parts of the world, when free expression is taken away, it is very dangerous and hard to get back – that’s why the people who came before us fought so hard to protect. Without freedom of speech we lose the checks and balances critical to a thriving democracy. We must defend our individual rights as if our lives, and flourishing society, depend on it.
Yes. This is why we need strong anti-SLAPP laws at both the state and federal level to stop this kind of nonsense. What Elon is doing here is not “defending free speech,” it’s literally attacking it.
If you’re really in on protecting free speech, then we all need to protect it completely.
Stand with X to protect free speech.
… “by suing a non-profit for speech that criticizes us.”
This is not free speech at all. This is Elon believing that free speech is only the speech he likes, and anything that criticizes exTwitter must be against free speech, because it drives support away from exTwitter which (in his mind alone) is fighting for free speech. This is authoritarian bullshit. It’s “we have to kill these protestors to protect our freedoms” kind of nonsense.
Also, Elon, the advertisers pulling their ads? It’s not because of Media Matters. It’s because you fucking endorsed a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory the same week. Part of free speech is the right not to associate with speech. Companies criticizing you is free speech. Same thing when companies choose not to associate with you.
And, not surprisingly, Elon’s biggest fans are cheering this on. A bunch of bluechecks cheering him on for “fighting for free speech” by… promising to sue an organization for its free speech. These people are delusional.
It sure seems like all their “free speech” support is pretty fucking conditional on whether or not they like the speech, huh?
And, because these stories can always get dumber, on Sunday there was an exchange in which someone (falsely) suggested that what Media Matters did (signing up for an account, following neo-Nazis, reporting that they saw ads) is the equivalent of fraud (it’s not). And that resulted in world’s worst human being candidate Stephen Miller tweeting that “fraud is both civil and criminal” and suggesting that “conservative state Attorneys General” should look into it, because he doesn’t even remotely care one bit about pretending that he’s not talking about having law enforcement prosecute speech because of ideological differences.
Musk, who I must remind you pretends to be a “free speech absolutist”, responded to Miller’s blatant call for having “conservative” AGs file criminal charges over speech because of ideological differences by cheering it on, followed by Missouri’s Andrew Bailey saying that his team was investigating:
Here’s where I remind you that AG Bailey is one of the two state AGs leading the case (currently before the Supreme Court) arguing that “the government should never try to influence how social media moderates.” That case started out as Missouri v. Biden (though the Supreme Court version is Murthy v. Missouri). Either way, Bailey is AG of Missouri.
So his argument appears to be “the Biden administration cannot pressure social media, but the Missouri government absolutely can.” Or, more accurately “it’s unconstitutional when Democrats do it, but it’s absolutely fine when Republicans do.”
I’m curious to see if any of those supporting Missouri’s case will admit that Bailey is a fucking hypocrite here?
Anyway, we’re posting this Monday morning, though as Ken White helpfully pointed out to Elon, you don’t have to fucking wait until Monday morning to file a lawsuit in the age of electronic filings:
So, who knows, it’s possible the lawsuit has already been filed (though, as Ken pointed out over on Bluesky, “only a twat would rush to file a complicated lawsuit.”) However, I’m traveling today, so if an actual lawsuit was filed, I’ll find out about it later, and see what (if anything) is worth covering some other time.
In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.
Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and Oct. 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic” – that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”
But from Oct. 27 until Feb 9, 2023, the average was 12,762 – an increase of 105%. In all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as “plausibly antisemitic” over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to Feb. 9, 2023.
Finding antisemitism with AI
To identify plausibly antisemitic tweets, my co-authors and I combined 22 published hate speech-identifying algorithms into a single mechanism and used even more machine learning to see which combinations of decisions led to the correct result. We then passed through all tweets – over a million in total – that contained any one of 119 words, phrases, slurs and epithets related to antisemitism.
No such process is perfect. We estimate our model to make a correct decision about 75% of the time. We also no doubt missed some antisemitic tweets not containing any of those 119 key words, as well as those taken down before early December when we collected the data.
We then used an algorithm to draw out 10 different themes of antisemitism seen in the tweets. Some centered around the use of specific antisemitic derogatory epithets. Others alluded to conspiracy theories concerning hidden Jewish influence and control.
Antisemitic tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over 19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist, Jewish or “Nazi” world order.
Another theme were tweets defending the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, who had made a number of antisemitic remarks after he had his account briefly reinstated by Musk.
Our research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also found around 4,000 of the antisemitic tweets were focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These variously claimed that the conflict was caused by Jews, or that Jews secretly caused the U.S. to support Ukraine. They also contained direct antisemitism directed against the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.
Musk rolls back content moderation
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter came on the back of what I have observed as a decadelong trend among tech giants to take more responsibility for hate speech, harassment, incitement, disinformation and other harms lurking in the information flowing through their platforms. Over that period, companies such as Facebook and Twitter gradually enacted policies to respond to extremism, hate speech and harassment, or increase “civility,” as Twitter itself described it in 2018, and built out the teams and tools to enforce them.
Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist,” pointed the platform in a different direction after taking control. In short order, Twitter’s independent Trust and Safety Council was dissolved, previously banned accounts were reinstated and over half of Twitter’s staff was laid off or simply left – including many of those responsible for enforcing the company’s hate speech policies.
As someone who has tracked hate speech on places like Twitter for around 10 years, I believe the changes to Twitter’s moderation practices are only partly to blame for the jump in antisemitism on the platform.
The media spectacle surrounding Musk’s takeover, along with his very vocal views on free speech, likely also encouraged exactly those people to join or rejoin the platform who had fallen foul of its previous attempts to confront hate. Our research gives some backing to this theory. Some 3,855 accounts we identified as posting at least one plausibly antisemitic tweet joined Twitter in the 10 days after Musk took over. This is, however, only a small proportion of the 146,516 accounts that sent at least one antisemitic tweet over the course of the entire study.
Little effect on curbing hate speech
A surge in hate speech on Twitter was flagged by researchers in the weeks after Musk took over, concerns the billionaire dismissed as “utterly false,” having earlier vowed to “max deboosted & demonetized” hateful tweets.
If Twitter has been de-amplifying antisemitism, our research shows almost no evidence of it. Before Oct. 27, antisemitic tweets received an average of 6.4 “favorites” and 1.2 retweets. Since then, they have averaged 6 “favorites” and 1 retweet. Although such engagement isn’t a perfect measure for visibility, tweets made much less visible to users would generally receive less engagement.
We also attempted to measure takedowns of antisemitic tweets. On Feb. 15, 45 days after we initially collected the data, we tried to re-collect all the tweets we identified as antisemitic. Tweets can be unavailable for lots of reasons, and Twitter’s enforcement is only one of them. Imperfect though this is, it does give us a tentative glimpse of what might be happening in regard to the removal of antisemitic posts. And across those dates, 17,589 antisemitic tweets were taken down – 8.5% of the total.
Rising tide of antisemitism
Our findings come at a time when many fear growing threats to Jewish communities. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked the highest number of antisemitic incidents – including harassment, vandalism and assaults – in the U.S. since they started tracking numbers in 1979. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon; in the U.K., the Community Security Trust has recorded a similar spike in anti-Jewish activity, while in Germany, anti-Jewish crimes surged by 29% over the pandemic.
Studying social media has shown me again and again just how powerfully it helps to form the cultures and ideas that underlie its users’ behavior. Ultimately, the proliferation of tweets that hold Jews responsible for all the world’s ills, that circulate dark conspiracies of control and cover-up, or that fire derogatory attacks directed toward Jews, can only support antisemitism online – and in the real world.
I’ve written a lot about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale, and there are lots of reasons for that. But one of the most common is the difficulty both AI and human beings have in distinguishing hateful/trollish/harassing behavior from those reporting on that behavior. We’ve pointed this out over and over again in a variety of contexts. One classic example is social media websites pulling down human rights activists highlighting war crimes by saying it’s “terrorist content.” Another were the many examples of people on social media talking about racism and how they’re victims of racist attacks having their accounts and posts shut down over claims of racism.
You can see the video on YouTube, and it’s not difficult to figure out how this happened. The message from Instagram says it violates that organization’s community guidelines against “violence or dangerous organizations.” The video in question, all about antisemitism, does include some Nazi imagery, obviously to make the point that in its extreme form, antisemitism can lead to the murder of Jews. But, Instagram has banned all Nazi content, in part due to those who complained about antisemitism on Instagram.
And that leads to a dilemma. If you’re banning Nazi content, you also have to realize how that might lead to content about Nazis (to criticize them and to warn about what they might do) also getting banned. And, again, this isn’t new. Earlier this year we had a case study on how YouTube’s similar ban took down historical and educational videos about the Holocaust.
The point here is that there is no easy answer. You can say that it should be obvious to anyone reviewing this that trailer (highlighting how bad antisemitism is) is different from actual antisemitism, but it’s a lot harder in practice at massive scale. First you need people who actually understand the difference, and you have to be able to write rules that can go out to thousands of moderators in a simple enough manner that explicitly makes clear the differences. And, you also need to give reviewers enough time to actually understand the context, which is kind of impossible given the scale of the content that needs to be reviewed. In such situations the “simpler” versions of the rules often are what get written: “No Nazi content.” That’s clear and scalable, but leads to these kinds of “mistakes.”
