A lot of GOP politicians align themselves with Christianity, especially the offshoot that believes the richer you are, the more God loves you. (That it tends to dovetail nicely with white Christian nationalism is just a bonus in these Trumpian times.) But somehow they never seem to be able to spend a dime of their own when people are in need.
Just take a look at Kristi Noem, current DHS head and former South Dakota governor. Noem sent a bunch of South Dakota National Guard members to the Texas border. Later, she refused to spend money deploying troops while her constituents were getting flooded out of their homes. She justified her refusal to spend residents’ tax dollars to help residents by pointing out the trip to the Texas border was actually paid for by someone with more money than discretion. She apparently hoped this would offset the $1.3 million in state emergency relief funds she blew on being performative, rather than on helping out the people who likely voted for her.
It’s always nice to have a few helpful millionaires/billionaires in your pocket. Donald Trump has more than a few of those. With the GOP refusing to negotiate in good faith with the Democratic party on a funding bill, the government remains shut down. Despite the fact that it’s the GOP holding the country hostage, rich Trump supporters who would absolutely riot if anyone suggested raising their taxes are cutting massive checks to cover a few of the administration’s expenses during this shut down.
Mr. Trump announced the donation on Thursday night, but he declined to name the person who provided the funds, only calling him a “patriot” and a friend.
[…]
“He doesn’t want publicity,” Mr. Trump said as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefer that his name not be mentioned which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”
The New York Times managed to identify the person behind this generous donation — a donation that can only be considered “generous” in the sense that it never should have happened in the first place.
Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It sounds like a lot, but we’re talking about a government that has been several trillion in the hole for years now. I’d love to see how this gets divvied up because if it’s just divided equally, it’s not going to mean a thing to the troops currently getting screwed by the party that claims it loves them the most.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requested about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.
Getting an extra Benjamin is nice if you’re already getting paid. When you’re not getting paid, $100 is just enough money to make you resent it. Sure, you’ve got $100 more than you had before Mellon stepped briefly out of the shadows to stuff a little cash into Trump’s coat pocket, but what the fuck are you supposed to do with it? It’s not enough to do anything practical, like keep all the utilities on or cover the house payment or even stock the cupboards. May as well just toss it in the nearest slot machine and hope for the best.
Mellon is a billionaire and a fan of Trump, as so many billionaires are. He’s also donated millions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vax efforts. He’s also this guy:
In an autobiography that he self-published in 2015, Mr. Mellon described himself as a former liberal who moved to Wyoming from Connecticut for lower taxes and to be surrounded by fewer people.
His book also contains several incendiary passages about race. He wrote that Black people were “even more belligerent” after social programs were expanded in the 1960s and ’70s, and that social safety net programs amounted to “slavery redux.”
And yet here he is, being a social safety net for thousands of troops who may never even see the money he gave to the Trump administration. For one thing, the logistics costs alone would probably eat up a great deal of what’s been donated. For another, this is pretty clearly illegal, which means no distribution will even happen.
[T]he donation appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.
With that much still unsettled, this may remain in limbo. And that’s probably for the best. The only thing more insulting that gifting troops with a useless $100 bill would be clawing it back once federal funding resumes.
Finally, if we really want billionaires to bail out the government, the easiest way to do this is by TAXING THEM MORE. Let’s not pretend this guy is some sort of quiet hero who did this because he cares too deeply for this country to see soldiers go without pay. He did this because it’s another way to ensure he and the rest of the people in his tax bracket remain as privileged as they’ve always been. $100 can be gone in a second. But influence and access is forever.
The Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political organization. It has transformed into a corrupt, immoral, and criminal enterprise that serves the interests of one man’s power while systematically destroying the constitutional principles this nation was founded upon. What we’re witnessing isn’t political competition but organized crime wrapped in patriotic rhetoric.
When the President threatens military officers’ careers for not applauding his political agenda, when he declares American cities “enemy territory” to be conquered by federal forces, when he orders the creation of “quick reaction forces” to suppress civilian dissent, this isn’t governance. It’s the systematic dismantling of constitutional constraints on executive power. The Republican Party leadership has abandoned any pretense of defending democratic institutions in favor of tribal loyalty to authoritarian rule.
Trump has already deployed military forces against American cities. He sent troops to “protect” Portland with authorization for “full force, if necessary.” He deployed 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to quell immigration protests. He deployed the National Guard and federal agencies to Washington, D.C., and federalized the police force ostensibly to combat crime. Now he’s announced the creation of military “quick reaction forces” to help quell civil disturbances across the country.
They’ve gerrymandered districts to maintain power regardless of popular will. They’ve implemented voter suppression tactics designed to prevent Democratic participation. They’ve signaled they won’t recognize electoral outcomes that threaten their control. They’ve converted the Justice Department into a revenge operation against political opponents while pardoning violent criminals who attacked law enforcement officers.
The Republican Party has become a seditious conspiracy against constitutional governance, orchestrated by corrupt oligarchs, seditious Christian nationalists, and fascist neo-reactionaries from Silicon Valley. These actors are exploiting legitimate anti-elite sentiment among Americans who have real grievances about economic inequality and institutional failure. They use well-funded propaganda and algorithmic manipulation to trick citizens into supporting the very oligarchs who created those problems in the first place. The goal isn’t reform but permanent power and the end of competitive elections altogether.
The corporate collaboration represents an equally damning betrayal of American principles. CEOs who pay tribute for regulatory favors aren’t engaging in normal business practice. They’re committing federal crimes while destroying the competitive capitalism they claim to defend.
Tim Cook’s golden plaque presentation followed by immediate tariff exemptions represents textbook bribery under federal law. YouTube’s $24.5 million “settlement” payment, with $22 million funding Trump’s personal real estate projects, is a protection racket disguised as legal resolution. These aren’t complicated ethical questions requiring nuanced analysis. They’re clear violations of anti-corruption statutes that should result in federal prosecution.
The democratic opposition should be taking careful notes and planning comprehensive public hearings once legitimate governance is restored. Tim Cook should be dragged before Congress with cameras rolling to explain his tribute payments under oath. Every CEO who handed Trump money in exchange for regulatory favors should face criminal investigation. Every company that provided services enabling human rights violations should face trust-busting and systematic accountability.
These executives aren’t legally immune from prosecution. They’re simply calculating that their wealth and status make them functionally untouchable. They’re committing crimes in broad daylight because they assume the justice system serves their interests rather than the rule of law. If we didn’t accept “I was just following orders” at Nuremberg, we certainly shouldn’t accept “I was just protecting shareholder value” from corporate executives who funded authoritarianism for personal profit.
But perhaps most contemptible are the conservatives who continue defending this criminal enterprise as “the lesser evil” while constructing fantasy scenarios where Democratic governance somehow represents a greater threat than systematic constitutional destruction.
These people are morally corrupted beyond redemption. Once you reach the point of arguing “well, they’re corrupt too” while watching the President deploy military forces against American cities, you’ve lost any claim to principled political judgment. You’ve revealed that your tribal loyalty matters more than constitutional governance, that your partisan identity matters more than national dignity, that your psychological comfort matters more than democratic survival.
There is no moral equivalency between normal political disagreement and systematic authoritarianism. There is no principled argument for supporting a criminal organization because you dislike progressive tax policy. There is no intellectual framework that makes corporate bribery acceptable because you’re worried about diversity initiatives.
These aren’t principled conservatives making difficult political calculations. These are unprincipled tribalists desperately searching for justifications to support evil while maintaining their self-image as moral actors. Their revealed preference is clear: they prefer authoritarian corruption to progressive governance, criminal conspiracy to constitutional democracy, systematic humiliation of American institutions to higher taxes on the wealthy.
History will remember them as collaborators who chose comfort over courage, tribe over truth, personal advantage over national dignity. They had every opportunity to choose differently. They chose complicity instead.
The Republican Party is a criminal organization. Its corporate collaborators are willing accomplices. And anyone still defending either has forfeited any claim to principled political engagement.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
It’s a meme so famous it has its own Wikipedia page. And like plenty of memes with this sort of pedigree, its origins are humble: just another article by The Onion (or rather its Clickhole offshoot). You know the face and you know the words:
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
To Marjorie Taylor Greene’s credit, she’s done this more than once. She’s the wild card in the GOP party, but not the kind that might lead to another win. She’s the other kind of wild card: the unknown and unpredictable factor that occasionally delivers debacles and flame outs, rather than the easy, uncomplicated heist of democracy her party is actively engaged in.
So, when MTG goes rogue, it means something. But it possibly means less than if a staid backbencher suddenly stood up and declared Trump wrong about anything. That said, we’ll take what we can get when the takings are so meager and limited in quantity.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is continuing to buck GOP congressional leadership, placing blame on top Republicans Thursday morning for failing to pull the government from its ongoing shutdown.
“I’m not putting the blame on the president,” Greene (R-Ga.) said in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “I’m actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader [John] Thune in the Senate. This should not be happening.”
Government shutdowns are a GOP specialty under Trump. This time around, though, the White House has expressly politicized the shutdown via its official websites, which is just another line this administration feels comfortable crossing.
The administration is angry because Democratic legislators won’t sign off on every ridiculous thing the Republican party is demanding in exchange for a barely-functioning government. In addition, it’s clear the GOP doesn’t actually want the shutdown ended, what with the administration using it as an excuse to lay off or fire people it wasn’t able to get rid of back when DOGE was still a going concern.
Marjorie Taylor Greene placing the blame where it belongs (speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate leader John Thune) definitely bucks the trend when it comes to Republican discussions of the ongoing shutdown. The GOP has aligned with the administration, which has chosen to publicly blame (again, via official government websites) the Democratic party for a crisis the GOP deliberately created to use as leverage to push through even more odious legislation.
Taylor Greene, of course, is no angel. Between her COVID conspiracy theories and her insistence that some sort of Jewish-controlled “space laser” caused California wildfires, Taylor Greene has been nothing but batshit crazy while somehow maintaining access to considerable public power. Pizzagate, QAnon, replacement theory, etc. have all been part of Greene’s arsenal for years. But this time, she’s actually right. There’s no conspiracy here. There’s just the GOP holding the government hostage until it gets what it wants.
And now, her super-weird form of local advocacy has turned her into the rogue the GOP can’t control. It’s not just this recent shutdown. It’s a whole lot of things the GOP would rather pretend simply didn’t exist, beginning with the Epstein files and running right through the healthcare price hikes their constituents will be facing if the GOP manages to pass the budget bill it has proposed:
Greene has continued to be a thorn in the side of Republican leadership in recent weeks, splitting from President Donald Trump and the GOP on a string of major topics — calling the war in Gaza a “genocide,” campaigning for the release of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case and pushing for an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.
MTG — however momentarily — has just become one of us: people who can not only see through the GOP’s increasingly stupid lies, but know that America’s never going to be great again with these motherfuckers in charge. There may be hope for Taylor Greene after all. But if recent history has anything to say about it, the new, improved MTG will be just as unpredictably awful as she was prior to this brief return to reality.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has apparently decided his latest form of politically motivated lawfare (the thing he insisted he would end once he took over) should be threatening Google over… checks notes… having spam filters that work too well at blocking actual spam. In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, Ferguson claims the company may be violating the FTC Act because Gmail’s spam detection system catches Republican fundraising emails.
This isn’t just bad policy—it’s a rehash of thoroughly debunked claims from 2022, dressed up with new threats and an alarming misunderstanding of both the First Amendment and the FTC’s actual authority.
The Letter That Shouldn’t Exist
Ferguson’s letter reads like it was written by someone who’s never encountered a spam filter in their life. He claims Gmail’s spam detection constitutes potential “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” because:
My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats. Indeed, according to recent reporting, Alphabet has “been caught this summer flagging Republican fundraising emails as ‘dangerous’ spam— keeping them from hitting Gmail users’ inboxes—while leaving similar solicitations from Democrats untouched….”
Let’s be real here: Republican political organizations have a long history of sending emails that look exactly like spam because, well, they often are spam. They use deceptive subject lines, aggressive tactics, and mass-mailing techniques that trigger spam filters not because of political bias, but because they’re using spammy tactics.
Even pro-MAGA commentators have called out their own team for this behavior:
Ferguson then tries to shoehorn this into FTC authority by claiming:
Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act. And the partisan treatment may cause harm to consumers.
This is legal nonsense wrapped in political theater. The FTC has never policed “political bias” in private companies’ editorial decisions, and for good reason—the First Amendment prohibits exactly this kind of government interference.
We’ve Been Here Before (And It Was Stupid Then Too)
This entire controversy stems from a 2022 study by political consultants who discovered that Gmail caught more Republican emails in spam filters. What Ferguson conveniently omits is what the study’s own authors admitted: this only happened on completely untrained accounts. Once users actually used their spam filters—you know, the way normal people do—the difference disappeared entirely.
The study also found that other email providers caught more Democratic emails as spam, but Republicans laser-focused on Gmail because it fit their victimization narrative better.
Republicans then filed both lawsuits and FEC complaints (both of which failed easily) claiming this was somehow an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats. Never mind that when given a chance to weigh in on this matter, the public—including many Republicans—don’t want political spam cluttering their inboxes and wish politicians would stop sending so much of it.
There’s also the fact that Google has offered Republicans a system to have their emails whitelisted… and Republicans never seem to take them up on it.
Why This Is Legally Bankrupt
Tech lawyer Berin Szoka demolished Ferguson’s legal theory in a thread explaining why this investigation violates the FTC’s own authority:
Bias can’t be “unfair” because Section 5(n) requires the FTC to show that “substantial injury” is “not outweighed by countervailing benefits,” and the First Amendment bars the government from weighing a spammer’s right to “speech” against a website’s right to editorial control over how to define and block spam.
Szoka also notes that claiming Google “deceived” users would require showing the company made specific promises about spam handling that it then broke. Ferguson’s letter contains no such allegations… because they don’t exist.
The real tell is in Ferguson’s breathless claim that:
Hearing from candidates and receiving information and messages from political parties is key to exercising fundamental American freedoms and our First Amendment rights.
This fundamentally misunderstands how the First Amendment works. Google has its own First Amendment right to decide what content to host and how to organize it. The government can’t force private companies to amplify speech they’d rather not carry—that would be compelled speech, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled violates the First Amendment.
Political Theater, Not Law Enforcement
Ferguson barely bothers making an actual legal case here, probably because he knows it’s garbage. This is political posturing designed to keep the White House happy by appearing to “do something” about conservative claims of “censorship.”
The letter is particularly rich coming from an administration that spent months threatening tech companies over fact-checking and content moderation, then celebrated when those companies caved to the pressure. Apparently free speech principles only matter when they benefit the right people.
Here’s what Ferguson and his allies refuse to acknowledge: if Republican fundraising emails are getting caught in spam filters more often, maybe the problem isn’t Google’s algorithms. Maybe the problem is that Republican organizations keep using tactics that trigger legitimate spam detection.
Political emails are explicitly exempt from the CAN-SPAM Act, which means political fundraisers can get away with behavior that would be illegal for commercial senders. They often use deceptive subject lines, fake urgency (“FINAL NOTICE”), and other tactics that any reasonable spam filter would catch.
The solution isn’t to threaten tech companies with government investigation for having effective spam filters. The solution is for political organizations to stop acting like spammers.
Ferguson’s letter represents yet another in a long line of attempts at dangerous expansions of FTC authority into areas where it has no business. The FTC is supposed to protect consumers from actual fraud and deception, not police private companies’ editorial decisions based on political considerations.
If this theory of FTC authority were accepted, it would open the door for government officials to threaten any tech company whose algorithms don’t produce politically favorable results. That’s not consumer protection—that’s garden variety authoritarianism.
The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent government officials from using their power to coerce private companies into amplifying preferred political messages. Ferguson’s letter is exactly the kind of government overreach the founders sought to prevent.
Ferguson’s not dumb. He knows this investigation is legally baseless. He knows the FTC lacks authority to police political bias in private editorial decisions. He knows the First Amendment protects Google’s right to determine its own spam filtering policies.
This letter isn’t about consumer protection or fair trade practices. It’s about using government power to intimidate a private company for making editorial decisions that favor users who don’t want spam over Republican politicians. That’s not just bad policy—it’s a violation of everything the First Amendment is supposed to protect.
The real scandal here isn’t that Gmail’s spam filters work too well. It’s that the chairman of a federal agency thinks threatening private companies over their editorial decisions is somehow part of his job description.
A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings.
These consumers — along with hundreds of others — reached out to their congressional representatives for help in the past 12 months.
“I have been unable to pay my rent, utilities, personal bills, student loans, or my credit card. I have been unable to buy groceries or put gas in my car,” wrote the New Yorker, who contacted Rep. Nicole Malliotakis’ office.
Records show their representatives — all Republicans — referred them to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency formed in the wake of the Great Recession to shield Americans from unfair or abusive business practices. All three consumers got relief, according to agency data.
Then the lawmakers — along with nearly every other Republican in Congress — voted to slash the agency’s funding by nearly half as part of President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a step toward the administration’s goal of gutting the agency.
Republicans have long been critical of the CFPB, accusing it of imposing unreasonable burdens on businesses. Already, the CFPB under Trump has dropped a number of cases and frozen investigations into dozens of companies.
Yet the agency has historically benefited consumers across the political spectrum, securing around $20 billion in relief through its enforcement actions.
Data obtained by ProPublica through a public records request shows that many of the same Republican members of Congress who have targeted the CFPB for cuts have collectively routed thousands of constituent complaints to the agency.
Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, for example, voted to reduce the CFPB’s budget. Yet each of their offices has referred more than 100 constituents to the CFPB for help, among the most of any House members. The office of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also voted for the CFPB cuts, has routed more than 800 constituent complaints to the agency, the most of any current lawmaker from either party, ProPublica found.
A spokesperson for Issa said in an email that most of his office’s referrals to the agency “occurred several years ago” and reflected “a conventional way” to handle constituents’ consumer issues.
Wittman and Cornyn didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the disconnect between their offices’ use of the CFPB’s services and their votes to cut it. Neither did New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, whose office fielded the defrauded service member’s complaint, or Malliotakis, who was approached by the New York business owner, or Rep. Rick Allen, whose office directed the Georgia chemotherapy patient to the agency.
Overall, members of Congress have steered nearly 24,000 complaints to the CFPB since it opened its doors in 2011. Roughly 10,000 of those were referred by the offices of current and former Republican lawmakers, ProPublica found.
“This is how members of Congress from both parties get help for the people who live in their districts,” said Erie Meyer, the CFPB’s former chief technologist, who left the agency in February. The agency has a particular mandate to help service members and seniors, she noted. “This is how, if a service member is getting screwed on an auto loan, this is the only place they can go.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has referred more than 200 constituents to CFPB since its creation. In a statement to ProPublica, he accused Republicans in Congress of “pursuing senseless cuts that will undermine their own ability to protect their constituents, who will be left in the lurch when they fall victim to scams or deceptive and unfair business practices.”
“Republicans have made clear that they stand on the side of big businesses — not consumers,” he added. “Their irresponsible pursuit of dismantling the CFPB will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”
An Irreplaceable System
In recent years, the CFPB’s public database shows the number of complaints has exploded, from around 280,000 in 2019 to more than 2.7 million last year.
Complaints have grown across many categories, including credit cards and debt collection. Last year, most of the complaints filed, over 2.3 million, were about mistakes or other problems involving credit reporting agencies, and more than half of them resulted in relief, CFPB data shows.
“These credit score formulas govern so many factors of your life. It’s not just your ability to get a loan, it’s your ability to secure housing or qualify for a job,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America. “It’s important that you can resolve something, but it’s difficult to do it on your own.”
Once a complaint is submitted, it is routed to the company, which has 15 days to respond. Companies can request an additional 45 days to reach a final resolution.
Many consumers end up getting nonmonetary relief, such as fixes to erroneous credit reports or an end to harassment by debt collectors, but some get financial help as well. More than $300 million has been returned to Americans through the complaint system, including $90 million just last year.
Normally, staff at the CFPB monitor the complaints to identify systemic issues and escalate complaints involving consumers who are at immediate risk of foreclosure, although that didn’t happen for a few weeks this year when the agency’s acting director halted its work.
The CFPB also shares complaint information with other federal agencies, states and localities to help them protect consumers. No other government or private entity has the capacity to effectively handle the volume of complaints that the CFPB does, experts and current and former employees say.
In legal filings opposing the Trump administration’s steps to effectively shut down the CFPB, 23 Democratic attorneys general noted that their states collectively have referred thousands of complaints to the agency and that its services can’t be replaced by state-level operations.
“In the CFPB’s absence, consumers will be left without critical resources,” they wrote.
The complaint system has also lessened the burden on congressional offices, which can route constituent problems to an agency dedicated to, and expert in, addressing consumer issues. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing dramatic cuts to the agency.
The CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve instead of annual appropriations bills. The structure is meant to safeguard the agency’s independence, though critics say this makes the agency less accountable, giving elected officials less power over its operations.
Initially, Republicans pressed for extreme cuts to the CFPB as part of Trump’s legislative package. House members approved a 70% cut. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to go even further, zeroing out the agency’s funding entirely.
Ultimately, the final version of the bill signed into law by Trump on July 4 cut the CFPB’s budget by around 46%, reducing the agency’s funding cap — the maximum amount it can request from the Federal Reserve — from $823 million to $446 million for this fiscal year. The agency requested $729 million last fiscal year.
The offices of lawmakers who voted for the bill have referred about 3,400 complaints to the agency, running the gamut of consumer problems — from crushing debt to mortgage issues to financial scams, ProPublica’s data analysis shows. (In some of these cases, consumers also took complaints to the CFPB themselves in addition to reaching out to their representatives. Consumers’ names aren’t disclosed in the data.)
Their constituents are sometimes desperate: “I’m about to be homeless because of this,” wrote a Florida resident whose bank account was frozen.
Others have expressed frustration at getting the runaround from a company. “I’ve spent countless hours on hold trying to speak with a representative, only to be met with silence or outdated instructions to send letters,” wrote one Virginian in a complaint about their bank.
In a statement after the CFPB funding cut passed, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, R-S.C., applauded the measure for saving taxpayer money but insisted it would not affect the agency’s mandatory functions, which include handling complaints.
Consumer experts as well as current and former CFPB employees, however, said the cuts will likely hinder the agency’s effectiveness.
“I think the whole process is at risk,” said Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit advocacy group Consumer Action. “If you starve the system, it cannot provide the benefits that it now offers.”
Signs of Strain
The Trump administration’s initial efforts to unilaterally hobble the CFPB give a hint of what may lie ahead for the complaint system.
In February, acting Director Russell Vought issued a stop-work order to all CFPB employees and canceled a slew of contracts, including for antivirus software that scanned files attached to consumer complaints.
The actions largely froze the complaint system for about a week. More than 70,000 complaints were submitted, but most were not sent to companies for their response during that period, data shows.
Although some issues were later fixed, the work stoppage spawned a backlog of more than 16,000 complaints that required manual review, according to court records from a lawsuit filed by the union that represents CFPB employees. About 75 complaints from consumers at risk of imminent foreclosure, which would normally be escalated to CFPB staff, weren’t acted upon.
In late March, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the CFPB to end the work stoppage, reverse contract terminations and reinstate probationary employees who were fired. However, an appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed, triggering a frenzied effort by the administration to cut about 90% of the CFPB’s staff.
The layoffs included the vast majority of the roughly 130-member team that manages the complaint system as well as nearly every staffer in legally mandated offices focused on service members and seniors.
The CFPB has fielded over 440,000 complaints from current and former service members and their families since 2011, according to CFPB data, more than 100,000 of which have resulted in relief.
The CFPB did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a court declaration, Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer, said that the agency’s leadership had “been assessing how the agency can fulfill its statutory duties as a smaller, more efficient operation. In making this assessment, leadership discovered vast waste in the agency’s size.”
Paoletta also said the agency would have a “much more limited vision for enforcement and supervision activities, focused on protecting service members and veterans, and addressing actual tangible consumer harm and intentional discrimination.”
In April, Jackson issued an order blocking the firings made at the CFPB after the appeals court decision. The administration has appealed Jackson’s ruling.
Lawsuits won’t protect the CFPB or its complaint apparatus from the cuts included in the recently passed spending bill, current and former agency employees pointed out.
These changes are likely to hit home with consumers no matter which party they favor, said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in the union’s lawsuit.
“Republicans don’t want to be abused by big corporations that ignore them any more than Democrats do,” she said.
There’s a trick at the center of American political discourse—so deeply embedded that even well-meaning people don’t realize they’re performing it. It goes like this: if you’re a fair-minded individual, you must believe that both political parties are fundamentally the same. To assert a meaningful difference in their commitment to truth, democracy, or constitutional governance is to betray your objectivity. In this view, saying the Republican Party is more dangerous than the Democratic Party isn’t just a factual judgment. Rather, it’s a tribal confession.
This, more than any specific lie or scandal, is the master gaslight of our era. It is the epistemic sleight of hand that has broken the American mind.
Because here’s the truth: one party has become a conspiracy cult organized around personal loyalty to a would-be autocrat, willing to burn down democratic institutions for power. And the other… hasn’t. That’s not partisanship. That’s observation.
To deny that difference isn’t neutrality. It’s disorientation.
This false equivalence is not just intellectually lazy. It’s a deliberate strategy to disarm the public’s capacity for understanding reality at the very moment when moral discernment is most needed. It trains citizens to see betrayal and resistance as equally suspect, to treat sedition and institutional defense as symmetrical extremes. It creates an imaginary center that floats somewhere between coherence and collapse—and insists that “balance” means staying there.
Consider how this works in practice: Trump’s indictments for crimes he actually committed are treated as equivalent to the imaginary “weaponization” of law enforcement under Biden. Trump had classified documents photographed in boxes at Mar-a-Lago. His charity was shut down for criminal self-dealing. We have him on tape asking Georgia officials to “find” exactly enough votes to overturn the election. But prosecuting these documented crimes becomes “lawfare”—equivalent, somehow, to the fever dreams in which children are trafficked from the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.
Only in a post-truth environment—where slogans pass for arguments and outrage replaces analysis—could such equivalences be drawn. To treat the prosecution of crimes as morally equal to the invention of conspiracies is not just unserious. It’s insane.
Yes, the Democratic Party is flawed. Yes, liberal institutions have failed in profound ways—some of which I’ve critiqued in these very digital pages. But they remain broadly committed to elections, peaceful transfers of power, constitutional process, and pluralistic government. That’s not nothing. That’s the foundation of everything.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has nominated a man who tried to overturn an election, incited violence against political opponents, promised to dismantle the civil service, and pledged to weaponize the Justice Department against critics. He now enjoys the open support of insurrectionists, foreign adversaries, and indicted financiers. This is not business as usual. This is the death spiral of democratic governance.
And it continues. With a single phone call to Governor Greg Abbott, Trump persuaded Texas Republicans to abandon their response to the Central Texas floods and instead embark on a radical gerrymandering crusade—targeting five new congressional seats through brute procedural power. Governance discarded. Power prioritized.
To equate these two forces is not fairness. It is moral blindness.
And that blindness has a function. It provides cover. It allows elites to keep access. It permits institutions to pretend they’re not implicated. It flatters audiences who want to feel superior to the “partisans.” But in a democracy, refusing to take sides when the stakes are constitutional survival isn’t wisdom—it’s abdication.
The center, properly understood, isn’t the midpoint between parties. It’s the ground where reality lives. And right now, that ground is under siege—not from both sides, but from one.
So no, I will not pretend both parties are the same. I will not apologize for calling authoritarianism what it is. And I will not lend credibility to the lie that recognizing asymmetry is itself a form of extremism.
That’s the fulcrum of the gaslight. That’s the belief they need you to accept in order to keep breaking reality apart.
Don’t believe it.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And one party has abandoned the truth.
The center must be held. But it can only be held by those willing to name who’s trying to tear it down.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
It would be too kind to say the irony is lost on Republican lawmakers. They would have to be capable of comprehending and acknowledging their own hypocrisy to even begin to recognize the irony. That’s why these lawmakers are so unconcerned with the long-term destruction they’re causing. It’s all worth it if it results in short-term success. And besides, they’re not the ones who are going to have to deal with the fallout.
But every so often, the tides turn fast enough even these sorts of lawmakers are getting caught up in the messes they’ve made. That’s how it’s going in Texas right now, as Republican lawmakers seek to undo campus free speech protections enacted a half-decade ago because it’s allowing people they don’t like to express ideas they don’t like.
In 2019, the Legislature passed a law requiring colleges and universities to ensure that all outdoor common areas of campus can be used to stage a protest, as long as demonstrators don’t break the law or disrupt school activities.
That measure came after Texas A&M leaders canceled a white nationalist rally and Texas Southern University scrapped a planned speech by Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. Both happened in 2017. Texas A&M said it canceled the event due to safety concerns while TSU said it canceled Cain’s speech because it was organized by an unregistered student group.
“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are,” Sen. Joan Huffman said at the time.
Some of these same lawmakers are now involved in an effort to create more speech restrictions on campus because students failed to comprehend the 2019 law was only there to ensure the presence of white nationalist rallies on Texas university campuses. Now that these expanded protections are being enjoyed by non-white nationalists, it’s time for a change.
Senate Bill 2972, which passed 97-39 in a final House vote on Wednesday, would give university systems’ governing boards the power to limit where protests can take place on campus.
Republicans who support say it will prevent disruption and unsafe behavior seen during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year. Critics say the measure contradicts previous conservative efforts to protect free speech rights on Texas campuses and is unconstitutional.
As is almost always the case when Republicans start re-writing laws they previously enacted, it’s the Republicans who are wrong and the critics who are right. Of the two groups, the critics are, at least, more consistent in their views.
There’s more to the law than simply expanding the amount of viewpoint censorship publicly-funded schools can engage in. In addition to giving universities more discretion on time/place decisions, students would be forbidden from using amplification devices (including microphones) when protesting during class hours, erecting overnight encampments, taking down a university’s “U.S. flag to put up another nation’s or organization’s banner,” wearing disguises (which really just means wearing masks of any kind, including the COVID-prevention variety), and protesting within 300 feet of any residences overnight.
This was never a problem between 2019 and this year, even though none of the proposed restrictions were in place since the law was first passed for the sole purpose of forcing public universities to host far-right speakers and white nationalist rallies. But with pro-Palestine protests taking over college campuses, it’s time for a change. Fewer rights for everyone — something that may result in fewer white nationalist rallies but a hit white nationalists are likely to take because it means people they don’t like won’t be able to protest either.
Even if you ignore the blatant hypocrisy of rolling back protections just because they’re capable of protecting students Texas Republicans don’t like, there’s also the sheer stupidity of what will likely become the finished work product sent to the governor’s desk. Here’s FIRE attorney Tyler Coward pointing out some obvious problems with the current proposal:
“Under this bill, the university would be required to ask a student to take off a MAGA hat if they were wearing it at 10:15 p.m. or a Bernie Sanders shirt because that is political, that is expressive activity,” he said.
Meanwhile, true believers like Senator Huffman will continue to pretend her party isn’t selling out its white nationalist voting bloc with this ham-handed attempt to silence pro-Palestinian protesters.
Huffman, a Houston Republican who authored that 2019 law, voted earlier this month in favor of the new limits on protests, citing similar reasons mentioned by other supporters. She said the new measure doesn’t undermine the former one.
Oh, but it does. It rolls back protections and makes it that much easier for universities to block appearances and rallies by bigots the Republic Party approves of. This attempt to only harm the protesters Huffman doesn’t like while protecting those she does like means the law won’t protect anyone and will make universities less likely to allow protests, rallies, and public appearances of any kind because nearly any cause could be considered to be “political” enough it’s just going to create a bunch of extra enforcement work for schools and their local security/police forces.
Buried in the House GOP’s massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.”
This is, ostensibly, about “protecting innovation.” Or maybe just pleasing some campaign donors [waves to Elon!]. But there’s a small problem.
What, exactly, is an “automated decision system”?
According to the bill, it’s “any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output, including a score, classification, or recommendation, to materially influence or replace human decision making.”
Right. So, yes, that would include AI.
But you know what else it includes? Pretty much every content moderation system ever created. And a whole lot more as well. As Dreamwidth founder Rahaeli points out, the incredibly broad and vague language would actually ban enforcement of basically any state internet regulation for the next decade. It could ban laws around using technology to diagnose health. Or using AI for hiring or sentencing guidelines.
Okay this is horrible but hilariously would also preclude 99% of state "think of the children" social media deanonymization laws and 100% of the attempts to regulate social media under "defective product" theories of action because it's so broadly written lol
Amusingly, the state laws this would kill include Republicans’ favorite new (generally unconstitutional) hobby horse — all those “protect the children online” bills they keep passing. You know the ones: laws requiring social media companies to verify ages, scan for harmful content, and generally “think of the children.”
See, every single tool these laws require would count as an “automated decision system.” The algorithm that checks if someone’s underage? That’s an automated decision system. The tool that flags potentially harmful content for kids? Also an automated decision system. The filters that GOP state legislators demand social media companies use? You guessed it.
In fact, if you read the definition carefully, it would seem to ban state regulation of pretty much any computer system that helps make decisions. Which, in 2025, is… most computer systems?
At this point, you might be thinking, “Well, surely there are exemptions for…” but nope. While the bill does include some exemptions, none of them would save these state-level content moderation laws. The House GOP, in their rush to please AI companies, have written a law so broad it would effectively prevent states from regulating any algorithmic system for a decade.
There’s a certain poetic justice here. These state-level social media laws have consistently been struck down as unconstitutional anyway. Having them all preempted by federal law might actually save everyone some time and legal fees.
At the very least, there’s a temptation to sit back and “let them cook.”
But this creates a fascinating contradiction: Republican state legislators are pushing for more control over tech companies, while Republican federal legislators are accidentally making that control impossible. It’s almost as if they don’t actually have a coherent technology policy beyond “do whatever seems politically expedient at the moment.”
To be fair, having federal-level AI regulation rather than 50 different state laws probably does make sense. But there’s a difference between thoughtful federal preemption and… whatever the fuck this is.
The House GOP clearly wanted to score some quick points with the AI industry. Instead, they’ve written a law that would nuke their own party’s cherished “save the children” crusade. Though given how those laws keep getting struck down anyway, maybe they’ve accidentally done everyone a favor.
What’s been noted before has been confirmed yet again: there is no widespread concern about the books kids have access to in public libraries. Instead, there’s just the concerted, but effective, efforts of a small group of people who feel everyone else’s rights end where their morality begins.
Something that was just the occasional blip on the radar for decades — the attempt to ban certain books — has become an everyday occurrence in recent years. There’s an acceleration in book ban attempts that can be directly traced back to Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Now that the window of opportunity is open, activists and “conservative” politicians are doing all they can to erase people and ideas they don’t like before that window closes or, at the very least, has its opening narrowed a bit.
The latest report [PDF] on censorship efforts compiled by the American Library Association makes it clear this isn’t a groundswell movement by personally offended parents to protect their kids from certain content. This is an activist movement that is determined to eliminate access to this content by whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, these groups are being helped along by legislators who believe their personal beliefs should be the only ones protected by the Constitution.
In its new State of American Libraries Report released Monday, the ALA found more than 70% of attempted bans of a given title or titles come from organized groups and elected officials, and just 16% originated with a parent.
“We can trace many of the challenges to lists of books that have been distributed by Moms for Liberty and other groups,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
The data shows this is a very recent phenomenon, with a sudden spike in book challenges occurring just as Trump was winding down his first term in office — one that was immediately followed by an insurrection attempt and the Republican party’s doubling down on everything Trump.
In 2023, OIF [Office for Intellectual Freedom] recorded demands to censor 4,240 unique book titles in libraries, the highest number of books challenged since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries. This reflects a 65% increase over the 2,571 unique titles targeted in 2022, the previous high. To understand how extraordinary this figure is, we can look at the average number of unique book titles challenged between 2001 through 2020. During that time, the average number of unique book titles targeted for censorship each year was 273. The highest recorded number of unique titles challenged during this period was 390 in one year. In that entire two-decade span, only 3,637 unique titles were challenged by censors—more than 600 fewer titles than in 2023.
This, of course, is due to the “party of free speech” being uniquely uninterested in actually protecting speech while acting in service of a man who didn’t even return to office until January of this year. His absence didn’t change the party’s thirst for censorship — something it touted even as it called for news agencies to have their licenses revoked, their press credentials rescinded, and — if possible — face prosecution for daring to criticize Trump and his followers.
There were plenty of empty threats involved in this concerted purge of content from libraries. But there were plenty of literal threats as well, ranging from personal threats delivered to librarians to the now-omnipresent government threat to libraries and the integral part they play in protecting First Amendment rights.
Reports filed with OIF documented an alarming number of threats directed at libraries and library workers. These threats included calls to close or defund libraries, attempts to criminally prosecute librarians and teachers for providing books and library resources to minors, and even bomb threats that closed down libraries and schools. Supporting many of these threats were legislative proposals by state lawmakers, who introduced 151 bills that would authorize the criminal prosecution of librarians, threaten library funding, or that imposed unconstitutional content-based restrictions on books for children and adolescents.
While it’s clear “Moms for Liberty” doesn’t actually care about liberty, it’s more disheartening to see elected officials not only ignoring the Constitution, but the best interests of their constituents. Contrary to what they may say in support of depriving people of rights, a majority of voters aren’t calling for book bans and/or the criminal prosecution of librarians. And, more hypocritically, many of these legislators, who claim their anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts are being made to return more “control” to parents of school-aged children, are more than willing to deprive parents of the power to determine what their own kids should or shouldn’t read.
These are the actions of malicious, selfish people who think they alone are qualified to decide what content is or isn’t acceptable to be made publicly accessible. And once they’re done destroying school libraries, they’ll be coming for public libraries (and, indeed, they already are) to prevent adults from obtaining any content these self-appointed censors don’t personally care for.
Authored by Texas Rep. David Lowe (R- North Richland Hills), the bill— HB 3958—would give the Texas Attorney General the ability to seek hefty penalties for museums that are deemed to promote obscene material.
The bill defines “obscene material” based on Sections 43.22, 43.23 and 43.24 of the Texas Penal Code, which classify obscenity as content that portrays sexual conduct without any artistic or educational value or features the nudity of individuals under 18.
You know why we don’t have more laws like these? I mean, beyond the obvious constitutional issues. It’s because obscenity laws don’t have carve-outs for museums. Even beyond that, the mere fact that something is being displayed in a museum suggests strongly that it has “artistic or educational value,” as The Questionable Authority pointed out on Bluesky:
If it's in a museum, it's definitionally not obscenity. Seriously. If it's in a museum, it has some form of social or artistic value, and if it has social or artistic value, it is not obscene under Miller and its progeny.
If it’s in a museum, it’s definitionally not obscenity.
Seriously.
If it’s in a museum, it has some form of social or artistic value, and if it has social or artistic value, it is not obscene under Miller and its progeny.
So, why does this bill even exist? Well, its origins lie with someone equally performative and stupid: Carlos Turcios, a self-proclaimed “conservative fighter” who managed to celebrate a (short-lived) coup when he turned his personal visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas) into police action and an equally stupid op-ed for the Dallas Express.
The Dallas Express visited the museum and saw several pictures featuring children. One photo showed a girl jumping on top of a table. Another depicted a boy with an unknown liquid substance and his genitals exposed.
The Dallas Express team then saw a video on a TV screen where an individual talked about her “queerness.”
“One of my major apprehensions around having a child was not knowing how we would be treated as queer people and queer parents. This is largely why I wasn’t interested in being pregnant,” the individual is heard saying during a video played during the exhibit.
Other photos showcase a topless woman exposing her breasts and a photo of two women together in bed, to name a few.
This article discusses Shirley Mann’s photography, which does include a few photos of her own children in the nude. None of this approaches the legal definition of CSAM, but Turcios is apparently one of those “I know it when I see it” people even though he doesn’t actually know it when he sees it.
That late December visit led to a single (apparently anonymous) complaint to local law enforcement, which of course resulted in this stupidity the following month:
Police in Texas have seized several works by the photographer Sally Mann from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (The Modern), following a complaint that the images portray naked children and could be seen as pornographic.
[…]
Although the exhibition has been open since mid-November, it seems Mann’s photographs first came under scrutiny just before Christmas, when The Dallas Express received a tip from a local resident and sent its staff writer Carlos Turcios to investigate.
Of course, there are no follow-up articles from Turcios at his blog or at the quasi-newspaper that gives him space to spout his inanity. The cops raided a museum and seized a bunch of photos and the local prosecutor went so far as to present this to a grand jury for obscenity/CSAM charges. But the grand jury decided this wasn’t the ham sandwich it was looking for.
The images — part of Mann’s controversial “Immediate Family” series from the early 1990s — had been removed by Fort Worth police in January following complaints from local officials, including Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who alleged the photographs could constitute child pornography. The museum had included several of Mann’s portraits, which depict her children nude, in its “Diaries of Home” exhibition.
On Tuesday, the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office issued a statement confirming the grand jury’s decision to take “no action” against the museum or its staff. The Fort Worth Police Department has said the photographs will be returned to the museum.
I guess Rep. Lowe is sore loser. Deprived of a victory lap by a jury of his peers (so to speak), he’s decided it’s time to specifically target Texas museums with a law that could result in $500,000/day fines should any other “conservative fighters” misinterpret/misrepresent museum exhibits. It’s not that the existing law isn’t capable of punishing museums for stacking a bunch of Hustlers in a corner and calling it an art exhibit (although porn is also protected by the First Amendment). It’s that the existing law just isn’t punitive enough to nudge museums — those bastions of woke liberalism — into self-censorship and limiting exhibits to whatever Norman Rockwell prints they have on hand (except for the one where the kid is waiting to get a shot in his naked butt cheek).
Having lost this battle, these local conservatives seem hell-bent on losing the war. The law, if passed, will be challenged. Considering its specific targeting of a single location hosting third-party artistic expression, it seems unlikely to survive even the most cursory review by a federal judge. Even the Tarrant County judge who’s similarly ridiculous won’t be able to change anything. It’s a state law, not a county ordinance.
Texans deserve better than this, even the ones who cheer this sort of thing on. Someone tried to turn art into smut and failed but rather than try to better their target selection, they’ve decided it’s time to make the entire state pay for their failures.
