Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog relies on a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies’ ability to innovate and grow. As the impact of technological innovation on society, civil liberties and consumer rights has grown, Techdirt’s coverage has expanded to include these critical topics.
The dynamic and interactive community of Techdirt readers often comment on the addictive quality of the content on the site, a feeling supported by the blog’s average of ~1 million visitors per month and more than 1.7 million comments on 73,000+ posts. Both Business Week and Forbes have awarded Techdirt Best of the Web thought leader awards.
You can also find Techdirt on Twitter and Facebook.
Senators Call For RFK Jr.’s Resignation After More Emails Suggest He Lied In His Confirmation Hearings
from the tiny-little-coffins dept
There are plenty of reasons to call for RFK Jr. to resign or be fired. There are plenty of reasons to call for him to be investigated. There’s his complete dereliction of duty when it comes to the American measles outbreak. There’s his sneaky misrepresentations carried out as he moonlights on a government-funded cooking show that he puts out because… reasons. There’s the budget and staffing cuts that have led to our lessened ability to respond to outbreaks of diseases like cyclosporiasis. There’s the possible violation of the Hatch Act. There are the negative health outcomes stemming from his misinformation campaigns. There’s also his disinterest and/or inability to follow basic governmental procedures.
But the latest calls for him to resign, be fired, or at least be investigated aren’t about any of the above. Here are the comments from several senators. See if you can guess what this is about.
“This is a pattern, not a slip,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate, lied to the American people, and jeopardized the health of children to advance his anti-vaccine agenda.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a social media post Friday that the documents were “Proof we got RFK lying on the record during his confirmation hearing (a crime).” He called for the matter to be referred to the US Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. In a separate statement to The Guardian, Wyden added that “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress.”
If you didn’t manage to guess that this is all to do with what Kennedy told senators about his 2019 trip to Samoa in his confirmation hearings, don’t feel bad. As we demonstrated above, there are plenty of things Kennedy has done that could have resulted in the quotes above.
We wrote about this trip Kennedy took to Samoa earlier this year, when reporting uncovered emails from several people involved in the trip indicating that Kennedy went there as part of his anti-vaxxer crusade. Why Samoa? Well, allow me to quote myself:
It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, it turns out that the vaccine didn’t kill the children at all. Instead, medical professionals had accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxer solution instead of sterilized water like they were supposed to. Despite that fact, the anti-vaxxers sowed all kinds of fear and disinformation throughout the country, whipping up negativity around measles vaccines. As a result of that, the government put a 10 months ban in place on the vaccine.
It was during that ban that Kennedy visited the island, apparently to answer the question, “How can I make this bad situation worse?” While there, he met with both anti-vaxxers and members of the Samoan government. But when asked during his confirmation hearings, he claimed that his trip had nothing to do with vaccines at all. He was there to help rollout a new medical record and tracking platform he was pitching. Two months after his trip, Samoa suffered a massive outbreak of measles that lasted months and eventually killed 83 people and sickened over 5,000.
Earlier this year, the AP and the Guardian uncovered emails sent by American and U.N. government staffers that suggested the trip Kennedy took was entirely about vaccines. These emails were all written by third-parties, however, and amounted essentially to what I wouldn’t call speculation so much as a plain reading of the facts surrounding Kennedy’s visit. But, still, these are third-party accounts.
Fortunately, both of those outlets didn’t stop there. They kept digging. And what has the senators in this post’s opening so furious are uncovered direct emails between Kennedy and Samoan government officials that make it abundantly clear that the whole point of the trip was for Kennedy and his team to investigate the MMR vaccine.
On Thursday, the Associated Press and The Guardian jointly released newly obtained documents that directly contradict Kennedy’s statements. One of the documents is a letter Kennedy sent to Samoa’s prime minister in January 2019, in which Kennedy falsely suggested “deaths associated recently with MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccines” were due to a bad lot of vaccinations from the manufacturer. Kennedy proposed letting him and his “team” from CHD investigate the country’s MMR vaccines. In all, Kennedy used the words ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine’ eight times in the letter proposing his visit.
The prime minister responded with a letter in February saying he welcomed Kennedy and his “team’s independent health assessment of our MMR vaccines.” He requested Kennedy coordinate a visit with him.
With the only caveat being that those emails need to be completely authenticated as legitimate, that’s as much of a smoking gun as you could possibly want for proving that Kennedy lied to Congress in his confirmation hearings. That fact obviously won’t surprise anyone, of course. Kennedy is a habitual liar. But to have it evidenced in such a clear and unambiguous way is a rarity.
And, frankly, a gift. Kennedy has to go. Any reasonable and informed person would agree with that and the vast majority of our congresspersons are, in theory, reasonable and informed. They are also political creatures and you may have noticed that all of the folks calling for Kennedy’s figurative head have the letter “D” next to their name.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said Kennedy “must resign or be fired immediately.” Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a doctor who responded to Samoa’s measles outbreak, also renewed his call for Kennedy to immediately resign.
Hopefully, either this reporting or a subsequent investigation will give cover to people on the other side of the aisle to join the call for Kennedy to be ousted. It probably should have been enough that Kennedy took a trip that pretty clear contributed to plenty of people getting killed, most of them children. But if it has to be his lying about it that does him in, so be it.
Filed Under: angela alsobrooks, anti-vaxxers, ed markey, measles, rfk jr., ron wyden, samoa, vaccines
Monitor Makers Start Pummeling Owners With Annoying Ads, ‘Smart’ Spyware
from the dumb-tech-is-smart-tech dept
Initially the idea of the “smart television” seemed like a good idea. That is until TV makers realized they could make significantly more money loading the television with spyware, tracking your every online choice, then selling all that data to a global assortment of unregulated data brokers.
It didn’t take long for product quality to sag and consumer privacy to become a distant afterthought in a country too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law or maintain the structural integrity of its regulators.
I spent years pining for a “dumb” television to no avail; basically just a high quality large monitor with hardware HDMI inputs and switching and no clunky operating system (no, just not connecting it to the internet wasn’t good enough). Instead of that, we’re now getting the inverse: monitor makers have started force-loading unasked bloatware and ads onto your PC:
“LG lost some trust after a recent report that some of its monitors installed McAfee pop-up ads onto connected computers. Since at least 2024, some of these displays installed an app, LG Monitor App Installer, onto connected computers under the cover of driver updates installed through Windows Update.”
In addition to convincing themselves that that was a good idea, monitor makers are also starting to push into the realm of “smart monitors,” or monitors with their own OS (and behavior tracking software), just like smart TVs:
“LG’s and Samsung’s smart monitors use the same ad-serving OSes that their respective smart TVs do, meaning they’re poised to use automatic content recognition (ACR). Users of LG and Samsung smart monitors, including reviews site RTINGs, have shown the displays being able to track user activity. I asked LG and Samsung if their smart monitors use ACR and will update this article if I get any responses.”
It doesn’t appear to matter that nobody actually asked for this. Or, at least, nobody asked for what this is ultimately going to become. And the companies certainly don’t want to transparently talk about the kind of data they’re collecting. But because tracking and monetizing your online behavior in a country with no modern privacy laws is so broadly normalized and profitable, you’re getting it anyway.
Filed Under: ads, bloatware, hardware, smart monitor, smart tv, software, spyware
Companies: lg, samsung
ICE, CBP Officers Prefer To Sexually Assault Children When Committing Crimes
from the starting-from-the-most-helpless-and-working-their-way-up dept
The “worst of the worst” are coming for the “worst of the worst.” Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy messaging otherwise every time an immigration officer murders a person.
For the entirety of Trump’s anti-migration surge, it’s been obvious that it’s all about expelling certain people and has nothing to do with ridding this nation of criminals. But there are quotas to meet. Trump is awful enough on his own, but he can’t read a spreadsheet. That’s why Stephen Miller exists: to apply the pressure Trump simply can’t stay awake to do himself.
For years, law enforcement officers at every level have abused their power and positions to violate the rights of regular people. That alone is a crime, even if it’s usually just considered a civil violation. Guess what else is a civil violation? Being in this country without having the proper paperwork or processes in place to comply with immigration law.
To keep up with demands for ever-increasing arrests, this administration has also engaged in hiring surges. The people responding to huge signing bonuses and the simultaneous lowering of training standards tended to be the people you expected them to be. And, as the DHS soon discovered, stripping standards and all but eliminating training that would be useful to new ICE/CBP officers, its pool of applicants ran from the sub-par to the absolutely criminal.
Given what else we’ve always known about how those with power seek out the weakest people to exploit and abuse — combined with the free pass courts now give to federal officers when they’re only violating civil rights — this new report that’s based on hundreds of criminal cases against immigration officers makes it clear a lot of the “worst of the worst” are employed by the federal government.
A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—”committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list,” the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, “are more likely to involve underage victims” than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim.
As bad as this looks, it’s probably even worse. As the Ohio Immigrant Alliance report [PDF] notes, this only covers immigration officers who have actually been caught and are facing criminal prosecutions.
This means there are many more who just haven’t been caught yet. And the chances of them being caught has been drastically reduced in recent months. ICE’s OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) has always been tasked with investigating complaints filed against ICE officers. It’s not just history. It’s the directive handed down by law, which now seems to be something the OPR can just ignore because it would rather investigate critics of Trump’s anti-migrant activities.
If you’re wondering how it gets so bad that most criminal allegations against immigration officers involve the sexual abuse of children, this is how we’ve reached what we can only hope is an inflection point.
First, there’s the Supreme Court, which has made it all but impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations, many of which include clearly criminal acts. Added to that is this administration’s absolute refusal to perform internal investigations, much less punish officers for excessive force, child molestation, or murdering US residents and citizens.
Now, I’m sure there will be dishonest comment brokers arriving to fill the comments with stupid stuff like “well, 152 officers is only X% of immigration officers, so this is actually a good thing.” They can fuck right off. I guarantee any commenter thinking this sort of thing is acceptable because it only involves a small minority of officers is also in favor of letting internet vigilantes beat/maim/murder anyone these amateurs happen to think might be seeking to harm minors. The Venn diagram of “get all the pedos” and “whatever Trump wants to do is fine” is pretty much a full eclipse.
In other words, it’s forgivable if a few ICE/CBP officers do this while engaged in God’s/Trump’s work. But anyone asking for gender-neutral bathrooms should be executed immediately because the only reason a trans person would ask for this is because they want to rape children.
And, in case you’re wondering, of course this isn’t all Trump’s fault. The lack of oversight and accountability has been a problem for years, reducing the deterrents from zero to less than zero. That being said, it’s been getting a lot worse since Trump took office for a second time:
All this, the report finds, is accelerating. Nearly 25 percent of examined criminal offenses tied to ICE and CBP happened during the second presidency of Donald Trump. More occurred in 2026 (22 so far) than in 2025 (14). Both years outperformed the previous peak year of 2024 (11). Still, the fact that the previous peak occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency testifies to Biden and the Democrats’ unwillingness to confront ICE and CBP.
To sum up, this situation was fucked from the get-go and it’s exponentially getting worse under the current [cough] “leadership.” And no one truly thinks Trump or anyone in his administration will look at this report and see a chance to improve things. Trump could try to beat Biden at his own “molested by an immigration officer” game, but this administration has already written off anyone subjected to violent acts (including sexual violence) by immigration as subhumans who just got what the deserved.
Expecting him to care about the steadily-increasing number of molestations by ICE or CBP officers is to expect the sun to rise in the west tomorrow. No one cares, because they never have. And this administration is capable of not caring at levels we’ve never seen before, to cop a favorite phrase of our current president.
Filed Under: cbp, ice, law enforcement misconduct, mass deportation, worst of the worst
X Kills Nitter And Xcancel, The Last Ways To Read Tweets Without Elon Watching
from the locking-up-the-public-square dept
When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because it was a new communications protocol totally controlled by a single company, eventually commercial pressure led the company to close off the openness. Jack Dorsey later admitted that this was a mistake, and he hoped that Twitter would go back to being an open protocol. That eventually led to the rise of Bluesky (where I am now on the board, having taken Dorsey’s old board seat) and the ATprotocol (along with some other competing protocols, each with a different implementation, but all believing in the value of open social systems).
And, of course, in the middle of all this, Elon Musk took over Twitter. You may remember that. Even though Jack Dorsey supported Elon’s bid, and suggested he embrace the open protocol aspect of where Twitter was heading, Elon went in a very different direction.
It’s funny now, four years on, to read those text messages between Jack and Elon, with Jack pushing for Elon to embrace reinventing Twitter as a decentralized open protocol, and Elon nodding along.
But, of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, what happened was Twitter became X, the personal, centralized, deliberately political project of Elon that no longer had any real resemblance to an open communications protocol. Almost immediately upon taking control, Elon began locking things down, and putting very high prices on access. There have been many changes to the API (and its pricing) since Elon took over the company (which eventually merged into xAI and then into SpaceX), but the one constant is that it’s a walled garden, focused almost exclusively on promoting the things Elon wants promoted, while demoting the things he’s scared of.
This has been known and somewhat obvious for years. But last week, it appears Elon put the final nail in the coffin for the belief that X might one day be an open protocol ever again. There were two widely known and widely used services for sharing posts on X without having to point people to X itself: Nitter and Xcancel. With both of them, if you wanted to share any particular tweet, you could just replace the “X.com” part of the URL (or the “twitter.com” part before that got rerouted) to either “nitter.net” or “xcancel.com” and you could see the same tweet (and the same thread above and below it) without giving Elon any of the traffic.
If you are an open protocol, that’s how it should work. Indeed, if you want to read Bluesky posts without ever touching Bluesky itself, there are already a bunch of independent ways to do it — different clients, different frontends, different views on the same underlying data — with more coming online all the time.
But, just to make it clear that X is a walled garden completely controlled by Elon and no one else, last week, X sent cease & desist notices to both Nitter and Xcancel, causing them to shut down.
That’s Nitter saying:
Cease and desist
On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.
nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I’m seeking legal advice and won’t be commenting further on the specifics for now.
Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.
Xcancel just put up some text saying something very similar:
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
This does real harm to many people, not just those who didn’t want to support Elon Musk. Many journalists and researchers would use these tools to track things in ways that Elon’s platform might not allow (or for which he might ban users). And, as Elon has continually locked down X, many things now require a login to view. It also makes a mess of many archives, including Wikipedia citations, that frequently relied on Nitter links.
While the cease and desist letters have not been publicly revealed, TechCrunch claims they were able to see them, and they accused the platforms of circumventing X’s API restrictions.
The letter from X, which TechCrunch has viewed, accuses Nitter of an “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” through its service, saying that X has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules.
Lawyers for X said the actions are in violation of “various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).” The letter gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EST on August 25 to shut down.
The legal theories here are basically bullshit. The “Harmful Access by Computer Act” is basically a Texas state version of the CFAA, the deeply problematic federal “anti-hacking” law that is regularly abused to stop people from doing things that should be perfectly legal. And while there have been some cases, like the Power Ventures case, that blessed the idea that such laws can block scraping, courts have been much more open to saying that there’s no hacking in merely scraping openly available web pages, such as in HiQ v. LinkedIn.
In fact, Musk and his lawyers should know all this is bullshit, because he lost his earlier lawsuit against Bright Data over scraping X.
The Lanham Act (trademark) claims seem equally bullshit. There’s zero likelihood of confusion here. The reason people use these sites is not because they confuse them with X, but deliberately because they are not X. And, to whatever extent either site referred back to X (or Twitter), that would be nominative fair use as accurately describing the source of the content.
Still, most of that is besides the point. X doesn’t need to actually win in court. Elon just needs it to be more expensive to fight him. And given that he literally has more money than anyone else in the world (and most companies to boot), there is no fair fight between a legal threat from him against a volunteer maintainer of an open source project.
But this is how walled gardens get built. X isn’t building a better product. It’s using Elon’s vast resources and ability to conjure up legal threats to shut down any system that enables openness.
To be clear, X is hardly alone in doing things like this. And some of it is absolutely due to the rise of AI scrapers and the desire of companies to sell access to their data. Reddit famously made a bunch of changes to its API a few years ago to limit access, and recently cut access even more. The widespread walling off of the open internet to fight AI scrapers is going to have some long-term negative consequences.
But rather than accept this, it should be even more incentive to embrace the tools that put us, not large companies, in control over our data.
Paul Frazee, Bluesky’s CTO, and an instrumental player in creating the ATprotocol that powers Bluesky and a bunch of other “locked open” apps recently wrote about this on Leaflet (a long-form blogging platform also powered by ATprotocol), in an article he called SELECT * FROM internet.blogposts. In that article, he highlights how the web has turned into a bunch of silos, and more and more of them keep locking the door:
The walled garden problem is downstream of a simple question: how do I
SELECT * FROM internet?
If you’ve never written database code,
SELECT * FROM usersis how you ask a database for everything it knows about its users. Once you have it you can filter it, sort it, and join it against anything else you’ve got.
The web doesn’t historically work that way. The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He’ll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.
The fact that “the web doesn’t historically work that way” is a historical error. Indeed, for many years, most people did think it worked that way. Google’s existence is kind of premised on the fact that it absolutely could ‘SELECT * FROM internet’ to build its index. The entire premise of the open internet was that everything could be indexed and searched, even if the SQL query were hidden behind a nicer UI.
But now, various companies (including Google!) have used a variety of both technical and legal measures to wall things off again.
Open protocols do a lot of useful things, but the most important may be that they lock the openness in place, so that no single company can send a legal threat letter and revoke it. A system like ATprotocol doesn’t rely on APIs controlled by a single company that can change them or cut off a provider. Instead, it corrects one of the original sins of the web: rather than one company holding all the data for a particular service, anyone can hold it. You can hold your own data (many people do) or you can let someone else (such as Bluesky) hold onto it, though in a manner where you can always take it out of their control, and host it yourself or somewhere else.
This is one of the reasons why I find ATprotocol so exciting. People looking at it as just a new way to build a Twitter clone have always missed the point. It’s a way to rebuild the entire web, where the users have way more control. Rather than handing over control to a new or different company and hoping they don’t enshittify, the entire setup is enabling the end users to have full control over their own data.
Killing off Nitter and Xcancel is the last step in Elon’s transformation of Twitter from something that wanted to be a new, open communications protocol, to “X,” a locked up, private platform tuned to the whims of a wealthy propagandist.
Every few months or so, someone writes an article about why you should get off of X, because every bit of engagement there feeds money, data, and influence to the world’s richest man in service of his fascistic political project, or because its algorithm is directly programmed to make you angry about stupid shit.
But I think there’s a more important reason: X’s transformation from a kind of open decentralized communications protocol to a closed bullshit delivery mechanism is symptomatic of many of the things going wrong in the world today, from the enshittification of all sorts of products and services, to the rise of authoritarianism around the globe.
Getting power back in the hands of the public doesn’t happen by further empowering the controllers of today’s data silos. Elon’s not going to help give you more power if you ask him nicely. Getting the power back means building and using the tools that make permission irrelevant in the first place.
Filed Under: atprotocol, communication, decentralization, despotification, elon musk, enshittification, open internet, open protocols, open social, protocols
Companies: nitter, twitter, x, xcancel
Daily Deal: The All-in-One Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
To completely understand computer security, it’s vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It’s also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundle will help you learn to master ethical hacking techniques and methodologies over 14 courses. It’s on sale for $28 for a limited time.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
FBI Lowers Hiring Standards To Approve Applicants Who Admit To Having Sex With Animals
from the lots-of-staffing-for-'field'-offices dept
As the Trump administration continues to chase away actual talent in order to staff federal agencies with loyalists and/or people who don’t know any better, it has had to lower hiring standards to keep the federal cupboards stocked.
ICE went on a hiring surge following the imposition of impossible arrest quotas and a few billion tax dollars. To keep ICE staffing at the level required to arrest 1,500-3,000 non-criminals a day, ICE had to lower its standards and drastically reduce the amount of training these new officers — many who were promised $50,000 signing bonuses — received.
The combination of bonuses and lowered standards not only saw ICE cannibalizing US law enforcement agencies, but also belatedly discovering that a lot of applicants weren’t even capable of meeting standards so low they had to trip over them.
The same thing is now happening at the FBI. Plenty of talent has fled/been bled since Trump took office for the second time. A large percentage of the remaining workforce has been tasked with providing support for Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which means there’s barely anyone left to do the work that still needs to be done by the FBI.
The standards have been lowered at the FBI. And the new standards are so low, they’d possibly even embarrass ICE HR personnel, as CBS News reports:
The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality.
[…]
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
Um…
Well, I’m not going to insult sex workers or sex purchasers, so long as everything is consensual. That this remains a criminal act in most places in the nation is a failure of policy, rather than a leading indicator of criminal proclivity.
But then we have to move on to the other stuff. Stealing from employers tends to be a deal breaker for new hires across both the public and private sector. And you would think an agency with plenty of expensive/sensitive stuff in its possession would be more wary than most when it comes to admissions of theft from former employers.
And that’s probably going to be a problem for the FBI as it moves forward with these relaxed-to-the-point-of-comatose standards.
But it is weirdly specific that the FBI has decided to soften its stance on bestiality. I mean, the FBI wouldn’t be removing this standard if it was such a rare occurrence that it rarely prevented securing a new hire. That it’s being removed now strongly suggests the FBI is being prevented from hiring a lot of… shall we say… otherwise qualified candidates.
It also says something about the hiring pool, which must be loaded with bodily fluids and animal hair. I have never been asked specifically about my animal-fucking activities when applying for any job during my past 33 years of full-time employment. It says something about the FBI that this question even needs to be asked, even indirectly. And it says something else entirely about the FBI now that it’s decided being charged or convicted for bestiality is no longer worrying enough to take a hard pass on a candidate.
That being said, there’s something about the FBI’s new hiring standards that actually suggest it might be willing to forgive and forget, which isn’t a bad thing.
The new standards also specifically address applicants who have engaged in past acts of bestiality or animal cruelty – saying they may still be considered for the bureau as long as the incidents took place before the age of 18, the sources said.
So, it’s not as immediately disturbing as it first appears, although you’d still think the FBI would have enough qualified applicants that it could leave the “no bestiality” requirement in place, no matter what age the person was when they performed these acts. Also, it seems like a lifetime moratorium on animal cruelty convictions should probably remain in place, since those actions tend to predict future acts of violence and are generally (if not entirely factually) associated with, you know, serial killers.
The caveats make this less awful than my headline would suggest. But, on the other hand, we expect federal agencies to hire the “best of the best” because they’re supposed to be the ne plus ultra of law enforcement. Under this administration, though, we’re apparently willing to settle for anyone who can fog a mirror.
Filed Under: bestiality, doj, fbi, kash patel, lowering standards, moral turpitude ftw, party of law and order, trump administration
Trump Demands FCC Punish Media Companies For His Sagging Polling
from the big-giant-babies dept
Our full-diapered mad king is at it again, this time urging FCC boss Brendan Carr to go after media companies for the crime of….simply pointing out his terrible, crashing polling numbers:
Trump last week also posted a long, rambling screed on his personal propaganda website, vowing that NBC News‘ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for the crime of accurately pointing out Trump’s political endorsements don’t carry the weight they used to.
The comment Welker actually made, as is par for the course for corporate media shows like Meet the Press, was just about as timid as you can get, simply stating Trump endorsements have seen “mixed results”:
“He’s going to loom large over these midterms. There’s no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle, so now she takes on Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina.”
The irony is that these are simply timid corporate media outlets that can often barely muster the courage to tell the truth (which, in this case, is that Trump’s endorsements will likely be toxic during the whole midterms). If Meet the Press offends Trump so deeply, it would be interesting to see his response to a healthy and vibrant media (if we had such a thing) firm in its conviction to the truth.
It goes without saying that the FCC has no authority to police accurate polling, journalism, or analysis of factual reality. Though overconfident Brendan Carr may certainly try.
As we’ve explored at length, the Trump FCC has been engaged in multiple overlapping manufactured investigations into ABC for a variety of “offenses,” ranging from comedian Jimmy Kimmel making fun of the president’s wife, to the morning talk show The View hosting politicians that Trumpism is clearly worried could erode Republican control of the Senate.
In the latter case, the Carr FCC appears to have colluded with right-wing local broadcast companies to falsely make it appear that a local ABC affiliate violated dated FCC “equal opportunity” rules by hosting Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico last February. Carr used this to try and justify an unprecedented early review of ABC’s eight local affiliate broadcast licenses.
ABC, in response, recently filed suit against the FCC for broad First Amendment violations, suggesting that as Trump’s health, political power, and influence wanes, the empty threats designed to chill media outlets’ desire to accurately criticize the president simply don’t carry the same weight.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, donald trump, fcc, free speech, kristen welker, polls
RFK Jr. Goes Full Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracy Theorist Over 2 PA Measles Deaths
from the tiny-little-coffins dept
When we just discussed the two recent deaths in Pennsylvania that came as a result of measles infections, we noted that there was very little information about the deceased. Some additional information has since been released, in particular the fact that one of those that died was a newborn child. This is the sort of fact that is heartbreaking to those of us with normal, functional brains.
Or, if you’re RFK Jr., it’s the kind of fact that causes you to drop the whole facade and go full on anti-vaxxer conspiracy clown.
On Tuesday, as news of the two deaths was breaking, Kennedy took to his personal X account to rail against the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and posted a link to The HighWire, a hardline anti-vaccine and conspiracy site run by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine propagandist and Kennedy ally.
Kennedy’s post also assailed Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has criticized Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and activism. Kennedy went on to blame national declines in vaccination rates on the Biden administration.
On Wednesday, as news broke that one of the deaths in Pennsylvania was in a newborn, Kennedy turned to his official X account as US health secretary to allege that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” He cited a tweet from Josh Parsons, a Republican commissioner of Lancaster County, who claimed there had been “zero measles deaths” reported in the county. The claims appear to be another old play from the anti-vaccine handbook.
Okay, deep breath, folks. Let’s start that reacting to two bodies that haven’t even gone fully cold yet by spinning out on a conspiracy theory rant about the very damned thing that could have saved them is roughly as reprehensible a thing as I could think up in my head. It’s mean. It’s heartless. It’s evil. There are people suffering right now, including people that recently lost a newborn child, and there is no quarter given by Kennedy to express sympathy for any of them. Instead, it’s right back to the pet conspiracy theories that have been debunked over and over again. I don’t need to hear from anyone ever again that Kennedy is somehow not an anti-vaxxer, or that he actually promotes the use of the MMR vaccine.
But now let’s hone in on the claim that the reported deaths may have been “altogether fabricated.” Due to the coroner’s statement that they had measles deaths in the county, you may have read that as a claim that nobody actually died here and somehow state officials were just making the whole story up. That’s not the case. The game of confusion that Kennedy is playing is much more subtle and, ultimately, stupid.
If you recall back during COVID, there were plenty of misinformation acts out there on the internet claiming that COVID death counts were inflated. Much of that was based on what the cause of death listing was on death certificates. “No, this wasn’t a death from COVID,” the bad actor would claim. “This person is listed as having died from pneumonia.” The spoiler here is that COVID causes pneumonia that wouldn’t have occurred but not for COVID.
The same trick is at play here and it’s a trick Kennedy damned well knows is bullshit. The newborn in this case died from a ruptured spleen. That was the listed cause of death. But the cause of the ruptured spleen in a newborn that was also infected with measles is, well, measles.
Paul Offit, a vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, clarified that the measles virus can be passed on in the womb or shortly after birth. The virus can cause the spleen to enlarge and rupture at birth. Offit urged that if measles wasn’t the cause of the baby’s ruptured spleen, the coroner should provide an alternative explanation.
Unlike Diamantoni, Offit said he had been in touch with state officials regarding the deaths and, based on the information he had received, he concluded that “these patients would not have died were it not for measles.”
You can think of it this way. A death certificate or doctor’s report is going to list an acute cause of death, but that may not be originating and overall cause that led to the death. This is also how AIDS works. Nobody dies acutely from AIDS. They die from illnesses that wouldn’t normally have killed them if their immune systems weren’t severely compromised from AIDS.
Would it make sense to downplay the significance of AIDS? Of course not! AIDS is still the root cause of the death, even if it doesn’t make sense to list that on a death certificate.
Again, Kennedy knows all of this. He’s playing misinformation games on top of the graves of two Americans he helped into their caskets, including an infant. There’s a level of callousness at play here that is at best near-sociopathic.
From, mind you, the person that has the American people’s health as his charge.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, health & human services, infectious diseases, josh shapiro, measles, mmr vaccine, rfk jr.
White Supremacists Spin DOJ’s SPLC Indictment To Legitimize Extremism & Expand Recruitment
from the smoothing-the-extremism-pipeline dept
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In April 2026, a federal grand jury returned indictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more than US$3 million in donated funds to people associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.
Prosecutors allege that the SPLC secretly paid members of those groups to act as confidential informants without telling donors. Eight informants received the money between 2014 and 2023, according to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The SPLC has denied the charges and seeks their dismissal, with lawyers for the group adding that the charges constitute “vindictive prosecution.” The SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, has stated that the informant program “saved lives” and reflected decades of dangerous civil rights work.
Critics of the prosecution at Lawfare, a media site focused on the U.S. legal system, argued that the indictment is among “the most cynical criminal cases ever brought by the Department of Justice.” They noted that the SPLC had no legal duty to disclose the confidential nature of its informant program to donors.
Within hours of the Justice Department’s indictment, I found that white supremacist influencers on Telegram, Gab and other social platforms were celebrating the arraignment. They portrayed the charges as proof that journalists and civil rights groups documenting extremist movements could no longer be trusted.
The indictment became a rallying point to discredit not only the SPLC but the wider body of research on hate groups and political extremism. I believe that these narratives will be used to help justify increasingly radical and, in some cases, violent responses.
Ideological ammunition
Some conservative advocacy groups and right-wing media outlets – including Moms for Liberty and the Daily Signal – immediately stripped the indictment of its legal context. In online posts, they recast it as established proof that the SPLC had been deliberately creating extremist activity rather than investigating it.
A Telegram search I conducted on May 6 identified 22 posts mentioning the SPLC across at least six white nationalist channels. Most appeared within 72 hours of the indictment. The posts did not engage in sustained discussion. They repeated a small set of claims.
The Super Sincere Alpha GOONMAXXING Aryan Sigma Patriot channel wrote: “The SPLC is a hate group.”
Other channels cited the indictment as proof that the SPLC had been paying sources to manufacture the very extremism it claimed to fight. In the White Lives Matter Official Telegram channel, users were urged to “become an activist for your race” while referencing the SPLC as an opposing force.
The similarity across channels and social media is notable. The same framing appeared repeatedly within a short time window. This suggests rapid circulation of a shared narrative across networks rather than independent commentary.
The neo-Nazi, neo-fascist layer
Comments on the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment by members of the Commander George Lincoln Rockwell channel – named for the founder of the American Nazi Party – demonstrate how antisemitic conspiracy theories work, not as explicit rhetoric but as a broader narrative.
Internet discussions portrayed the SPLC as a politically motivated or illegitimate actor. Posts in Patriot Front Updates, for example, circulated allegations of fraud and money laundering while criticizing the SPLC and its efforts to identify and challenge white nationalist activity.
I found that this criticism of the SPLC also became connected to a broader antisemitic conspiracy narrative – one that portrays the organization as operating on behalf of purported Jewish interests rather than simply as an advocacy organization with political and ideological commitments.
These narratives circulated alongside the “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that shadowy elites are encouraging immigration and demographic change to replace the white population and diminish its political and cultural influence. It’s a conspiracy theory that the SPLC and others have documented as central to contemporary white nationalism.
In this logic, the indictment is not an isolated fraud case – it is evidence that a coordinated network of institutions has been systematically suppressing white identity.
Victimhood as recruitment
Scholars of white nationalism have long identified victimhood narratives as central to that movement’s appeal. By portraying white people as under attack or unfairly displaced, these narratives transform social change into a story of persecution and provide a powerful justification for political mobilization.
My research on white nationalism shows how contemporary extremist movements rely less on formal membership and more on decentralized digital spaces. It is there that narratives, grievances and identities are continuously reinforced.
In these environments, major news events like the SPLC indictment become opportunities.
Why this pattern repeats
Extremist movements have long used mainstream controversies as recruitment opportunities.
Participants often interpret external events through narratives of threat, injustice and persecution. In doing so, they transform moments of controversy into evidence that their worldview is correct.
In the 1990s, for instance, the deadly standoffs between federal officers and the Branch Davidians religious sect near Waco, Texas, and survivalist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, became foundational persecution narratives for militia and Christian Identity movements. These groups saw the sieges as proof that the federal government was hunting gun owners and religious dissenters.
In online extremist communities, these events can become powerful tools for reinforcing group identity and attracting individuals who are searching for explanations or belonging.
With a real-world legal event like the SPLC indictment, extremists can point to government action as evidence that their worldview is being validated. The result is a narrative that appears responsive to current events, even when the connection is shallow or distorted.
Redirected domestic terrorism policy
Legal scholars have noted that the Justice Department indictment fits within the Trump administration’s broader pattern of redirecting domestic terrorism policy away from white supremacist groups.
The Trump White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention violent far-right groups as a domestic terrorism threat at all.
That context matters for understanding how the SPLC case landed in extremist spaces: not as an isolated fraud allegation but as institutional permission. The indictment has become a symbol before the evidence has been weighed.
In today’s fragmented digital media environment, symbols travel faster than facts, especially when they confirm what a radicalized audience already wants to believe. I believe the real danger is not that white supremacists believe the SPLC is guilty. It is that the controversy, whatever its legal outcome, has already done its work.
Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton
Filed Under: advocacy, extremism, fascism, hate groups, white supremacists
Companies: splc
Administration Escalates Deportations To Haiti As Violent Gang Attacks Escalate In Haiti
from the shithole-presidency dept
I can’t assume the Trump administration hoped this would happen. But I can’t believe no one in the administration (Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan) isn’t secretly thrilled that this has happened.
The administration managed to revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees in America, a decision that affects nearly 350,000 people. The revocation of this status (which involved a protracted court battle) comes with the implication that these refugees are no longer in danger and can safely return to the country they fled.
No one in the administration actually appears to believe this is true about Haiti. When questioned about it, “Immigration Czar” Tom Homan couldn’t actually form a coherent sentence in defense of sending thousands of refugees to their doom.
“Why is the Trump administration knowingly sending Haitians, including many who’ve lived in the U.S. legally under Temporary Protected Status, into the danger that they describe?” [CNN’s Dana] Bash asked Homan.
“We’re returning deportees to their home country,” Homan replied. “I’m not in the loop on this specific incident … but when people are deported, they can’t stay here, they’re gonna go home.”
At best, this is what is known as a conclusory statement. It’s the equivalent of using the word you’re defining in the definition. Of course people being deported can’t stay in the US. That’s how deportation works. But that doesn’t answer the question that was asked: how can this administration justify the deportation of Haitians to a country the State Department says is so dangerous it has issued a “No Travel Advisory?”
This doesn’t either, although it does make it clear every Trump administration official will simply feign ignorance when confronted with their own awfulness:
“Look, the bottom line is they’ve been ordered removed,” Homan replied. “I don’t know the conditions in Haiti. I’ve never been to Haiti. I don’t know if you have. But look, the judge made a decision … and they need to go home.”
Yep, there’s literally no way to tell how things are in Haiti without actually going there yourself. But you won’t because the State Department is pretty fucking clear that Haiti is a bad place where bad things happen.
Here’s the exact wording used by the State Department, which, I must remind you, is headed by Trump stan Marco Rubio (emphasis in the original):
Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.
This has been true of Haiti for decades. Multiple rounds of plundering by foreign nations (including our own) destabilized the nation to the point where it’s just been a succession of coups and dictatorships for most of the past 150 years. It hasn’t been a safe place to live for more than a century. And now, because a bunch of bigots are running our country, it’s only safe enough for deported Haitians, even if it definitely isn’t safe enough for US citizens.
That’s because this administration — or at least a handful of the people involved in running it — don’t consider Haitians to be people. At best, they’re maybe two-thirds of a white American, which is why the State Department tells US citizens not to go there, even as this same government is escalating deportations of Haitian refugees.
Oh, did we mention it’s not safe for US citizens? Why, then, are we deporting literal US citizens to Haiti?
The Department of Homeland Security sent a second deportation flight in a week to Haiti on Thursday, returning 57 Haitians to the unstable Caribbean country, including several children born in the U.S. and Brazil.
You do know what people born in the US are, right? They’re US citizens. Trump may be trying to undo birthright citizenship, but the law of the land (and a recent rejection of Trump’s racist overtures by the Supreme Court) still makes these kids US citizens. And who knows why we’re flying Brazilian kids to Haiti other than just because we can.
Of course, this all traces back to Trump himself. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he amplified and repeated racist claims that Haitian refugees were stealing neighbors’ pets and eating them. Prior to that — during his first term in office — he referred to Haiti (along with the entire continent of Africa) as a “shithole country.”
And that’s why what has just happened in Haiti — a country that has already seen 3,000 killings in the first six months of this year — is more likely to make Trump (and a bunch of his enablers) pleased, rather than horrified:
At least 47 people were killed and more than 50 others kidnapped when armed men attacked a once-peaceful community near Haiti’s capital earlier this week, the United Nations said Tuesday.
It is believed to be one of the largest mass kidnappings in Haiti in recent years, and one gang leader is threatening to kill the hostages if authorities kill any gang members as they try to secure the community nestled in the hills above Port-au-Prince.
If you don’t think the hostages are going to be killed in the near future, you’re hopelessly optimistic. The gang has made it clear that any attempt to free hostages will result in their death. And the gang really doesn’t need the hostages because there are still plenty of other people to kill and/or kidnap in the area they’re trying to control. Government officials aren’t exactly sounding confident that they’ll be able to do anything to limit the final murder total, which clearly demonstrates Haiti is not a safe place to exist, much less seek to eke out a living.
And there are more victims of violent crime arriving every day, thanks to the Trump administration. Some of those potential crime victims were born in the US. The youngest deportee born in the US on the most recent flight is only three years old.
But this is all fine with Trump and his MAGA faithful. People who aren’t white get what they get, especially if they’re from third-world countries where residents are just expected to eat shit and die, rather than grab their piece of the American Dream these faux patriots continue to claim makes us the best country in the world.
Filed Under: bigotry, cruelty, dhs, donald trump, haiti, ice, mass deportation, stephen miller, tom homan, tps, trump administration
No comments:
Post a Comment