James.galbraith

Alarming critics, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Madhu Gottumukkala, accidentally uploaded sensitive information to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, Politico reported.

According to "four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident," Gottumukkala's uploads of sensitive CISA contracting documents triggered multiple internal cybersecurity warnings designed to "stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks."

Gottumukkala's uploads happened soon after he joined the agency and sought special permission to use OpenAI's popular chatbot, which most DHS staffers are blocked from accessing, DHS confirmed to Ars. Instead, DHS staffers use approved AI-powered tools, like the agency's DHSChat, which "are configured to prevent queries or documents input into them from leaving federal networks," Politico reported.

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Minneapolis residents and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters can claim at least a partial victory after weeks of protest, confrontation, and violence in Minnesota. The Trump administration is scaling back its immigration enforcement surge in the region, after bipartisan outrage and criticism over a second ICE killing of an American citizen last weekend.

This scrutiny — and the resilience of demonstrators in Minnesota — seem to have finally forced President Donald Trump to waver and pushed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a partial retreat. The administration announced a draw down of some of the DHS presence in the Twin Cities; moved in a different liaison to handle immigration enforcement; and reassigned “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino, the most visible face of the administration’s blue-city surges. 

The futures of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House’s immigration strategist Stephen Miller, meanwhile, remain in question.

But all these moves shouldn’t mask an uncontestable fact: These officials, and the broader Trump administration, have still been blatantly misleading the public for weeks about Minneapolis and the two 37-year-olds, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, killed this month.

Pretti’s killing, and the unabashed vilification from administration officials, is the most cut and dry example. His family, neighbors, former colleagues, and friends have decried the utter shamelessness of DHS’s characterization of Pretti. 

The White House itself now appears to be walking back some of the administration’s previous commentary. Asked this week if Trump agrees with his deputies that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had “not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti in that way,” while Trump himself said he did not agree.

But even before Pretti’s killing, the administration was bending the truth and pushing contradictory narratives about how ICE and Customs and Border Protection operate — denying what videos seemed to show and witnesses reported in testimony.

So, while there appear to be some consequences for some officials, that doesn’t change the fact that the federal government has egregiously misled the public.

The Trump administration’s mistruths on Alex Pretti are clear cut

Video evidence has been crucial to both of these ICE killings, and we’ve seen a lot of it — of the actual shooting and of the lead-up to it. None of this has stopped the federal government and its spokespeople from spinning a contradictory narrative.

Federal officials:

1. Claimed that Pretti “attacked” agents and instigated an altercation (Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Bovino). No footage shows Pretti attacking officers or interfering with the original work of agents.
2. Characterized Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and his actions as “domestic terrorism” (Noem, Stephen Miller, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin). His actions don’t meet Noem’s own definition, which is “when you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence.”
3. Claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun or “approached” officers “with” a gun (Noem, Bovino). Videos show he was holding a cellphone in one hand while his other hand was empty.
4. Claimed Pretti reacted “violently” when they attempted to disarm him, and “defensive” shots were fired (Bovino). Video shows Pretti was unarmed when he was shot and did not react “violently.”
5. Claimed Pretti was an “assassin” looking to “murder federal agents,” “inflict harm,” or “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” (Miller, Bovino, Noem). None of this is true based on the evidence we have now, and the administration has presented no proof of this motive, except that he had a firearm and ammunition on his body.
6. Suggested Pretti broke the law by having a firearm on him, or that it was inappropriate for him to have a firearm at a protest (Patel, Noem, Trump). Pretti had a permit to carry the gun, and it was legal for him to carry it in public in Minnesota.

Renee Good’s killing was also twisted into a pro-ICE narrative

Just as in Pretti’s case, we have a score of video angles we can look at to determine what happened. The administration was more willing to send out surrogates and push out a counter-narrative of self-defence, given the involvement of a car. Plenty of videos, however, also contradicted what the administration claimed.

Officials:

1. Argued that Good tried to ram her car into an ICE agent. Multiple video analyses show that she was turning her wheel away from officers, who surrounded her. 
2. Characterized Good as trying to commit “an act of domestic terrorism” (Noem).
3. Said Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” an ICE officer (Trump). The officer who shot and killed her was not run over, and no evidence has been presented that she “willfully” sought to hurt the officer.
4. Described her as “very violent,” “very radical,” and “brainwashed.”

Beyond these specific cases, DHS and the agencies carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda already faced a credibility crisis — downplaying the violence and aggressive tactics employed by agents and officers; walking back claims about specific enforcement actions; and smearing or demeaning reporters, public officials, or activists who criticize the administration. 

The now-demoted Bovino, for example, was reprimanded by a federal judge last year for lying to her about being hit with a rock in a Chicago neighborhood when explaining the justification he had for throwing a tear gas canister at protesters. 

Bovino “ultimately admitted he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas,” US District Judge Sara Ellis said back in November. 

Ellis went on to say the incident “calls into question everything that defendants say they are doing…during law enforcement activities.”

President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that “you can’t have guns,” in response to a question about intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, whom federal agents fatally shot over the weekend. 

Pretti had been carrying a firearm, though he did not reach for it at any point as agents wrestled him to the ground. An agent even secured Pretti’s firearm before his fellow agents fired the first shot. Pretti was legally permitted to carry a concealed firearm.

But none of that mattered to Trump.

“With that being said, you can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t,” Trump said about the killing, during a press gaggle near Marine One on Tuesday. “But it’s just a very unfortunate incident.”

Second Amendment extremists everywhere must be up in arms—both figuratively and literally—after they’ve spent decades claiming that Democrats like former President Barack Obama wanted to take away everyone’s guns.

Or they’re not, because it seems their belief in a Second Amendment wasn’t predicated on actual values.

Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years.

Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they've never had to convince a jury that they aren't liable for harming kids.

This week, the first high-profile lawsuit—considered a "bellwether" case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints—goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

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On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel said he had launched an investigation of Signal chats used by Minnesota families in response to a social media thread from a right-wing influencer. The chats have popped up in response to killings initiated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after President Donald Trump deployed them.

In an interview, Patel told serial plagiarist and conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that the FBI would be probing chats on the Signal app after a conspiratorial thread on X by right-wing influencer Cam Higby went viral. Johnson has a long history of dishonest “reporting” and has been promoted by the Trump administration, an approach which includes access to high level officials like Patel.

“As soon as Higby put that post out, I opened an investigation on it,” Patel told Johnson.

“We immediately opened up that investigation because that sort of Signal chat being coordinated with individuals, not just locally in Minnesota, but maybe even around the country, if that leads to a break in the federal statute or a violation of some law, then we are going to arrest people. You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm's way.”

Higby’s thread was posted on Saturday and has over 20 million views on the social media platform owned by Trump donor and conspiracy theorist Elon Musk. Higby boasts in the thread that he “infiltrated” the Minneapolis-based Signal chat and contains screenshots of posters warning one another about ICE sightings and operations in the city.

In one post flagged by Higby he notes that a woman posted about a possible sighting of ICE while walking her dog.

Minnesotans have developed ad hoc networks in response to ICE’s invasion of the state. Many of the people using Signal chats are ordinary citizens, including parents who are attempting to protect their children and neighbors.

In an interview published in early January, a Minnesota father identified as “Greg” told NBC, “Every morning I feel like I’m forced with the choice of ‘Do I try to do patrol to protect my daughter and her preschool or do I come to my son’s kindergarten to do patrol here?’”

Agents of ICE have killed two civilians in Minnesota and wounded many others as part of the deployment ordered by Trump, so the fear of residents is not abstract—it is a very real problem and ongoing threat to the public at large.

Patel’s investigation is further evidence of how badly the right has lost the battle to define what is happening in Minnesota and around the country as ICE and other agencies execute Trump’s mass deportation policy. While the administration insists it is fighting against crime, the reality is families are being terrorized and individuals harassed and assaulted based on their race.

Related | Why Trump is finally waving a white flag in Minnesota

Patel launching an official investigation based on right-wing misinformation is part of a Trump administration pattern. The targeting of Minnesota came about after a right-wing YouTuber caught the attention of Trump and other influential Republicans by posting videos about purported fraud by the state’s Somali immigrant population. Soon after, Trump began making racist remarks about the residents and deployed ICE.

The decision to investigate family group chats once again highlights the fact that Trump chose Patel to lead the FBI because he kissed up to Trump, not because he is an expert in law enforcement.

Patel’s time at the FBI has been marked by lurching from one mess to another—and now he’s spying on moms and dads simply trying to protect their way of life.

Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called "Project Panama" to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies. The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort and hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had worked on the legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier. Anthropic bought books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and World of Books. A vendor document noted the company was seeking to scan between 500,000 and two million books. Before Project Panama, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann downloaded books from LibGen, a shadow library of pirated material, over 11 days in June 2021. He later shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror site with colleagues, writing "this is awesome!!!" Meta employees similarly downloaded books from torrent platforms after approval from Mark Zuckerberg, court filings allege, though one engineer wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August without admitting wrongdoing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine claimed on Monday to have "concerns" about federal immigration agents fatally shooting intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—but she said she has no plans to alter legislation that funds those agents', in order to prevent more senseless killings.

Collins made the comments in a speech on the Senate floor, saying she will not move to change the Department of Homeland Security's annual funding bill in the wake of Pretti's killing. She said that tinkering with the legislation could lead to a partial government shutdown on Jan. 31, when funding for DHS and a handful of other agencies runs out. The House—which passed the funding bill last week—would have to approve of any changes the Senate makes to the bill. And the House isn’t slated to return to Washington until Monday, after funding lapses. 

"The tragic death of Alex Pretti has refocused attention on the homeland security bill, and I recognize that and share the concerns," said Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and has the power to amend the legislation. During this, she bungled Pretti's name, pronouncing it “pet-tree.”

She also claimed that the DHS funding bill has safeguards to prevent further killings, including funding for body cameras and training. For her, that is sufficient.

Of course, DHS already has funding for body-worn cameras, but its agents aren't wearing them as they maraud through the streets, demanding to see people's papers and violently beating and even killing people. The funding bill may provide additional money for body cameras, but it doesn't require the cameras to be worn, so what good does that do?

The bill won't stop DHS from sending masked agents into American cities to terrorize residents, round them up without warrants, and beat or kill anyone who dares to speak up about it. 

“I fought to include policies in this bill to that end: a provision forbidding the detainment and deporting of U.S. citizens, a requirement for agents to wear body cameras, and ensuring Members of Congress can conduct lawful oversight of ICE facilities. Republicans rejected each one," Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement when she voted against passage of the DHS funding bill last week.

Senate Democrats have vowed not to vote for the DHS bill without changes, and asked for Senate Republicans to put the other department funding bills up for a vote while they work to amend the DHS bill. Given that Republicans are refusing to do that, it all but ensures there is a partial shutdown.

“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

Allowing yet another shutdown is a risky move for President Donald Trump and his congressional Republican majorities. Trump and the GOP lost the war on the lengthy government shutdown last year, and he would likely lose a second battle, especially since public opinion is on Democrats' side about Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Polling shows large majorities of Americans are aghast at the conduct by Trump's immigration goons, with a plurality of Americans now supporting abolishing ICE entirely.

A poll from the Republican firm Echelon Insights found that just 40% of likely voters support ICE's enforcement efforts, and a plurality (45%) say ICE's raids are making them feel less safe.

If Republicans refuse to negotiate to rein ICE in, they could see public opinion fall even further away from them.

Collins is especially vulnerable. She faces reelection in a state that Trump lost and which is now the target of its own Trump-led immigration enforcement campaign. 

It will be yet another instance in which Collins says she’s concerned, then does nothing to help anyone. 

On Monday, the mad king Donald Trump cried uncle in Minneapolis, uncharacteristically making nice with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and, for the first time since taking office, appearing to de-escalate his war on Democratic-run cities.

By Monday evening, The Atlantic’s Mick Miroff reported that Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino wasn’t merely being sent out of Minnesota, he was being fully demoted, with his entire social media operation dismantled.

“Bovino became a MAGA social-media star as he traveled the country with his own film crew and used social media to hit back at Democratic politicians and random critics online,” reported Miroff. “Veteran ICE and CBP officials grew more and more uneasy as Bovino worked outside his agency’s chain of command and appeared to relish his role as a political actor.”

There is zero chance Trump cared about any official unease. What likely enraged him was how catastrophically he and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem handled the aftermath of the Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti. The lies that followed were so brazen and clumsy that even many Republicans struggled to defend them. That list, apparently, included Trump himself.

And the fallout may not stop with Bovino. Miroff reported that Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, Bovino’s biggest backers inside DHS, are now themselves at risk of losing their jobs. One can only hope.

The demotion also follows Miroff’s reporting from Saturday detailing deepening recruitment and training problems inside Border Patrol and ICE, problems that the Minneapolis operation has only made worse.

“One ICE official I spoke with told me that some of the new hires, especially rehired retirees, are having second thoughts,” Miroff wrote. “Hundreds of the returning officers have been ordered to Minnesota, two officials said, where the administration is conducting the largest-ever DHS crackdown. Some officers have been so cold and miserable that they’ve already quit, and ICE officials have held calls to figure out how to deal with the sudden resignations.”

But the problem isn’t just the weather. Previous administrations were capable of deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records without laying siege to entire cities. What’s changed is the job itself.

“Returning officers who have come back from retirement are finding themselves in unfamiliar roles,” Miroff reported. “They spent much of their careers trying to conduct low-key ‘targeted enforcement’ operations in which they planned arrests in advance and sought to take suspects into custody in the safest and least dramatic way possible. Now they’re out in the streets wearing masks, with protesters yelling at them and video cameras rolling. ICE has changed, and the job isn’t the same.”

ICE and Border Patrol have certainly changed. Defenders will argue that this is just a temporary deviation, that these agencies can be restored to their prior norms under a future administration. Maybe that will be true someday. But it won’t be easy, because Trump and his allies didn’t just politicize these agencies, they actively selected the worst people to staff them.

Who else willingly signs up to terrorize fellow Americans while hiding behind masks, basking in confrontation as crowds scream in their faces? It takes a particular kind of damaged psyche to want that job. And as countless videos have shown, many of these people don’t just tolerate it, they revel in it.

That rot can’t be reformed away. It has to be torn out. The entire structure needs to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch, with everyone who participated in this era barred from future government service.

Related | Impeach Kristi Noem

But that reckoning can wait. For now, good riddance to Bovino. If luck holds, he’s gone for good.

Noem should be next. Perhaps she’ll spare herself the humiliation and resign before Trump does what he always does in the end: making sure loyalty is a one-way street.

Click here for your "Abolish ICE" T-shirt and make your voice heard!

Gisele Fetterman, the wife of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, decried acts of violence committed by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. At the same time, her husband, who has become increasingly close to the Trump administration, continues to back federal funding for ICE.

In a private social media post on Sunday that was widely shared, Gisele Fetterman discussed her history as an undocumented immigrant and the “uncertainty and fear” she felt every day as a “private chronic dread” as something that has now become a “national wound.”

“This now-daily violence is not ‘law and order.’ It is terror inflicted on people who contribute, love, and build their lives here. It’s devastatingly cruel and unAmerican,” she wrote.

Gisele Fetterman came to the United States from Brazil and lived with her mother and younger brother in a one-room apartment in New York City.

By contrast, while Sen. Fetterman wrote in a Monday statement that the two civilians recently shot and killed by ICE agents “should still be alive,” he continued to use language on immigration more affiliated with the hardline anti-immigrant right.

“I believe our nation deserves a secured border and that we should deport all criminal migrants. I also believe there needs to be a path to citizenship for those hardworking families who are here,” he added.

Fetterman rejected growing sentiment to force a shutdown of funding to the Department of Homeland Security, and added, “I reject calls to defund or abolish ICE.” Fetterman said he disagreed with ICE strategies but did not condemn the agency’s actions or the Trump administration’s pursuit of racist anti-immigrant policy.

First elected to Congress by painting himself as a progressive, Fetterman has increasingly fallen in line with the Trump administration on a host of issues in recent months, in addition to reports of his erraticness and staff turnover. Fetterman visited with Trump following his election win and has voiced support for Trump’s position frequently enough that some residents of his home state have sought to replace him.

Fetterman has ventured so far into pro-MAGA territory that earlier in January he was highlighted in a Fox News report after he slammed the growing movement on the left to abolish ICE as an “extreme” position.

“The party must resist the destructive tendencies to push extreme positions,” Fetterman wrote, echoing right-wing rhetoric often featured on networks like Fox.

Fetterman’s statement on the latest Minnesota killing occurred two days after the incident and was reportedly the last Democratic senator to do so.

Related | Alex Pretti killing twists gun-rights nuts into knots

“Even our state’s Republican senator has released a statement on [Alex] Pretti’s killing. Fetterman continues to be an embarrassment to PA,” wrote Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, who represents the commonwealth alongside Fetterman.

Trump's ICE is escalating. We need to support our friends and neighbors right now! Can you donate $5 today to support immigrant rights?

The US Department of Transportation apparently thinks it's a good idea to use artificial intelligence to draft rules impacting the safety of airplanes, cars, and pipelines, a ProPublica investigation revealed Monday.

It could be a problem if DOT becomes the first agency to use AI to draft rules, ProPublica pointed out, since AI is known to confidently get things wrong and hallucinate fabricated information. Staffers fear that any failure to catch AI errors could result in flawed laws, leading to lawsuits, injuries, or even deaths in the transportation system.

But the DOT's top lawyer, Gregory Zerzan, isn't worried about that, December meeting notes revealed, because the point isn't for AI to be perfect. It's for AI to help speed up the rulemaking process, so that rules that take weeks or months to draft can instead be written within 30 days. According to Zerzan, DOT's preferred tool, Google Gemini, can draft rules in under 30 minutes.

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Increasingly, the Trump administration’s defense of Alex Pretti’s killing has come to center on the fact that he had a gun.

“We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers,” Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol’s commander-at-large, told CNN over the weekend. “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a Fox News hit.

This is a weak defense on the merits; we have video evidence that federal agents disarmed Pretti before they killed him. But it’s also a flagrant contradiction of decades of conservative dogma, which insisted that American citizens have an unquestionable right to openly carry weapons, including at protests. 

The Trump administration isn’t just dissembling about Pretti (who was, it should be noted, legally permitted to carry in Minnesota). They are trampling one of the core beliefs of the movement they claim to lead.

Gun rights groups have mostly been critical of this position. “Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms—including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights. These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed, and they must be respected and protected at all times,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement.

And it’s clear that the politics of it are terrible for the administration: Prominent Republicans in both Minnesota and Washington have criticized the shooting, and anonymous DHS officials are leaking to CNN and Fox News about how poorly Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have handled themselves. Even Trump himself is now taking a more conciliatory position on the Minneapolis deployment.

So what’s remarkable is the degree to which conservative movement stalwarts have been consistently willing to adopt the Bovino-Patel-Noem line.

Witness Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative commentator — who has said the NRA is too squishy on guns — essentially blaming Pretti’s death on his decision to carry. “I think you, when engaging in obstruction with federal agents, can get hurt. When armed, things can go wrong,” Erickson wrote.

Dana Loesch, one of the most prominent gun rights advocates in America, took a similar line.

“You cannot obstruct a law enforcement operation,” Loesch wrote on her Substack. “This is illegal. It’s made even worse if you do it while you are armed. Pretti made the choice to disrupt a federal operation…which set off a chain reaction of tragic events.”

And far-right podcaster Matt Walsh, who has described gun-toting teen Kyle Rittenhouse as a “hero,” took an even more aggressive stance — castigating those conservatives that dared to criticize the emerging federal line.

“An armed leftist went out with a gun to deliberately interfere with legitimate law enforcement operations, and I’m seeing some ‘conservatives’ on this site claim that it might be ICE’s fault that the guy is now dead. Insane. Some of you people will never fucking learn,” Walsh posted on X.

These figures are not the most devoted MAGA-conspiracy types, akin to Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer. They are ideological conservatives who got in the game well before Trump ran for president, and have stated principles over and above personal devotion to the president and his movement. 

In theory, they’re supposed to stand for conservatism even when it’s inconvenient for the White House.

The fact that they’re not, even when events create such a flagrant contradiction between one of their party and one of their most foundational beliefs, shows just how completely many on the right have sold their souls to power.

The professional conservatives’ hypocrisy

To understand just how hypocritical the right-wing stance is here, it’s important to first reconstruct the conservative take on Pretti’s killing as charitably as possible.

Conservatives believe that the state has a right and obligation to enforce its laws, including by deporting people who are in the United States unlawfully. The federal operation in Minneapolis is designed to enforce said laws, but the local authorities’ refusal to assist ICE’s deportation campaign is (for conservatives) tantamount to lawless rejection of federal authority.

On this view, people like Alex Pretti are also obstructing a legitimate function of government. Federal agents will, at times, have no option but to subdue them by force. It’s perhaps tragic when that produces a fatal incident, but it’s the protestors’ fault that it’s happening in the first place.

“The Left is in a cycle of constant self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto nullification of federal immigration law in Minneapolis,” writes Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review magazine.

But Lowry and his allies get what’s actually happening in Minneapolis backward. 

It is not activists behaving lawlessly, but rather ICE agents who are indiscriminately arresting and beating Minnesotans while claiming (with the vice president’s explicit permission) that they can go so far as breaking into people’s homes without a judicial warrant.

To cite Pretti’s decision to carry as a justification for his killing is to directly betray the entire premise of the conservative movement’s pro-gun stance.

Such abuses of civil liberties are not necessary for enforcing immigration law. Many DHS officials themselves are critical of the current strategy on pure effectiveness grounds, seeing it as inefficient relative to a national push targeting known criminal migrants. Even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican’s Republican, has admitted this, saying in the wake of the Pretti shooting that the feds needed to adopt a “more structured” deportation policy that can avoid “all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right now.”

But on the level of principle, it’s worth seeing how flagrantly the Erickson-Lowry logic contradicts the right’s long-standing Second Amendment advocacy.

The orthodox conservative movement position is that the Second Amendment exists as a safeguard against tyranny. Well, masked agents of the state beating and even killing Americans on the streets of a major city looks an awful lot like tyranny to many Americans! After the killing of Renee Good, it makes sense — according to traditional conservative theories — for someone like Alex Pretti to carry a weapon while protesting the state and challenging its agents. 

To cite Pretti’s decision to carry as a justification for his killing is to directly betray the entire premise of the conservative movement’s pro-gun stance. And no, it doesn’t make a difference for this point that Pretti supposedly “interfered” with ICE by aiding a woman their officers had attacked. He was, in his judgment, standing up to tyranny — without ever drawing his weapon or threatening an agent. 

If the mere fact that he had a gun during this made his killing defensible to the right, or at least understandable, then their stated principle — that citizens have a right to judge state actions tyrannical, and arm themselves when they fear said tyranny — carries no real weight.

The twilight of the limited government conservative

The only possible recourse for the right here is to argue that Pretti is simply wrong: ICE is not behaving tyrannically, which means that Pretti did not have a legitimate right to arm himself while resisting its operations.

But if that’s the case, then the entire operating logic of the Second Amendment as bulwark against tyranny goes out the window. 

That logic depends on the idea that citizens have not only a right, but a duty to judge when the state becomes tyrannical — and resist accordingly. If the right only extends to people that conservatives judge to be correct on the merits, then they are not endorsing a consistent principle of limited government: They are endorsing a principle of “armed resistance for me, bullets to the chest for thee.”

Of course, it’s nothing new to see conservatives betray their stated limited government principles. 

Over and over again, on issues ranging from tariffs to executive power, conservatives have faced choices between Trump’s position and their own stated belief in the limited role of the state in public life. And over and over again, Republicans and their ideological allies have lined up behind Trump.

But guns are different. For people like Loesch and Erickson, the Second Amendment is one of the fundamental reasons to be a Republican in the first place. Part of what they get out of the deal with Trump is that his judges will endorse far more expansive views of gun rights than those appointed by a Democrat. It’s one of the core principles of their Faustian bargain.

But now, we’re seeing the bill come due. 

A lawful gun owner was killed by agents of the state, after he had been subdued and without ever threatening those agents, and the state is citing the sheer fact of his gun ownership as justification. It’s as clear-cut an example of the state treading on Second Amendment principles as one could imagine — hence why gun rights groups have, to their credit, been critical.

That America’s conservative ideologues are having so much trouble doing the same illustrates just how much partisanship, and a willingness to align oneself with power, has corroded many on the right.

On Saturday, a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti at close range after Pretti had been pepper-sprayed, beaten, and forced onto his knees by other agents. 

Pretti, 37, was a US citizen and reportedly in the area to observe agents’ actions. He was also a registered nurse and a legal gun owner with a permit to carry a weapon — one that he was no longer in possession of when he was shot to death.

Pretti’s death is at least the third shooting by immigration agents in the Minneapolis area this year, and the second where the person who was shot died.

The shootings have understandably attracted the most attention nationwide. But since the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis began in early January, there have been widespread abuses of power US by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, including use of chemical crowd control like pepper spray and tear gas; brutality against protesters, bystanders, and immigrants; and baseless and often inflammatory arrests and detentions. 

The first ICE shooting

On January 7, just days into an immigration crackdown targeting the Minneapolis area that Trump officials heralded as “largest immigration operation ever,” an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good as she attempted to drive away. 

The White House, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other federal officials quickly backed Ross to the hilt, describing Good as a domestic terrorist and describing the shooting as justified, despite video evidence to the contrary.

Since then, the message behind the administration’s support for Ross and the shooting seems to have been clearly received by ICE agents in Minnesota, who have behaved much more like an occupying force than a law enforcement operation: Not only have local officials pleaded with them to leave the state, they are also operating from behind masks and with militarized force, including tactical gear, riot control agents, and assault weapons.

They have even pitted themselves against local police: A Minneapolis-area police chief said this earlier week that some of his off-duty officers have been harassed and racially profiled by immigration agents.

In multiple cases, federal agents have been documented using Good’s killing as a threat against other observers documenting their actions, asking one woman, “Have y’all not learned?” before grabbing her phone and detaining her.

What immigration agents have been doing in Minneapolis

Other incidents are too numerous to tally in full, but several stand out. 

Last week, federal agents violently detained two Target employees, both of whom a Minnesota state representative said were US citizens and who were later released. At least one of the employees was left in a nearby parking lot with injuries. 

In another incident, a US citizen was dragged from her car by federal agents after she was stopped on the way to a doctor’s appointment; agents broke the windows of her vehicle and carried her hanging face down by her arms and legs. And federal agents have been recorded pepper-spraying an already-detained man in the face at close range.

A Minneapolis family was also caught up and brutalized by federal agents last week: On the way home from a basketball game, a family of eight — including a 6-month-old and five other children — was tear-gassed inside their vehicle by federal agents. All survived, but the 6-month-old required CPR.

The second of three shootings by federal immigration agents in the Minneapolis area was also a case of mistaken identity: ICE agents shot a Venezuelan man in the leg, wounding him, even though he was not their original target.

More recently, ChongLy “Scott” Thao, also a US citizen, was detained in his home at gunpoint by federal agents and taken away in sub-freezing temperatures wearing only his underwear, sandals, and a blanket. Thao was arrested without a warrant and ultimately released hours later — without an apology for his detention or for the damage to his home, Thao said.

Thao’s detention is part of a larger pattern in Minneapolis, where ICE agents are increasingly acting in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. As my colleague Eric Levitz wrote on Friday, ICE has decided, according to a closely held internal memo first obtained by the Associated Press, that it can enter homes with only an administrative warrant, rather than a judicial warrant. Such administrative warrants do not require a judge’s approval and can be issued by ICE agents themselves. 

ICE’s crackdown has also swept up children in the Minneapolis area, including an incident this week where agents attempted to use a 5-year-old child as “bait” to detain others by having him knock on the door of his home after taking his father into custody, according to officials at a Minneapolis-area school district. They also detained a 2-year-old and her father on Thursday and temporarily removed both of them to Texas.

Local publications like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — and bystanders filming interactions, as Pretti appeared to have been doing before he was shot and killed on Saturday — have created a more comprehensive record of ICE and CBP’s actions in the state. But even this relatively limited number of incidents shows a clear pattern of unchecked aggression and ongoing escalation by agents.

“How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey asked on Saturday. But for the Trump administration, it’s not clear those deaths are very much of a problem at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When TikTok users in the U.S. opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the U.S., TikTok was compelled by the U.S. government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity. Called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the new entity is made up of a group of investors that includes the software company Oracle. It's easy to tap "agree" and keep on scrolling through videos on TikTok, so users might not fully understand the extent of changes they are agreeing to with this pop-up. Now that it's under U.S.-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. Here are the three biggest changes to TikTok's privacy policy that users should know about. TikTok's change in location tracking is one of the most notable updates in this new privacy policy. Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of U.S. users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone's location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts. Similar kinds of precise location data is also tracked by other social media apps, like Instagram and X. [...] Rather than an adjustment, TikTok's policy on AI interactions adds a new topic to the privacy policy document. Now, users' interactions with any of TikTok's AI tools explicitly fall under data that the service may collect and store. This includes any prompts as well as the AI-generated outputs. The metadata attached to your interactions with AI tools may also be automatically logged. [...] This change to TikTok's privacy policy may not be as immediately noticeable to users, but it will likely have an impact on the types of ads you see outside of TikTok. So, rather than just using your collected data to target you while using the app, TikTok may now further leverage that info to serve you more relevant ads wherever you go online. As part of this advertising change, TikTok also now explicitly mentions publishers as one kind of partner the platform works with to get new data.

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The White House doubled down after posting a digitally altered photo of Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong, dismissing it as a "meme" despite objections from her attorney and comparisons to reality-distorting propaganda. "YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter," White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr wrote in a post on X. The Hill reports: The statement came after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a photo of Armstrong's arrest Thursday showing Armstrong with what appears to be a blank facial expression. However, the White House later posted an altered version of the same photo that shows Armstrong crying. Armstrong's attorney Jordan Kushner said in an interview with CNN that an agent was recording Armstrong's arrest on their cellphone. "I've never seen anything like it. It's so unprofessional," Kushner said. "He was ordered to do it because the government was looking to make a spectacle of this case. I observed the whole thing. She was dignified, calm, rational the whole time." Kushner went on to call the move to alter the photo "a hallmark of a fascist regime where they actually alter reality."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off. But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant -- and by extension law enforcement -- to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes. The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Guam, a U.S. island in the Pacific. Local news outlet Pacific Daily News covered the case last year, reporting that a warrant had been served to Microsoft in relation to the suspects' hard drives. Kandit News, another local Guam news outlet, also reported in October that the FBI requested the warrant six months after seizing the three laptops encrypted with BitLocker. [...] Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.

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Nearly two-thirds of registered voters (61%) think Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have gone too far in their tactics as they seek to fulfill President Donald Trump's deportation agenda, a New York Times/Siena University poll released on Friday found.

But not Republican voters.

The same poll found that more than half of Republican voters (56%) think ICE's tactics have been "about right," while another 24% say that ICE has "not gone far enough.” 

That means more than three-quarters of Republicans are fine with ICE’s violence in Minnesota and now in Maine, where Trump has sent his goons to carry out his reign of terror.

Let's take a look at the tactics Republican voters think are "about right" or are not forceful enough.

A Minneapolis Star Tribune photographer captured a disturbing image of federal immigration agents spraying a chemical irritant directly into the eyes of a man who was subdued on the ground—an unquestionably excessive use of force.

There’s also the heartbreaking image of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy in a bunny hat, being arrested by ICE agents. A leader at the boy’s preschool said the masked agents used the boy as "bait" to get to his father, a level of depravity that should nauseate anyone with a heart.

Or how about the horrifying image of ICE busting into the home of a U.S. citizen, guns drawn and without a warrant, and then frog-marching him in his underwear and sandals in frigid temperatures into custody? Defending ICE’s depravity, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the man was a sex offender. As it turns out, though, the man was a citizen with no criminal record. As for the sex offender whom ICE said it wanted to arrest? Well, he has been in jail since 2024. 

Think those are the only horrors? Think again.

There’s the story of a 6-month-old infant who needed CPR after an ICE agent threw a tear-gas canister under the car the infant’s family was driving. When it exploded, the car’s airbags deployed, trapping them inside to choke on tear gas. Including the infant, there were six children in the car.

DHS initially blamed the family for their infant's hospitalization, saying the parents should not have taken children to a protest. But the family was not going to a protest. They were driving home from their older child's basketball game.

DHS later deleted its victim-blaming post on X, after it was clear that the family was just trying to go about their lives in the occupied hellscape they are unlucky enough to be trapped in.

There's also a disabled woman who was merely trying to drive to a doctor's appointment when ICE agents smashed out her car window and ripped her from her vehicle as she cried and screamed.

And who can forget Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother of three whom an ICE agent shot and killed in her car? DHS lied that the officer who killed her was in danger. But an autopsy revealed that the bullet that killed her went through the side of her head. Add that together with the video evidence, and we now know that the officer was not directly in front of her vehicle and that he killed her when he was not in danger.

These are just a handful of the dozens of instances of ICE using excessive force and flagrantly violating people’s constitutional rights in order to carry out Trump’s racist deportation agenda. 

Democrats and independents find it abhorrent. The New York Times poll shows that 94% of Democrats and 71% of independents say ICE’s tactics are going too far. 

Yet Republicans are eating it up, because like their Dear Leader, the cruelty for them is and has always been the point. 

And now, we’re all paying the price for their sadism.

Vice President JD Vance was stumping in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday, where he was asked about President Donald Trump’s framing of the ongoing abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “mistakes.” 

“You're always gonna have mistakes made in law enforcement. I mean, we all know this,” he said. “That's the nature of law enforcement.”

Vance’s glib remarks come amid weeks of public outrage over ICE violence, including the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

Many videos circulating on social media show ICE goons detaining and arresting minors, such as this one, where a swarm of jackbooted thugs terrorize a family while the mother pleads. 

Another video shows two teenagers being handcuffed after masked ICE thugs rear-ended their car in South Minneapolis. According to Minnesota Public Radio, the crowd that gathered to film and observe the terrifying ordeal were promptly tear gassed and pepper sprayed.

The gestapo is here.

If you’re wondering why your attorney friends are just staring into space and disassociating, wonder no more: A secret memo told the secret immigration police that invading homes without a warrant is totally fine, totally cool—just keep it on the down low.

The Associated Press got its hands on an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that—and this is not hyperbole—absolutely guts Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Actually, that’s the polite, mainstream media way of putting it. What this memo really does is purport to override the Fourth Amendment with no law, just vibes. In other words, it’s unconstitutional as hell. 

To be clear: ICE and Customs and Border Patrol goons were given permission to use force to enter private residences and snatch up someone who has a final notice of removal. 

There is no law cited here. That’s not a slam on the quality of the legal reasoning—it’s just a literal statement. 

First, the memo reminds us all that President Donald Trump issued his anti-immigrant executive order on Jan. 20, 2025. Executive orders do not have the force of law, but this administration has nonetheless taken the mere existence of the order as a permission slip to trash the Constitution and terrorize individual immigrants and entire cities. 

After announcing nothing but the fact that Trump’s order exists, the memo then pivots to saying that, well, the Department of Homeland Security has “not historically relied on” using administrative warrants alone to arrest immigrants in their homes. This is a mushy lawyer way of saying that DHS knows full well that its shock troops can’t use administrative warrants to bust into houses and hasn’t tried to do so in the past. 

Administrative warrants are civil and issued by an immigration judge who works for the executive branch and can be hired and fired by Trump. Judicial warrants are issued by real judges independent of the executive branch and require the requesting officer to show individualized probable cause. 

The former allows ICE to detain someone in public, but doesn’t give them the right to enter private spaces. For that, you need a judicial warrant thanks to the pesky Fourth Amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This is basic Fourth Amendment law. Police must obtain a warrant showing probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and a particularized suspicion of the person or place to be searched. In other words, the Constitution prohibits police from storming into your house based on some civil document signed by an immigration goon. 

Related| ICE killed an unarmed citizen. Republicans keep trying to justify it.

But voila! According to the DHS, its general counsel “recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.” 

That means that in Trump’s America, an administrative warrant and a final removal order constitute probable cause to enter private homes by force. 

Would you like to know what parts of the Constitution, the INA, and immigration regulations factor into this legal analysis? Heavens, no. There’s nothing there. 

Nonetheless, the memo tells ICE agents to go buck wild. With only an administrative warrant in hand, ICE goons can now “knock and announce” and, after giving people inside a “reasonable chance to act lawfully,” ICE can use force to enter. You will not be the least bit surprised to learn that there is no explanation of what a “reasonable chance” is, or how long it should last. 

Once ICE busts in, they can do a limited search “to ensure officer safety,” but can also arrest someone for anything incriminating they find in plain view. 

So now, ICE agents can violently invade someone’s home based on a civil, not criminal, warrant. Then, they can detain someone even if they have committed no crime because—much to DHS’s chagrin, no doubt—simply being undocumented is not a federal crime. 

But what about all those undocumented people with criminal records, the worst of the worst? Surely it’s fine if DHS uses a battering ram to get to them, right? 

Well, no—that would still be bad. However, it’s even worse that the overwhelming majority of the people being detained under Trump’s mass deportation push—73%—have no criminal record at all. For those detainees with criminal records, the bulk of their “crimes” are things like low-level traffic violations. 

Even ICE knew how unconstitutional this was, so agency officials passed along the memo in secret and by word of mouth, trying to leave no trace.

It’s tempting to say this further dismantling of the Fourth Amendment was inevitable after last fall, when Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh invented “Kavanaugh Stops.” Kav explained that ICE could ignore the Fourth Amendment and detain people based on racial profiling because the constitutional violation would be so teeny-tiny—it’s just a few minutes of your time, and you’ll be on your way! 

The upshot: Those “brief” stops have been used as justification for brutal violence when ICE detains people. 

But guess what? This DHS policy was in the works well before Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Perdomo, which came down in September 2025. The DHS memo blessing warrantless home invasions was issued in May 2025. Trump’s racist goons were always going to do this, and it was always going to be a secret.

The Fourth Amendment isn’t optional, no matter how much the Trump administration would like it to be. However, with Congress and the Supreme Court abdicating their constitutional obligations to check and balance the executive branch, there’s nothing stopping Trump and his vile racist minions from further violating the Constitution, all in the service of hurting people. 

An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia's data strategy team directly contacted Anna's Archive -- the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books -- to explore "including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs." Internal documents cited in the amended complaint show Nvidia sought information about "high-speed access" to the collection, which Anna's Archive charged tens of thousands of dollars for. According to the lawsuit, Anna's Archive warned Nvidia that its library was illegally acquired and maintained, then asked if the company had internal permission to proceed. The pirate library noted it had previously wasted time on other AI companies that couldn't secure approval. Nvidia management allegedly gave "the green light" within a week. Anna's Archive promised access to roughly 500 terabytes of data, including millions of books normally only accessible through Internet Archive's controlled digital lending system. The lawsuit also alleges Nvidia downloaded books from LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library.

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Websites that authenticate users through links and codes sent in text messages are imperiling the privacy of millions of people, leaving them vulnerable to scams, identity theft, and other crimes, recently published research has found.

The links are sent to people seeking a range of services, including those offering insurance quotes, job listings, and referrals for pet sitters and tutors. To eliminate the hassle of collecting usernames and passwords—and for users to create and enter them—many such services instead require users to provide a cell phone number when signing up for an account. The services then send authentication links or passcodes by SMS when the users want to log in.

Easy to execute at scale

A paper published last week has found more than 700 endpoints delivering such texts on behalf of more than 175 services that put user security and privacy at risk. One practice that jeopardizes users is the use of links that are easily enumerated, meaning scammers can guess them by simply modifying the security token, which usually appears at the right of a URL. By incrementing or randomly guessing the token—for instance, by first changing 123 to 124 or ABC to ABD and so on—the researchers were able to access accounts belonging to other users. From there, the researchers could view personal details, such as partially completed insurance applications.

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States are bracing for what’s projected to be “one of the most extreme” winter storms across nearly half of the United States this weekend. But the potential devastation could be amplified by the lack of federal disaster relief.

In North Carolina, the impacts of 2024’s Hurricane Helene can still be felt across the state. Now, freezing rain threatens dayslong power outages and arctic temperatures for residents who—in some cases—don’t even have a home to shelter in.

And thanks to President Donald Trump’s overhauling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, help is likely not on its way. 

According to local reports, Carolinians who were placed in temporary housing by FEMA were evicted earlier than designated—some as recently as this week—despite having no other housing options. 

Daily Kos contacted FEMA and North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein for comment about how people could be impacted by the incoming storm but did not receive a response by time of publication. 

Unhoused locals have been sitting in limbo waiting for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, to dole out funds for those affected. Even though there’s plenty of money—a whopping $1.5 billion, in fact—set aside to buy out the homes of Carolina residents, nothing has moved forward. 

The Trump administration’s destruction of FEMA has brought about bipartisan concern, with senators even meeting in secret to discuss how to save the vital agency.

But Trump has been doing everything in his power to destroy FEMA—though sometimes unsuccessfully. Last month, a judge ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully by ending a program that helps communities prepare for natural disasters. 

Still, FEMA’s ineffectiveness under Trump and Noem has already cost many lives. In July 2025, approximately 120 Texans died during a catastrophic flood when, instead of being able to provide immediate disaster relief, FEMA agents had to wait 72 hours for Noem to sign off on the budget. 

Now, as dozens of states prepare for another potential natural disaster, the extreme damage that Trump has done to FEMA might be felt again by those who have already been left vulnerable.

In yet another sign that we are living in an Orwellian hellscape, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday told Americans not to believe their own ears when they heard President Donald Trump confuse Greenland and Iceland multiple times during his rambling speech in Davos, Switzerland.

Leavitt made the ridiculous claim in a post on X, in which she angrily responded to NewsNation reporter Libbey Dean, who pointed out that Trump "appeared to mix up Greenland and Iceland around three times."

"No he didn’t, Libby," Leavitt replied, misspelling the reporter's name in the process. "His written remarks referred to Greenland as a 'piece of ice'  because that’s what it is. You’re the only one mixing anything up here."

Let's roll the tape, shall we?

During his speech, Trump blamed a recent stock market drop on “Iceland,” saying, "They're not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money."

He again made the flub when talking about our NATO allies’ distaste for his threats of annexing Greenland, saying, "Until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy."

And while Trump did refer to Greenland as a "piece of ice," that is likely what caused the 79-year-old to mix up the name of the territory he wants to conquer. 

“It must genuinely suck to be Trump's flak and feel obligated to lie about the dumbest shit all the time. Just yesterday, Trump went to the press briefing room and complained that Leavitt her team suck at their jobs. Now she has to deny reality,” Tommy Vietor, a former aide in Barack Obama’s White House, wrote in a post on X.

Of course, we won’t shed a single tear for Trump’s propaganda princess.

But the most likely explanation for why she is debasing herself is that Leavitt's audience is not the American public but Trump himself, who is obsessed with optics and with looking like the strongman he aspires to be. Her gaslighting was almost certainly an attempt to appease her Dear Leader, whose ego cannot handle being the laughingstock of the world.

It's hard to believe that anyone would believe Leavitt's lies otherwise.

But as famed author George Orwell wrote, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

House Republicans want to pretend that Bill and Hillary Clinton are the only worthwhile focus of the Epstein files scandal, but unfortunately for them, Democrats are ready to dismantle their desperate attempt to run interference for President Donald Trump.

During a Wednesday hearing for the House Oversight Committee, Democrats tore into Attorney General Pam Bondi’s failure to release the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump’s. The administration was required by law to release all the files over a month ago. 

Democratic Rep. James Walkinshaw of Virginia synthesized the case against Bondi, calling her actions a clear cover-up. He displayed one of the many fully redacted datasets included in the less than 1% of the files that have been released so far.

“Despite clear legal requirements and a law that Donald Trump signed, a subpoena that you signed, Mr. Chairman [Rep. James Comer], and repeated public promises, Attorney General Bondi has failed to release the files,” Walkinshaw said, describing the “sliver” of material disclosed a mockery. 

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida underscored the need for subpoenas of the staff of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He also emphasized Democrats’ commitment to universal transparency.

“I don't care if you're a Democrat, I don't care if you're Republican,” Frost said. “I'm tired of rich people trying to evade justice and accountability, period. But you can't do it just for the party you disagree with.”

Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico—who did yeoman’s work in exposing the sham theatrics of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—lifted the veil on a GOP more interested in producing sound bites for right-wing media than investigating alleged crimes.

“If this was actually about getting to the bottom of this case and actually holding individuals accountable for the crimes that were committed by Jeffrey Epstein, by Ghislaine Maxwell, by the associates, and the many, many people who are implicated in this case, what would be happening right now in this committee is that Pam Bondi and DOJ [Department of Justice] officials would be sitting right there on the witness panel, answering questions under oath,” she said.

Democrats hit the same important point: Trump’s Department of Justice remains in violation of a bipartisan law—and the GOP is carrying their dirty water for them.

Adobe has added a suite of AI-powered features to Acrobat that enable users to edit documents through natural language prompts, generate podcast-style audio summaries of their files, and create presentations by pulling content from multiple documents stored in a single workspace. The prompt-based editing supports 12 distinct actions: removing pages, text, comments, and images; finding and replacing words and phrases; and adding e-signatures and passwords. The presentation feature builds on Adobe Spaces, a collaborative file and notes collection the company launched last year. Users can point Acrobat's AI assistant at files in a Space and have it generate an editable pitch deck, then style it using Adobe Express themes and stock imagery. Shared files in Spaces now include AI-generated summaries that cite specific locations in the source document. Users can also choose from preset AI assistant personas -- "analyst," "entertainer," or "instructor" -- or create custom assistants using their own prompts.

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Today's News:

In February 2025, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana ignored his own values and deeply held beliefs to vote to confirm anti-vaxx lunatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services—all to appease President Donald Trump.

Cassidy—a doctor by trade who supports vaccines—ignored all of the evidence before him to vote to put Kennedy in charge of HHS. It was a decision that proved devastating for the fate of vaccines and the eradication of preventable illness in the United States. 

So why did he do it? Well, in the hope that Trump would help him avoid a career-ending primary challenge when he’s up for reelection this year.

But Cassidy was not rewarded for his actions.

Instead, Trump endorsed his primary opponent, potentially sealing Cassidy's fate as a soon-to-be loser.

"Highly Respected America First Congresswoman, Julia Letlow, of the wonderful State of Louisiana, is a Great Star, has been from the very beginning, and only gets better! I am hearing that Julia is considering launching her Campaign for the United States Senate in Louisiana, a place I love and WON BIG, six times, including Primaries, in 2016, 2020, and 2024!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Jan. 17. “Should she decide to enter this Race, Julia Letlow has my Complete and Total Endorsement. RUN, JULIA, RUN!!!" 

Letlow—who is only in the House because her husband died of COVID-19 before he could get the vaccine that Kennedy is against—did, indeed, announce her bid for Senate on Tuesday. 

In response, Cassidy wrote on X that he is not only going to run for reelection, but that he is going to win.

"Congresswoman Letlow called me this morning to say she was running. She said she respected me and that I had done a good job. I will continue to do a good job when I win re-election," Cassidy wrote. "I am a conservative who wakes up every morning thinking about how to make Louisiana and the United States a better place to live."

But despite his defiance, Cassidy is now clearly the underdog.

Not only did Cassidy vote to convict Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, but he’s also continued to evangelize about the benefits of vaccines—which his state does not support. 

Cassidy has also condemned Kennedy’s anti-vaxx policies, criticism that is too little too late. And now that there’s a Trump-backed alternative in the race, Cassidy's fate feels all but sealed.

Ironically, since his first campaign, Trump loved to read lyrics from Al Wilson’s song, "The Snake."

"I saved you," cried that woman

"And you've bit me even, why?

And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"

"Oh shut up, silly woman," said that reptile with a grin

"You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in."

In Trump's understanding of the lyrics, the snake represents refugees from which he would protect Americans. But for Cassidy—and for Trump voters who expected him to care about anything but himself—Trump himself has turned out to be the snake.

GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, another Trump sycophant, also found that out when Trump chose not to endorse him in his reelection battle against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

Ultimately, my hope for Cassidy is that he gets an early retirement haunted by his role in bringing back preventable illnesses.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority spent much of Tuesday morning trying to figure out how two mutually exclusive principles can both be true at the same time. One principle is that all Second Amendment cases must be judged using a bespoke legal rule that only applies to the Second Amendment. The other principle is that the right to bear arms must not be treated differently than other constitutional rights.

Four years ago, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Republican justices struck down a century-old New York law that required anyone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” before they could obtain a license allowing them to do so. On Tuesday, the Court heard Wolford v. Lopez, a challenge to a Hawaii state law that appears to have been designed intentionally to sabotage Bruen. 

While the law at issue in Bruen directly banned most people from carrying a gun in public, Hawaii’s law tries to achieve this same goal indirectly by requiring gun owners to obtain explicit permission from a business’s owner or manager before they can bring a gun into that business. Because few businesses are likely to grant such permission — and few gun owners are likely to go into a business unarmed, ask the manager for permission, and then return with their weapon — Hawaii’s law is likely to operate as an effective ban on firearms in most public spaces.

But Bruen also announced a bizarre legal rule that applies only in Second Amendment cases. Under Bruen, a gun regulation is constitutional only if the government can “demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Thus, government lawyers must prove that consistency by comparing the modern-day law to “analogous regulations” from the time when the Constitution was framed. If the courts deem the old laws to be sufficiently similar to the new law, then the new law does not violate Bruen.

This bespoke rule for Second Amendment cases is so vague and ill-defined that judges from across the political spectrum have complained that it is impossible to apply. But, in Wolford, Hawaii’s lawyers made a very strong argument that their law should survive Bruen. Their brief names an array of old laws that are very similar to the Hawaii law at issue in Wolford. 

A 1771 New Jersey law, for example, barred people from bringing “any gun on any Lands not his own, and for which the owner pays taxes, or is in his lawful possession, unless he has license or permission in writing from the owner.” A similar 1763 New York law made it unlawful to carry a gun on “inclosed Land” without “License in Writing first had and obtained for that Purpose from such Owner, Proprietor, or Possessor.” And these are just two examples of the kinds of laws that existed in the 1700s that resemble Hawaii’s law.

But it turns out that none of this history actually matters, as all six of the Court’s Republicans — including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who did have some tough questions for lawyers on both sides of the case — signaled Tuesday that they are likely to strike the law down.

The Republican justices want to apply a double standard in Second Amendment cases

One of the Republican justices’ primary arguments against the Hawaii law was that the law would be unconstitutional if, instead of applying Bruen’s historical test, the Court were to apply a more normal approach to constitutional interpretation. 

Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, suggested that the First Amendment does not permit a state to forbid people from knocking on a private property owner’s door and asking for their vote. So why should the Second Amendment be read to allow states to bar this person from carrying a gun? As Roberts argued, one of the “motivating concerns” behind decisions like Bruen is that the right to bear arms has historically been treated as a “disfavored right.” And thus there shouldn’t be disparities between how the Court treats the First Amendment and how it treats the Second Amendment.

Similarly, Justice Samuel Alito accused Neal Katyal, the lawyer for Hawaii, of “just relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status.”

But if Roberts and Alito don’t like the fact that Second Amendment cases are treated differently than First Amendment cases, they have no one but themselves to blame. Again, Bruen announced a bespoke legal test, which fetishizes history, and which applies to no other constitutional right. So a court that fairly applies the Bruen test will sometimes reach different results than they would if they applied the legal rules that apply in First Amendment cases. 

If Roberts and Alito don’t like this reality, the obvious solution is to overrule Bruen.

The Republican justices, in other words, appear to want a double standard to apply in gun cases. When a modern-day gun law is not similar to gun laws from the 1790s, the Republican justices can apply Bruen and strike down the modern-day law under Bruen’s good-for-the-Second-Amendment-only legal standard. But when a modern-day gun law is similar to gun laws from the 1790s, then they can complain that the government’s lawyers are treating the Second Amendment differently than other constitutional rights — and strike down the law.

One other sign that the Hawaii law is in trouble is that several of the Republican justices tried to embarrass Katyal, because one of the many examples of old laws cited in his brief was probably enacted for nefarious reasons. One of the old laws Katyal cites in his brief is a post-Reconstruction law, enacted by Louisiana, which allegedly was enacted in order to disarm Black people on private land.

Of course, laws that target people because of their race are unconstitutional, but not under the Second Amendment. They violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that no one may be denied the equal protection of the laws. 

In any event, if Louisiana were the only state to require gun owners to obtain a property owner’s permission before bringing a gun onto their land, then that historical example would undercut Hawaii’s legal argument significantly. But this allegedly racist law is but one example of an historical law similar to Hawaii’s. And the fact that Louisiana may have enacted one racist gun law does not invalidate all of the other examples of similar laws in Katyal’s brief.

The bottom line is that several states historically enacted laws similar to Hawaii’s law, and all but one of those laws appear to have been enacted for benign reasons. If Bruen were applied honestly, this web of old laws seems to require courts to uphold Hawaii’s law.

But the Court’s Republican majority does not appear interested in applying Bruen when they do not like the outcome it produces. Again, when Bruen’s unique test cuts against a gun law, they can strike that law down under Bruen. And when Bruen’s historical test cuts in the other direction, the Republican justices appear to believe that they cannot apply Bruen, because that would mean treating the Second Amendment differently than other constitutional rights.

Republicans are up in arms after California Gov. Gavin Newsom set a special election to fill a GOP-held House seat for Aug. 4—the latest date he could under state law.

The move ensures that the seat—left vacant when Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa died unexpectedly on Jan. 6—will be open for eight months, thereby robbing House Speaker Mike Johnson of a critical vote in his narrow and unruly majority.

“Gavin Newsom’s decision to punt this special election to August is a blatant waste of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to the people of California’s First District," National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson whined in a statement. "He could have scheduled this election alongside the June primary, but instead chose to leave this seat vacant for months. Californians deserve a voice in Congress, and Newsom is denying them one for purely political reasons.”

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California also complained, writing in a post on X, "When its [sic] a Democrat seat, Newsom says the goal is representation as soon as possible. When its [sic] Republican, he purposely leaves constituents stranded."

Of course, Newsom was just giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine. GOP governors have held Democratic-leaning seats open for even longer, as a way to help House Republicans.

For example, a safely Democratic House seat in Houston will have been vacant roughly 11 months, after Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott played politics and called a special election for the latest date he could.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis kept the seat of the late Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings vacant for nine months, starting in 2021. That robbed Democrats of a vote in a critical period of then-President Joe Biden's first year in office.

Yet Republicans weren't complaining then.

They whine only now, when a Democrat is using Republicans’ hardball tactics against them.

Indeed, that should be a feather in Newsom's cap in what is expected to be a crowded Democratic primary field in the 2028 presidential race.

Newsom has consistently fought fire with fire, including shepherding through a mid-decade redistricting effort that thwarted President Donald Trump's efforts to rig the midterm elections for Republicans.

Back in August, when Newsom launched the redistricting effort, he explained why it's so critical that Democrats do whatever they can to fight back against Trump and the GOP.

“We’re not going to act as if anything is normal any longer," Newsom said at the time. "It’s not about whether we play hardball anymore. It’s about how we play hardball. And California has your back.”

With his decision to hold California’s 1st District open as long as possible, Newsom is proving that to be true once again.