The Department of Justice has tapped two prosecutors with expertise in organized crime and terrorism prosecutions to implement a White House directive to crack down on its political opponents, a department spokesperson confirmed to TPM.
Continue reading “Exclusive: DOJ Taps Gang, Terrorism Prosecutors to Crack Down on Political Groups”The Supreme Court’s Corruption Must Be Broken
This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.
What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.
SCOTUS Officially Kills Precedent that Protected Agencies from a Vengeful President — But with Special Federal Reserve Carveout
The Supreme Court cast its long-telegraphed death blow to independent agencies Monday, confirming that the president can fire at-will civil servants that were meant to be insulated from political backlash. In a second opinion, though, the Court gave the Federal Reserve a special carveout from this new reality.
Continue reading “SCOTUS Officially Kills Precedent that Protected Agencies from a Vengeful President — But with Special Federal Reserve Carveout”Supreme Court Rules Against Republicans’ Attempt to Restrict Vote by Mail
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected, 5-4, Republicans’ attempt to limit which mail ballots can be counted, an effort which would have unleashed chaos and disenfranchised voters for the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Rules Against Republicans’ Attempt to Restrict Vote by Mail”White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report
Religious Liberty for Christian Nationalists
Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission released a 224-page draft report on Friday afternoon, delivering a tome that is at once an homage to Christian nationalism and a roadmap for the United States Department of Justice to embrace. At the center of the report is an attack on the wall of separation between church and state, which Christian nationalists falsely contend is a “myth.” Instead, the report argues for a “better analogy” that “religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.”
A bridge, that is, between Christian nationalists and an authoritarian state that privileges their rights over everyone else’s.
Trump created the Commission by executive order last year, and stacked it with mostly right-wing evangelicals, a smattering of Catholic leaders, and one Jewish member, all of whom endorse the Christian nationalist claim that America was founded as a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” nation, according to a lawsuit filed against the Commission by The Interfaith Alliance and other faith groups. The draft report embraces an array of Christian nationalist persecution complexes and anti-trans hobbyhorses, such as claims that COVID-19 vaccine requirements violated religious freedom, and that public school officials “have sought to impose a new radical orthodoxy on parents and kids,” which leaves “boys and girls confused about how God made them.”
Micah Schwartzman, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Virginia School of Law, called the report “an embarrassing document,” noting, in just one example, that it blames Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and other proponents of “a new philosophy” that “emerged in Europe, which laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty.”
Beyond European philosophers, there are other culprits cited in the report as enemies of religious liberty — claims just as divorced from reality as the core assertion that the term “wall of separation” has been “reappropriated to signify something that operates more like a ‘Berlin wall’ of separation between church and state than a mutually respectful boundary.” The report contends that “transgender ideology,” which another section of the report describes as a “new radical orthodoxy,” finds its roots in “the third-century Gnostic dualism, which posits that there is a gulf of separation between the spirit and the physical world, which it sees as intrinsically evil.” The report concludes that in the 20th century, “this age-old ideology began to take hold of American institutions and paved the way for the progressive activist movement to accumulate power at the expense of parents, families, churches, and individuals.”
Trump’s executive order dictated that the Commission be housed at the DOJ; now, in its report, the Commission recommends that Trump “instruct” the DOJ “to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” The report also says Trump should “instruct” the DOJ, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “to create religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals for students, parents, teachers, healthcare workers, and others to obtain support in the face of religious liberty violations and increase public awareness of existing reporting channels.” To ensure such a snitch state function to pursue violations of other Americans’ rights is upheld, the Commission also recommends the nomination and confirmation of federal judges “with a history of showing courage to decide religious liberty cases on the merits where warranted, rather than engage in improper judicial avoidance.”
The report’s authors note that there is a 15-day public comment period, although the document does not say where to submit a comment.
More Founder Fabulists
Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins spotted House Speaker Mike Johnson attributing a quote, often used by Christian nationalists, to John Quincy Adams in his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington on Saturday. The phrase, “duty is ours, results are God’s,” Jenkins has reported, is “an axiom quoted by Christian nationalist leaders affiliated with groups such as Wallbuilders, the organization run by activist David Barton,” probably the figure most responsible for embedding the “myth of separation” in the Christian nationalist consciousness. According to Jenkins’ reporting last year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has also used it, attributing it to “the Founders” and Adams. But, “like other dictums embraced by Christian nationalists, the sourcing is dubious,” Jenkins wrote. “Researchers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which holds Adams family papers, told RNS they couldn’t find any instance of Adams using the phrase.”
Off-the-Charts Corruption Continues Apace
Children of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stand to profit from a $1.6 billion dollar agreement between the Commerce Department and a “little-known American company” to mine in Kazakhstan for tungsten, a metal essential for the manufacturing of weaponry and computer chips. The Kazakhstan deal, the New York Times reports, “is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.”
Trump’s Great American State Fair Is Terrible
“The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be,” is Kelsey Ables’ lede in a quietly devastating and deliciously detailed review of a marquee event in Trump’s “patriotic” celebration of America’s 250th birthday. About the replica “triumphal” arch erected on the National Mall as a preview of the larger monstrosity Trump wants to build across the Memorial Bridge, Ables writes that it “appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.”
JD Vance and Watergate
Historian Rick Perlstein reminds us that, despite the furor Vice President JD Vance caused last week by laughing off Watergate and saying it would be a 12-hour news story today, minimizing Watergate and trying to pass it off as a prank or harmless campaign antic is a long Republican tradition.
Why Todd Blanche Will Have to Talk More About Jeffrey Epstein at His Confirmation Hearings
Marcy Wheeler explains how journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit to compel the release of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act raises even more questions that Blanche will have to answer about DOJ’s ongoing withholding of documents at his upcoming confirmation hearings to be attorney general.
How Trump Is Dismantling the Federal Civil Service
This important New York Times story about the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) may on the surface seem to be only of interest to D.C. insiders, but it gets to the heart of Trump’s campaign to politicize the federal civil service for his own ends. Led by a White House staffer, James Sherk, who previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, “churning out policy papers about waste and abuse within the civil service,” the administration pressured the MSPB, in a case involving the firing of immigration judges, to take up “a constitutional argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would invalidate its own existence, siding in favor of presidential power.”
Police State
ICE agents have been criss-crossing New York State, hunting down citizens who had been critical of the agency’s lethal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. They went to the Rochester home of David Streever, who had written a letter to then-ICE director Todd Lyons comparing the agency’s tactics to Nazis. Not finding him there, chillingly, agents then tracked him down at a hotel room in New York City as he was en route home from an overseas trip. In another instance, agents found Paigelynne Gonyea, who had posted about the murder of Renee Good on Instagram, and confronted her where she was serving as a poll worker in Syracuse in New York’s primary two weeks ago. “Another poll worker captured the visit on video. It was so wild, the Republican elections commissioner called a contact at Homeland Security to confirm it wasn’t a hoax,” Syracuse.com reports.
What a Difference a Year and a Historic Election Makes
Budapest held its first Pride march since the anti-LGBTQ authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Trump ally was voted out of office in April. Last year, under Orbán’s leadership, the government passed constitutional amendments attacking LGBTQ rights, including banning pride events, which had the effect of turning the scheduled march into a massive anti-government demonstration, drawing an estimated 200,000 people, and foreshadowing Orban’s ouster.
The SAVE Act Self-Owns Will Continue
Good morning! For the next few months (at least), I’m going to be posting a few stories every morning that TPM is tracking. We’ll still be doing Morning Memo, too. We hope to make the yet-to-be-named thing you’re reading available as an email at some point in August. For now we’re doing a kind of soft launch.
I’ll try to keep it relatively light, as is befitting of the morning. But given everything, I’ll just emphasize — I’m going to try.
Let me know what you think of these little dispatches. I’m very curious if they’re useful for TPM members — or for anyone else. (But hey, if you’re not a member, please become a member! We need those memberships to keep doing what we do.)
Johnson Sends Trump the Housing Bill He Tried to Take Hostage
For months now, Donald Trump’s fixation on the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that he seems to think will help Republicans win the midterms, has made it far harder than it has to be for Republicans in the Senate to legislate. It’s the only legislation that the president truly cares about, and he sporadically attempts to ham-handedly take other bills hostage, refusing to cooperate with whatever Republicans want or need to get done until they pass the SAVE America Act — which, without radically changing how the Senate functions, remains impossible. They simply don’t have the votes.
Continue reading “The SAVE Act Self-Owns Will Continue”Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’
I wanted to share a small observation about the interweaving worlds of AI, oligarchy, monopoly and — more distantly, but only a bit — autocracy. Over the years I’ve written regularly about the intersection of technology and journalism and the business models which underlie journalism. Because of TPM, I had a front-row seat to many key events, trends, dead ends and more in the evolution of the business models of digital journalism over more than two decades. I’m not sure I knew more than anyone else — certainly lots of people knew more than me about the details of particular areas of knowledge. But I was up close and had a good view of the big picture. What set me apart somewhat was that there were very few people working so closely and obsessively with these evolving business models (a matter of pure necessity) who were also full time writers. In any case, those of you who’ve been TPM Readers for many years will know a lot of that writing on the intersection of tech and journalism. (I have a post coming in the next few days which will add a new chapter to that, TPM’s place in those evolving or declining business models, and I hope you’ll take a moment to read it.)
About a decade ago I wrote a lot about Google’s evolving monopoly role in the advertising business. But what I always worked to keep front and center in that writing was that Google was significantly different from the other emerging platform monopolies in that its DNA and profit centers were built around the open internet. Facebook is a walled garden. It always was. Ideally it wanted you to spend every minute on Facebook. Apple was and is also a walled garden, albeit a more lovely one. Google’s DNA was different. Its wealth and power began with search. And search requires things you want to search for, which is to say other places to go besides Google websites. Now, in practice, not everything Google did was just like this. But, big picture, this made Google a very different operation than Facebook, to cite one very big example. Its profound monopoly power in the digital advertising world grew directly out of its power in search. And even after that monopoly power was firmly entrenched, its advertising business was heavily weighted toward non-Google websites subcontracting to Google the right to run its digital ads on those websites.
Continue reading “Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’”TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the News
[Report]
The Rise of the AI Censors
Last week, Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released its annual digital news report, which found that “for the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news.” The analysis looked at news consumption patterns around the world. It found over three quarters of the population is watching online news videos each week and many people rely on it more than traditional television broadcasts.
It’s clear that online video, especially short-form clips, is crucial for reaching the public. That’s particularly true since traditional internet traffic is rapidly drying up for most media outlets. The sharp audience dropoff is largely attributable to an AI takeover at the world’s largest search engine.
In this landscape, video matters more than ever, particularly TikTok. The Reuters Institute report noted that TikTok and Instagram are “the fastest growing video-led networks” with the latter platform leading the way.
Given all of these trends, I have started trying to build up my own TikTok presence with an eye towards ultimately creating more official TPM content on the platform. I quickly found out that the influential app makes it almost impossible for small and independent creators to report or comment on current events. Based on my own experience, it seems far-right politics thrives on the platform while reporting on extremism is almost instantly shut down.
I began regularly trying to post videos about news, history, and culture last month. Some were quickly removed.
The first clip taken down was one where I talked about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s great grandson playing pro soccer — and electrifying Europe’s far right fans. There was no explanation for the removal and when I tried to appeal, it was denied. The response to the appeal indicated TikTok’s censors determined the video promoted “Violent and Hateful Organizations and Individuals.” Of course, while I had indeed mentioned extremist groups in the clip, it wasn’t at all positive or promotional. The video also was posted to YouTube without issue.
Based on the near-instant speed of the removal, it seemed clear AI was in control of the heavy handed censorship on the platform. I was disturbed by the experience, especially since I have heard other creators have faced similar issues since earlier this year when, after intervention from the White House, TikTok was taken over by a new American ownership group that includes the Oracle Corporation led by Larry Ellison, a billionaire backer of President Donald Trump.
After my video on Mussolini was taken down, I put several of these questions to TikTok’s public relations department in an email. I sent them the copy of my video on YouTube along with links to several clips that had been permitted to air on TikTok including a trending pro-Mussolini dance featuring fascist salutes and videos focused on “Black fatigue” and “Jew fatigue,” two extremist memes that are as blatantly antisemitic and racist as their names suggest.
TikTok never responded to my query. However, shortly after I sent it, my video was reinstated and the various extremist clips I flagged were all taken down.
Of course, that kind of special treatment is not what we’re looking for and it’s not an answer to the larger questions here. As of this writing, there are tons of “Black fatigue,” antisemitic, and pro-fascist clips live on the platform. In fact, while individual videos I flagged were removed, an account I pointed to that is wholly focused on “blk&jewfatigue” is still publishing on TikTok.
And, even after apparent intervention from TikTok PR, another clip of mine was nearly instantly removed for an unspecified “community guidelines” violation. The video talked about how the UFC heavyweight who insulted Michelle Obama at the White House fights earlier this month became a jiu jitsu meme. Once again, I was able to share it on YouTube without incident. We’ve also had no problem posting content on Instagram.
I ended up filming a TikTok detailing this experience and sending it to the platform’s PR department with a new round of questions. As of this writing, they have not offered any response.
That wasn’t even the last of it. Another clip I made showing the questionable salute gesture one of the UFC fighters made at the White House was also taken down a few days after I posted it earlier that month. That one was removed after a copyright claim from Paramount, which has a streaming deal with UFC and is another part of Ellison’s media empire. The clip featured a few seconds of clearly newsworthy footage from the fight, which was filmed on government property. Other videos — that did not highlight the controversial nature of the gesture — were apparently unchallenged by Paramount. And, once again, this exact video of mine has no issues on YouTube. I appealed the decision noting that my usage of the footage clearly fit under the fair use exemption for news reporting. So far, my appeal has received no response.
I am far from the only content creator who has run into these issues. Ryan Broderick, who is editor-in-chief of the excellent Garbage Day newsletter, which chronicles internet culture, has written about his own experience repeatedly being “thrown in TikTok jail” since the platform’s new ownership took over.
In a conversation earlier this month, Broderick talked to me about his experience with TikTok, or, as he put it, his “least favorite relationship on the internet.” Broderick said that Garbage Day had multiple videos taken down with no explanation and that he knew other creators who were simply giving up on the platform. Like TPM, he also has not received on the record responses from TikTok to questions about its censorship policies. However, through his reporting and analysis, Broderick has been able to get some sense of the dynamics on the platform.
Broderick said that, based on his conversations, he believes accounts with six-figure followings have largely been able to dodge the aggressive AI censorship.
“My read on this is, like, if you can fight through the kind of brutal establishment of your account and you can get a big audience, TikTok will just sort of give you carte blanche,” Broderick explained.
According to Broderick, much of the censorship is taking place in what he called a “weird middle ground” of accounts with mid-size followings and regular posting schedules. And, of course, that space is exactly where small, independent media outlets like TPM and Garbage Day reside.
Broderick also believes that some of these changes to the platform have coincided with the takeover by the new American ownership group.
“We have a separate team that basically scours every platform for metrics every month. We call it ‘Garbage Intelligence.’ It’s a thing we do for our paid readers,” said Broderick. “We track month to month changes on TikTok through that. And we have noticed changes. So, I can say to you without a shadow of a doubt that the algorithm is different.”
Prior to Trump pushing TikTok to new owners, the platform was known for an algorithm that curated highly individualized feeds for viewers. But Broderick said Garbage Day has found that, following the takeover, for the first time in about three years, the same accounts consistently had the most engagement each month. And those pages were not focused on current events.
“TikTok has never wanted to be a news platform. Like it’s extremely allergic to when news happens on the platform. It always has been,” he explained.
TikTok may not ever have been designed as a news service. And Broderick doesn’t believe the worst theories that have emerged about Ellison solely censoring left-wing content on the platform are correct. However, he does suspect that the company has become a less hospitable environment for media outlets overall.
“The major line you’re seeing from a lot of people right now is Oracle is run by a right-wing oligarch with ties to Trump and they’re going to censor creators. The fact is, that’s really hard to do. Like, it’s very hard to censor a left-wing creator without also censoring right-wing creators because the stuff that they’re talking about is largely the same,” Broderick said, before adding: “But what they can do is they can make it harder, you know, for certain kinds of accounts to get started.”
Broderick also believes that, under its new ownership, TikTok is burying news — and particularly left perspectives — under “slop.”
“We saw this when Facebook got rid of the news feed — like for news content, they can emphasize dumber stuff, which is definitely what’s happening on TikTok,” said Broderick. “Instead of censoring the left, they can bury it in stupid shit. And that’s, I think, absolutely happening on TikTok.”
Welcome to the new internet. Your search results and feeds are being controlled in ways you may not have realized. AI, billionaires, and total blackouts are now part of the game.
[Product Review]
It Begins Where It Ends
Donald Trump’s son, Barron, and granddaughter, Kai, are going into the family business. The young entrepreneurs have each recently launched a beverage brand — and judging from a review of the beverages in The Guardian, they’re targeting a new generation of suckers to swallow their nonsense.
Baron’s beverage brand is called Sollos. This is what The Guardian’s Adam Gabbat had to say about it:
Sold with the vaguely threatening slogan “It begins where it ends”, Sollos says it is a “brand built around the Florida lifestyle”. Which lifestyle? Retirement home? Monster truck? It doesn’t say.
The drink’s “about” page does, however, claim that “SOLLOS is designed revolving around the cycle of the sun”, a phrase as grammatically incorrect as it is meaningless, while its creators – Trump, 20, is one of five co-founders, all of whom have spent some time in Florida – also say the drink “is built to move with your day”, a phrase I do not understand.
“Most brands launch with four flavors hoping you’ll like one of them; we have been obsessing over one flavor until it was flawless,” the website claims. The flavor they went with is pineapple and coconut, and it retails at an eye-watering $39.99 for 12 cans. It arrived, to its credit, in very nice packaging.
Excited, I opened a can of Sollos. It smelled like suncream mixed with pineapple juice. I took a sip. It tasted like suncream mixed with pineapple juice. I poured some out. It’s the color of a sort of posh apple juice, with the glass-staining sugariness to match.
It’s not for me. But then, I am not the target audience: I am neither seeking a beverage that will, in Sollos’s words, “truly fit how people in Florida actually live”, nor I am necessarily looking for something which “all started in a cabana”.
Kai Trump’s drink is Blue Raz Slush which was “inspired by nostalgic blue raspberry slushies and summertime memories”. Gabbat’s review:
Bad. It is a bad drink. Like Red Bull but with a more chemical finish, it did not taste of summertime memories – none of my memories, anyway – although I suppose one could say that it does have a bold flavor.
Both brands are likely to morph into meme coins soon so get them while supplies last!
[Galaxy Brain]
Rehabilitating Watergate
The “honorable” JD Vance spoke at an event at the Nixon Library on Thursday and had this to say about the only president forced to resign the office:
I think Nixon’s historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, its not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump Administration. There is a parallel.
[TPM Trivia]
How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?
1. What’s the too-good-to-be-true name of the Trump-donor owned company that won a no-bid contract to clean the Reflecting Pool (and seems to have completely fumbled the job)?
2. Which former Federal Reserve chair died this week?
3. What’s the title of JD Vance’s new book on his conversion to Catholicism, which has been widely panned by critics?
[Words of Wisdom]
We Won All The Damn Elections
“I think it’s ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the White House, and we’re yelling ‘election fraud’? I mean, we won all the damn elections.” –Thomas Massie
[Good Twetes]
You’re an Idiot!
Trivia answers: 1) Greenwater Services 2) Alan Greenspan 3) Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith
Correction: The answer to last week’s question “Which two behemoth media companies did the DOJ decide to allow to merge this week despite antitrust concerns?” should have been Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. We regret the mistake.
Trump Rails Against ‘Mutilization’ and People Being ‘Hatched to Death’ in Grim Speech at Evangelical Forum
President Donald Trump painted a terrifying and, at points, somewhat incomprehensible vision of the world in a lengthy speech at the Evangelical Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday afternoon.
Continue reading “Trump Rails Against ‘Mutilization’ and People Being ‘Hatched to Death’ in Grim Speech at Evangelical Forum”‘Centrists,’ This Is on You
I’ve been observing the unfolding conversation about big DSA wins in New York City on Tuesday and specifically the clout Mayor Zohran Mamdani has gained because he went three for three in congressional endorsements. It’s a complex picture and I’m generally more sanguine about what’s happening than others. As I wrote, I think Chevalier doesn’t have any business in Congress. Lander and Valdez are simply the left wing of the Democratic party and on that front even Lander and Valdez are very different candidates. I may do a separate post on Chevalier’s extremism on Israel-Palestine and, yes, Jews, as well as other issues. Important topic but not the topic of this post.
I’ve made the point a few times that our political language and mental geography assumes that there are two political spectra in the Democratic party, one that is right/centrist to left and another that is accommodation to fight. It’s often assumed that these pretty neatly line up — progs and left-wingers are up for a fight but the more center-left or liberal folks are more cautious, institutionalist or even accommodationist. And yet there’s no real connection between these two things.
So far, so good. You’ve heard me make this general point many times. But it is really on the center-left, or liberals, to make clear that this isn’t the case. And to a great degree they are not — not convincingly — though there’s been progress on this front over the last eighteen months. And in a political climate in which people are both really angry and really scared and think major change is necessary, the old rhetoric, the old posture just isn’t going to cut it. It doesn’t speak to anyone. It seems jarringly out of touch with the moment.