NEWS: Texas Tech Bans Students from Writing About LGBTQ+, Trump’s Corrupt Payoff to Ballroom Contractor

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May 02, 2026

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A note on media diet: Great journalists work at corporate outlets. The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Gizmodo broke important stories in this edition, yet operate under ownership structures that create real editorial pressure to normalize American fascism. A healthy, pro-democracy media diet draws from the full spectrum of fact-based reporting while remaining clear-eyed about who owns what and why that matters. Discernment, the kind you’d use while reading labels in the store when seeking to feed your kids, is a must.

This week, the outlets most worthy of your financial support are: Erin In The Morning, Rickipedia, Sensemaking Distortion, Mother Jones, NOTUS, The Popehat Report, and The Nation.

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Here’s what you may have missed:

Censorship / Free Speech

Erin In The Morning, Texas Tech Issues Ban On Students Writing On LGBTQ+ Topics

A new memo from the Texas Tech University System bars professors at five universities from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core courses, eliminates entire fields of study, and forbids graduate students from writing dissertations on sexual orientation or gender identity. Instructors must skip LGBTQ+ content even when it appears in standard textbooks, and “incidental references should be avoided.” AI is already being used to flag course materials for review. The student-research ban appears to be the first of its kind at any major American university system.

Why this matters: A public university system telling students what they may research in their own dissertations is a direct attack on academic freedom and the First Amendment. When the state decides which human lives can be studied and which must be erased, the machinery of authoritarianism in plain sight.

Jameel Jaffer, Post on disclosed State Department memo

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, posted a State Department action memo disclosed in Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Rubio that is the basis for canceling visas and green cards of foreign tech researchers and regulators. The memo recommends barring foreign nationals “responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States.” The memo recommends including family members because doing so will “increase the impact on the targets.” Both recommendations were approved.

Why this matters: The U.S. government is now using visa law to punish foreign researchers, regulators, and their families for studying or regulating American tech platforms. Dressing government censorship up as anti-censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian inversion, and the public would not know the criteria existed if not for this lawsuit forcing disclosure.

New York Times, Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel

Internal DHS training materials reviewed by the Times instruct immigration officers to deny green cards to applicants who criticize Israel, post pro-Palestinian content, or desecrate the American flag, even though the Supreme Court has ruled flag burning is protected expression. Officers are told to weigh “anti-American” or “antisemitic” views as “overwhelmingly negative.” Green card approvals have fallen by more than half. USCIS has begun rebranding adjudicators as “homeland defenders” in job postings asking applicants to “protect your homeland and defend your culture.”

Why this matters: The administration is using immigration law to punish legally protected speech, including speech the Supreme Court has explicitly held cannot be criminalized. The First Amendment becomes a privilege of citizenship rather than a right of being on American soil. And nativist, white supremacist dog whistles are thrown in for good measure.

Rickipedia, “An Ignorant Population Is Easier to Control”

Rick Perlstein interviews YA author Samira Ahmed about a coordinated terror campaign against children’s literature that has banned her books in roughly forty states and forced her to check into hotels under a white pseudonym after rape and death threats. Ahmed describes how Moms for Liberty turned book-banning into a turnkey operation with copy-paste complaint forms and out-of-context excerpts used to brand authors as pedophiles. School visits, which supplement the income of authors of color, are collapsing. Two children’s imprints have already shut down. HR 7661 would let the mere presence of a trans character get a book labeled pornography.

Why this matters: This is a coordinated, well-funded campaign to make Black, brown, queer, and Muslim authors disappear from American libraries.

Corruption / Self-Dealing

New York Times, Trump Quietly Gave Favored Firm a No-Bid Contract for $17 Million

The Trump administration secretly handed the firm building Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park. The Biden administration had estimated the same job at $3.3 million in 2022. To jack up the price, the Park Service twice applied an inflation adjustment and tacked on another 50 percent for a “schedule compression factor” the original estimator says he never put there. To skip competitive bidding, officials invoked a rare “urgency” exemption typically reserved for war or natural disasters, citing America’s 250th birthday. They never posted the contract publicly as required. Eight other D.C. fountain repairs announced the same month went through normal bidding and cost less.

Why this matters: A president steering inflated, no-bid taxpayer contracts to a favored contractor while hiding the paperwork is textbook self-dealing. These guys are doing corruption every dang day.

Matthew Stiegler, Post on Mike Davis and Justice Gorsuch

This Bluesky post from last fall ties right-wing legal operative Mike Davis to Justice Neil Gorsuch, noting that years ago Gorsuch helped land Davis a DOJ job, then chose him as his clerk on the 10th Circuit, then again on the Supreme Court. The post quotes another item in which Davis called House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, a “house slave” for George Soros, pairing an anti-Black slur with an antisemitic Soros trope. Davis founded the Article III Project, a dark-money, court stacking 501(c)(4) that hides its donors and, per IRS filings, funneled roughly $700,000 of its $1 million haul straight back to Davis or a business he owns. Despite being a corrupt racist, Davis was floated as a potential Trump Attorney General. He’s back in the news because according to a March 2026 Wall Street Journal investigation, he allegedly told DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you” while earning up to $300,000 a month as a paid advisor to Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Slater and her deputies were forced out shortly after, and a federal judge has now ordered Davis deposed.

Why this matters: A man who clerked for a sitting Supreme Court justice and allegedly extorted a DOJ official into killing antitrust enforcement is publicly a racist and is known to be corrupt. He is one of the most powerful unelected figures in conservative legal politics.

Mother Jones, Convicted MAGA Fraudster Should Get 30 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say

Federal prosecutors are seeking 30+ years for Guo Wengui, the Chinese billionaire who launched a “New Federal State of China” with Steve Bannon on a boat in 2020, for one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.” A jury convicted Guo in 2024 of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers, mostly Chinese immigrants who believed their “investments” would help defeat the Chinese Communist Party. Guo spent the money on an $832,000 Lamborghini, a $4.4 million Bugatti, and the $30 million yacht where Bannon was living when federal agents arrested him for unrelated fraud. Guo’s operation paid or employed Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, and current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Six victims wrote of suicidal thoughts after losing their savings.

Why this matters: Prominent MAGA disinformers with close ties to the president and his administration have been paid by a man who systematically defrauded immigrant families out of their life savings.

New York Times, Elon Musk Has Used SpaceX as His Personal Piggy Bank

Internal SpaceX documents show Elon Musk borrowed $500 million from his own rocket company between 2018 and 2020 at interest rates as low as 1 percent—well below market and the kind of insider lending banned at public companies after the Enron collapse. SpaceX has repeatedly bailed out Musk’s other ventures, lending Tesla money during the 2008 crisis, propping up the failing SolarCity in 2015, and acquiring his cash-burning AI venture xAI this year on terms that undermined the positions of longstanding SpaceX investors. A Delaware judge previously found Musk “more involved in the process than a conflicted fiduciary should be.” With SpaceX now valued at over $1 trillion and preparing for one of the largest IPOs in history, Musk will have to publicly disclose these conflicted transactions for the first time.

Why this matters: The richest man on earth has spent two decades shifting hundreds of millions between companies he controls on terms no ordinary investor could ever access, and he’s also a major federal contractor. It’s basically insane.

Washington Post, The man turning the Pentagon into a venture capital firm

Emil Michael is the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering, redirecting the military-industrial complex toward Silicon Valley. The Pentagon is now taking direct ownership stakes in private defense-tech companies and preparing to deploy up to $200 billion in federally backed loans. One of the first $620 million loan recipients was Vulcan Elements, a startup backed by 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner; a former senior defense official said Vulcan was prioritized over other firms already slated for loans. Michael sold millions of dollars worth of xAI stock in January, just after xAI signed its Pentagon deal.

Why this matters: A handful of Trump-aligned operators are restructuring nearly half a trillion dollars in annual defense spending to flow toward firms in their own networks, including Trump’s son’s investment fund. These guys are just wildly corrupt.

Authoritarian Lawfare / Rule of Law

The Popehat Report, The Comey Threat Indictment Is A Grave Embarrassment To The United States Department of Justice And The Rule of Law

Criminal-defense lawyer Ken White breaks down the April 28, 2026 federal indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on two absurd felony threat charges. The charges are based on a May 2025 Instagram post by Comey of seashells arranged on a beach to read “86 47.” Comey captioned it, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” White argues no rational person could read a former FBI director’s seashell pun, using slang for “ditch” or “get rid of,” as a serious threat against the President, and that the case will likely fail on a First Amendment challenge before any evidence is weighed. White says what’s clear to any rational observer—that the DOJ now functions as an instrument of Trump’s personal grievance and will punish protected speech.

Why this matters: The Justice Department is using fraudulent prosecution to terrorize critics into silence. A government that can criminalize a joke-post written in seashells can criminalize anything.

Surveillance

The Nation, These AI-Powered Surveillance Cameras Are Everywhere—and People Have Had Enough

Americans are fighting back against Flock Safety, a private company whose nearly 90,000 AI-powered cameras photograph passing cars and feed the data into a network that thousands of police departments and Border Patrol can query without a warrant. An analysis found over 50 agencies ran searches tied to protest activity. A Texas officer used the network to track a woman who had obtained an abortion. Since the start of 2025, more than 30 cities have terminated their Flock contracts. Santa Cruz terminated after learning state agencies illegally accessed Flock data on behalf of federal law enforcement roughly 4,000 times in five months, and Oak Park, Illinois did so after data showed Black drivers were being flagged at an 85 percent rate in a city where Black residents make up 19 percent of the population.

Why this matters: A private company has built one of the largest warrantless surveillance networks in American history and federal agents are using it to track abortion patients and protesters. Ordinary people are dismantling it city by city. We do not have to allow a panopticon. It is not as inevitable as its architects need us to believe.

ICE / Immigration

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ICE begins 2026 with high pace of arrests in Georgia

ICE has recorded more than 13,600 arrests in Georgia since Trump returned to the White House. This is more than twice the number in Minnesota despite the higher-profile operation there. Georgia now ranks fifth nationwide for ICE arrests. Driving the surge is a 2024 Georgia law that mandates local jails flag and hold immigrants without legal status for ICE pickup, even for traffic infractions. Roughly 70 percent of those arrested in Georgia have already been deported (nearly 10,000 people). The data was obtained only because UC Berkeley researchers sued the federal government to get it.

Why this matters: Mandatory cooperation laws have turned every traffic stop in Georgia into a deportation pipeline, separating American children from their parents. The ICE machine running quietly in red states is doing even more damage than the headline-grabbing raids elsewhere.

Washington Post, ICE arrests in D.C., Maryland and Virginia surge under Trump

ICE made nearly 20,000 arrests in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia in Trump’s second term through March 10, 2026. That is more than five times the number of ICE arrests made during Biden’s last full year. Despite then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s claim that 70 percent of those arrested were “convicted criminals or have criminal charges,” 60 percent had no prior criminal record, peaking near 80 percent in Maryland in February. Many arrests are happening at scheduled check-ins where people are showing up to comply with the government’s requirements. A federal judge in early December ruled the administration’s warrantless arrests in D.C. likely violated federal law, citing a “systemic failure” by top officials.

Why this matters: The administration is justifying mass arrests with criminality lies that the data flatly contradicts, and federal judges have already found the practices likely illegal. When most of those swept up have no criminal record and many are arrested while complying with the system, the program isn’t about public safety. It is about creating a climate of fear built on a white supremacist ethos. Reminder: the Trump administration is actively recruiting neo-Nazis to be ICE agents.

Disinformation / Elections

Sensemaking Distortion, Here We Go Again: Same Old Tropes, New Election

Disinformation researcher (and former WNBA player, pretty cool) Kate Starbird breaks down a viral rumor that began on April 16 when Jim Walsh, GOP member of the Washington State House and chair of the state Republican Party, posted a Facebook video claiming a “concerned citizen” found hundreds of mail-in ballots dumped near a Renton strip mall. The video racked up 300,000 views and was amplified by Sinclair-owned KOMO and right-wing accounts including Libs of TikTok. Starbird’s team has catalogued dozens of nearly identical “lost ballots in a dumpster” rumors going back to 2020. King County election officials confirmed multiple security measures that make the discovery functionally meaningless for fraud, and Walsh himself later conceded the box was not evidence of fraud. Starbird outlines their strategic disinfo playbook: seed distrust, push voter ID and proof-of-citizenship laws, prepare to contest 2026 midterm results.

Why this matters: A coordinated machine of state-level GOP officials, Sinclair-owned local news, and partisan influencers is manufacturing outrage over a fake legitimacy crisis that they require in order to suppress votes and contest results they don’t like.

Press Freedom / Government Transparency

NOTUS, The Trump Administration Is Dismantling FOIA

Twelve experts told NOTUS the Trump administration is categorically worse at FOIA compliance, with one giving Biden a D and Trump “an F-triple-minus.” Backlogs are exploding. The State Department’s grew from 21,000 to over 27,000 requests in a year. The administration has fired multiple officials in retaliation for lawful disclosures, including two ODNI staff who released a memo showing intelligence community consensus that Trump’s claims about Venezuelan gangs were wrong, and three CBP staff who objected to a scheme to dodge release by mislabeling completed assessments as drafts. The administration has installed Roman Jankowski (previously part of a Heritage Foundation effort to flood the government with thousands of “vexatious” FOIA requests targeting Biden-era employees) as DHS chief FOIA officer. More than 1,000 FOIA-related lawsuits have been filed since Trump took office, compared with 591 in the same window of Biden’s term.

Why this matters: A democracy without a working public records law is a democracy where corruption is purposefully made invisible. Slow-walking, retaliation, and filling transparency offices with officials who previously tried to weaponize them are not bureaucratic failures, but rather the deliberate engineering of an information vacuum.

Climate / Energy

Gizmodo, AI Companies Think Destroying the Planet Is an Acceptable Trade-Off for Unlimited Profits

More than 3,000 new AI data centers are proposed or under construction across the United States. A Wired analysis found just 11 of them could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, exceeding the entire nation of Morocco. A single Microsoft project in Texas is permitted to emit 11.5 million tons annually. Elon Musk’s xAI ran methane gas turbines at its Tennessee Colossus data center without permits. The U.S. has now surpassed China as the world’s biggest developer of new gas projects, even as the same AI companies driving the buildout publicly tout net-zero pledges.

Why this matters: AI corporations are quietly torching the climate to power chatbots while their PR departments keep talking up green commitments. A democracy cannot make informed choices about energy or climate policy if the public does not see the actual emissions footprint behind every product launch, which is why Gizmodo’s reporting on Wired’s reporting…is essential. The more outlets covering this the better.

New York Times, It’s the Age of Electricity and America Isn’t Ready

In this guest essay, Heatmap founding executive editor Robinson Meyer argues America’s aging electricity grid is buckling at exactly the moment demand is roaring back. For the first time in over a decade, U.S. electricity demand is steadily growing, and the largest regional grid operator is projected to set an all-time record this summer. Meyer pins rising bills not on data centers and AI, but on the cost of operating and maintaining the grid itself. He calls Trump’s voluntary “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” toothless and argues tech companies should instead be required to fund a national grid modernization fund. He also calls on Congress to pass permitting reform, end Trump’s de facto block on new renewables, and create a federal authority to build long-distance transmission.

Why this matters: Cheap, reliable electricity is a precondition for nearly every modern democratic outcome—affordable housing, climate stability, manufacturing, basic quality of life. For-profit utilities dominate grid planning, not we the people. Yet, the public pays in higher bills and slower decarbonization while massive companies shirk responsibility.

Public Health / Regulation

The Guardian, Gambling addiction ‘out of control’ as betting markets surge, advocates warn

Public health experts gathering in Boston are calling for gambling to be regulated like alcohol or tobacco as online betting has metastasized following the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision lifting the federal sports betting ban. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states and prediction-market platforms (which let users wager on award winners, war developments, and almost anything else) have exploded. More than $1 billion was traded on Kalshi during Super Bowl Sunday alone. Harry Levant of the Public Health Advocacy Institute argues “The problem is the product, not the people.”

Why this matters: A regulatory loophole has let prediction markets bypass state gaming laws and reach younger gamblers nationwide while addiction destroys families in plain sight.

Foreign Policy / War

New York Times / Instagram, The cost of the war in Iran has hit nearly $1 billion a day

National security correspondent Eric Schmitt reports the war in Iran is costing nearly $1 billion a day and has burned through U.S. weapons stockpiles. Pentagon officials are concerned that the rush to rearm Mideast forces is leaving the United States less prepared to confront potential adversaries.

Why this matters: Recklessly depleting U.S. armaments for an open-ended war wastes lives (most importantly) and degrades military preparedness using our taxpayer money. The New York Times normalizes Trump, hurts marginalized communities, and props up the status quo and yet it is also still capable of public-interest reporting like this, which is exactly why a discerning media diet matters.

The Guardian, US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN

UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told a Chatham House audience that the $2 billion a day Trump is spending on the war in Iran could instead easily fund his $23 billion plan to save 87 million lives in less than a fortnight. Instead, the UN's humanitarian budget has been cut roughly in half, driven by U.S. cuts (the U.S. has historically supplied 40-45% of the funding) and European cuts.. Fletcher warned that normalizing language like “bomb you back to the stone ages” gives “every wannabe autocrat” license to target civilians in violation of international law. He described the Trump administration as practicing “real-estatecraft” rather than statecraft.

Why this matters: The richest country on earth is spending $2 billion a day to bomb a country while letting the global humanitarian system collapse.

Information Ecosystem

M/C Journal, The Rise and Fall of Twitter as Crisis Communication Infrastructure

A peer-reviewed article by disaster informatics scholar Leysia Palen traces how Twitter, in its early years, became vital crisis-response infrastructure. Corporate decisions destroyed it. From 2007 onward, Twitter incubated entirely new forms of collective behavior during disasters: eyewitness reporting, the user-invented hashtag, and self-organized, digital humanitarian groups that coordinated medical needs after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Emergency management agencies came to depend on the platform to push warnings and listen for ground-truth reports. That infrastructure collapsed when Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022, eliminated API access, and dismantled trust-and-safety teams. Palen argues crisis communications can no longer be entrusted to a handful of Silicon Valley executives and calls for purpose-built nonprofit public media.

Why this matters: A functioning democracy depends on functioning public communication during emergencies, and an extremist billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter took out a piece of life-saving public infrastructure that was never replaced. The whims of a private corporation have disabled how global society warns itself about wildfires, hurricanes, and pandemics. An equitable public media system is the best fix.

Be sure to drop other public interest journalism and research that you saw this week in the comments so I can put add it to the next one.

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