News You Missed This Week: Musk's xAI Allows Users To Make Child Porn PLUS Trump's Public Approval Is Tanking
Sharing, donating, and subscribing to public interest journalism is literally an action you can take to fight for democracy.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Information, in the form of propaganda and lies, has turned our fellow Americans—the ‘don’t tread on me’ contingent no less—into fascism lovers, unthinkingly boarding the bandwagon of ‘comply or die’ rhetoric in the wake of Renee Good’s murder.
Meanwhile, the rest of us seem unable to connect the dots that if bad information can create fascists, good information—in the form of facts, journalism, and viral videos of ICE aggression—can reverse the indoctrination of our MAGA friends and loved ones.
I sift through the noise to provide the reporting and ideas that matter and point readers toward journalism that actually improves understanding. If this work makes staying informed or communicating with your MAGA loved ones easier for you, support it here.
Support for American fascism is the product of millions of metaphorical smokestacks pumping a haze of disinformation and xenophobia out of phones, radios, and televisions and into the minds of the American public every day. Donald Trump and his surrogates lie to us every day in a strategic effort to pollute information flow, and thereby generate toxic belief. A diseased public is a weak public without the strength to object.
But Trump can’t control all of the information all of the time. And information, like the countless videos of ICE gestapo tactics that the average American is exposed to via social media and, occasionally, mainstream outlets, is turning the tide against him.
If you feed the public toxic information, lies and propaganda, a portion of the population will come down with the type of cognitive cancer that results from constant exposure to such toxins, just as habitaully smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol is proven to increase disease risk.
So reverse the tide. Spread fact-based pro-democracy information every time you see it. Dare I say it, make American minds healthy again. The same process that has led to so much division and pain can be reversed. They flood the zone with shit. You flood the zone with facts. Don’t let up.
Share this great journalism to your social media or to your friends directly. Then take a concrete action to uplift and defend our democracy’s immune system by subscribing or donating to any of these outlets. Your support keeps truth alive.
Here’s what you may have missed:
Bucks County Beacon, Why Donald Trump Is Telling Such Obvious Lies on the ICE Minneapolis Killing
It’s puzzling. Why lie in a situation like this? Who can you hope to deceive, when evidence falsifying your statements is freely available?
…We need to come to grips with the multiple functions of obvious falsehoods like these to understand why they are made so often and so prominently, and how they serve authoritarian leaders.
First, something that seems obvious to you can be credible to others. How? Because in an era of algorithmic news feeds, we are not all getting the same news. Those with a newsfeed of nothing but MAGA influencers are in a different epistemic bubble from other people.
And they may well be in an echo chamber, in which opposing voices are so discredited that when an alternative narrative reaches them, it’s immediately dismissed.
Millions of people may not have seen the videos of the incident at all, or may have seen versions with instructions on how to interpret the visuals: she’s not turning around, she’s backing up in preparation to ram into the shooter; she’s not calmly indicating that she isn’t a threat, she’s refusing to comply with orders.
…Authoritarians can display their power by asserting obvious falsehoods, showing that they cannot be held to account. They also play to their base by showing contempt for a shared enemy, while demanding displays of loyalty and compliance from underlings.
…Other people may simply become confused by obvious lies. The competing interpretations of the Minneapolis video are diametrically opposed. Once news sites and social media feeds are sufficiently populated by these opposing views, it can feel like an overwhelming task to discern what’s really true.
And exposing a lie still doesn’t end its influence. It is easier to create an opinion with a lie than to undo that opinion when the lie is debunked, something known to psychologists as the continued influence effect.
Filling social media feeds with falsehoods to create confusion is a crucial part of the strategy that Steve Bannon, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser, called “flooding the zone with shit.” This can leave people unsure of who to trust, what to believe, or even what the issue really is.
Mother Jones, Protesters Decrying the Killing of Renée Good Know What They Saw with Their Own Eyes
Last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz invoked Orwell’s 1984 to describe this break between what millions of people saw, and what Trump and his allies insisted had taken place: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he quoted. “It was their final, most essential command.”
So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?
“I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.”
“I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.”
Mother Jones, They Want You to “Quit Demonstrating”
Two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, Rep. Roger Williams issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration’s critics in Minnesota and beyond.
“People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” the Texas Republican told NewsNation. “And until we do that, I guess we’re going to have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes or doing the right thing need to be protected.”
That’s a pretty clear encapsulation of MAGA-world’s views on dissent these days. You aren’t supposed to protest. You aren’t supposed to “yell at” or “challenge” the militarized federal agents occupying your city. And anyone who wants to be “protected” should probably just stay “in their homes.” Williams isn’t some fringe backbencher; he’s a seven-term congressman who chairs the House Small Business Committee. He is announcing de facto government policy.
Current Affairs, The Only “Domestic Terrorists” On Our Streets Are ICE Agents
This was bound to happen sooner or later. ICE agents are swarming our cities, given heavy weaponry, anonymity, and impunity. They are the largest law enforcement agency in the country, thanks to the monster budget Congress has given them. Virtually anybody can become an ICE agent with minimal training or background checks, including teenagers as young as 18, and there have been multiple cases of ICE officials with ties to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups that were only discovered after years on the job. Good isn’t the first person they’ve shot; there have already been nine others since last September. Earlier in Minneapolis, ICE agents stormed into a school, “began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.” In Louisiana, a detention officer recently pleaded guilty to sexually abusing prisoners at an ICE facility. And those are the crimes we know about.
Slate, You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.
Slate reporter Laura Jedeed says she attended an ICE Career Expo and underwent less than a six-minute interview with minimal questions, only to receive a tentative job offer from ICE despite not completing required paperwork or background checks and seeing her status listed as “Entered on Duty.” DHS has disputed that she was ever officially offered a job, calling her claims a mischaracterization of a “Tentative Selection Letter,” but Jedeed posted video evidence of what she interpreted as a final offer. She argues that her experience reveals extremely lax screening and vetting practices in ICE’s recruitment process, raising concerns about who might be entering the agency’s ranks.
Robert Reich, How To Mobilize America Against Fascism
Here’s what you can also do: Mobilize your employers, your organizations, and your congregations — anywhere you work, any group of which you’re a member — and get them to use their influence to end this barbarity.
Organize your fellow employees, retirees, alumni, and congregants. Get them to help you pressure trustees, directors, and heads of every major university, professional association, charity, and foundation. Every corporate CEO or managing director. Every religious leader.
Push everyone with any formal authority in this nation to speak with clarity and conviction against what is happening, and to commit themselves and their organizations to ending this scourge.
Incisive commentary that takes a clear-eyed look at the facts on the ground and seeks to arm folks with ways to take action is precisely what we need more of in our public discourse.
The Intercept, Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota
…More than one agent has been caught on camera in recent days invoking the idea of “learning” a “lesson.” In a video posted to TikTok, one federal agent warns two separate people in separate vehicles that they have not learned the lessons of recent days — an apparent allusion to the killing of Good.
“You don’t fucking learn — what’s fuckin’ happened in the last couple of days,” the agent says to someone as two other agents pat down the occupants of a car. Seconds later, the agent approaches a woman filming from a second vehicle and issues a similar warning.
“Listen, have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” says the agent, who was clad in tactical gear without any insignia identifying his agency. “Have you not learned?”
…In multiple instances, agents can be heard accusing protesters of impeding their efforts. Filming the police, though, is not a crime. A majority of courts repeatedly and across jurisdictions have held that there is a constitutional right to record police and other law enforcement carrying out their duties in public places, so long as an observer doesn’t interfere with officials and complies with reasonable orders, such as keeping a safe distance.
Mother Jones, ICE’s Violence Is “By Design” Under Trump
“They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things,” said Scott Shuchart, who previously worked at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS and more recently as ICE’s assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy under the Biden administration. Violent interactions with the public aren’t surprising, he added. “That’s sort of by design.”
Dan Gividen, an immigration lawyer who acted as deputy chief counsel for ICE’s Dallas field office between 2016 and 2019, compared what the agency is doing as akin to running into a crowded movie theater and yelling “fire.” “You’ve got these ICE officers that are pouring out of these vehicles, pointing guns at US citizens—people who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong—and causing chaos.”
The New Republic, Joe Rogan’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump ICE Raids Hands Dems a Weapon
“Are we really gonna be the gestapo?” Rogan asked. “Where’s your papers—is that what we’ve come to?”
Rogan has targeted ICE constantly. He has repeatedly denounced ICE arrests of day laborers outside Home Depot and at construction sites. He has sharply criticized the arrests of noncriminal immigrants. He has attacked ICE for “scaring the shit out of everybody” and for “arresting people in front of their kids.” Other star podcasters who reach large, mostly male audiences have said similar things.
All this suggests again that ICE’s brutality—and Trump’s—has achieved an extraordinary level of penetration into the culture, reaching into online spaces where people who aren’t fixated on politics hang out.
This is its own important development, and there is mounting evidence of it everywhere…
“In testing of 15 viral videos about the Minneapolis shooting, raw eyewitness footage and straightforward reporting consistently drove meaningful increases in Trump disapproval,” reads the memo, which I’ve obtained, though it also says some ideologically charged messages were less effective.
Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, Whether It Is ICE or Local Police, the U.S. Has Normalised Anti-Democratic Law Enforcement Practices
But the tactics used against Black communities can be transferred to other communities, often with slight modifications. Remember when the New York Times describing teenager Mike Brown who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 as “no angel”? Or when then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000 released the sealed juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond, a 26 year-old Black man killed by police, saying of the victim “he was no altar boy.” (For good measure Dorismond, it turned out, had attended the same Catholic high school as Giuliani had in fact, once been an altar boy).
So it was no surprise that within an hour of Ms. Good’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described the victim as a “domestic terrorist.” The disgraceful FOX News host Jesse Waters, smugly described Good as “a self-described poet, with pronouns in her bio...[who]… leaves behind a lesbian partner.” In MAGA world that is how they signal to their base to turn off the empathy - that this white woman is not worthy of your sympathy – not worthy of protection.
Ken Klippenstein, Exclusive: Secret ICE Programs Revealed
The media is telling a certain story about ICE, giving the blow by blow on the most public horrors but never quite seeing the bigger picture that it’s part of a larger war. As a military intelligence source told me, the ICE crackdown isn’t just about immigration; it’s about gathering intelligence in support of Trump’s war on cartels — as well as on Antifa, on the radical left, and those who are “anti-American,” and anyone else they consider terrorists. And since the administration has been so quick to label everyone, including Renee Good, terrorists, it’s no wonder they think they’re at war…
Opposition to ICE’s conduct following Renee Good’s death has spread throughout the Department of Homeland Security, as I previously reported. The discontent is also affecting the Justice Department, with several top federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigning over pressure to investigate Renee Good’s widow. Meanwhile, the FBI is itself increasingly split, the political part reportedly investigating Good’s ties to activist groups that the Trump administration labels extremist.
The Guardian, How a billionaire with interests in Greenland encouraged Trump to acquire the territory
More proof for the public record that Trump is enriching his buddies and betraying his promise to avoid foreign entanglements.
One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”
…The businessman, Bolton learned, was Ronald Lauder. Heir to a makeup fortune – the global cosmetics brand Estée Lauder – he had known Trump, a fellow wealthy New Yorker, for more than 60 years.
…After the billionaire’s intervention, a White House team began to explore ways to increase US sway in the vast Arctic territory controlled by Denmark.
The proposal seems to have stirred Trump’s imperialist ambitions: eight years on, he is mulling not just buying Greenland but perhaps taking it by force.
Like many of those around the president, Lauder’s policy suggestions appear to intersect with his business interests. As Trump has ratcheted up his threats to seize Greenland, Lauder has acquired commercial holdings there. Lauder is also part of the consortium whose desire to access Ukrainian minerals appears to have spurred Trump to demand a share of the war-torn country’s resources.
Journalism like this is essential to public understanding of the devastating consequences of electing Donald Trump.
Cal Matters, California investigates Elon Musk’s AI company after ‘avalanche’ of complaints about sexual content
xAI reportedly updated its Grok artificial intelligence tool last month to allow image editing. Users on the social media platform X, which is connected to the tool, began using Grok to remove clothing in pictures of women and children.
…Research obtained by Bloomberg found that X users utilizing Grok posted more non-consensual naked or sexual imagery than those of any other website. In a posting on X, Musk promised “consequences” for people who made illegal content with the tool. On Friday, Grok limited image editing to paying subscribers…
“Real women are having their images manipulated without consent, and the psychological and reputational harm is devastating,” the San Ramon Democrat wrote. “Underage children are having their images used to create child sexual abuse material, and these websites are knowingly facilitating it.”
Evidence of concrete harm from deepfakes is piling up. In 2024, the FBI warned that use of deepfake tools to extort young people is a growing problem that has led to instances of self harm and suicide. Multiple audits have found that child sexual abuse material is inside the training data of AI models, making them capable of generating vulgar photos. A 2024 Center for Democracy and Technology survey found that 15% of high school students have heard of or seen sexually explicit imagery of someone they know at school in the past year.
Los Angeles Times, Anti-ICE protester blinded by federal agent during demonstration in Santa Ana, family says
In the video, at least one agent appears to fire nonlethal rounds at the crowd, hitting one woman in the leg before aiming and striking Rummler’s face.
The video shows Rummler dropping to the ground after being shot, holding his face as the crowd retreats. The same agent then drags him by the hood of their jacket; they appear to be choking, grasping at the jacket binding their neck as blood pours from their left eye.
Another video shows Rummler inside the building, lying on the ground bleeding while agents fire what appear to be pepper balls at the back of the head and neck of a man trying to record the incident with his cellphone.
Rees said her nephew told her that the agents pressed his face against the pool of blood and did not immediately call paramedics.
“The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye,’” she said, recalling what her nephew told her…
“This constitutes as deadly force as far as the law is concerned,” said Ed Obayashi of the video. The Modoc County sheriff’s deputy and legal advisor to police agencies, who has testified in similar cases, said that “all the training manuals and [legal] cases say you don’t aim at the face because these projectiles can cause serious injury [or] death.”
Obayashi said, based on law enforcement use-of-force standards, an officer can deploy deadly force if they feel their life is in imminent danger, or that they are in danger of great bodily harm.
“I just don’t see that here,” he said.
LA Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong interfered with his newsroom’s independence ahead of the 2024 election in order to aid Trump’s re-election bid. But well-funded newsrooms with dedicated reporters like the LA Times are able to get experts on the record who help us understand the lawlessness of the Trump regime. It’s a complicated time to be a news consumer. Donate to the other outlets in this list before subscribing to the LA Times.
MS NOW, How the money in ICE’s ballooning budget could have been used to help Americans
But OBBBA gave ICE (and other immigration-related departments) far more than that: $45 billion over four years to expand its detention facilities and about $30 billion for staffing and bonuses. With just those increases (and setting aside other, smaller additions), ICE stands to have a budget of about $30 billion during the fiscal year that began in October.
…The administration has already articulated how it intends to spend that money. It aims to hire 10,000 new agents and double its detention capacity to 100,000 people. But what if, instead, we diverted that money away from a punitive effort to uproot immigrants and toward assistance for Americans in need?
I pulled data on several social programs, estimating both how many people received benefits from those programs and how much they cost, allowing me to determine roughly how much each recipient of benefits got on average during a year….
…just under $30 billion could do a lot of good for a lot of people over the course of a year. It could fund about a third of SNAP payments (that is, food stamps), the entire school lunch program, nearly all Section 8 housing vouchers, the entire Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), including state spending, a quarter of federal spending on K through 12 education and a fifth of the costs of disability insurance.
…But that’s not how the government plans to spend the money. What we got for our investment in the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, and ICE last year was 605,000 deportations and tens of thousands of arrests. Of those arrested by ICE and held in ICE detention, the majority have no criminal convictions — and more have no criminal records at all than have convictions or pending charges. Analysis by Syracuse University’s Austin Kocher shows that 92% of the increase in ICE arrests and detentions came from targeting those with no criminal history.
Many Americans hold deep cynicism for mainstram media. And cable news broadcasts are definitely the equivalent of sugar in an information diet. But here we see the need to still consult fact-based reporting that is still regularly produced by these newsrooms. The perspective of what we could be doing to benefit the American people with ICE funds, rather than terrorizing them, is essential for Americans to understand.
Freedom of the Press Foundation, FBI ignores federal law to raid journalist’s home
“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.
“The government has said that Natanson is not under investigation, nor should she be for simply reporting information provided to her by sources. Even the Trump DOJ’s guidelines on searching reporters’ source materials (which were weakened from prior guidelines based on the administration’s proven lies about “fake news”) make clear that it’s a last resort for rare emergencies only. The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation and, if investigators are able to access them, we have zero faith that they will respect journalist-source confidentiality.”
Just a terrifying turn of events that is out of the authoritarian playbook. Journalism can come from many places, including advocacy orgs like the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The Guardian, Ex-FDA workers warn Trump cuts will increase risk of food safety lapses in US
Sweeping cuts and the “politicization of science” inside the Food and Drug Administration have increased the risk of safety lapses across the US, former agency workers warned.
Less than a year after Donald Trump returned to power, and his administration oversaw the firing and resignation of thousands of FDA employees, a listeria outbreak that killed six people and sickened 27 across 18 states due to contamination of prepared pasta meals underlined the danger posed by safety failings.
“Those kinds of things are going to keep coming,” said David Harbourt, a former veterinary safety manager at the FDA, who was fired last year. The agency’s work “has been compromised for at a minimum, the short term, hopefully not the long term”, he claimed. “But it’s those aspects of American people’s lives that we almost take for granted that are going to be affected in a very negative way in the coming years.”
Share other great journalism you saw this week so I can put it in the next one. Be sure to check out my Bluesky lists for an easy way to find pro-democracy journalism and commentary in just minutes each day.
Quick reminder: You don’t have to navigate our broken information ecosystem alone. I help people understand what’s really going on by pointing them to fact-based reporting and expertise from trustworthy sources. Paid subscribers make it possible for this work to remain available to everyone. To become a paid subscriber click here.
Great article!