THIS IS JOURNALISM: Somalis Are Human Beings, Not Garbage AND Human Beings Reject AI Data Centers
Stories you might have missed this week. Following, sharing, donating, and subscribing to public interest journalism is literally an action you can take to fight for democracy.
Good afternoon, everyone. People don’t understand that journalism is the whole ball game. If we are unable to find credible information we are forced to rely on mis- and disinformation to shape our understanding. We see the repercussions of this every day as our MAGA friends and loved ones consume a toxic media diet that causes them to cheer on a sexually abusive habitual liar as he literally makes their lives harder.
Being well-informed is the first step in reclaiming our democracy. That’s why journalism is so important. That’s why we have to fight for it.
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.
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Here’s what you may have missed:
The Washington Post, Minnesotan Somalis like me are not ‘garbage’
MAGA leaders seek to consolidate power by feeding their base hate and resentment, as seen by Trump’s disgusting, dehumanizing attacks on Somali immigrants. Letters to the editor can forcefully push back on divisive political rheotric by exposing readers to perspectives they might not otherwise access, fostering community, understanding, and connection. The below letter from a Somali American elevates an essential, humanizing perspective to the national level.
I grew up in Minnesota. It is where I learned to ride a bike, where I first laced up a pair of ice skates and where I stood shivering beside a frozen lake learning how to ice fish with neighbors who treated me like family. Minnesota, with its lakes, its kindness and its ethic of hard work, shaped me. It is the bedrock of my American story.
Like many immigrant kids, I believed in America’s promise: that through faith, discipline and perseverance, you can build a life of dignity and purpose. That belief carried me to Georgetown University, where I graduated with honors, and it led me to found businesses, including a Minnesota-based start-up. Every step of my journey has been rooted in gratitude for the opportunities this country gave me.
That is why President Donald Trump’s references to Somali immigrants as “garbage” struck me so deeply.
The Somali community in Minnesota contributes about $67 million in state and local taxes every year, according to estimates made by Concordia University economist Bruce Corrie.
Let us be clear about who Somali Americans are: We are teachers, entrepreneurs, veterans, engineers, rideshare drivers, homeowners and college students. We raise families, volunteer in our neighborhoods and contribute daily to the vitality of our cities. We embody the Minnesota values we grew up with: resilience, hospitality, humility and grit.
Somali Americans are not “garbage.” We are not outsiders. We are Americans.
Abdullahi Asir, Seattle
Of course, this comes via the Washington Post whose owner, Jeff Bezos, has repeatedly interefered with the independence of his newsroom in favor of Trump. It’s another example of how complicated our information ecosystem is. Journalists at the Post are doing great work, lifting up essential perspectives and reporting momentous stories like Pete Hegseth’s “kill everybody” order, while the newsroom simultaneously succumbs to the corrupting pressures of its owner.
More Perfect Union
Starke County, Indiana voted 75% for Trump in 2024. But now they’re opposing Trump’s AI agenda, and the Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend a 12 month pause on new hyperscale data centers.
The idea of banning AI data centers is becoming more and more popular.
Watch this amazing report:
Covering Planning Commission meetings is the essential stuff of journalism and democracy, but this type of reporting is dying with the loss of local news across the country. More Perfect partnered with a local independent journalist, UplandSandy, for this story, giving a hyper-local issue a national audience. Citizens can be inspired to take action when they see others standing up to corporate power.
Associated Press, Trafficked, exploited, married off: Rohingya children’s lives crushed by foreign aid cuts
Severe cuts to foreign aid this year have shuttered thousands of schools and youth training centers for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Aid workers and families report increases in child marriage, child labor, exploitation, and other abuses among Rohingya children since the cuts. Children as young as 10 are working and girls as young as 12 are being forced into prostitution. The reductions are driven in part by the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, which has crippled child protection programs worldwide.
Though the U.S. spent just 1% of its budget on foreign aid, Trump dubbed USAID wasteful and shut it down, a move that has proven catastrophic for the world’s most vulnerable. In Myanmar, the AP found the aid cuts have caused children to starve to death, despite U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement to Congress that “No one has died” because of the dissolution of USAID. A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.
Journalism like this is essential to public understanding of the devastating consequences of electing Donald Trump.
The Guardian, ‘It’s not a coincidence’: journalists of color on being laid off amid Trump’s anti-DEI push
Journalists of color at outlets including CBS News, NBC News, and Teen Vogue say they were disproportionately laid off while white colleagues were reassigned. This is occuring as companies roll back diversity efforts amid the Trump administration’s racist, anti-DEI push.
The piece ties these disproportinate dismissals to broader corporate and regulatory pressure, including FCC scrutiny of media companies’ diversity initiatives and Skydance’s promise in merger filings to eliminate Paramount’s DEI programs.
This story is important because our government is actively pursuing a white supremacist agenda. When media companies fall in line with this agenda, public understanding suffers as audiences receive news with less diversity of perspective.
For more on our white supremacist government read This is what a white supremacist administration looks like from Paul Waldman and Joseph Dye at Public Notice.
The party of today, embodied as it is in Donald Trump and the administration he leads, is no longer so worried about being called racist, because it has unashamedly taken white supremacy as its cause.
You can support and uplift Black-led media by reading and subscribing to Capital B. Comment below with suggestions of other great news orgs and journalists to uplift.
Jacobin, Big Pharma Can Tweak Drugs to Keep Generics Off the Market
Large pharmaceutical companies are exploiting the U.S. patent system by filing secondary patents with minor tweaks in order to delay competition from generics. This practice has kept prices high on widely used drugs like Eliquis, Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus, generating billions in additional revenue while preventing cheaper alternatives from hitting the market. The piece argues that reforming patent extensions is necessary to allow generics to enter the market sooner and reduce drug costs for patients, insurers, and public programs.
Classic journalism exposing the greed and harms to the public of bad corporate actors.
The Guardian, Jared Kushner – and three Arab monarchies – are at the heart of the Paramount-WBD bid
The piece details Jared Kushner’s involvement in the proposed Paramount-Warner Brothers/Discovery deal and the obvious appearance of corruption based on his political ties and sources of funding. After those ties were reported in pieces like this one, Kushner withdrew from the deal. That outcome reflects the basic function of journalism: exposing the actions of powerful people and, at least occasionally, forcing accountability.
This Guardian piece is an opinion column grounded in documented facts, financial relationships, and reporting. Honestly, it’s weird that so much of modern journalism feels the need to label factual information delivered with a point of view as anything other than “news.”
Popular Information, The AI industry’s $100 million play to influence the 2026 elections
A group called Leading the Future has already raised more than $100 million from figures like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale (who recently said we should bring back public hangings) to sway the 2026 midterm elections. The group’s stated goal is to support “pro-AI candidates.” Popular Information chief Judd Legum claims Andreessen Horowitz “essentially bought an executive order for $100 million.” (see video below)
Great journalism informs us of how wealthy special interests excersize their outsized ability to influence political outcomes.
Mother Jones, Another Big Reason to Worry About Bari Weiss’ Tenure at CBS News
This column from David Corn touches on themes in my work. Truth is decaying. Meanwhile technology allows disinformers to spread lies and deepfakes ever more effectively. The tension between low public trust in media and the societal need for trustworthy information must be resolved. But how?
Like many in the non-mainstream media, I have long been critical of various aspects and actions of major news outlets, while recognizing they often produce wonderful and consequential works of journalism. Yet as the AI Matrix approaches, my hunch is that we are going to need large institutions with influence and reach (no matter if their audiences are smaller than they once were) to help us prevent the truth from being wiped out by a flood of lies. As consumers of information, we will have to learn not to accept the first impressions caused by AI disinformation and wait for confirmation—an exercise humans are not well designed for…And we will need somewhere to turn for guidance.
Talking Points Memo, Underground Legal Clinics Offer a Lifeline to Migrants Facing Mass Deportation
In a Manhattan church basement, volunteers connect immigrants with support services. New Sanctuary Coalition builds multilingual teams and court accompaniment programs to help immigrants facing enforcement actions by ICE. It’s part of a broader network of advocacy groups in New York City providing legal guidance and support.
The Trump administration also directed judges to stop granting deferred deportation orders to youth who are in the process of applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile status. The organizer laid out the trap this creates for these young migrants.
“So, the courts have declared that they’re abandoned. They come from horrible situations, they’ve got nobody, and they’ve got to come up with money from a job they don’t have legally,” the organizer said. “They’re exploited as food service delivery guys, or construction guys. … They’re exploited with bad working conditions, and low pay, and they have to come up with a fee, and they have to stay underground for five or six years until the visa shows up.”
This a perspective on the crises and exploitation facing immigrants that the general public doesn’t often see reported in media.
ABC News, Energy bills in US have increased 13% since Trump took office, new report finds
The amount of money Americans are paying for their energy bills increased by 13% in 2025 after Trump took office, according to a report from Climate Power using U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
The report pointed to the massive spending bill Trump signed in July, which it claims is “driving up utility costs and destroying jobs by removing cheaper, cleaner energy sources from the grid, all while funding new tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.”
Projects that were canceled or delayed since Trump’s election have led to a loss of 24,958.5 megawatts of planned energy generation, which could have powered more than 13.17 million homes, according to the report.
Prices are expected to spike even further, especially as rising energy demands are driven by data centers and extreme heat, the study said.
“A lot of it is data centers,” according to Mark Wolfe, co-director of the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate.
Jacobin, In Media MergerMania 2025, We All Lose
Consolidation of media under a small number of powerful owners reduces competition and limits opportunities for artists, filmmakers, and workers. These deals have already led to job cuts and cutbacks at legacy outlets.
Warner Bros. has been at the center of three of the biggest media mergers of all time—and for what? As Fonda writes, these mergers have just resulted in “fewer jobs, fewer opportunities to sell work, fewer creative risks, fewer news sources, and far less diversity in the stories Americans get to hear.”
Newsweek, Trump DOJ Handling of Pam Bondi’s Brother’s Cases Raises Eyebrows
Democrats in the House and Senate are expressing concern that the Department of Justice inappriately interfered in cases involving Pam Bondi’s brother, attorney Brad Bondi. They cited several decisions and interventions involving Brad Bondi’s clients that raise ethical concerns about proper barriers being in place to separate the attorney general from her brother’s matters. The lawmakers have requested that the DOJ produce related communications and records by January 2, 2026.
…in August 2025, in a case in which Cruise Lines International Association filed suit against the Hawai‘i Department of Taxation and the State of Hawai’i, Bondi represented one of the plaintiffs. The DOJ intervened, essentially on behalf of that client, the Democrats wrote, potentially altering the course of proceedings.
Other cases included two in August, in which the DOJ dropped charges under the Biden administration. One saw federal prosecutors in Missouri voluntarily drop wire fraud charges against property developer Sid Chakraverty, while in Florida, former Republican lawmaker Carolina Amesty also saw fraud charges dropped.
The Democrats also referred to a pardon granted by President Trump earlier this year to one of Bondi’s clients, Trevor Milton. The Utah billionaire was convicted of federal securities fraud and wire charges, but Trump’s intervention meant he avoided a four-year prison sentence.
Pam Bondi has a history of corrupt behavior. This is an extremely important matter pertaining to the rule of law that I first saw reported by Law360. However, their story exists behind a paywall. Newsweek was the only other outlet that I could find covering this. I cannot generally recommend Newsweek as their ownership has installed a MAGA activist to run their Opinion section.
Daily Beast, How Newsweek Has Gone Down the Far-Right Rabbit Hole
It’s an example of how thorny it is to navigate our toxic information ecosystem. Essential information for the public to know is only being delivered by two outlets, one of which consistently employs hyper-partisan and misleading frames. This Newsweek reporting on this story is accurate and fair, which might mislead the public into thinking the rest of their coverage is accurate and fair. Sigh.
Did you like this? Let me know in the comments. And 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. You can literally beat Aaron Parnas to breaking stories with these lists!
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