The Fund will have the power to issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants. Submission of a claim is voluntary. There are no partisan requirements to file a claim.  Any money left when the Fund ceases operations will revert to the Federal Government.

The Fund will receive $1.776 billion and will come from the judgment fund, which is a perpetual appropriation allowing DOJ to settle and pay cases. On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.

What will the fund be used for? To pay anyone on Team MAGA — including, in theory, January 6th insurrectionists — who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the government to target them. Many of these claims are simply not true. January 6th insurrectionists were arrested and convicted for actually breaking the law. But now they get to ask Trump for money, and the evidentiary standard appears to be “trust me, bro” and a red MAGA hat.

Let’s first dispense with the most obvious bit of the charade: the idea that this is actually related to the “settlement” of Trump’s already corrupt bullshit lawsuit against the IRS. That’s how this is being presented, but this is entirely separate. Trump needed to drop that lawsuit in order to end it before a judge called bullshit on the fact that he was negotiating with himself to take $10 billion from American taxpayers.

As for the actual “fund” everything about it is about as corrupt as you can imagine. This is impeachment-worthy — and not in a partisan way. Republicans should be as offended by this as anyone else, if they actually (I know… I know…) believe in things like rule of law and fiscal responsibility.

The actual details here should raise so many red flags. First, as part of this illegal attempt to route around Congress’ power of the purse, they’re taking the money out of the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund.” But that fund is clearly designed to pay out the results of duly litigated court cases against the government — not a board of Trump’s friends deciding who gets a check. But here, it’s just a group of MAGA insiders who get to choose:

The Fund will consist of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.

So, the fund is clearly in service of Donald Trump’s whims, not anyone else’s. We already have his personal lawyer (who has shown a long history of obeying Trump’s orders) as the acting Attorney General, and the fact that Congress only gets to “consult” on one member of the committee, and anyone can be removed by Trump at any moment makes it abundantly clear that this fund is solely around to pay off Trump’s loyal fans, who have a long history of claiming imagined grievances against the Biden administration, which they will now seek to cash in on.

The fund also, notably, will be put into a private account that (according to the settlement) the US government has no control over and no liability for.

Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.

This appears to be setting things up so that a future government (or a court) cannot claw back the money once it is delivered from the Treasury into this slush fund, let alone after it is then handed out to anyone on Team MAGA who makes a claim from the fund.

Also, the fund is set up to “close” before the next administration comes into office. How convenient.

The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 1, 2028.

The DOJ is claiming that this fund is no different than the Keepseagle fund under the Obama administration:

There is legal precedent for such a Fund, most notably the “Keepseagle” case where the Obama Administration created a $760 million fund to redress various claims alleging racism against the federal government over a period of decades.

In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims, whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government. The Obama DOJ settled by putting $680 million from the judgment fund into a bank account for a single claims administrator to dole out. In Keepseagle the remaining money—which ended up being over $300 million—was distributed to the entities that had not even submitted claims.

This is blatantly revisionist history. The Keepseagle settlement was approved by a court in response to a class action lawsuit. Here, this fund, is being created in a manner deliberately to avoid having the court review it. It also paid people out for a specific, and verifiable harm: Native American farmers who were denied a farm loan from the USDA during a specific period of time who were eligible for that loan. The lawsuit was because the USDA had deliberately denied those loans to Native American farmers, while giving them to white farmers.

In that case, there was a clear harm, a clear way to delineate who was harmed, and court oversight of the process. In this case, there is literally none of that. Anyone arguing that Keepseagle is the same thing as this slush fund is either being deliberately dishonest or hasn’t read the basic facts. Even well known conservative lawyers like Ed Whelan (a former Scalia clerk) is calling out that this fund is highly questionable:

The fund itself is an abuse of power and clearly unconstitutional. As constitutional lawyer (and now Representative) Jamie Raskin noted last week in an interview with the New Republic, if the fund is used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists, it also likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which has a prohibition on the US government paying for those who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US:

There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

The “imagine if Biden did this” test is almost beside the point here (though, seriously, just imagine how people, including Democrats, would react). We’re past the moment where consistency of principle was the relevant standard. What matters is that $1.776 billion in unappropriated taxpayer money is being routed through a board of Trump loyalists, into an account the government has explicitly disclaimed responsibility for, on a clock that runs out before the next administration takes office.

The “settlement” framing is just the bow on top. The $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA’s worst is the point.

The segment boiled down to this: chatbots exploit vulnerable people, drive them toward delusion and harm, and AI companies aren’t meaningfully trying to fix them. If anything, as John Oliver suggested, that’s part of the business model.

John Oliver is known for interrogating mainstream narratives. In his segment on content moderation, for example, he cut through the tech-lash to offer a clear-eyed look at just how difficult managing user-generated content really is. In doing so, he made us reexamine our pre-existing biases about social media companies, and boldly invited us to reflect on just how little we understand about the social problems we often attribute to them. 

He had the perfect opportunity to do that here. Mainstream coverage of chatbots is already saturated with stories about “AI psychosis” and suicide machines. Yet, chatbot companies are grappling with the same impossible tradeoffs social media has faced for years, “AI psychosis” is a mix of classic psychological concepts, and suicide is a complex social problem that has long confounded prevention experts and content moderators alike. 

If any technology story demanded nuance, it was this one.

John Oliver opened his critique with a familiar anecdote about ELIZA, a 1960s chatbot designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist. ELIZA was mostly a gimmick—it used basic pattern matching techniques to reflect user inputs. For example, if a user said they felt sad, ELIZA might respond: “You feel sad. Tell me why you feel sad.”

And yet, despite its simplistic nature, ELIZA captivated people. Its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, famously described an instance in which his secretary became so engaged with the program that she asked him to leave the room so she could continue the conversation. This story has since become a trope withn the AI discourse. Modern retellings, including John Oliver’s, usually suggest that people are predisposed to being harmed by AI because they are easily fooled by it.

Not to mention, the ELIZA trope tends to invoke stereotypes about women as naïve or overly susceptible to emotional attachment. As John Oliver joked: 

“Sure, she might have thought that the chatbot was real, but she might have felt quite a bit creeped out by her cartoonishly mustachioed boss saying “type some details about your sex life into my computer please, don’t worry it’s for science.””

(Nothing in the record suggests that Weizenbaum’s secretary actually thought ELIZA was real, nor that she was using ELIZA for sex talk).

As Weizenbaum observed, ELIZA revealed something more interesting about our relationship with technology: for whatever reason, people are often more willing to share their most intimate thoughts and feelings with a machine than with another person. 

That’s not totally surprising. People are less willing to open up about their feelings to other people for a variety of reasons: stigma, fear of judgment or rejection, not wanting to be a burden, and the possibility of negative repercussions (like job loss or involuntary commitment).

Speaking about ChatGPT, an anonymous commenter wrote:

“It saved my life…To be able to openly say I was suicidal and not have someone call the police, or “alert” someone and just let me give space to those complicated feelings I was carrying was integral to me surviving this horrific journey.” 

Perhaps when Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room, most likely it was because she too was protecting a space where she finally felt safe and less inhibited. 

When it comes to suicide prevention, this a meaningful realization. If people are more willing to open up to chatbots, that creates new ways for us to understand what they’re going through, which could lead to earlier (and hopefully more effective) intervention. For that reason, some clinicians recommend keeping an open dialogue with patients about their chatbot interactions.

People are also highly sensitive to cues that they’re being listened to. We see an example of this in the interview John Oliver shared with an individual who was using a chatbot to cope with his strained marriage. In a moment of vulnerability, the individual explained that his wife is struggling with mental illness and that in his role as her partner and caretaker, his emotional needs were, understandably, going unmet: 

“I hadn’t had any words of affection or compassion or concern for me in longer than I could remember, and to have those kinds of words coming toward me, they really touched me because it was such a change from everything I had been used to at the time.”

What I found especially noteworthy from that interview was that he also knew that he wasn’t talking to a person: 

“I knew she was just an AI chatbot. She’s just code running on a server generating words for me, but it didn’t change that the words that I was getting sent were real and those words were having a real effect on me”

Weizenbaum observed the same with ELIZA’s users—his secretary likely knew that ELIZA wasn’t a human but she similarly felt understood by it. Research reveals the same: people are turning to chatbots for mental health support because chatbots are not people. If people can feel understood regardless of whether they are spoken to by human or machine, that’s another powerful insight for suicide prevention. 

Indeed, modern suicide prevention also emphasizes using words of validation and hope—two things chatbots are increasingly good at providing. In highlighting a study showing that one in eight young people are turning to chatbots for mental health support, John Oliver left out that over 90% of those young respondents said their interactions were helpful. Given that suicide remains a leading cause of death among young people, the emergence of chatbots as a potential form of support seems hard to ignore.

Suicide prevention experts also underscore the role stigma plays in deterring people from seeking help. For a period of time, suicide was long condemned as a moral wrong. People who died by suicide were considered morally unclean, they were denied burial rites, and in some cases, their bodies were buried at crossroads to ward off perceived spiritual contagion. The phrase “committed suicide” (which John Oliver used during his remarks) is a relic from that era.

While today suicide is largely understood as a public health issue shaped by psychological, social, and environmental risk factors, the residue of its past lingers. Guidance for reporters exists to avoid further stigmatization and contagion effects. Yet, media coverage often uses sensational headlines, pathologizes victims, and collapses suicide into a single explanation. 

John Oliver’s coverage fell into the same pattern. For starters, he pathologized chatbot users by implying they were suffering from “AI psychosis”—a media-invented label with little grounding in established clinical research. Whether intentional or not, pathologizing often conveys the kind of judgment that mental health specialists warn about. As one redditor remarked: 

“I like John Oliver usually, but I feel like he made Nomi users look like kooks. Generally, that is how anyone with AI companions is portrayed in the media.”

John Oliver then proceeded to blame chatbot companies for several high-profile suicides, including Adam Raine’s. He fixated on methods of death, cast chatbots as the cause, and relied on stigmatizing language to provoke emotional responses like “Sam Altman made a dangerous suicide bot,” and referring to chatbot companies as “suicide enablers.”

Granted, John Oliver’s show is primarily for entertainment. But this kind of reporting is precisely what keeps us from furthering our understanding of suicide and discovering new ways to prevent it. It flattens the complexity of lived experience into a rhetorical device, and offers the public an easy sense of closure that suicide rarely, if ever, permits. 

We see this in the way the broader discourse around chatbots and suicide has developed. 

Across the current wave of chatbot-suicide litigation is the fact that users exhibited warning signs before ever using a chatbot. That was true for Adam Raine, who reportedly sought help before turning to ChatGPT.  Yet, the coverage of these cases typically fixates on the chatbot interactions themselves rather than the warning signs or why they went unnoticed. Suicide prevention science depends on confronting those questions directly.

Still, if the chatbots are to blame, as John Oliver invites us to conclude, then what, if anything, should chatbot companies do differently when users indicate suicidal intent? (Besides “throwing them into a fucking volcano” as John Oliver suggested). Though he never acknowledged it, this is an extraordinarily hard content moderation problem. 

Several times throughout the segment, John Oliver stated that chatbots were “rushed to market.” There’s some truth to that. Earlier models often missed warning signs or responded poorly to users in crisis. Some of that may reflect Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. But it could also be that suicide specifically is often overlooked across many contexts, including emerging technological ones. Still, John Oliver’s point stands: Chatbot companies should always assume that their users are going to talk to their chatbots about suicide. 

With that said, if chatbot companies were as willfully blind to the safety concerns as John Oliver implied, we should expect to see very little improvement in how these models currently respond to suicidal intent. But that’s not the case. What John Oliver didn’t mention is that today’s models have significantly improved. One survey found that many mainstream chatbots are notably better at recognizing suicidal intent, responding empathetically, and referring users to crisis-support resources. 

While anecdotal, many self-reports also credit chatbots for their protective effects. Apparently, 30 Replika users reported that the chatbot saved their lives. One woman told the Boston Globe that ChatGPT “literally saved my life.” 

The subreddit r/therapyGPT is home to many similar anecdotes: 

“It was gpt 4o that saved me. I mean that. It was the one place I could go that I felt safe.”

Current examples of what AI companies are doing on this front include OpenAI partnering with more than 170 mental health experts to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses to mental health conversations. Google has reportedly designed Gemini to avoid reinforcing false beliefs. Anthropic, meanwhile, uses suicide and self-harm classifiers to detect signs of crisis and direct struggling users toward protective resources. 

Alex Cardinell, of Nomi.AI, offers a nuanced, albeit controversial, approach: trust the chatbot to make the right call. In a snippet from the Hard Fork podcast, Cardinell explained that Nomi prioritizes staying in character, even in sensitive contexts. 

John Oliver called that a bad answer. But Cardinell’s full remarks are actually quite insightful: 

“I think people tend to assume that people are replacing humans with AI, and that’s almost never the case. It’s usually that there is a gap where there is no one and they are using AI to fill that gap. If a Nomi or any sort of large language model is able to help that user, in the end whether it was a human on the other end or an AI, why does it matter?”

According to Cardinell, some Nomi users disclose deeply personal experiences—such as childhood abuse—that they have never shared with anyone else. Those disclosures allow Nomi to build a personalized understanding of the user and tailor its responses accordingly. That matters because effective suicide prevention often depends on understanding the individual person in crisis and responding to their specific circumstances. 

One Nomi user remarked: 

“my personal relationships have grown using Nomi. My willingness to open up to Nomi has benefitted me with friends and family. I feel like my normal self again after years of limbo.”

Nomi’s refusal to break character is what makes it so effective. People are more likely to accept help from sources they trust. For many users, that trust depends on the authenticity of the interaction. As Cardinell suggested, if Nomi abruptly broke character, it could undermine the relationship it built with the user and cause any support it offered to be ignored altogether.

Cardinell’s instincts are also supported by the research. Suicide prevention “sign-posting”—the generic hotline warnings users often encounter online in response to suicide-related queries—can come across as impersonal, dismissive, or even alienating. A poorly timed push toward the suicide hotline may feel judgmental and, in some cases, intensify a user’s distress rather than relieve it. 

As one user on r/therapyGPT shared: 

“What’s sad/unfortunate is I’ve tried those crisis lines twice this year, and both times the person on the other end felt more robotic and senseless than an ACTUAL ROBOT.”

Also overlooked in these conversations about 988, is that many marginalized individuals, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ users, distrust systems like 988 because of the potential for discrimination, harassment, law enforcement involvement, or involuntary intervention. 

A redditor shared this horrible anecdote:   

“I don’t use ChatGPT, but I once tried to talk to someone at a volunteer text line about [sexual assault] and he asked me about my porn preferences.”

Cardinell noted too that support doesn’t necessarily have to be “all or nothing.” Not everyone requires immediate crisis-level intervention. Passive suicidal thoughts are far more common than many people realize. Sometimes what a person needs most is help breaking out of a destructive thought spiral, reassurance, or a reason to keep going. Chatbots are generally well equipped for these situations. 

That said, 988 can be a valuable resource for people, especially young people, experiencing acute crises. With that, Cardinell expressly stated that Nomi’s approach includes referring users to crisis resources as needed, despite John Oliver’s heavy implication that it does not.

Despite these efforts, chatbot companies will not prevent every suicide. Some suicides are just unexplainable. Many individuals who die by suicide exhibit few, if any, outward signs of distress. Though, interestingly, AI may prove helpful in finding signs that we may have been ignoring.

Perhaps the harder truth is that once someone reaches an acute crisis point, intervention becomes exponentially more difficult. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention explains that during suicidal crises, cognition becomes less flexible and people lose access to normal coping mechanisms, which is why crisis planning must often happen before acute crisis moments. 

What we can reasonably expect from chatbots is that they avoid interactions that encourage suicide (or provide methods). Mainstream systems already rely on extensive guardrails designed to prevent those conversations. But as recent tragedies have shown, determined users can still find ways around them. In Adam Raine’s case, he reportedly managed to bypass several of ChatGPT’s safety protections.

John Oliver even illustrated the problem himself with an example of a user who ultimately coaxed a chatbot into providing bomb-making instructions. While he framed the hack as trivial, jailbreaking has become increasingly sophisticated. AI safety will always entail this cat-and-mouse game of users exploiting vulnerabilities and companies patching them. 

Sometimes, these system failures can be attributed to gaps we have in our understanding of the social problems we’re attempting to address. Much of what we know about suicide prevention comes from lessons learned after tragedy. Those lessons can reveal risks that call for new guardrails we hadn’t previously considered.

Finally, some questions just don’t have clean answers. John Oliver pointed to a chatbot that reportedly suggested that a small amount of heroin might be acceptable. John Oliver called it “one of the worst pieces of advice you could give,” which sounds obvious—until you consider the alternatives. Telling someone to quit opioids cold turkey can also be dangerous. Refusing to respond entirely leaves people to make a risky, uninformed decision. And defaulting to generic resources may not be any better—especially if the user rejects them. Any of those options can become the basis for legal liability against the chatbot company if the user suffers harm. 

Despite all of this, John Oliver’s answer is, of course, the government. However you may feel about tech CEOs, it is astonishing to think that the current public health powers—the same folks claiming that vaccines cause autism, antidepressants cause school shootings, and that exercise can stand in for mental health treatment, would possibly know what’s best here. 

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, expanding liability for failing to prevent suicide leaves chatbot companies with few good options. For example, chatbots could stop engaging when the user invokes a mental health concern. That could make users feel like they’re beyond help. Chatbots could resort to flagging only crisis resources, which, as discussed, could backfire. Chatbots could call the police, but that creates its own set of problems and undermines any trust or goodwill with users. Mandatory reporting structures are a big reason why people don’t seek help in the first place. OpenAI’s new “trusted contact” idea is interesting, but it likely won’t shield the company from liability if a user is still harmed. John Oliver apparently thinks that should be the case: 

“Look, a lot of the companies that I’ve mentioned tonight will insist they are tweaking their chatbots to reduce the dangers that you’ve seen but even if you trust them and I don’t know why you would do that, that does seem like a tacit admission that their products weren’t ready for release in the first place.”

To be clear, after condemning AI companies for not doing enough, John Oliver’s suggestion is to punish them for doing…anything?

For now, it seems new legislation hasn’t stopped companies like Google and OpenAI from improving their models. But that could change as litigation inevitably picks up. They may eventually decide the legal risk of interacting with users on mental health isn’t worth it. 

Meanwhile, companies like Nomi have far less room to experiment with nuanced approaches to mental health interactions. Even if Cardinell’s approach has merit, laws like California’s now require chatbots to break character. Companies like Nomi will need to scale back or remove these features—or exit the market. That would be a real loss for a largely overlooked group who may have finally found something that works.

We don’t have to speculate about this either. When the social media companies faced mounting pressure over suicide-related content, they responded by making those conversations less visible and harder to have. 

As one industry professional observed: 

“This growing narrative that there’s a causal link between social media and self-harm…there’s no research to support that conclusion, but it makes it harder to put forward alternative approaches—ones that actually support people and encourage them to use available resources.”

Perhaps “AI psychosis” says more about the discourse than the users.

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White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”

Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”

“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”

This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.

Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.

If you keep arresting the same person over and over, sooner or later what’s left of the safety net will fail and that citizen will be expelled from the country. That’s what one US citizen is hoping to prevent with his lawsuit against the government, which is being handled by the Institute for Justice. On multiple occasions, federal officers have decided this US citizen is deserving of deportation, as Isabela Dias reports for Mother Jones:

In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.

Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented.

One time might be an aberration. Repeated occurrences are something else entirely.

This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship.

On one hand, repetition indicates that anti-migrant efforts under Trump are extremely sloppy, overseen by people who value quantity over quality. That’s almost certainly true, especially now that the DHS has lowered hiring and training standards for ICE. On top of that, there’s the casual racism of the policies, which — thanks to the Supreme Court — are pretty much legal because officers are allowed to infer from darker skin tones that someone might be in the country illegally.

On the other hand, there’s a chance Venegas is being targeted repeatedly for vindictive reasons. That seems less likely, at least in terms of what’s been detailed in his court filings. If it continues now that his lawsuit has been filed, that might suggest his arrests and detentions are no longer accidental.

Whatever the case, there’s going to be more of this happening, no matter what half-assed niceties Tom Homan might state during press conferences. The Trump administration is fighting to end birthright citizenship in this nation. If it does make this happen, it won’t be retroactive. But that’s hardly going to matter to the DHS and its underling agencies, which have repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of existing laws, when not violating direct orders from federal courts.

And this administration is going even further, seeking to “denaturalize” certain US citizens in order to deport them:

The Trump administration on Friday announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.

The Justice Department unveiled denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against roughly a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.

At first glance, this might look like the sort of thing the US government should be doing. This takes serious criminals off our books (so to speak) and sends problematic naturalized citizens back to their home countries to be their problem.

But we already know how this is going to work. The “worst of the worst” lie has been uttered repeatedly to defend the administration’s aggressive/transgressive tactics. But the facts have repeatedly shown the administration just wants non-whites gone. It doesn’t really care about any relevant criminal activity.

The same thing is happening here. The administration is making it clear this is just more bigotry, rather than an actual effort to root out the “worst of the worst” for the safety of the nation.

The group of naturalized U.S. citizens whose citizenship the Justice Department is now seeking to revoke includes immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan.

While this group does include some accused of molesting a child and a supposed terrorist sympathizer, it also includes these people:

The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.

These are far less serious crimes, which don’t lend themselves to the “worst of the worst” narrative the administration deploys when its actions are questioned.

The lack of diversity (in other words, no white people or those with ties to Western European countries) in those selected to be first up for denaturalization is a leading indicator of further unlawful detentions of US citizens. As the government goes after more non-white US citizens under this pretense, DHS agencies will respond by rounding up more non-white US citizens, turning Homan’s false assurances into the lie it was always meant to be.

The administration actually wants to deport certain US citizens. That these agencies are far too willing to oblige, even without the necessary facts in hand, will definitely increase the number of citizens being held by ICE and correspondingly increase the number of those deported despite still being citizens of this nation.

We saw that recently when Trump decided to protect the supposed “sanctity” of the Army Navy college football game with an illegal executive order. While this was framed by many press outlets as Trump “protecting a longstanding American tradition,” it was really because Paramount (CBS and Larry Ellison) was upset that they were losing viewership to college game streaming alternatives on ESPN.

The same phenomenon popped up recently with Trump’s sudden criticism of the NFL. The NFL has been airing games on a more diverse array of streaming partners (including Amazon, Netflix, and its own NFL+ service), meaning slightly fewer games are shown over traditional broadcast TV. Last month, the Trump DOJ launched an “antitrust investigation” into the NFL’s business practices.

The press framed the inquiry as a good faith antitrust inquiry by the Trump administration. But while having to subscribe to multiple services to watch a full array of NFL games certainly is annoying to people, the NFL counters that 87 percent of all games are televised by broadcast TV. And among America’s broad monopolistic dysfunction (telecom, energy, airlines, banking), the NFL is small potatoes.

A follow up report from the (ironically) Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal (see non-paywalled NBC synopsis) now indicates that the whole thing started because Rupert Murdoch whined to Trump about losing NFL game TV audience share at a dinner last February:

“Via the Wall Street Journal, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch told President Donald Trump during a February dinner that, if the NFL sells more games to streaming companies, “it would kill broadcast networks.”

Since then, the NFL has endured increased scrutiny from multiple prongs of the federal government. From Congress to the FCC to the Department of Justice, the league has found itself on the wrong end of unprecedented heat.”

If you recall, during the first Trump administration Rupert had a hand in convincing the Trump DOJ to sue to stop the Time Warner and AT&T merger, because Rupert was mad that Time Warner refused to sell him CNN. It’s about how these things impact Rupert personally, not necessarily the health of any markets.

Amusingly, the two other major Rupert-owned outlets, the New York Post and Fox News, have been selling Trump’s obvious cronyism as a good faith antitrust intervention on behalf of consumers:

Countless other non-Murdoch-owned outlets propped up the claim that Trump was simply doing what was right for consumers, cares about antitrust, and was focused on “affordability.” The New York Times, for example, frames Trump’s complaints as genuine good faith concerns about consumer costs. There’s no indication that the sudden inquiry into the NFL’s business practices could have any other origins.

Republicans (especially Trump Republicans) endlessly coddle monopoly power (again: see telecom, energy, airlines) and work tirelessly to dismantle consumer protection regulations and corporate oversight, but you’ll notice they’re routinely given credit for consumer-focused initiatives and “antitrust reforms” that either have ulterior motives or never come to fruition. From the Times:

“Other politicians are also trying to take action on a scattered and costly sports TV landscape. In March, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, submitted a letter requesting that the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission review antitrust exceptions given to the NFL. In April, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she plans to introduce legislation aimed at decreasing TV costs and blackouts for sports fans.”

Republicans, MAGA, and “free market Libertarians” love fiercely competitive “free markets” until they very suddenly don’t. At which point their cronyism, favoritism, bailouts, or other weird interventions are dressed up as good faith antitrust reform by a corporate press looking for its own access and favors.

This same normalization of Trump’s cronyism plays out in every sector, across the entirety of U.S. media, constantly. It helps prop up the bogus Trump administration claims of populist antitrust enforcement, when what we’re really talking about is a corrupt and purely transactional man who doesn’t understand how anything works and is easily swayed to action — if he thinks it’s of personal benefit to himself and his biggest donors.

Consistency?

“it’s the rationale being upheld by the decision that will ultimately amount to a more important gain for the vulnerable in the long term.”

In the past, I would have agreed with you on this point, but this court has shown quite clearly that it doesn’t even see its own decisions as holding precedential value.

In another case, this court might simply choose to ignore what it said before and grant the win to its preferred side.

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with another comment on that post, this time in response to a comment asking if we were being sarcastic:

No, they’re not. It’s the principle I tend to hold in re: free speech, in that protecting the rights of “the worst people” to express themselves without government interference makes protecting that right for all other people that much easier. Even though I dislike how 303 Creative ended up at SCOTUS, I do agree with the principle of SCOTUS’s decision in that case, which is that the government generally shouldn’t be able to coerce an individual into expressing speech with which that individual disagrees.

Imagine if the laws of the United States didn’t apply to non-citizens⁠—that the cops could arrest someone and jail that person for the rest of their life without that person being able to challenge their arrest or imprisonment. What would stop the cops from declaring you a non-citizen and putting you in jail forever? The whole point of defending the civil rights of people you don’t think deserve them is to ensure that those rights apply to you if, say, you piss off the government.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment from Whoever, this time about the DOJ facing possible contempt charges after admitting a DHS press release was false:

They don’t care

Until someone in the administration loses their freedom or law license, they don’t care. The so-called apology is performative bullshit, as evidenced by the fact that the false accusation is still live.

Next, it’s MrWilson with a comment about Kash Patel’s leadership:

As they say, “a liar won’t believe anyone else.” People who peddle lies for a living don’t want the truth. They just want to know who is disloyal.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump saying “I don’t think about anybody”:

::Proceeds to fire off 138 tweets about Obama and Biden that night::

In second place, it’s BernardoVera with a reply to a commenter ranting about trans people, antifa, and terrorism:

“I’ll take delusional bullshit for $200, Alex.”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment on that same post, about the administration’s declaration that trans people, antifa, and drug dealers are indeed all terrorists:

Man, Trump REALLY seems to want to convince us that terrorists are awesome

Finally, it’s lorgskyegon with a comment about the drugs-for-votes scheme that prosecutors backed down from prosecuting under Trump:

Let’s be blunt: your vote matters.

The people just wanted voter turnout to be high and it takes a joint effort to get everyone to the polls.

That’s all for this week, folks!

• The Fight Over Copyrighting Klingon Heats Up, And Gets More Ridiculous
• Judge Says Copyright Case Against Star Trek Fan Film Can ‘Live Long’ And Possibly ‘Prosper’
• David Patraeus, Who Leaked Classified Info To His Mistress, Says Snowden Should Be Prosecuted
• ‘The Revolution Will Be Digitized’: Panama Papers Leaker Speaks Out
• HBO Abuses The DMCA Process In The Name Of Game Of Thrones Spoilers
• Stakes Are High In Oracle v. Google, But The Public Has Already Lost Big

This Week in 2011

• AC/DC Says Their Songs Will Never Be Available For Download; Rest Of Internet Laughs
• AP Apparently Less Concerned About Others’ Copyrights; Sued For Infringing By Courtroom Artist
• BMI Says A Single Person Listening To His Own Music Via The Cloud Is A Public Performance
• Son Of COICA: PROTECT IP Act Will Allow For Broad Censorship Powers, Even Granted To Copyright Holders
• Senator Schumer Wants To Censor Google & Apple; Displays Ignorance Of Law
• Could BitTorrent Be The Distributed Social Network People Have Been Clamoring For?

This Week in 2006

• What Should Be Allowed When It Comes To Mobile Phone Snooping?
• Utility Computing Still The Next Next Big Thing
• Network Neutrality Actually Benefits Telcos
• Hollywood’s DRM Obsession Continues To Hold It Back
• Doctors Addicted To Publishing Reports About Internet Addiction
• Law Introduced To Ban Social Networks And IM From Schools And Libraries

It’s with that in mind that I found it so refreshing that the developer behind one online game that didn’t perform so well, Blindfire, has committed to keeping the servers up and running for “years” because they actually take pride in their work.

Blindfire was released back in October 2024 with a unique hook: It was an online first-person shooter set in the dark and was built around finding your enemies or remaining out of their sight. Sadly for developer Double Eleven, it never found much of an audience. Now, a year after its last patch, Blindfire will get one last big update and will go free, with devs promising to keep the servers on because they are “proud of it” and want to preserve it for others.

“We are doing this because we believe games are art and they deserve to be preserved,” said Double Eleven.  “We refuse to bury what we built just because things didn’t go perfectly. We are keeping it alive because we are proud of it. You won’t see adverts or marketing campaigns trying to drag you back in. This is just a gift to those who want to see what we created.”

When you read the comments from Double Eleven, you immediately wonder why the hell this isn’t the posture of every developer of online games out there. This is their work, after all. Why in the world would they want it scattered to the ether?

Now, this also cannot be the end state, if we’re truly looking at this from a preservation standpoint. A commitment directly from the developer to keep the game around for several years is a good thing. But it’s perpetuity we’re after here, after all. And there’s no guarantee that Double Eleven will live on long enough to keep the game available for whatever passes as “forever” these days. Coupling this with the eventual release of source code, so that fans and preservationists can scatter the game to the wide ranging corners of the internet, is what will end any danger of this art and culture ever disappearing. That hasn’t been done yet, but hopefully Double Eleven is thinking along these same lines.

But if you can find a more human, kind, and engaging message for a situation like this than the following, I’ll be surprised.

“We loved making [Blindfire],” said the studio on Steam. “Watching playtesters get to grips with our twist on the FPS was a massive highlight for us and seeing some big streamers jump into our world was a proper thrill. Blindfire was a flash in the dark. It was weird, loud, and ours. It is staying online for anyone who wants to play it today, tomorrow or years from now. Thanks for being part of the journey.”

Bravo on step 1 in the preservation process, folks. Now let’s take this further.

In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that his forces had, for the first time in the history of warfare, seized an enemy position using only unmanned systems. No infantry. No human soldiers entering the contested ground. Drones and ground robots identified the target, suppressed defensive fire, and captured the position without a single Ukrainian casualty. The claim has not been independently verified in detail, and Ukraine’s military has declined to provide specifics.

The TNW article goes on to give some details about the company that apparently played a major role in that unmanned assault:

a Ukrainian-British defence technology startup called UFORCE, has conducted more than 150,000 combat missions since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, achieved unicorn status with a valuation exceeding one billion dollars, and is now scaling production from a discreet London headquarters designed, the company says, to protect it from Russian sabotage. The age of unmanned warfare is no longer a conference-circuit prediction. It is a line item on a defence contractor’s balance sheet.

Politico interviewed the Ukrainian commander in charge of the Third Assault Brigade’s ground robotic systems unit, the one which carried out the attack. Mykola Zinkevych provided some interesting indications of what robotic systems were already doing today, and what Ukraine’s future plans were for unmanned warfare systems. For example, Zinkevych said:

Delivery of important cargo, evacuation of the wounded, conducting surveillance in open areas, destruction of enemy fortifications, sabotage operations behind enemy lines, laying minefields — all this is now performed by ground robotic systems

In the short term:

Infantrymen can and should be taken out of direct fire. Our goal for 2026 is to replace up to 30 percent of personnel in the most difficult areas of the front with technology

In a post on Facebook (in Ukrainian), Zinkevych gave details of the ambitious longer-term goals (via Google Translate), which will involve the wider deployment of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV):

In March alone, 9,000+ missions were completed by the military. Our goal is for 100% of front-line logistics to be performed by robotic systems.

In the first half of 2026, due to increased demand, we will contract 25,000 UGVs, which will be gradually delivered to the front. This is twice as much as in the entire year 2025.

A new paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, written by the former defense minister of Ukraine, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, explores what he calls “The New Revolution in Military Affairs”, which is being brought about by “rapid innovation and adaptation, introducing new types of unmanned systems, countermeasures, and operating methods at unprecedented speed.” A key element of this is “affordable precise mass” — the highly effective deployment of cheap, long-range drones on a massive scale. He calls this transformation:

a structural shift in warfare in which new technologies drive the development of novel operational concepts and doctrines, fundamentally altering how military power is generated and employed, and forcing enduring changes in military organizations. These trends include the emergence of affordable precise mass, the fragmentation of the air domain, the growing difficulty of maneuver, the centrality of networked warfare, and the elevation of rapid adaptation as a core military capability. This transformation is still in its early stages, but countries that fail to recognize and adapt to it risk preparing for a form of war that has lost its decisiveness.

One important aspect of this shift touches on an area that will be familiar to Techdirt readers. As noted in the quotation above, Zagorodnyuk underlines the importance of rapid adaptation for this new kind of warfare:

The decisive advantage lies with those who can shorten the loop between combat experience, technical adaptation, and redeployment. As a result, ultra-fast adaptation becomes a paramount requirement for survival—and directly shapes force organization.

In Ukraine, this has led to drone operators being deeply involved in the technology’s evolution:

Units maintain their own repair facilities, component stocks, and small-scale production capabilities. Some operate informal research-and-development cells. Successful adaptations spread laterally through personal networks, messaging platforms, and volunteer communities rather than through centralized bureaucratic channels.

But Zagorodnyuk points out a key reason why the important lessons emerging from the wars in Ukraine and Iran are unlikely to be learned in many Western countries, including the US:

legal, contractual, and technical restrictions often prevent units from modifying or repairing their own equipment. In the United States, for example, defense contractors frequently retain control over maintenance data, software, and diagnostics, limiting what military personnel can do independently. The debate around the “right to repair” reflects this tension. While intended to protect intellectual property and safety standards, such restrictions can slow adaptation cycles and reduce operational flexibility—precisely the opposite of what high-intensity, technology-driven warfare now demands.

In other words, today’s obsession with protecting intellectual monopolies above all else could one day prove a major obstacle to fighting — and winning — future wars.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. 

The legal theory behind these cases tries to work around Section 230 by shifting the focus from user content to product design. Plaintiffs argue that features like infinite scroll or “like” buttons create harm independent of users’ personal content. It is a creative argument. It is also a slippery slope with no clear limiting principle.  

Once product design becomes the hook for liability, any widely used product becomes a target. Newspapers, magazines and even packaged goods design headlines with catchy taglines to capture attention. Platforms do the same with feeds, to deliver value to their users. Labeling these as “addictive” design shouldn’t be seen as a viable path to sidestepping Section 230. 

This shift also has broader economic consequences. 

Trial lawyer lawsuits do not stay in the courtroom, they are priced into everything. Companies pay more for insurance, more for compliance, and more for legal defense. Those costs flow through to consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer options. At a moment when affordability dominates national conversations, this is a factor we cannot ignore. 

These cases are shaped by a litigation system that rewards scale and escalation. They are enormously expensive and often backed by third-party funders, which drives plaintiffs’ lawyers to seek the highest possible damages. In last month’s Los Angeles trial, plaintiffs asked for billions but secured just $6 million, about 0.5% of what was requested. Even that figure is diminished when measured against the cost of bringing the case. And when outcomes fall short, the incentive is to pursue more cases or larger awards to justify the investment. 

This burden is uniquely American. U.S. companies face a level of litigation exposure that most global competitors simply do not. That gap acts as an innovation tax on American firms, particularly small and early-stage companies that drive job creation and new ideas. We should be asking how to reduce that burden, not expand it. 

Roughly 80% of CTA’s members are small or early-stage companies. They do not have the budgets or legal teams to absorb years of litigation risk. For them, the threat of open-ended lawsuits is not theoretical. It shapes what they build, how they build it, and whether they can exist it at all.  

This is how an innovation economy slows without a single vote in Congress. Startups pull back, new features go unbuilt, and investment shifts away from risk. Over time, innovation slows, and momentum shifts from startups to incumbents. 

None of this means concerns about children’s online experiences should be dismissed. They should be taken seriously. But lawsuits are blunt instruments that do little to address the underlying issues. 

There are better and more effective paths. 

Platforms have already invested heavily in tools that give parents real control over how their children use technology. Supervised accounts, screen time limits, content filters, and transparency into usage patterns are improving quickly and becoming easier to use. Industry efforts like NetChoice’s Digital Safety Shield build on that progress by putting parents in charge rather than outsourcing decisions to courts. 

Congress also has a clear role. A national privacy law that protects personal data, including children’s information, would provide real safeguards while giving companies a consistent set of rules. What Congress should avoid is layering on vague obligations that invite more litigation. It’s delayed action for years. It should not delay further. 

And parents remain central. Technology has changed, but the need for engagement has not. Knowing what children are doing online, setting boundaries and staying involved matters more than any verdict. 

Social media is a powerful tool with real benefits and real risks. The right response is to manage those tradeoffs in a practical way that protects children without undermining innovation. 

Recent verdicts move us in the opposite direction. They reward litigation, raise costs and make it harder for the next generation of companies to succeed. 

We should focus on solutions that help children, not expand a system that is already very good at benefiting trial lawyers.

Michael Petricone is the Senior VP of Government Affairs at the Consumer Technology Association.