Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There’s a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal.
California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, and result in layoffs, higher consumer prices, and product quality hits as the merged company attempts to pay down a massive debt load. As we’ve previously mentioned, every deal involving Warner Brothers has resulted in such an outcome.
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted a 14-day restraining order after hearing arguments from both sides last Friday. The delay has the potential to be doubled as the courts debate the merits of the state antitrust case. Such delays can sometimes prove fatal for transactions of this size, resulting in mergers being scrapped before antitrust litigation can fully debate the deal merits.
“Plaintiff States’ showing at least demonstrates that serious questions going to the merits remain, weighing in favor of preliminary injunctive relief,” the judge wrote. “Paramount and Warner Bros. will continue to operate as separate, viable companies competing in the marketplace while they wait for the Court to adjudicate this case. The balance of equities, combined with the public’s vital interest in antitrust enforcement, therefore tips sharply in favor of the requested injunctive relief.”
Paramount had previously indicated that the company wouldn’t be harmed by delays until at least the end of September, at which point things could get complicated for Paramount’s merger, and Larry Ellison’s broader media domination ambitions.
Ellison and Oracle are aggressively over-leveraged on AI, and should an AI bubble pop trigger economic reverberations during the antitrust debate, Ellison’s ability to manage the deal debt load and financing could prove less tenable. Especially given that as of September 30, Paramount has promised shareholders a “ticking fee” compensation amounting to about $7 million per day if the deal isn’t closed.
As the antitrust lawsuit loomed, Paramount executives seemed increasingly desperate to rush the deal to completion, at one point (falsely) threatening to leave California, and at another point (falsely) claiming that opponents of the deal were engaged in antisemitism.
There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played in Brooklyn for over five decades at that point. The league, at one point, tried to bully a local Little League for using the names of MLB teams, but not their logos, which is something that roughly every Little League team everywhere does. It attempted to trademark the names of three cities in which MLB teams play. And, my personal favorite and most appropriate for this post, the league opposed a finance company’s trademark application because it claimed two of its separate teams both owned the rights to the letter “W”.
The real lesson in all of this is that the League can’t be trusted with anything other than very narrow trademarks. Anything more broad than that causes them to act the fool. And perhaps this is a lesson the USPTO has actually learned, given that it recently denied MLB’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Play Ball”.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied MLB’s application to trademark “Play Ball” for clothing, the USPTO wrote in a final action filing on Friday.
“In this case, the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment,” the USPTO wrote in its denial.
The USPTO also wrote phrases “that merely convey an informational message are not registerable.”
Those are things that MLB’s well-dressed lawyers absolutely know, of course. But they attempted to bank on a complacent trademark office to try to sneak one past the goalie anyway, to mix metaphors. And if the league had gotten the mark, you can be one hundred percent certain it would have gone on yet another bullying campaign targeting apparel makers, other sports leagues, and who knows who else.
In fact, the most surprising part of all of this is that it appears to have taken 4 years for the USPTO to reach this decision. Josh Gerben breaks it all down like this.
Gerben said the rejection and public domain nature of phrases could depend on the class. Other companies have trademarked “Play Ball,” including a food company for bubble gum, a minerals company for surfacing playgrounds and “The Play Ball” for the gala fundraiser for the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
“In this case they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning,” Gerben said. “For a clothing brand, the government doesn’t think it’s unique enough to be registered.”
Somehow, some way, we have to get past this practice of looking at trademarks as some kind of retroactive profit center, where a business gobbles them up and then corners a market that was already in existence. That’s all that this sort of attempt to lock up language is. The term “play ball” can be associated with Major League Baseball, certainly. It can also be associated with other sporting activities, or business negotiations, or any other number of things. That’s because it has become a generic phrase, no longer an identifier of the source of a good or service.
Again, MLB’s lawyers knew all of this before applying for the mark. They just didn’t care.
Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness.
What happens to these spaces when adults are given permission to inspect a child’s body to determine their gender?
The Supreme Court rulings on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. decided that transgender girls cannot play sports that align with their gender identity. Not only does this ruling essentially prohibit transgender kids from participating in most youth sports – codifying the exclusion this vulnerable population already experiences – it also puts all children at risk of the harmful consequences of body surveillance.
I am a social work scholar who studies LGBTQ+ belonging and organizational climate. I’m also a former NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete, and I know firsthand what it’s like to have uninvited scrutiny of your body because strangers doubt your gender.
Based on my research and experience, when policies allow for the bodily surveillance of children, all children are at risk of losing the benefits of youth sports – not just transgender children.
Youth sports can help children improve their sense of competence and confidence. They offer opportunities to practice life skills, such as setting goals, solving problems and thinking positively. Sports can also help protect against depression and stress by bringing supportive adults and positive role models into children’s lives.
However, when youth sports environments become overly stressful, unfair or humiliating, they can also serve as grounds for potentially harmful experiences. For example, coaches and parents can negatively affect a child’s body image by repeatedly criticizing their weight. Teammates and peers can also pressure each other in destructive ways.
The developmental value of youth sports depends on the environment it creates. It stands to follow that ensuring youth sports spaces have as many positive influences as possible is in the best interest of all children.
Research suggests that policies legalizing bodily surveillance are not a positive influence for any child in youth sports.
Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm
Bodily surveillance plays out in significant ways for all children in youth sports, not just transgender youth. Policies that legalize bodily surveillance for youth open the door to causing harm in unsuspecting children.
Researchers define bodily surveillance as “viewing the body as an outside observer” through active judgments of a person’s physicality, superficial appearance or perceived gender presentation. While bodily surveillance claims to regulate women’s sports in the name of fairness, experts contest the scientific basis of these claims.
Women’s sports have been the site of bodily surveillance for decades, and the cisgender women involved in those sports are all too awareof the ways their bodies are judged through the lens of sexism. Often, how their bodies are judged are influenced by a definition of femininity based primarily on white bodies.
Bodily surveillance can involve assessing how tall is too tall for someone to be a girl? How strong is too strong? How fast is too fast? Who decides when a child exceeds that threshold, and what happens to that child if they do?
Children who compete at the top of their division or class will have to contend with invasive procedures. To evaluate claims of unfair advantages, strangers may request hormone or genetic testing to look for common biological variations that cisgender children and their parents may not even be aware of. Testing may also include genital or pelvic inspection to look for the presence or absence of a penis, or even transvaginal ultrasounds to detect the presence of ovaries.
Strangers are already policing children’s bodies
Bodily scrutiny is not restricted to just transgender children – it already affects cisgender children, too.
In 2022, a high school athlete in Utah was secretly investigated after she defeated other children in a sports competition. Parents of the second- and third-place finishers raised a complaint that led the high school athletics association to analyze her school records back to kindergarten to determine the child’s gender, without consulting her parents. This is a strong example of how people can initiate investigations simply because the child does not look “feminine enough.” In this case the child in question was indeed a cisgender girl.
In 2023, two adults harassed a 9-year-old child at an elementary school track meet. The adults, claiming the girl was transgender, stopped the entire event and demanded she show “certification of her sex.” This was also a cisgender female child.
Strong, athletic women are often subject to suspicion because of their so-called “masculine traits.” As a taller-than-average person who was assigned female at birth, I personally experienced countless moments of bodily scrutiny during my time as a NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete. These experiences made me want to shrink out of public view and did not give me confidence in my athletic performance. Moreover, the effects of this scrutiny bled into my personal life, significantly affecting my self-esteem and self-perception throughout my young adulthood.
Imagine if that scrutiny happened when I was much younger, when I did not yet possess the emotional maturity or life experiences to cope with it. Research shows that such bodily scrutiny is already damaging transgender youth and that bodily shame can significantly affect young people’s mental health, leading to disordered eating and other physical and psychological harm.
When societies give formal permission to scrutinize a child’s body and question whether they belong in a sport, it opens the door to potential harm against all children. Children’s bodies, regardless of their gender identity, become open for people to inspect, create rumors about or render public judgment against them, often without any recourse for the children experiencing harm.
Children who had previously never faced the harms of bodily surveillance may soon be subject to its violence because of this law.
Inclusivity benefits all children
Just as all children can potentially suffer from bodily surveillance regardless of their gender identity, embracing inclusivity can improve the well-being of all children.
Youth sports, just like schools and churches, are not just places where children compete, learn facts or practice their faith. These community institutions are places where children build the confidence, relationships and sense of belonging that can shape their adult lives and the impact they’ll have on their family and community in the future.
The scope of sex-based bodily surveillance by necessity extends beyond transgender students, and the effects of this surveillance negatively affects all children involved in youth sports, regardless of identity.
Megan Gandy is Associate Professor of Social Work, West Virginia University
Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign government, the “donations” for things like the east wing “renovation” (which is still somehow supposed to be funded by taxpayers), and the attempt to sue his own government for $10 billion, it feels like there is no end to the grifting.
Just recently there were reports of an insane level of market manipulation, in which Trump would buy certain stocks and then pump them up on Truth Social. That alone feels like an impeachable offense, but why stop at merely one layer of corruption when you can profit off of others getting in on the corrupt bargain? Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the company that runs Truth Social, is now going to start selling “early access” to Trump’s posts via an API.
The product, called ‘Truth API’, will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.
The feed is designed for organizations “most impacted by the cost of a delay in information”, such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. “Until now… firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap.”
The move is TMTG’s first step into data licensing, and opens up a new revenue stream for the company, which has faced challenges in scaling its media business amid stiff competition from larger social media firms.
I can pretty much guarantee that delivering such posts from the “10 most influential accounts” is nine accounts too many. This offering is entirely about giving high frequency trading firms that millisecond advantage to front run the market and execute trades based on Trump’s posts to try to get ahead of the chump trades from retail investors swayed by Trump.
TMTG’s CEO doesn’t even try to claim it’s anything else:
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts … As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company,” TMTG’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.
And, yes, lots of other internet companies offer licensed API access to content, but for other reasons. The only reason anyone could possibly want this is to get a split second advantage to trade on pronouncements the President of the United States makes. The value of this offering does not grow over time. It has a clear limit: the day Trump is no longer president, the value drops back down close to nothing at all.
If there were an actual legitimate reason to offer such a service, then McGurn could have expressed it, but he just out and out admits that it’s because markets move based on Truth Social posts (he conveniently leaves out that those posts all come from a single user: the president himself, who just happens to own the platform and directly profits off of any of its success).
Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm before taking office to avoid even any whiff of potential conflict. Donald Trump is leaning into the conflict and putting a price tag on it. He’s announcing to the world that they can get early access to pronouncements from the President of the United States… for a price. There is no world in which that should be allowed.
Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they’ll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to.
Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration’s attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to the government’s witnesses noted a plethora of “untruthful statements” or “material misrepresentations.”
Six months later, the losing streak created by unforced (but deliberate) “errors” continued. Federal immigration officers just couldn’t stop lying, forcing DOJ prosecutors to voluntarily dismiss a bunch of felony assault cases that were completely reliant on statements made by officers who were later shown to be lying.
Here’s another case that’s hit a dead end because an ICE officer lied and an ICE supervisor decided to pass on these lies to a federal prosecutor. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)
Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, 31, was referred to by DHS as a “criminal illegal alien” and a “known Tren de Aragua terrorist.” The agency said he “violently attacked an ICE agent” by slamming her head into the ground and attempting to choke her to death. At a preliminary hearing, a Homeland Security agent and a federal prosecutor said Hurtado-Cariaco received “special forces-type training” in the Venezuelan military and may have been involved in “killing people, hurting people, [and] committing human rights violations.”
The only thing true here is that Hurtado was once a member of the Venezuela military. But he deserted, fled to the US, and filed an asylum claim. He was paroled into the US in 2024 and, since then, had been steadily working as a delivery driver.
The arrest of Hurtado didn’t look great. Two ICE officers tried (and failed) to subdue him. He managed to escape custody, but was arrested successfully shortly after he fled the scene of the first attempted detention.
Perhaps the (attempted) arresting officer was too embarrassed to tell the truth. But the lies he told had serious consequences.
The initial narrative of what happened during Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest was provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Craig Allrich. Allrich, who was not at the scene of the arrest, penned the affidavit that would be used to secure a criminal complaint against Hurtado-Cariaco.
The first complaint actually told the truth. It simply said that Hurtado had resisted arrest. But that apparently wasn’t good enough for Allrich and/or the officer who failed to subdue Hurtado during his first encounter with him. Things got worse for Hurtado in a hurry.
It was in the amended complaint that Allrich laid out how Hurtado-Cariaco allegedly attempted to murder the female ICE officer, referred to as “Victim 1” throughout the document.
[…]
[A]s the two agents struggled to detain Hurtado-Cariaco, he was “able to get control of Victim 1 and place [her] in a chokehold.” Allrich said the male agent gave repeated commands to Hurtado-Cariaco to release the chokehold, but he “chose to continue choking Victim 1 rather than simply fleeing the scene.”
This assertion was a lie. Two recordings made by bystanders who witnessed the attempted arrest made it clear Hurtado had definitely resisted arrest, but at no point did he pin down the female ICE officer, nor did he ever place her in a chokehold.
At no point in either video is Hurtado-Cariaco seen choking the female agent. Instead, the videos show agents placing Hurtado-Cariaco into a chokehold on two separate occasions as he attempts to break free.
Hurtado’s federal public defender, Richard McWilliams, says federal prosecutors sat on these recordings and refused to remove the attempted murder charge despite having evidence proving otherwise. US Attorney Lesley Woods says this isn’t true, claiming the public defender refused to turn over the recordings he had obtained.
But Woods’ claims are difficult to believe, especially when prosecutors waited months to rewrite the indictment, excising the bogus attempted murder charge just so that they could replace it something nearly as damaging.
By November, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment, which abandoned the attempted murder charge and replaced it with another serious felony – providing material support to a terrorist organization.
According to prosecutors, the mere existence of a tattoo — one that doesn’t actually demonstrate a connection to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — was enough to hit Hurtado with terrorism charges.
Oh, and the guy was almost certainly not in Tren de Aragua either, as ICE accused. Like with make-up artist Andry Romero, it seems ICE’s reason for declaring him a gang member was… a tattoo. Of a clock. With his son’s birthday. Showing a man holding a kid’s hand.Seriously. ICE can’t be trusted.
(And that charge is only possible because the Trump administration unilaterally declared this gang to be foreign terrorist organization — something it only did in an attempt to legalize its unconstitutional detain-and-deport program.)
None of this bullshit impressed the judge handling Hurtado’s criminal case.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said at the sentencing that the allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence.” Though Rossiter said there is “no doubt” that Hurtado-Cariaco committed the offense that he pleaded guilty to by fleeing the officers and struggling with them, he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”
That’s a polite way of saying either the ICE officer at the scene lied or that the ICE supervisor who prepared the affidavit didn’t care whether or not he was being lied to.
And the judge isn’t happy with the government’s last ditch attempt to stick Hurtado with a lengthy sentence by belatedly adding some terrorism charges to the mix. As it stands now, Hurtado’s guilty plea to resisting arrest nets him a 14-month sentence, most of which he has already served because he’s been in jail since his arrest last June.
“To refer to him as a terrorist, attempted murderer, that he had put a chokehold on these victims… It’s just not borne out by the evidence,” Rossiter said. “And it’s troubling.”
If you can’t do your job without lying, you can’t be trusted to hold that position. If the administration can’t find enough people to arrest and deport without having to make up stories about murder or terrorism, then it needs to restrain itself to the promise that has always been empty: go after the worst of the worst. These lies were caught. Dozens or hundreds of others will go undetected.
Given what we know about the people “leading” this country and these agencies, I firmly believe they’d lie even if they didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of people they are. And the foot soldiers willingly serving this rolling atrocity of an administration need to be filmed whenever possible, because it’s the only way to keep them honest.
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We — and plenty of others — have been warning that the global rush to mandate age verification wouldn’t stop at “let’s make sure kids can’t see porn” or even just “keep kids off of social media.” It would inevitably expand into treating anonymity and privacy tools themselves as the enemy. Australia is now proving that in real time: Its eSafety regulator has gone from checking whether porn sites gate their content to treating VPN use — one of the best tools people have for protecting their privacy online — as a compliance problem to be stamped out.
The correct term for age verification as it is implemented today is therefore identity verification. Given today’s internet infrastructure, it is unreasonable to assume that this information will not be shared through commercial agreements or with governments.
The consequence of introducing identity verification is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. You cannot be certain that your criticism of the government will not be followed up by the authorities. You can no longer start a digital initiative on a social media platform aimed at gathering people to criticize an authority without facing a significant risk of consequences. Depending on the country you live in, this could even endanger your life. In its current form, social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.
Freedom of expression is threatened not only in a direct sense (you post something and then the police knock on your door), identity verification also creates a chilling effect. It becomes a cornerstone of censorship machinery in the sense that people begin to self-censor if they know that expressing opinions may have personal consequences. This is also something that changes over time. What is considered acceptable to post online is determined by whoever currently holds power. Different sides of politics often have different views on what constitutes harmful content. Just because what you post today is not considered inappropriate does not mean it will remain acceptable in the future.
Some can argue that they’re biased since they’re in the business of selling VPN service, though arguably, more age verification laws increase demand for VPNs. But, the reality is that as age verification laws spread, so too do the attacks on VPNs and the ridiculous and dangerous threats to somehow outlaw their usage.
The latest is in Australia, where their teen social media ban has been an abject failure. Have no fear, however, they’re going to just start targeting VPN usage. Of course, they’re not framing it as a response to the failure of their social media ban, but rather a response to adult content websites’ age verification being beaten by people using VPNs, because it’s always easier to start your attacks on privacy, security, and anonymity by blaming a more marginalized industry like adult content:
Nine in 10 of the most visited adult sites used by Australians now have age checks for users, according to the online safety regulator, but eSafety has said it will assess whether those sites are allowing users to bypass restrictions with virtual private networks (VPNs)….
But, of course, it’s not just about adult content. They’ll go after VPN usage for social media as well:
Similar to the expectations of the social media companies for the under-16s ban, eSafety said it was expected under the codes that sites “must take reasonable steps” to prevent workarounds like VPNs, and eSafety “will look at this when considering compliance”.
The sheer irony of an agency named “eSafety” claiming that VPN use was a “workaround” that must be blocked? VPNs provide way more safety than anything that the “eSafety” Commission has done regarding internet usage.
Age verification is surveillance. Full stop. And it’s increasingly being closely tied to law enforcement and governments. Tech policy expert Heather Burns recently pointed out that age verification providers were literally reporting people to law enforcement for the crime of… using an alternative OS. As she notes:
age verification providers now hold themselves to be delegated law enforcement and extensions of the judiciary, using the guise of age verification for child safety but for reasons which have nothing to do with it.
Iain Corby: Yeah, just briefly to add, I think there is a distinction here between when we just accept the parent’s word for the child’s age and when services need to get an independent verification of that age. We do know, this was mentioned earlier, that often, parents are complicit in helping their kids to access services which are age-limited when they shouldn’t be accessing those services. So, sometimes you will need to do an independent age verification rather than simply relying on a parental attestation. So, it’s sort of one step up from self-declaration, but it’s not an independent view of the age of that user.
So Australia is just confirming the point privacy folks have been screaming about for years: age verification is inherently an attack on privacy and security. It will absolutely be used to remove anonymity, decrease security, enhance law enforcement surveillance, and, as the last quote shows, diminish even parental decision-making regarding our children.
Age verification was never going to stop at the age gate. VPNs are just the next thing on the list. Other user empowerment tools (Tor? encrypted DNS?) will be next. There’s simply no version of this that ends with your privacy intact.
Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what’s left of the country’s already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what’s left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president’s ass.
Current laws (remember those?) prohibit any single local broadcast news company from serving more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The original (good) idea was that this helped protect opinion diversity and competition in the local broadcast news space. Republicans don’t like that, because they want to replace all journalism with right-wing and oligarch friendly propaganda.
Brendan Carr last March had already made it clear he viewed the law as optional when he granted Nexstar Media Group a waiver for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna. That deal would let the company reach more than half of all U.S. households with what passes as “local news.” Now he’s trying to replace a congressionally-approved law with a “case by case review” dictated by Republican whims:
“Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.”
This is, to be clear, illegal. Something the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, made clear in her own statement:
“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder. Congress set the 39 percent national ownership cap in federal law, and only Congress has the authority to raise or eliminate it. The Commission cannot waive away that limit simply because these corporate behemoths want to get out from under it.”
Clearly there will be lawsuits, though they’re likely to drag on until long after Nexstar and Tegna have merged, with future regulators being very unlikely to unwind the transaction. I’d then expect to see Sinclair Broadcasting to merge with the remaining company, creating a monopoly over local broadcast TV.
While people are quick to insist that “who cares, nobody watches this stuff,” they don’t seem to realize that somewhere around 80 million households still watch local broadcast TV channels via antenna, cable TV, streaming providers, or satellite.
As I’ve frequently discussed, most of these local broadcasters deliver a sloppy combination of lazy infotainment and right-wing agitprop, as that viral video about Sinclair Broadcasting made clear a few years back:
Carr’s very unsubtle goal here is to turn the entirety of U.S. local broadcast television into propaganda arms of the U.S. right wing. That’s not an opinion or hyperbole, and he’s well on his way already. It might help if there was a functional opposition party that had made meaningful media reforms a centerpiece of their political platform anytime in the last quarter century.
And this is, of course, just local broadcast TV. We’ve also got Carr’s FCC helping Larry Ellison do the same thing to CBS and CNN. Ellison’s also steadily doing the same thing to TikTok while Elon Musk does the same thing to what used to be Twitter. If you stand back, tilt you head, and squint just right, you might begin to notice a consistent theme.
Transphoba destroys an otherwise normal person from the inside out. It is a brainrot that rips apart someone’s soul and replaces it with a hatred so unyielding and all-consuming that it damn near becomes that person’s entire personality. God, imagine actually hating trans people because they’re brave enough to take charge of their fucking body and live in it the way they want to live in it. Imagine being that much of a motherfucking coward.
Because even China understands that Trumps instability and unpredictability is bad for the entire world and it affects them even if it enables them to step up and become a leader on the global stage.
‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.’ – Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain
Over on the funny side, things are a little slow again this week, so we’ll forego the editor’s choice and just look at the top two winners. In first place, it’s Thad again with a comment about Trump’s election fraud claims:
Yeah, but even Fox is nervous about repeating Trump’s election fraud claims, for some reason.
