RFK Jr. Goes Rogue
RFK is weakening the CDC’s ability to perform its basic functions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8sZBojJ6r4
Month: September 2025
Charlie Kirk Would Not Have Wanted This
“many of Kirk’s most ardent fans are now engaged in one of the largest mass cancellation efforts of all time: Some Republican legislators, MAGA activists, and conservative media figures are assembling watchlists with the explicit aim of silencing, firing, expelling, and perhaps even criminalizing any and all anti-Kirk sentiment.
…
There is also a big difference between canceling someone for justifying violence against Kirk and canceling someone who merely objects to his views, behavior, and political project. Furthermore, there’s a major difference between canceling someone in a public-facing communications role and canceling someone who is otherwise obscure.
…
Opposing cancel culture does not mean there should be zero accountability for anyone in a public role. It only means that those of us who denounced the excesses of woke enforcement during the late 2010s should similarly reject a rightwing counterreaction that seeks to unperson anyone who does not hold Kirk in sufficient esteem.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Kirk disdained cancel culture and loved debate—seriously, he relished the fray more than most, and enjoyed mixing it up with people who obviously disliked him. Launching a vast and unscrupulous campaign to silence everyone who shares an unkind thought about Kirk is a poor way to honor his legacy.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/charlie-kirk-would-not-have-wanted-this/
FCC Head Says Kimmel Not ‘the Last Shoe to Drop,’ Musk’s A.I. Push, Your Friday News Quiz
Trump has repeatedly suggested that broadcast stations that air things he doesn’t like should get their licenses revoked. Two late night hosts appear to have been suspended or let go at the desire of Trump and his administration. Where are the free speech warriors now? Was it all a lie?
These companies also need federal approval for desired mergers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAyZSp97uf0
Jon Stewart’s Post-Kimmel Primer on Free Speech in the Glorious Trump Era | The Daily Show
After Trump’s FCC apparently badgered ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show produce a Trump-compliant episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXNJ3V9lzg
Brendan Carr Flagrantly Abused His Powers To Cancel Jimmy Kimmel
“Monday night on his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel said something dumb about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah last week. Two days later, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced that it was “indefinitely” suspending the comedian’s show.
Maybe the Disney executives who made that decision—CEO Robert A. Iger and Dana Walden, who oversees the company’s television division—were simply reacting to public outrage at Kimmel’s remarks. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was announced several hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested that TV stations might be fined or lose their licenses for broadcasting the show. That constitutionally dubious threat shows how the FCC can abuse its regulatory powers to suppress speech that offends President Donald Trump and his allies…
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/brendan-carr-flagrantly-abused-his-powers-to-cancel-jimmy-kimmel/
The FCC Should Let Jimmy Kimmel Be
“In addition to not being very funny, the observation rested on a false assumption—that the presumed killer, 22-year-old Utah man Tyler Robinson, is a conservative…
Brendan Carr, chair of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), weighed in on the matter; not only did he criticize what Kimmel had to say, he also implicitly threatened the broadcasters. (Kimmel’s show appears on ABC.)…
This was not an idle threat. The FCC licenses broadcast channels, and can fine them or even take them off the air. Moreover, the FCC oversees mergers of companies in the communications space. Nexstar Media, which owns many of the ABC local affiliate stations that air Kimmel, is attempting to acquire Tegna Inc., a rival firm; the FCC needs to okay the deal. There’s a lot at stake, and FCC can make life very difficult for companies that defy it.
And so, on Wednesday night, both Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group—another major telecommunications company—informed ABC that they would not air Kimmel on their affiliate stations. ABC then opted to place the show on indefinite hiatus….
This is outrageous. Not because Kimmel is gone: Private companies have the right to determine their programming as they see fit…
But it shouldn’t be a government decision. By inserting itself into the controversy and appearing to twist the arms of private companies so that they would make editorial decisions that please the Trump administration, the FCC is clearly engaged in a kind of censorship.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “This shouldn’t be a complicated or difficult dichotomy to understand. Jimmy Kimmel is repulsive, but the state has no role in threatening companies to fire on-air voices it dislikes or who the state believes is spreading “disinformation,” which is exactly what happened here.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/the-fcc-should-let-jimmy-kimmel-be/
Charlie Kirk Was Not A Good Guy
A reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article on Charlie Kirk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2FTnmoG8T4
Legal Scholar Says Supreme Court Could Become a “Pointless Institution” | Amanpour and Company
One reason that the Supreme Court gets so much power is that it’s the branch that gives reasoned explanations for why it makes the heavy decisions it does. With the shadow docket, which currently holds a majority of Supreme Court decisions, the court gives no explanations for its sometimes momentous decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IkaMdt3Dbw
KEYLESS CAR THEFT EPIDEMIC
Criminals can steal your car’s key fob’s signal and use that to steal your car. This is causing insurance rates to go up. Some kids do this because Tik Tok teaches them how to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTqw0Vfg-A
Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation:The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign
“We collected a dataset with
over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between
September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct
users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified
Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all
users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables
us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative
with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-
sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced
36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content
originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using
state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about
4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were
bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they
had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ide-
ologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian
Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,
it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291