“Before Donald Trump made him second in command at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche was the president’s most prominent defense attorney, shielding him from an avalanche of criminal cases that threatened to land him in jail for years.
That loyalty led Trump to appoint Blanche as his designated representative to the National Archives, the keeper of White House records from the president’s first term. Large swathes of those first-term records are slated to become publicly available next week, and under the Presidential Records Act, the president’s designees play an outsized role in governing the public’s access to those files.
American Oversight, a prominent left-leaning government transparency group, is urging Blanche to relinquish his role as the gatekeeper to Trump’s presidential records, saying his attorney-client relationship with the president — in addition to his role as deputy attorney general — presents a conflict. Anything less, the group argues, will erode public confidence in the process.”
“Although President Donald Trump frequently decries the threat that fentanyl poses to Americans, his comments reveal several misconceptions about the drug. He thinks Canada is an important source of illicit fentanyl, which it isn’t. He thinks fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs, which they don’t. He thinks the boats targeted by his deadly military campaign against suspected cocaine couriers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific are carrying fentanyl, which they aren’t. Even if they were, his oft-repeated claim that he saves “25,000 American lives” each time he blows up one of those boats—which implies that he has already prevented nine times more drug-related deaths than were recorded in the United States last year—would be patently preposterous.
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The fentanyl implicated in U.S. drug deaths is not a “weapon.” It is a psychoactive substance that Americans voluntarily consume, either knowingly or because they thought they were buying a different drug. Nor is that fentanyl “designed or intended” to “cause death or serious bodily injury.” It is designed or intended to get people high, and to make drug traffickers rich in the process.
Trump nevertheless claims “illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” How so? “Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose,” he says. But that observation also applies to licit fentanyl, which medical practitioners routinely and safely use as an analgesic or sedative.
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Contrary to what Trump implies, the danger posed by fentanyl in illicit drug markets is only partly a function of its potency. The core problem is that the introduction of fentanyl—initially as a heroin booster or replacement, later as an adulterant in stimulants or as pills passed off as legally produced pharmaceuticals—made potency, which was already highly variable, even harder to predict. It therefore compounded a perennial problem with black-market drugs: Consumers generally don’t know exactly what they are getting.
That is not true in legal drug markets, whether you are buying booze at a liquor store or taking narcotic pain relievers prescribed by your doctor. The difference was dramatically illustrated by what happened after the government responded to rising opioid-related deaths by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions. Although those prescriptions fell dramatically, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. That result was not surprising, since the crackdown predictably encouraged nonmedical users to replace reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with much iffier black-market products.
The concomitant rise of illicit fentanyl magnified that hazard, and that development likewise was driven by the prohibition policy that Trump is so keen to enforce. Prohibition favors especially potent drugs, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. Stepped-up enforcement of prohibition tends to reinforce that effect. From the perspective of traffickers, fentanyl had additional advantages: As a synthetic drug, it did not require growing and processing crops, making its production less conspicuous and much cheaper.
Traffickers were not responding to a sudden consumer demand for fentanyl. They were responding to the incentives created by the war on drugs.
“Seed oils have become a major target of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, whose figurehead is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,” according to Kennedy, who has accused fast-food restaurants that use seed oils of poisoning Americans.
But among nutrition experts, opinions about seed oils and health are much more mixed, with plenty suggesting they’re fine in moderation, are better than alternatives, or are unwisely treated as a unit despite the fact that different seed oils have different properties and effects on health.
There’s also mixed evidence on the effects of common food dyes and additives)”
ICE repeatedly exercises a gratuitous use of force.
Multiple ICE agents have threatened protestors by referring to the killing of Renee Good. These are threats to kill people by law enforcement, often for simply being annoying. The implications are more aggressive than simply, ‘hey, if you protest or/and don’t listen to my orders, we may possibly get into the situation where I have to kill you to defend myself.’ The implications are, ‘Keep annoying me or disobeying me, and I’ll fucking kill you like we did that woman.’
Reportedly: ICE Agent: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.”
That ICE agent seems ready to use deadly force in more than a strict self-defense situation.
A border control agent reportedly said that he and his comrades thought the protesters were crazy. It’s easier to use force against someone who you perceive as crazy.
Last year, more people died in ICE detention than any previous year.
Citizens are being detained because they seem illegal to ICE and Border Patrol. Native Americans are being detained because ICE thought they were illegal foreigners. According to a Native American woman, an ICE agent told her “we’re coming for you” for no reason. She said that she was Native American, and he said, “yeah, you’re next.” That doesn’t sound like someone professionally enforcing the law.
“The war has ebbed and flowed over the past 54 years, but the results are clear. Drugs won. But instead of learning the requisite lessons, the Trump administration is ramping up anti-drug-war rhetoric to lunatic levels. The president recently issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” He’s empowered the military to destroy Venezuelan boats that likely aren’t carrying that synthetic opioid or even headed to the United States.
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“Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes.” Now “other highly potent synthetic opioids are becoming more attractive for drug trafficking organizations to produce and sell.”
Drug-warriors ignore how their own policies helped create the latest crisis. The feds began cracking down on prescription opioid analgesics (OAs) to combat their overprescribing to people with pain issues. “Unfortunately, opioid dependence and addiction do not simply dissipate with the contraction in the availability of OA pills…Instead, individuals who lost access have turned to cheaper, more accessible and more potent black market opioid alternatives,” per a 2017 article in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The prime alternative was heroin. The feds cracked down on that, too, and then black markets shifted to fentanyl.
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Most Americans are aware of the foolhardy nature of alcohol Prohibition, which empowered organized crime, led to alcohol poisonings as illicit operations rarely have great quality control, corrupted police agencies and politicians, and caused prison overcrowding. We see similar results after a half-century of drug prohibition.”
“instituting a “duty of care” for AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” (per Blackburn’s summary of the bill). This duty would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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“It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.”
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Section 11 of Blackburn’s bill is promoted as combating “the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Big Tech and AI systems.” But, in practice, it could require AI systems to have a pro-conservative slant—at least as long as President Donald Trump or other Republicans are in power.
The bill would set up “audits of high-risk AI systems to undergo regular bias evaluations to prevent discrimination based on protected characteristics, including political affiliation.”
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“Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.””