Saturday, February 21, 2026
CBS Is Being Destroyed Before Our Eyes
In the span of months, one of America’s most storied broadcast institutions has managed to alienate its most recognizable late-night host and lose one of its most respected journalists, all while inviting scrutiny over whether it is voluntarily bending the knee to political pressure from the Trump administration. The optics are catastrophic.
CBS looks to have made a strategic blunder when it announced plans last year to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” but decided to keep host Stephen Colbert on air until May 2026. The decision created a lame-duck host with a nightly platform and a growing sense of grievance. On Monday, Colbert told his studio audience that CBS lawyers had called his show “in no uncertain terms” to block an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. According to Colbert, the network didn’t just want to censor the content — it wanted to censor the censorship itself, informing him that he couldn’t even mention that he’d been prohibited from airing it.
“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this,” he told his audience, “let’s talk about this.” He ultimately posted the interview to YouTube, where it has since drawn more than 5.2 million views — far more than it ever would have attracted as a routine late-night segment.
It’s amazing how long we’ve known about the Streisand effect, the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or suppress information ends up drawing more attention to it, yet institutions still can’t resist stepping on the rake. CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now. It’s worth noting that his public criticism of CBS parent company Paramount Skydance’s $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris — a lawsuit that legal scholars widely regarded as meritless — is widely believed to be the real reason CBS canceled “The Late Show.”
The pretext CBS used to object to Colbert’s interview with Talarico originated from a January notice from the Federal Communications Commission issued by the agency’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who has spent his tenure weaponizing regulatory ambiguity to intimidate broadcasters. The notice warned that late-night and daytime talk shows could no longer assume they qualify for the “bona fide news exemption” from the equal time rule, a protection that has been in place since Jay Leno’s producers won it in 1996. Carr hasn’t formally repealed the exemption. He has merely threatened to — and watched as networks trip over themselves to comply with a rule that doesn’t yet exist. Colbert put it plainly on air: CBS was “unilaterally enforcing” guidance that had not been made law. No one forced their hand; they just folded.
The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, also called out both the network and the Trump administration. Gomez wrote on X that CBS’s decision is “yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this Administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech” and made clear that “the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.”
Layered on top of all of this is the arrival of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss built her brand at The Free Press as a contrarian voice fluent in the grievances of people who believe mainstream media has become too liberal. She was installed by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount and almost immediately began leaving her mark with shifts in content and reports of chaotic decision-making behind the scenes.
In January, Weiss announced 19 new paid contributors to CBS News with evident excitement, describing them as experts who would appear across the network’s broadcasts and digital platforms. Among them was Dr. Peter Attia, a wellness influencer and longevity podcaster with a large online following and a heterodox approach to medicine that has made him popular in right-leaning media. Three days after Weiss announced Attia’s hire, the Department of Justice released a new trove of the Jeffrey Epstein files — in which Attia’s name appeared more than 1,700 times. The emails were not ambiguous. In a June 2015 message, the wellness influencer wrote to Epstein that the worst part about being his friend was that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” In another exchange from 2016, Attia made a crude sexual joke directed at the convicted sex offender. The files also revealed that Attia had, on at least one occasion, chosen to spend time with Epstein rather than visit his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.
What followed inside CBS News was, according to multiple reports, a battle. Weiss refused to fire Attia because she saw it as “giving in to the ‘mob,'” while senior Paramount executives took the position that a man with hundreds of documented email exchanges with an accused child sex trafficker could not function as a credible expert contributor on a broadcast network. The situation reportedly required escalation to Ellison himself to resolve. (Notably, Weiss reports directly to Ellison — not to the head of CBS News nor to the president of Paramount.) Weiss’ reported rationale — that Attia’s “contrarian voice” was too valuable to lose — reveals that in her editorial calculus, the network’s credibility with its audience is less important than her commitment to a particular brand of heterodoxy.
Early on, Weiss also expressed interest in wooing “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper away from his full-time role at CNN to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” before she settled on Tony Dokoupil. Cooper, in the end, chose to leave CBS entirely. . . . As one insider put it, Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.”
Cooper’s reported judgment is a devastating verdict on the Weiss era from a nationally-known and widely-respected veteran correspondent, and comes one week after producer Alicia Hastey walked out of CBS News with a damning farewell note calling the newsroom atmosphere one of “fear and uncertainty.”
Cooper’s exit raises questions about the future of “60 Minutes.” Other veterans like Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley have already spoken publicly about concerns over the state of CBS News and its changing newsroom standards. Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned months earlier, making it clear that he believed the program’s editorial independence was under strain. The institution is not just losing talent; it is losing the credibility built over decades that no roster of podcasters can replace.
What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of institutional independence in real time at one of the most historically significant news and entertainment corporations in America. Stephen Colbert is leaving in May. Anderson Cooper is already gone. What CBS should be asking itself is not how to manage the departure of the people who made it matter, but whether anyone left in the building still believes the mission is worth defending.
Friday, February 20, 2026
What Prince Andrew's Arrest Says About America
On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, at 2:57 p.m., Prince Andrew—as he then was—received details of his upcoming trips as Britain’s official trade envoy: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Vietnam, Singapore. At 3:02 p.m., he forwarded the entire email to Jeffrey Epstein.
At dawn today, that stupid and unethical decision—and many others like it—finally caught up with him. Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on the morning of his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and are now searching his homes. Prosecutors have not yet released specific charges, which are thought to relate to Andrew passing on sensitive government information to Epstein. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. His brother, King Charles III, was not officially informed in advance, but had signaled that the royal family would cooperate with any police inquiry.
Charles had already stripped Andrew of his title after the latest batch of Epstein files dropped, because the newly released emails proved beyond doubt that Andrew had lied about breaking off contact with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, in 2010. The disgraced former prince had also been evicted from his lavish residence in Windsor, just outside London, where he had lived effectively rent-free for many years. “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” Charles wrote in his statement on the arrest, adding: “Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”
In the United States, the Epstein affair is still seen primarily as a sex scandal. The financier was well known as a man who could easily find women—“no one over 25 and all very cute,” he told Elon Musk—to go on dates with his rich friends. (“Pro or civilian?” Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, asked about one such woman.) But here in Britain, this is a corruption scandal—and not just because Andrew sent Epstein confidential information about investment opportunities in Afghanistan. The police recently searched two addresses linked to Peter Mandelson, a former government minister and an ambassador to Washington who also lied about the extent of his friendship with Epstein.
During his time in government in the late 2000s, the files show, Mandelson forwarded market-sensitive emails to Epstein, on subjects such as the eurozone bailout of Greece, mixed in with laddish banter and discussions about how Mandelson might make money after leaving office. Mandelson has already been stripped of his seat in the House of Lords and his affiliation with the Labour Party; for a few hours, many in the press corps thought the scandal might bring down Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had bafflingly appointed Mandelson as U.S. ambassador, despite his long record of other scandals. In the end, Starmer’s chief of staff, who had recommended Mandelson for the job, stepped down instead.
The allegations against Andrew date from a similar period, when he was a trade envoy for the British Foreign Office. That job turned out to involve flying around the world in high style—often to places run by oligarchs, dictators, and fellow royals, on the basis that they would be flattered to deal with a prince. Once there, he might also take the opportunity to watch, say, a Formula One race or have a few rounds of golf. Attractive young women seem to have been present at many of these events. Foreign intelligence services must have regarded Andrew’s appointment in 2001 as a gift from the heavens.
In 2007, for example, he sold his white elephant of a mansion, Sunninghill, which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had given him as a wedding present. A Kazakh oligarch paid millions over the asking price, and then never moved in.
The problem for the royal family was that Andrew and his then-wife, Sarah—known in Britain as “Fergie,” after her unmarried name—had no discernible talents but extremely expensive tastes. . . . .The couple separated in 1992, but Sarah continued to use her title, the Duchess of York, to boost her commercial ventures. In 1995, Buckingham Palace refused to pay off any more of her debts, and issued a statement saying that “the Duchess’s financial affairs are no longer Her Majesty’s concern.”
After this, despite making millions of dollars from her series of children’s books, Fergie went crawling to Epstein for loans. . . . . Both she and Andrew were tethered to Epstein by their greed and entitlement. They wanted millionaire lifestyles. More than that, they felt that they deserved them. Why? Because of an accident of birth in one case, and a fortuitous marriage in the other. The couple have been divorced for three decades but have never really moved on, possibly because they are mirror images of each other.
Until 2022, he also benefited from the protection of his mother. Andrew was widely perceived to be the late Queen’s favorite child: Charles was sensitive, unlike his parents, who had been raised as emotionally stunted aristocrats; Anne, a tougher, horse-mad child, was Prince Philip’s pet; Edward, like many youngest children, benefited from his parents softening with middle age. But no one really knew what to do with Andrew, who was nicknamed “Baby Grumpling” because of his temper.
Over the years, the late Queen had repeatedly smoothed Andrew’s way in life. But even she could not save him after his disastrous decision to give an interview to the BBC in 2019 about his connection with Epstein. He presented a portrait of blithe privilege, denying a deep connection with the financier by saying he had hosted him only for a “straightforward shooting weekend.” He claimed to have spent three days with Epstein in New York in 2010 for the sole purpose of breaking off their friendship. This was unbelievable at the time, and has now been debunked by the latest files. “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!” a 2011 email from Andrew declares. The revulsion at his appearance on the BBC prompted his mother to strip him of his ceremonial titles and retire him as a “working royal.”
Charles has gone even further—supported by his son Prince William. Both the king and his successor believe that Andrew’s actions could destroy the royal family, and they are keen to amputate him from the Windsors and cauterize the wound. None of the statements from Buckingham Palace has carried the slightest hint that they believe Andrew has been wronged by a witch hunt. The king’s last statement before today included a telling line: “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and sympathies have been, and remain with, the victims of any and all forms of abuse.”
All this presents quite a contrast with the U.S., where the fallout from contact with Epstein has largely been restricted to second-tier names—some of whom are provably guilty only of being chummy with a sex offender, which is not itself a crime. Like Andrew, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also claimed to have broken off contact with Epstein . . . . However, Lutnick has the fortune to work for Donald Trump. The [Felon]
presidentis unlikely to request that anyone resign for being friendly with Epstein, since that would apply to him, too.The former Prince Andrew acted as he did because he lived in a world in which someone like him never faced consequences. That isn’t true anymore. “Nobody is above the law,” Starmer said in response to the news. In Britain, at least, that might actually be true.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
The End of Reagan-Era Republicanism
On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a warning about [the Felon's]
President Trump’sescalating efforts to bend American institutions to his will. David explains how episodes including the Justice Department’s attempted prosecution of members of Congress, the political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and the campaign-style appeals delivered at Fort Bragg represent a systematic attempt to erode the guardrails of American democracy.Then, David is joined by Mona Charen, a contributor at The Bulwark and longtime conservative commentator. Together, they reflect on their shared political evolution—from their early days as Reagan-era conservatives to their break with today’s Republican Party. They discuss what they believe they got right and what they got wrong, how Trump transformed the conservative movement, and why the version of conservatism they once believed in may be gone.
One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of [the Felon]
President [Donald] Trumpand the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical. The Department of Justice, well, it’s part of the administration, for sure, and the attorney general is an appointee of the president. But there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially the criminal-enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the president.Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years. This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice perhaps since [President] Warren Harding’s in the 1920s and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—supposedly acting on her own but obviously acting at the command of Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, who was acting, obviously, at the command of Donald Trump—when the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress, four of them members of the House of Representatives, two of them United States senators, for making a video urging U.S. military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something that would be as basic as telling the president of the United States not to take bribes. How could such a statement be controversial unless the president was taking bribes and unless the military was contemplating illegal orders? So they took offense for that reason, and they tried to prosecute members of Congress.
Now, the speech of members of Congress is protected not only by the First Amendment, like as yours and mine is, but by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, which puts very severe limits on the ability of anybody to punish a member of Congress for something that the member of Congress said. And yet the Department of Justice tried just that. Happily, a grand jury completely rejected the charges—there was reportedly not a single member of the grand jury who took this seriously; it was unanimous rejection, an unparalleled humiliation for the Trump Justice Department. But the litigation of other attacks on those members of Congress continues.
At the same time, we saw in this past weekend a really shocking event, where President Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. . . . . President Trump appeared onstage with the Republican candidate for Senate and urged military personnel to vote for that candidate.
The military is, of course, the most important apolitical institution. Presidents address the military all the time, but they are not supposed to make political speeches, rally speeches, to ask the military to vote a certain way. That’s unheard of. That’s shocking. It’s the prelude to authoritarian rule.
Now, fortunately, again, as with the rejection of the attempt to indict members of Congress for what they said, the attempt to mobilize the troops as political actors, that also looks to have fallen flat. Reporters who were present noted that the soldiers, who maybe were warned by their commanding officers, made a point of clapping for the president’s appearance, clapping when the president talked about raising their pay—well, that’s traditional—but keeping very quiet when the president made his pitch that they should vote for the president’s preferred candidate for United States Senate. But in both cases, these are mere instances of failure, not stories of the successful pushback by institutions.
One of the most important independent institutions in the United States government is the Federal Reserve. . . . [the Felon]
Trumphas tried to put pressure on Powell to cut interest rates by bringing up all incredible things or by preparing to bring—it’s not filed yet—a criminal investigation of Powell for some series of nonsense charges. Now, the charges aren’t filed, but the [Felon]presidenthas been huffing and puffing and the Department of Justice has been subpoenaing Powell as if these actions were ready.But Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is outgoing, has said, I am not going to consider any nominee by the president, meritorious or not, unless we end these full prosecutions, these sinister prosecutions, that Trump has instituted against one Federal Reserve governor already, Lisa Cook, and is threatening against another, Jerome Powell, because they wouldn’t cut interest rates as fast as he wanted. Until these prosecutions are at an end, no consideration of any nominee whatsoever. And because of the closely balanced nature of the Senate and the rules of the Senate, Tillis may be able to make this stick.
So the punishment for Trump’s attempt to pervert the Federal Reserve may be getting more of what he doesn’t like, which would be a fit irony. But the best outcome: End this nonsense. Ideally, replace Bondi with an attorney general with some integrity, but failing even that, just end these shameless prosecutions, end these shameless acts of intimidation, drop the cases, close them, and then let the Senate consider the Warsh nomination on its merits, such as they are.
And I was a conservative columnist and speaker and all of that—pundit. But with the rise of Trump, I saw the destruction of pretty much everything that— . . . he was also the antithesis of what I regarded as conservative virtues. So for example, he encouraged people to believe that he personally, through force of will, could solve huge problems that face us as a country. I thought that was the antithesis of everything that conservatism believed; it was Caesarism.
And then, of course, all of his various heresies, like his attacks on free trade and his racism, which, again, I thought was the fulfillment of every fever dream of the left that thought conservatives were all racists underneath, that if you scratched them, you’d find that they were really racist. And here, along comes Trump, who confirms this. So I resented that as well.
[National Review editor] Jonah Goldberg put it best many, years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people, they just were absorbed into this thing. And so I watched one after another, and for a long time, it was a subject of grief for me that I watched these people that I respected bend the knee. It was an ongoing process that took years, and during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.
Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who are ready—in his first term, he was trying to do it pretty much by himself; now he has eager allies. They’re destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they’re destroying our international posture. And maybe I should mention, as that’s another thing I still believe in, I still believe the United States should be the leader of the free world, should have alliances, should stand up for countries that are invaded by aggressive neighbors, rather than finding common cause with their oppressors.
I hope that there will come a time when there’s enough recognition across party lines that we’ve gone off the rails that there will be an openness to a true accounting. There are people who are committing real crimes, including the president of the United States right now. The blowing up people in boats who you just suspect may be drug traffickers is a prime example. But it’s gonna take time and a huge amount of persuasion, and more than the persuasion, it’s gonna take more experience of the awfulness for the American people to get to the point where they’re ready for an accounting.
What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews. . . . But the world has changed. The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There’s no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement, far less a party, now that is recognizable.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
The Felon's Cratering Poll Numbers
The past two months have been some of the worst for Donald Trump’s approval rating—ever. Polling aggregators have his net approval in the low 40s, with 34 percent approval on the economy and 30 percent on cost of living. In individual polls, his overall approval dips down into the mid 30s. The last time Trump’s numbers looked this bad was right after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The slippage is especially drastic with young voters. In the 2024 election, a majority of 18-to-29-year-olds voted for Kamala Harris, but compared with 2020, young voters swung hard toward Trump. According to the Cook Political Report, on March 1, 2025, Trump’s net approval rating with these voters was minus 7. Yet by February 1 of this year, it was an astonishing minus 31.8. Now young people are abandoning Trump faster than any other voting bloc.
It’s tempting to think that this is all happening because of this administration’s blatantly authoritarian and norm-shattering actions: deploying masked ICE agents into American cities, stonewalling on the Epstein files, demolishing the East Wing, capturing Venezuela’s president, sharing racist videos on social media. All of those actions matter, and are slowly chipping away at Trump’s base of support.
But they’re not the whole story—or even the main story—of why Trump is losing young people. I run focus groups with voters every week, and what I’ve heard from this age group is much simpler: Trump is not doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices and the economy. In the focus groups, young people who voted for Trump have said that they believed him during the campaign when he promised to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Now they say they feel duped and let down.
For these young people to have placed their faith in a con man like Trump might seem naive. But most members of Generation Z were still children when Trump came down the escalator. They don’t remember a lot of the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s first run for president, or even his first term. They don’t view Trump as sui generis or beyond the pale, because he’s been the dominant force in our politics for as long as they’ve been politically aware.
Now, though, they’re young adults entering the workforce. Many of them have student loans, and they’re at a particularly cost-sensitive point in their lives. They notice when a politician like Trump promises to lower prices, and then doesn’t deliver.
Compared with 2020, in 2024 young voters swung to Trump in every key battleground state except Georgia. That includes a 24-point swing in Michigan, an 18-point swing in Pennsylvania, and a 15-point swing in Wisconsin. About 56 percent of young men voted for Trump in 2024, the same share that voted for Biden in 2020. Trump’s overall youth support jumped 10 points relative to his performance in 2020. . . . .The red-Solo-cup energy that sustains MAGA was in full effect, and America’s youngest voters—especially young men—were drawn in.
Young people like these were receptive when Trump said he would bring down prices and tame inflation, fix America’s broken health-care system, make housing affordable, create millions of new jobs, and do away with other economic woes that were plaguing many Americans, but that felt especially acute for young voters just entering the job market. The young people in my focus groups talk about how their student-loan debt is rising, housing is out of reach, and looming AI-powered disruption makes many jobs feel precarious. They’re clear-eyed that they might not be as well off as their parents’ generation.
Over the past 13 months, though, America’s young people have watched as Trump did a whole lot of things that weren’t what they elected him to do. Relative to when Trump took office, housing prices are up, job growth is stagnant, inflation has been persistent, college is less affordable, and people are more likely to be uninsured. That, more than anything else, is why young people in the focus groups say they’re disappointed.
“ From an economics factor, so many of the things that I would say are not wants, but instead needs, have just absolutely skyrocketed,” Joseph, from Michigan, said in September. “And basic families are spending so much on just the cost of living that they don’t have a cost to save, or anything like that. There’s just no financial way out.”
All of this suggests that Trump didn’t own the votes of young people who supported him in 2024; he rented them. And many of them are now getting tired of antics that, in their minds, take the focus away from the economy. When we asked a recent group about Trump’s threats against Greenland, Mukesh, a Trump voter from California, said: “I think we should just respect it, and leave it, and just focus on what’s actually happening inside the nation.”
Based on what I’ve heard in the focus groups, Democrats have a big opportunity with young people, because they’re some of the latest arrivals to Trump’s coalition. Democrats need to offer these voters a platform that addresses their concerns, while hammering Trump for his failure to do so.
In a recent focus group, the moderator asked Ruben, a Trump voter in Georgia, what advice he would give Democrats. He said: “ I’d say put a larger focus on the economic development. A lot of people these days are really coming of age, like being able to vote. And the younger Generation Z, we care about our finances, being able to pay rent, being able to afford food.”
These young people want someone who sees the economic pain they’re going through, and promises to actually do something about it. They don’t want policy papers. They want hope, good vibes, the red-Solo-cup energy—but directed toward what actually matters to them.
The Felon played these voters for fools. Hopefully, they will not be duped by him again.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Pam Bondi's Sickening Behavior
I have never been a fan of Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general and now the Felon's attorney general who has jettisoned any pretense that the Department of Justice ("DOJ") exists to protect the American public and turned the DOJ into the Felon's personal tool for seeking revenge on critics and real or perceived foes and the main line of cover up for the Felon's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Given the lengths that the DOJ is going to redact the Felon's name - and the names of other wealth and powerful elites, a number of whom are in the Felon's cabinet - one can only assume the full truth would be severely damaging to the Felon and might warrant criminal prosecution. As for the victims of Epstein's sax trafficking network, Bondi made it clear that she could care less about seeing justice done, Indeed, during last week's congressional hearing, Bondi would not even look at the assembled victims in the audience. GOP Rep. Thomas Massie said the following about Bondi's behavior:
She came with a book full of insults, one for each congressperson. She obviously had one for me. And, you know, I’ve been there when Merrick Garland was there. Obviously, politically, I don’t agree with him, but he performed much better in terms of at least not looking bad. And, unfortunately, we didn’t get the answers we wanted about the Epstein Files Transparency Act from her. . . . . “Donald Trump told us that even though, you know, he had dinner with these kinds of people in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration, and they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
Sadly, everything the DOJ is doing currently is aimed at protecting the guilty, including the Felon. piece at The New Republic looks at where things stand:
During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.
Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.
It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.
Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.
Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.
In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.
Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. . . . . Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.
To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.
It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights.
And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.
None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.
Sunday, February 15, 2026
The Felon's Regime Wants to Silence Social Media Critics
As the Department of Homeland Security and ICE continue to act as the Felon's secret police aimed at terrorizing undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike - ignoring literally thousands of court orders against its actions - the New York Times reports that now DHS wants information on social media accounts that are either critical of the Felon's increasingly fascist regime or track the misdeeds of ICE. Claims are disingenuously made that this is necessary for the safety of heavily armed and lawless ICE agents, but the reality is that the Felon and his cabinet of unqualified misfits and grifters cannot tolerate criticism and being called out for who and what they really are. Disturbingly, DHS is using administrative subpoenas that circumvent judicial review to seek information on critics and their social media accounts. This leaves Felon/DHS targets unprotected by judicial review and left to their own devises to oppose these administrative subpoenas (we all may want to have the ACLU on speed dial) that seek to intimidate and silence critics. I suspect as the Felon's poll numbers continue to crater thanks to unpopular policies and no meaningful action to lower consumer prices, the offensive against free speech will escalate. Here are highlights from the Times piece:
The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.
In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
“The government is taking more liberties than they used to,” said Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.” . . . . its [DHS] lawyers have argued that they are seeking information to help keep ICE agents in the field safe. . . . Meta, Reddit and Discord declined to comment.
“When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology. Last month, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, also said on Fox News that he was pushing to “create a database” of people who were “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.”
Unlike arrest warrants, which require a judge’s approval, administrative subpoenas are issued by the Department of Homeland Security. They were only sparingly used in the past, primarily to uncover the people behind social media accounts engaged in serious crimes such as child trafficking, said tech employees familiar with the legal tool. But last year, the department ramped up its use of the subpoenas to unmask anonymous social media accounts.
In September, for example, it sent Meta administrative subpoenas to identify the people behind Instagram accounts that posted about ICE raids in California, according to the A.C.L.U. The subpoenas were challenged in court, and the Department of Homeland Security withdrew the requests for information before a judge could rule.
Mr. Loney of the A.C.L.U. said avoiding a judge’s ruling was important for the department to keep issuing the subpoenas without a legal order to stop. “The pressure is on the end user, the private individual, to go to court,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security also sought more information on the Facebook and Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking ICE activity . . . . On Sept. 11, the Department of Homeland Security sent Meta a request for the name, email address, post code and other identifying information of the person or people behind the accounts. Meta informed the two Instagram and Facebook accounts of the request on Oct. 3.
“We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Facebook account,” the notification said, according to court records. “If we do not receive a copy of documentation that you have filed in court challenging this legal process within ten (10) days, we will respond to the requesting agency with information.”
The account owner alerted the A.C.L.U., which filed a motion on Oct. 16 to quash the government’s request. In a hearing on Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the A.C.L.U. argued that the government was using administrative subpoenas to target people whose speech it did not agree with. . . . Two days later, the subpoena was withdrawn.
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