curated citations to news sources
Gil Duran: ‘Tech Billionaires Accused of…Working to Implement Corporate Dictatorship’
“In a world increasingly ruled by tech companies, some of the industry’s most powerful figures appear to be quietly drafting blueprints for the near future. There’s just one catch: it may or may not be a democratic one.”
Joe Wilkins at Futurism, a publication focused on science and technology, did an interesting analysis of my work in a piece headlined “Tech Billionaires Accused of Quietly Working to Implement Corporate Dictatorship.”
(Gil Duran more…)
James Eagle: Tech’s three titans now worth more than double Germany’s economy
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Robert Reich: The silencing
Colbert, The Washington Post, Columbia University … and on it goes
The latest casualty of Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of this heinous regime.On Tuesday, Porter wrote his last column for The Washington Post. In it, he criticized Trump’s attempt to dismantle the global trading system.
Porter didn’t stop there. He also explained why he was leaving the Post:
“Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow, directed toward the relentless promotion of free markets and personal liberties…. I have no idea to what extent this is driven by Mr. Bezos’ fear of what Donald Trump could do to his various business interests, most of which are more valuable to him than The Post.”
Well, I do have an idea. Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris. He made a huge contribution to Trump’s inauguration. And he stood directly in front of Trump at Trump’s swearing in.
Why? Because Bezos owns a bunch of mega-corporations, including Amazon, that depend on Trump’s goodwill and could be in deep trouble if Trump decided to retaliate against Bezos.
(Robert Reich more…)Daily Beast: FCC Chair Dodges Direct Fox News Question About Colbert Firing
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“Did President Trump have anything to do with the cancellation of Colbert’s show?” the America’s Newsroom host asked of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS axed last Thursday days after Colbert needled the network’s parent company for agreeing to a $16 million settlement with Trump.Sarah Jones: Blake Lively Attacks Mostly Female Content Creators with Trump-like Subpoenas
Blake Lively is married to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and she’s coming for the rights of female content creators with subpoenas for their bank info, contacts, locations and more.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – July 24, 2025
The Epstein list made it into last night’s premiere of the twenty-seventh season of the television series South Park when Satan, in bed with Trump, commented, “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”
The episode hit the president’s lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert’s contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger, and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and to root out the “bias” at CBS News in order to win the administration’s support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal.
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The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes, Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home.
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The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans’ extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.
In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.
The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms—a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the PTC.
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Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a memecoin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot, sporting an evil grin, manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read: “You never truly know who’s pulling the strings.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Texas Tribune: Texans will pay higher power bills as clean energy development slows because of tax credit cuts, economists say
The One Big Beautiful Bill drastically shortens the timeline for wind and solar projects to qualify for tax credits. This will impact even Texas, where wind and solar power have boomed and power demand is rising.
Economists expect that the development of solar and wind farms nationwide will slow and electricity prices will rise in the coming decade because of significant rollbacks to tax credits that benefited those industries, in addition to other economic uncertainty.Texas, which has built more wind power than any state and is a top contender for the most solar power, faces this projected slowdown as grid operators predict soaring electricity demand.
Energy analysts have noted that an unusually high number of solar and battery projects in the state were already canceled or paused in the months leading up to the tax credit cuts because of uncertainty over how deep the cuts would be and the specifics of tariffs that would raise the price of steel.
(Texas Tribune more…)
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NY Times: As Starvation Rises, Israeli Minister Says Israel Is ‘Driving Out’ Gazans
Amid rising starvation in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli government minister said on Thursday that Israel had no duty to alleviate hunger in the territory and was seeking to expel its population.
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Dean Blundell: U.S. Coast Guard Rams Canadian Fisherman’s Boat, Drags Him to ICE Detention — In Canadian Waters
Another American Violation on Sovereign Canadian Soil — Or Just the First One We Caught?
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This wasn’t ambiguous. This wasn’t a high-speed chase. This wasn’t a drug cartel sting. This was a 60-year-old Quebecois fishing off a borrowed boat — in Canadian waters, near Venise-en-Québec, 15 kilometres north of the U.S. border.
(Dean Blundell more…)
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Lisa Needham: SCOTUS’s immunity ruling looks even worse now
The administration’s wild threats against Obama show it did nothing but embolden Trump.
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Jennifer Rubin: Undaunted Search for the Truth
Julie Brown’s essential reporting on Jeffrey Epstein must be commended
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Bulwark: MAGA Inches Closer to a Ghislaine Maxwell Alliance
Is perpetrating heinous crimes against children too big a hurdle for a political alliance of convenience? Maybe not.
Liz Dye: DOJ slides into DMs of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell
They’re gonna make her an offer she can’t refuse.
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In 2020, the government pointed to Maxwell’s “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct” as a reason to deny her bail. Now, with her entire life in the government’s control, it turns to her as a source of truth. Or, if not truth, a story that can help the president out of this jam.
(Liz Dye more…)Sarah Jones: Mafia Boss Strikes Again as MAGA Republican Admits Trump Threat to Ghislaine Maxwell
Rep. Tim Burchett admitted that Trump is enticing Ghislaine Maxwell to change her testimony with the promise of a reduction in her sentence, otherwise she will serve life. This is a threat.
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Above the Law: Federal Judge Pulls Opinion With Fake Quotes And YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!
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Internet Archive: Internet Archive Designated as a Federal Depository Library
engadget: Internet Archive is now an official US government document library
The new designation will make it easier for the public to access government documents.
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Above the Law: Trump Administration Strong-arms ~$200M Out Of Columbia During His Worst Time To Ever Hustle Someone Out Of Millions
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Register: White House bans ‘woke’ AI, but LLMs don’t know the truth
They can only enforce consistency based on their training
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Slate: Any Other President Would Have Fired Pete Hegseth by Now
The secretary of defense illustrates a key weakness of the Trump administration.
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NY Times: Trump’s Name Is on Contributor List for Epstein Birthday Book
The Times also reviewed other records of the president’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, including an inscription in which the future president called him “the greatest.”
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Al Jazeera: Trump visits US Federal Reserve HQ amid feud with Chairman Powell
Mary Geddry: The Foreman of Fiction: Trump’s Fed Meltdown in a Hard Hat
How Donald Trump tried to bully Jerome Powell with imaginary numbers, Obama-era renovations, and plywood economics, and still managed to embarrass only himself
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Trump Says Those Interested in Epstein are “Bad People” & The Campaign to Fictionalize America’s History
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Austin Chronicle: Deported Texan Born to Soldier on U.S. Base Abroad Still Stuck in Jamaica
DHS insists he is Jamaican, though he’d never been there before
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CNN: Two senior NOAA officials were just placed on leave. Both led ‘Sharpiegate’ inquiry
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The inquiry found then-acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs and another NOAA official violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy by backing Trump’s hand-drawn version of the forecast for 2019’s Hurricane Dorian. Trump’s modification to the National Weather Service’s forecast, drawn in a Sharpie, suggested the storm would hit Alabama.
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yahoo!sports: Venezuelan team denied entry into U.S. for Little League’s senior tournament
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ESPN: Donald Trump signs order, seeks to clarify NCAA athletes’ employment status
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The NCAA’s long-held prohibition on paying athletes has crumbled in the past decade under pressure from a litany of legal challenges and state laws. The association and its power conferences formally agreed to an antitrust settlement in June that will allow schools to pay up to $20.5 million directly to their athletes in the coming academic year. Those payments are also designated as endorsement contracts on paper but likely will serve as de facto salaries.Steve Berman, one of the co-lead plaintiff attorneys in the antitrust settlement, criticized Trump for trying to intervene.
“Plain and simple, college athletes don’t need Trump’s help, and he shouldn’t be aiding the NCAA at the expense of athletes,” Berman said last week. “… As a result of our case, college athletes are now free to make their own deals. For Trump to want to put his foot on their deal-making abilities is unwarranted and flouts his own philosophy on the supposed ‘art of the deal.’”
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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