Apple Newsroom:

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

We all knew this was coming and it’s about time. Tim Cook was never a product guy, and that seemed okay for a while because he knew that wasn’t his strength and so he didn’t interfere too much. But over time, he’s showed that he cares more about chasing profits than making great products. Granted, that sounds like every public company under capitalism. But this is Apple. Historically they’ve been most successful when they focus on making things that people enjoy.

John Ternus is a product guy. He’s been in charge of hardware and Apple’s hardware is fantastic right now. Elevating him to CEO is an excellent decision and hopefully he can return the focus to products over profits. Make great stuff, put the users first, and the money will follow. In the words of Socrates, “Virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money, and all other things good to man.”

Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO of Global Tetrahedron:

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you’ll die if you don’t buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

The New York Times:

The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially planned to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”

Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker hopes to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy, he said.

“I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.

I love it when people do things just for fun and to make others laugh. Sometimes it feels like the world doesn’t have enough of that, at least not on a large scale involving well-known companies. But if The Onion isn’t going to do this kind of thing, nobody will.

However, The Onion was supposed to purchase InfoWars back in November 2024. They would have completely owned the brand and the IP, but it was blocked by a judge. It seems they’ve come up with a workaround but this might not stick either.

Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.

On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’ Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.

The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Guerra Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks.

I hope this actually happens, if only because it would be funny. I like to think they wouldn’t announce this unless they knew for sure that the deal would go through, especially after the first time. But even if this attempt isn’t successful, CEO Ben Collins (the real CEO, not the fictional CEO character quoted above) seems incredibly committed to the bit. For that, he has my respect.

I’ve always been interested in technology. I enjoy learning about it, thinking about it, and much to the annoyance of those around me, talking about it. Technology was my first love, and when you’re in love you want to tell the world. At the time, I didn’t realize how much of my world was built by Apple.

The Macintosh, which defined the modern idea of what a computer is and how it works, was released a decade before I was born. The PowerBook was a revolutionary new design that is now used by every laptop in the world, and that was three years before I was born. I was seven when the iPod came out. By the time I was a teenager, all these things just seemed normal. The GUI, the mouse, laptops, a thousand songs in your pocket… this was simply the natural order of things. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the history and gave Apple credit for their role in creating the things I love.

The iPhone was released the summer before I entered eighth grade. By the time I graduated high school, it had changed the world. How lucky I am that I got to come of age with the most important computer ever made. At some point during those years, it seemed obvious that I should be paying attention to the company behind it. But it wasn’t just the iPhone that made me a fan of Apple: it was their events, hosted by Steve Jobs.

At the time, nobody else had events like this. It was fascinating to see someone not just talking about about their products, but also talking about their philosophy behind why something was designed in a particular way. Basically, Steve talked about what they believed in.

Companies don’t usually spend any amount of time talking about their values and principles, but Apple does. They claim to have strong opinions about what they believe is right, whether that’s about product design or human rights. They frequently say that they want to leave the world a better place than they found it.

However, Apple is also a for-profit corporation in a capitalist system, and sometimes that conflicts with their values. And money usually wins. Apple, like all of us, is at their best when they stick to their principles and at their worst when they prioritize profits.

I will always be a fan of Apple, partly because of their undeniable impact on the world, and partly because I really enjoy a lot of their products. But it also goes deeper than that. I believe in many of the values that Apple claims to profess, even when Apple itself seems not to. I will always be a fan of Apple because I will always believe in what they could be. Cut me and I bleed six colors.

So here’s to the first 50 years of Apple. Here’s to the crazy ones.

Erin Reed:

On Tuesday, the Florida legislature passed a bill that would ban all local governments from “promoting” or “adopting” activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—and bar any recipients of city contracts or grants from doing the same. The bill explicitly includes gender identity and sexual orientation in its definition of DEI, meaning any official activity “with reference to” LGBTQ+ people could trigger a violation. That could include promoting or supporting local Pride events with any city resources or funding LGBTQ+ community health centers. The bill also contains a novel and extreme enforcement mechanism: any elected official the governor deems in violation would be guilty of “misfeasance in office,” which under the Florida Constitution gives Governor DeSantis the power to immediately suspend that official by executive order—without a court hearing. It is a power he has already weaponized twice against elected Democratic state attorneys, and which would now expand to every city commissioner and county official in the state.

It’s worth reading the whole piece to see all the implications this could have, but the summary alone gives you a sense of how insane this is. I could talk about how this is exactly the kind of cancel culture that conservatives complain about, or I could talk about how this has a chilling effect on free speech, but I don’t think I need to go into detail on any of that. They just hate queer people.

Bob Iger is stepping down as CEO and will be replaced by the head of the Parks division. Again.

The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company Board of Directors announced today that, in a unanimous vote held on Monday, it elected Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro to become Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, effective at the upcoming Annual Meeting on March 18, 2026, when he will succeed longtime Disney CEO Robert A. Iger. The Board also intends to appoint D’Amaro as a director immediately following that meeting. As head of the company’s largest business segment with $36 billion in annual revenue in FY2025 and 185,000 Cast Members and employees worldwide, D’Amaro, a 28-year Disney veteran, is the architect of the largest global expansion in Disney Experiences history, and has led the segment to new heights financially, creatively, and in guest satisfaction.

Concurrent with D’Amaro’s appointment, Dana Walden, Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment, has been named President and Chief Creative Officer of The Walt Disney Company, also effective March 18. As Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment, Walden has led Disney’s world-renowned, award-winning entertainment media, news, and content businesses globally, including Disney’s streaming businesses. In this new role – a historic first for the enterprise – Walden will report directly to D’Amaro and will ensure that storytelling and creative expression across every audience touchpoint consistently reflect the brand, engage audiences at scale, and advance core business objectives, while driving enterprise-wide initiatives and translating vision into action.

Julia Alexander on why Josh D’Amaro got the job:

D’Amaro will rely on Dana/Alan for their relationships, expertise, etc. But Disney choosing the parks guy at the same time that Dis’ experience division surpasses $10B in quart rev for first time speaks about where the company’s main profit center will draw from. Add in Epic partnership, cruises, and monetizing content flywheel at a more significant rate, and you can see why it isn’t Dana or Alan.

Parks has always been big business, but experiences are what consumers are proving more willing to spend on, and entertainment is being disrupted so fast and so frequently that what it looks like in a decade’s time — and what Disney’s role in it is — is up for debate every day.

There’s a reason it’s been so difficult to find Bob Iger’s successor. He’s both good at business and he has good relationships with talent. Disney needs both of these things in order to succeed. I’ve said for years that they should consider co-CEOs, the way Netflix has Ted Sarandos for the creative side and Greg Peters for the business side. Today’s announcement looks like a similar arrangement.

It seemed like it was always going to come down to either Josh D’Amaro or Dana Walden. I get the sense that D’Amaro is a little bit more of a business guy, and Walden is a little bit more of the creative type. He can manage the spreadsheets, and she can manage the talent. By elevating D’Amaro to CEO and simultaneously creating a new position for Walden, Disney is acknowledging that both of them are needed to run this company.

The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Studios announced today that, after nearly 14 years of leading Lucasfilm, President Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down from her role and will transition back to full-time producing, including the studio’s upcoming feature films The Mandalorian and Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter. Going forward, Dave Filoni will take on creative leadership of Lucasfilm as President and Chief Creative Officer, Lucasfilm, and Lynwen Brennan will serve as Co-President, Lucasfilm, with each having held senior executive roles at the studio for more than 15 years. The two will report to Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman, and their close collaboration will carry Lucasfilm into its next chapter of storytelling, with a strong foundation of creative vision and operational leadership guiding the studio forward.

Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck News:

Seven years between Skywalker and May’s The Mandalorian and Grogu is an inexcusable eternity in franchise filmmaking, and the projects Kennedy abandoned during that stretch could fill a Sarlacc pit. She announced new films with Rian Johnson, and Damon Lindelof and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and the Game of Thrones guys, and Josh Trank, and Taika Waititi, and Patty Jenkins (that one came with a hype video). She sidelined Gareth Edwards for Tony Gilroy in the middle of Rogue One, and fired Lord and Miller while they were shooting Solo despite signing off on their vision for a more comedic prequel. She booted Colin Trevorrow from Rise of Skywalker and paid a fortune for J.J. Abrams to undo Johnson’s creative choices in The Last Jedi because some nerds online were pissed. That’s just the stuff that became public. Over and over, sources pointed to a chaotic process at Lucasfilm. Now Donald Glover, Simon Kinberg, and James Mangold are awaiting the fate of their projects. Only Star Wars could keep convincing these Charlie Browns to line up to kick Kennedy’s football.

It’s harsh, but I can’t disagree. So many projects have been announced and so few have actually happened. Most of the output has been on television, and that’s not necessary bad, but the results have been mixed at best. To be fair, it’s probably not all her fault. Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver pitched a film called The Hunt for Ben Solo and it seems that Kennedy was on board, but Bob Iger and Alan Bergman killed it. And even Marvel Studios has announced a few projects that didn’t end up happening, although Kevin Feige certainly has a much better track record.

As far as Dave Filoni being the new creative lead, I’m not excited. The great thing about the Star Wars universe is that it has the potential to tell many different kinds of stories, but it seems like Filoni is only interested in a few of them. He usually sticks to similar themes and tone, and sometimes it works out really well. The Clone Wars contains some of the greatest moments in all of Star Wars, but I don’t want everything to feel like that. Andor is radically different in both theme and tone, and that’s what elevates it to one of the best works in the entire franchise. I’m not sure that show would have been greenlit under his leadership. I hope Dave Filoni remembers that the world is wide enough for both Cassian and Grogu.

Wikipedia was founded 25 years ago today, on January 15, 2001. In that time, it’s become one of the most important websites on the internet. So today I wanted to share some of my favorite parts from this article on The Verge: “How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks.”

Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation.

This is a fantastic article that talks about how Wikipedia was created, how it works, and why it’s under attack. It started with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger attempting to start their own online encyclopedia called Nupedia; only experts could contribute to it, and there was a rigorous review process before anything could be posted. Unsurprisingly, it took them a year to write just 20 articles. To speed things up, they decided to open-source the project, and thus Wikipedia was born. There were more than 20,000 articles created in its first year.

There were few rules at first, but one that Wales said was “non-negotiable” was that Wikipedia should be written from a “neutral point of view.” The policy, abbreviated as NPOV, was imported from the “nonbias policy” Sanger had written for Nupedia. But on Wikipedia, Wales considered it as much a “social concept of cooperation” as an editorial standard. If this site was going to be open to anyone to edit, the only way to avoid endless flame wars over who is right was, provocatively speaking, to set questions of truth aside. “We could talk about that and get nowhere,” Wales wrote to the Wikipedia email list. “Perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic is to write about what people believe, rather than what is so,” he explained.

I think everyone would agree that the NPOV policy is a good one, and setting aside questions of truth in favor of beliefs is a good way to get there. If people can’t agree on an issue, at least they should be able to agree on what it is they’re disagreeing about. But of course, people believe all sorts of silly things. So how do you handle things like climate change deniers or flat-Earthers?

In response, the early volunteers added another rule. You can’t just say things; any factual claim needs a citation that readers can check for themselves. When people started emailing Wales their proofs that Einstein was wrong about relativity, he clarified that the cited source could not be your own “original research.” Sorry, Wales wrote to an Einstein debunker, it doesn’t matter whether your theory is true. When it is published in a physics journal, you can cite that.

Instead of trying to ascertain the truth, editors assessed the credibility of sources, looking to signals like whether a publication had a fact-checking department, got cited by other reputable sources, and issued corrections when it got things wrong.

At their best, these ground rules ensured debates followed a productive dialectic. An editor might write that human-caused climate change was a fact; another might change the line to say there was ongoing debate; a third editor would add the line back, backed up by surveys of climate scientists, and demand peer-reviewed studies supporting alternate theories. The outcome was a more accurate description of the state of knowledge than many journalists were promoting at the time by giving “both sides” equal weight, and also a lot of work to arrive at. A 2019 study published in Nature found that Wikipedia’s most polarizing articles — eugenics, global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio — are the highest quality, because each side keeps adding citations in support of their views. Wikipedia: a machine for turning conflict into bibliographies.

It’s not Wikipedia’s job to ascertain truth; its job is to present information from credible sources. So each article acts like a summary, and you always have the option to check the citations and explore the topic in more detail. And if you think important information is missing, you can add it as long as you follow the rules: neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiability.

If each article is a summary, the Talk page is the history of how we got to the summary. If you ever wonder why an article is written in a particular way or why some piece of information is included, you can view the Talk page to see the discussion. There may be fierce disagreement, but everyone must follow the rules. And it’s all documented so that anyone can read the arguments and see how the editors arrived at that conclusion.

In 2009, law professors David A. Hoffman and Salil K. Mehra published a paper analyzing conflicts like these on Wikipedia and noted something unusual. Wikipedia’s dispute resolution system does not actually resolve disputes. In fact, it seems to facilitate them continuing forever.

These disputes may be crucial to Wikipedia’s success, the researchers wrote. Online communities are in perpetual danger of dissolving into anarchy. But because disputes on Wikipedia are won or lost based on who has better followed Wikipedia process, every dispute becomes an opportunity to reiterate the project’s rules and principles.

In 2016, researchers published a study of 10 years of Wikipedia edits about US politics. They found that articles became more neutral over time — and so, too, did the editors themselves. When editors arrived, they often proposed extreme edits, received pushback, and either left the project or made increasingly moderate contributions.

This is obviously not the reigning dynamic of the rest of the internet. The social platforms where culture and politics increasingly play out are governed by algorithms that have the opposite effect of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy in nearly every respect. Optimized to capture attention, they boost the novel, extreme, and sensational rather than subjecting them to increased scrutiny, and by sending content to users most likely to engage with it, they sort people into clusters of mutual agreement. This phenomenon has many names. Filter bubbles, epistemological fragmentation, bespoke realities, the sense that everyone has lost their minds. On Wikipedia, it’s called a “point of view split,” and editors banned it early. You are simply not allowed to make a new article on the same topic. Instead, you must make the case for a given perspective’s place amid all the others while staying, literally, on the same page.

That last sentence is my favorite in the whole article. Wikipedia is designed to force everyone to literally get on the same page. And the content of each page lives or dies based on who did a better job of following the rules. It doesn’t matter what your personal opinion is, you must maintain NPOV and verifiability if you want to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, some people can’t handle that.

There’s a whole section of this article about all the people who complain because they think Wikipedia is biased. A lot of the complaints are about a page called Reliable sources/Perennial sources. This is where editors have compiled a massive list of sources and determined the credibility for each one. This way they don’t need to keep having the same arguments over and over again about the same source on every Talk page. And of course, as with all of Wikipedia, you can see the the historical record of all the arguments that led to that decision.

But to Wikipedia’s critics, the page has become a symbol of the encyclopedia’s biases. Sanger, the briefly tenured cofounder, has found a receptive audience in right-wing activist Christopher Rufo and other conservatives by claiming Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, he argues, it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,” like the existence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and the FBI playing a role in the January 6th Capitol attack.

Last spring, the reliable source page collided with one of the most intense political flashpoints on Wikipedia, the Israel-Palestine conflict. In April, an editor asked whether it was time to reevaluate the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League in light of changes to the way it categorizes antisemitic incidents to include protests of Israel, among other recent controversies. About 120 editors debated the topic for two months, producing text equal to 1.9 The Old Man and the Seas, or “tomats,” a standard unit of Wikipedia discourse. The consensus was that the ADL was reliable on antisemitism generally but not when the Israel-Palestine conflict was involved.

Unusually for a Wikipedia administrative process, the decision received enormous attention. The Times of Israel called it a “staggering blow” for the ADL, which mustered Jewish groups to petition the foundation to overrule the editors. The foundation responded with a fairly technical explanation of how Wikipedia’s self-governing reliability determinations work.

The article goes on to talk about how people will cherry-pick examples of things getting deleted in an effort to prove bias, but when you read the Talk page that explains why it was deleted, it’s usually because it wasn’t following the rules. One person tried to use some kind of GPT language model to prove bias, but that study wasn’t peer reviewed, and those who looked into it explained why it doesn’t hold up.

There are biases on Wikipedia, but it’s not about the politics of left versus right. It’s more about the site as a whole and what topics even get a page in the first place. Sometimes this reflects bias in other media; as former Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher said, “We’re a mirror of the world’s biases, not the source of them. We can’t write articles about what you don’t cover.” Other biases could come from the fact that most editors are men in Europe and America, so topics that interest them are much more comprehensive.

Then there’s a large section of the article that explains in detail all of the ways that authoritarian governments around the world have attempted to manipulate Wikipedia. There’s even been some threats from the US government, and American editors are getting concerned:

In April, the Trump administration’s interim US attorney for DC, Edward Martin Jr., sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation accusing the organization of disseminating “propaganda” and intimating that it had violated its duties as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

From a legal perspective, it was an odd document. The tax status of nonprofits is not generally the jurisdiction of the US attorney for DC, and many of the supposed violations, like having foreign nationals on its board or permitting “the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders,” are not against the law. Sanger is quoted, criticizing editor anonymity. In several cases, the rules Martin accuses Wikipedia of violating are Wikipedia’s own, like a commitment to neutrality. But the implied threat was clear.

“We’ve been anticipating something like this letter happening for some time,” a longtime editor, Lane Rasberry, said. It fits the pattern seen in India and elsewhere. He has been hearing more reports of threats against editors who work on pages related to trans issues and has been conducting security trainings to prevent their identities being revealed. Several US-based editors told me they now avoid politically contentious topics out of fear that they could be doxxed and face professional or legal retaliation. “There are more Wikipedia editors getting threats, more people getting scared,” Rasberry said.

Most people don’t really understand how Wikipedia works, and that can lead to them being skeptical of it or mistrusting it completely. But the great thing about it is that anyone can participate. One of the guidelines is to assume good faith, so as long as you’re engaging in good faith, you will be welcomed. The article mentions that there are many people who first got involved by vandalizing certain pages, but after talking to the community and learning the rules, they became valuable editors. The best defense of Wikipedia is to explain how it works.

As for the letter from the interim DC attorney, Trump withdrew Martin’s nomination in May, though he still has a position leading the Justice Department’s retribution-oriented “task force on weaponization.” In any case, the Wikimedia Foundation responded promptly.

“The foundation staff spent a lot of passion writing it,” Wales said of the reply. “Then they ran it by me for review, and I was ready to jump in, but I was like, actually, it’s perfect.”

“It’s very calm,” Wales said. “Here are the answers to your questions, here is what we do.” It explains how Wikipedia works.

Now that we’ve reached the end of 2025, I wanted to look back at this year in television. Obviously I don’t have time to watch all of the biggest shows, and this isn’t a complete list of everything I watched, but these were my favorites.

Andor

A lot of movies and TV shows give us the myth of The Chosen One who goes on The Hero’s Journey. But it’s called a myth for a reason. The truth is that if you actually want to build a rebellion, you need an organized grassroots effort with a lot of people working together toward a common goal. And you need that organization so that you can elevate someone to the position where they can become a hero. Most of those people will not be remembered, but they’re just as important. As Nemik said, “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

This is a show about what it actually takes to fight back against a fascist regime. It’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be ugly, and a lot of people are going to die without ever getting the credit they deserve. But it’s always worth fighting and we must always have hope. After all, rebellions are built on hope.

The Rehearsal

Once again, Nathan Fielder is doing things that have never been done before on television. In some ways, this season was weaker than the first because it had less of a consistent storyline throughout. Each individual episode was great, but sometimes I felt that it wandered a bit from the central premise of the season. However, this season reached even greater heights (literally and figuratively), and the finale was extraordinary. This man is a genius with a level of commitment to the bit that is unmatched.

Pluribus

There’s been a lot of conversation about what this show is about. I’ve seen people argue that it’s about COVID, AI, or even colonialism. The great thing about this show is that I think everyone is kind of right. There are so many interesting ideas packed into this one season that it’s very open to interpretation. One of the themes that resonates the most with me is loneliness, including a specific kind of loneliness: this is what it feels like to be the only sane person in an insane world.

Severance

Looking back, I’m not sure how well this season holds together as a complete work. I think the story had a couple of unnecessary detours or things that never really payed off, at least not yet. This felt like a season that was very heavy on lore and emotion, and a little light on making progress within the larger story.

All of that being said, this was a ton of fun to watch week-to-week and the quality of this show is still very high. The premise is fantastic, and I’m totally captivated by the possibilities of where this could go. I think this season was a lot of character exploration and setup for what comes next, but the finale delivers an incredible point of no return. Now all the pieces are on the board, the battle lines have been drawn, and there’s no going back.

The New York Times:

It was supposed to be a celebratory milestone, the final step in the process to obtain U.S. permanent residency. Instead, as each interview with an immigration officer wrapped up, federal agents swooped in, handcuffed the foreign spouse and took him or her away.

But the couples and their lawyers said they had followed the required steps: They had submitted extensive paperwork and paid fees. The foreign spouses had been fingerprinted and passed medical exams. None had criminal records. None had entered the country illegally. They had already been granted employment authorization.

I think ICE has realized that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find undocumented immigrants because those people are purposely trying to evade the system. On the other hand, documented immigrants are, well, documented. These are people who are trying to do things the right way. This means that they’re in the system, there’s records of their homes and their workplaces, and they have meetings set up with immigration officers. If your job is to deport people and your boss is demanding that you get your numbers up, it’s much easier to arrest someone when you know exactly where they’re going to be at a specific time.

They said they were only going after people who were here illegally. They said they would start with the violent criminals. They said they just want people to come into the country the right way. They lied about everything.

Reuters:

Two months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, investigations and other action against more than 600 people. Republican officials have endorsed the punishments, saying that those who glorify violence should be removed from positions of trust.

The article goes on to mention that 22 academics were fired in 2020 for comments about George Floyd, and more than 160 people were fired in 2024 for being pro-Palestine. It appears the latest round of cancellation is the most successful yet. I think this is a great example of how the right-wing operates and how efficient they can be.

First, they spend years screaming about cancel culture. They talk about it as though everyone who is even slightly left of center are all engaged in a mass campaign to get people fired simply for being conservative. They make it sound like online lefties, media liberals, and the Democratic Party are all working together to take away free speech.

Second, they decide that they should use the tools of their enemy against them. However, their enemy’s tools are imagined. They believe they’re taking a page from the enemy’s playbook, but actually they’re writing the playbook themselves.

Third, they become the very thing that they claim exists on the other side. A highly organized group of people consisting of online activists, media personalities, and politicians, all working together to get others fired for political speech that they don’t like. I would say they’re no different from their enemy, but the truth is, they’re worse.

This also feeds into their attacks on education. From the article:

Teachers, academics and university administrators were among those most frequently punished for criticizing Kirk. More than 350 education workers were fired, suspended or investigated in the days following the assassination, including 50 academics and senior university administrators, three high school principals, two cheerleading coaches and a theology instructor.

It’s amazing how effective a movement can be when everyone works together to achieve a shared goal. If only this kind of energy could be put towards something that actually helped people.