Donald trrump

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has thrown out the conviction of Douglass Mackey for lack of evidence, remanding his case to a district court for immediate dismissal. The ruling marks a massive victory for shitposters everywhere. For those of you who are not extremely online or deeply obsessed with the Pilgrim’s Progress of First Amendment rights in America, Mackey is the online figure formerly known as “Ricky Vaughn” whom the Biden FBI arrested in 2021 for a tweet he posted in 2016 making fun of Hillary Clinton and spreading satirical information about “texting to vote.” The government said he was using "social media to spread disinformation relevant to the impending 2016 Presidential Election.

This week, a lone federal district court judge in Boston, Massachusetts, with nary a citation to the Constitution, statutes or the applicable Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, entered a temporary restraining order prohibiting the federal defunding of Planned Parenthood. The basis for Judge Indira Talwani’s order is left for the public to surmise. Perhaps the good judge will fill in the blanks before the next hearing planned in the case, within two weeks; or perhaps not, since TROs are generally not appealable. Either way, the judge’s barren two-page order, as it stands, is a textbook example of a lawless judiciary engaged in policymaking from the bench.

The death of the financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at Manhattan’s notorious Metropolitan Correction Center has been ruled to be a suicide, and one that took place entirely by Epstein’s own hand, without any external interference. At least, that’s the story according to the Department of Justice and the FBI, who have also announced for good measure that the so-called Epstein Files, which supposedly contained the details of his high-profile clients, do not exist. After the disappointment of the decidedly low-profile release of the JFK-assassination files earlier this year, this is a second blow for conspiracy theorists who have been assured by the government that there is definitely, 100 percent nothing to see here. Will this be enough for them?

Elon Musk has set up a third party and pledged to contest next year’s midterms. But to find a third party that has performed well in a midterm election, we must journey far into the annals of American history. Minnesota and Wisconsin-based parties managed a handful of House representatives and a senator or two in 1934, but these were states-first campaigns that were anchored in a geographical power-base – something Musk does not have. We can discount the movements linked to Ross Perot in the 1990s and George Wallace in 1968, who both ran for president but did not have a viable wider party slate at their own elections or ensuing midterms.

“I didn’t ask hard questions because I knew I wouldn’t get an honest answer,” said Tucker Carlson, our edgelord Barbara Walters, in the hype-video run-up to his dull interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. But he didn’t get any honest answers in the interview anyway, so why bother asking in the first place? Carlson doesn’t seem to grasp that America’s geopolitical opponents grant him special access precisely because he won’t ask the hard questions. Carlson’s interviews are valuable because they give us a glimpse into what it would be like if we had an actual state-run media. Our journalism has its ideological biases.