"Government Censorship Is Deeply Un-American"

Complaint by ABC et al. against FCC: 

1. Government censorship is deeply un-American.  That fundamental principle predates the Republic, with our Founders recognizing that “the freedom of the press is one of the great[est] bulwarks of liberty.”1  And it is no less true today, as the Supreme Court unanimously 1Va. Declaration of Rights § 12 (adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates, Williamsburg, Va., June 12, 1776). 1 Case 1:26-cv-02902     Document 1     Filed 08/18/26     Page 3 of 46 reaffirmed only two years ago: the government may not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”  Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024).   

2. This case concerns the Administration’s sustained effort to do just that.  Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts.  

3. That campaign began in this Administration’s earliest days and has only intensified since.  Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech—the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air.  Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech. 2   

4. In prosecuting the Administration’s campaign against free speech on network television, the Commission fights on several fronts using its expansive regulatory powers.  What has unfolded, in the words of sitting FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, is “a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC’s authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press and all media into submission.”3   

5. The Administration has not been shy about openly coercing ABC into changing its programming.  For example, in response to on-air comments by ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC’s Chairman issued an ultimatum to Plaintiffs: “We can do this the easy way or 5. The Administration has not been shy about openly coercing ABC into changing its programming.  For example, in response to on-air comments by ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC’s Chairman issued an ultimatum to Plaintiffs: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.  These companies can find ways . . . to take action . . . on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”4   

 6. For months, the Administration has steadily increased the pressure on ABC, culminating in the present threat to the broadcasting licenses of the eight ABC Owned Stations (“the Stations”).  The day after the President objected to additional on-air comments by Mr. Kimmel, the Commission issued an unprecedented order requiring the Stations to file early applications to renew their licenses—years before any of their licenses would have come up for renewal in the ordinary course and allowing only thirty days to file applications which ordinarily take months to prepare.  Until the day before that order issued, the Commission had not called for a renewal application ahead of schedule in more than half a century.  Nor had it ever demanded simultaneous early renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a single broadcast network—much less stations with the record of public service and award-winning journalism like these Stations.  In a contemporaneous interview, the Chairman did not mince words when explaining the Commission’s decision to ramp up its pressure on ABC: “If you didn’t take us seriously, now you should.”5   7. The Commission has demanded a review of the Stations’ licenses extraordinarily early.  For all but two of the Stations, this early review comes before their current license terms have even reached the halfway point, and years before the Commission is statutorily authorized to grant renewal.  That timing underscores the Commission’s true purpose: coercing and retaliating against a network that refuses to bow to the Administration’s demands.

Price Controls

 Anthony Salvanto, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus at CBS:

Though a slight majority, along with most Democrats and independents, [Republicans] would be okay with government price controls.

Nixon tried price controls, and they inflicted economic damage that lasted through the 1970s.  In his memoirs, he made a rare admission of error

What did America reap from its brief fling with economic controls? The August 15, 1971 decision to impose them was politically necessary and immensely popular in the short run. But in the long run I believe that it was wrong. The piper must always be paid, and there was an unquestionably high price for tampering with the orthodox economic mechanisms.

Viral Disinformation About Iran Nukes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Trump's war drove gas prices up.  Now Vance says that the war's purpose is to lower gas prices.  Incoherent.

Steven Lee Myers, Ronen Bergman, and Farnaz Fassihi at NYT:

On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said.

It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim soon caromed around the internet anyway.

The quotation appeared on Israeli accounts, and then a television channel there posted it, calling it the first public declaration that Iran was working to build a nuclear bomb. That evening, it made its way into remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the country’s national cemetery.

In the United States, Mike Waltz, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, reposted the quotation, as did Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican. Fox News also reported the claim, as anchors and guests cited it as evidence of Iran’s duplicity.

The quotation, attributed to Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was part of a campaign that succeeded in misleading politicians and news organizations around the world, according to a review by The New York Times. The claim’s spread showed how easily viral disinformation can twist the public debate over matters as serious as war and peace.

It is unclear who fabricated the quotation. However, it appeared intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding claim that Iran is determined to build a nuclear weapon and that war against Iran was necessary.

President Trump, who had tried to justify the war by citing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has been searching for a way out of it, and the quotation went viral three days after he said he was halting all attacks on Iran to give peace negotiations a chance.

“This quote was clearly crafted to drive a wedge into peace negotiations,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how disinformation and propaganda spread on social media.

Deleting Data -- Update

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook, State Department X posts, and DOJ press releases about the January 6 insurrection.

Scott McCain at TechTimes:

Treasury's own 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment documented active cases of drug traffickers, cybercriminals, and fraudsters laundering proceeds through anonymous U.S. shell companies — and then, three months later, the agency permanently eliminated the only federal database designed to expose who owns them.


FinCEN issued a final rule on August 11, 2026, permanently removing the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to disclose beneficial ownership information — the identities of the individuals who actually control a business — to its national database under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The rule took effect upon publication in the Federal Register on August 12. FinCEN simultaneously pledged to delete every record previously submitted by U.S. persons — names, addresses, and identity documents collected throughout 2024 when the law was briefly operative.

JP Alegre at The Deep Dive:

A machine-learning project a Canadian university student built in high school has become the basis for the most complete public archive of a quarter-century of USAID program evaluations, after the Trump administration took the original database offline last year.

USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse dates back to 1975 and has grown to include more than 168,000 documents on the agency’s foreign aid work. Its website went dark in early 2025 without warning as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency moved through the agency, and workers reportedly hauled its servers entirely away.

Musk wrote on X at the time that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

...

Ketevan Gallagher had no connection to that fight when she downloaded more than 4,000 evaluation PDFs from the DEC in 2024, for a senior research project using machine learning to analyze the reports. She’s now studying computer engineering at the University of Toronto. She reached out to AidData, a development research lab at William & Mary, when the DEC went offline the following year, to see if it could preserve her collection.

AidData published the archive this month at usaid-archive.aiddata.org, describing Gallagher’s organized dataset as “a unique solution for those searching for lessons learned” from decades of US foreign aid work. It now holds roughly 4,500 evaluations spanning 2000 to 2023, a subset of the original collection. Gallagher said she was “very grateful that AidData was able to preserve this data.”

Party and Patriotism

 Many posts have discussed patriotism and American exceptionalism.

Ruy Teixeira and Karlyn Bowman at AEI:

The reasons why our politics has been a cold shower for Americans’ patriotism are not hard to discern. One of them is the president. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by framing the U.S. as a nation in terminal decline, and he has frequently drawn a moral equivalence between the actions of foreign dictators and America’s own foreign policy. In the period since Trump overtook the Republican Party, right-wingers have become much more critical about America as it actually exists. And though Trump regularly expresses patriotism, his pageantry and truculent manner have been more polarizing than unifying. He seems to miss no opportunity to associate love of country with his own personal MAGA brand.

But it’s by no means just the fault of Trump and his party. Democrats have long practiced what we might call a “yes, but” approach to patriotism. The general idea is that patriotism is kind of okay but only if it’s immediately linked to the terrible things that America has done in the past and the injustices that still exist today. Simply being patriotic, full stop, is viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. And on the party’s ascendant far left, the Democratic Socialists of America—which stands to see a number of their members elected to Congress in November—recently released a platform that called for getting rid of the Constitution altogether.

But you don’t just need to look at the radical left to find Democratic objections to patriotism. Just this week, Fox News reported that Christina Bohannan, an Iowa Democrat trying to swing a critical House seat, called patriotism “sensitive and controversial” in a statement she issued in 2021. And last month, moderate Democratic representative Tom Suozzi of New York bemoaned his party’s aversion to patriotism. “The choice Democrats face is clear,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “We can allow patriotism to become a partisan label, or we can reclaim a tradition that rightly belongs to every American.”

Disappearing Town Halls

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The congressional town hall is becoming an endangered species.

Why it matters: August recess once meant lawmakers returning home to face constituents — sometimes friendly, sometimes furious. After a wave of explosive confrontations last year, many lawmakers have stopped them altogether.

Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) is among the dwindling number of lawmakers who still regularly subject themselves to the traditional, open town hall.

"You've got to show up in the town square and answer the questions. I told people I'd do it when I ran, and I kept my promise," Flood told Axios.

Flood holds three in-person town halls a year. He said his forums last year each drew about 750 people, while attendance this year has ranged from 235 to 315.

Zoom in: Only 11 lawmakers have town halls scheduled for the rest of August, according to LegiStorm's town hall tracker.For a ritual once synonymous with August recess, that's a remarkably thin showing.

Flashback: Republicans got screamed at — a lot — at town halls last year, as constituents vented over DOGE, federal layoffs and the Trump administration's spending cuts.Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) was booed, heckled and repeatedly interrupted at a March 2025 town hall in Asheville as he defended Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE cuts.

During an August 2025 town hall, constituents shouted at Flood, "Liar!" and "You don't care about us!"

The angry confrontations prompted NRCC chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) to tell Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls.

In summer 2009, Democrats faced angry voters at their town hall meetings across the country as constituents protested the Affordable Care Act. (As of January 2026, public approval of the ACA was 61%, according to KFF.)Democrats suffered historic losses in the 2010 midterm election.

Saving Social Security: Lotsa Luck

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Jeff Stein at NOTUS:

A group of eight centrist senators is attempting to compel Congress to revamp Social Security, in what many in Washington see as the first real effort at overhauling the government’s biggest program in more than a decade.

The push, led by retiring Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), sets the stage for a major confrontation later this year with potential consequences for the 59 million seniors who currently receive benefits.

Their bill, the PROMISE Act, does not directly cut Social Security benefits or raise taxes to avert the program’s approaching budget shortfall. Rather, it would task a bipartisan board with writing a plan to keep the pension system funded for another 50 years, likely through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and benefit cuts. The legislation would also establish parliamentary rules aimed at pushing Congress to act on the board’s proposal.

...

AARP — the roughly 40-million-members-strong seniors’ organization — has begun urging lawmakers to reject the bill, highlighting polling that suggests 85% of Americans support maintaining or increasing benefits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has begun calling for Senate Democrats to reject benefit cuts and instead stand behind financing Social Security by repealing the existing limit on payroll taxes for those earning more than $184,500 per year, arguing “the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security.”

Even conservatives who have long called for Social Security reform are mobilizing against it. Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader who leads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he has begun lobbying congressional Republican leadership to oppose the bill. Norquist called the legislation a “very real effort by the left” to convince Republicans to support tax hikes.

One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to candidly assess legislative dynamics, said, “I will eat my shoe” if the bill passes this year.

Durbin acknowledged those odds: “Miracles do occur,” he said.

In another potential sign of the legislation’s radioactivity, half of its original sponsors — Cassidy, Durbin, Tillis and Republican John Cornyn of Texas — are leaving the Senate at the end of this year. (Cassidy and Cornyn lost their primaries against Trump-backed challengers.)