Catholic Ties

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Patricia Tevington and Gregory A. Smith at Pew:

Catholicism’s roots in the United States run deep. Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) claim some connection to the Catholic faith. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that:

• 20% of U.S. adults are Catholics: They say they are Catholic when asked about their present religion.
• 9% of U.S adults are “cultural Catholics”: They don’t identify with Catholicism religiously, but they say “yes” when asked whether “aside from religion” they consider themselves Catholic in any way (for example, ethnically, culturally, or because of their family background).
• 9% are former Catholics: They neither identify as Catholic religiously nor consider themselves culturally Catholic, but they say they were raised in the Catholic faith.
• 9% are connected to Catholicism in other ways: They are not Catholic, culturally Catholic or formerly Catholic, but they have a Catholic parent, spouse or partner or they say “yes” when asked if they ever attend Catholic Mass.1

Social Security Misinformation

Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

Alexandra Berzon,Nicholas Nehamas, and Tara Siegel Bernard at NYT:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

...

The numbers were accurate: Millions of people who had died before modern-day record keeping made it easy to verify deaths were listed as still being alive, experts said. But the agency automatically stops payments going to people listed as older than 115, except in rare circumstances.

One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.

ACB

Many posts have discussed the independence of the judiciary.

At NYT, Jodi Kantor writes of Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence — measured by how often she is on the winning side — is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Justice Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president.

...

On the court, she stands somewhat alone. One of only two former law professors, she is also the least experienced judge, the youngest member of the group, at 53, and the only mother of grade-school children ever to serve. The sole current justice who was not educated at Harvard or Yale, she is a Washington outsider and foreigner to the power-player Beltway posts that shaped most of her colleagues.

Her apartness shows in her votes and her signature move of joining only slices of her colleagues’ opinions. She agrees with most of the supermajority’s outcomes, but sometimes writes to say they took the wrong route to their conclusion. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they’re doing it wrong.) Or she joins the liberal justices but stipulates that she can’t fully buy in.

How often Barrett voted with the majority

Conservative decisions

100%

91%

84%

80%

60%

Liberal decisions

40%

20%

2020-21 term

2021-22

2022-23

2023-24

Nonunanimous decisions that were orally argued and signed

 

Source: Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael J. Nelson, Penn State

 

The New York Times

 

Share of conservative votes

100%

Alito

80%

Thomas

Kavanaugh

Gorsuch

60%

Roberts

Barrett

40%

Jackson

Kagan

20%

Sotomayor

2020–22

2022–present

Nonunanimous decisions that were orally argued and signed

 

Source: Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael J. Nelson, Penn State

 

The New York Times

About the Data

The data in this article come from an analysis prepared for The Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson, of Penn State. The researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information about every Supreme Court case since 1791. More information on how decisions are coded “liberal” or “conservative” can be found on the database website.

Views of the US

Richard Wike, Jacob Poushter, Laura Silver and Janell Fetterolf at Pew:

People across the 24 countries surveyed are divided in their ratings of the U.S. on a number of measures:

• A median of 49% of adults have a favorable overall view of the U.S. An identical share have an unfavorable view.
• People in eight countries tend to name the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power. In 12 nations, more consider China the top economy. In four, about equal shares name the U.S. and China.
• A 50% median say democracy works well in the U.S., while 46% say it works poorly. And most agree there are strong partisan conflicts in the country.

In many – but not all – of the nations surveyed, views of the U.S. have become more negative since the last time we asked.

DTLA, AI, and Disinformation

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

Laura Doan and Emma Li at CBS:

As demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids continue in Los Angeles, misleading videos, conspiracies and false claims have spread on social media.

Many of the posts recycle longstanding conspiracy theories, which have often been revived during past episodes of civil unrest. Some posts have made claims that wealthy individuals engineered or financed the protests, and they have racked up millions of views online.

Some posts exaggerate the unrest, using videos of past demonstrations to depict a city overwhelmed by violence. In fact, clashes since the current protests began Friday have remained largely confined to parts of Los Angeles County.

...
One widely shared video of vandalized police cars set ablaze, which was posted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas on Sunday, was originally from news coverage of May 2020 protests in response to the death of George Floyd. 

...

Amid the recycled imagery, authentic pictures of National Guard members sleeping on the floor of a federal building in Los Angeles this week were falsely described as old or unauthentic.

The images were initially published by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday and republished by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on X, who said they served as proof that the deployment was poorly planned, and claimed the soldiers were "without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep."

Some social media users said the images were old and depicted soldiers at previous deployments. Grok, X's AI chatbot, determined the images were likely from Afghanistan in 2021.

However, the images are authentic. Using images published by the U.S. Northern Command and other videos posted to social media, CBS News independently confirmed the images were taken from the loading dock area of the Robert Young Federal Building.

Catherine Kim at Politico:

The latest rollout of accessible AI video generators presents unique challenges to the truth — and public perception of it — because videos are “more powerful as a medium in terms of convincing people of reality,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor at CUNY Queens College who studies internet literacy.

“Pictures are easily manipulated,” he said. “That idea has been there. But when it comes to videos, we’ve just been trained as an individual society to believe videos. Up until recently, we haven’t really had the opportunity to assume videos could be faked at the scale that it’s being faked at this point.”

It’s not just the sheer amount of slop that is filling social media feeds that’s posing a problem. It’s the ability to visually manipulate scenes to fit the creator’s political agenda that is making it so much harder to decipher the truth during the L.A. protests. Consider these completely fake AI-generated videos posted over the past few days: one of a hypocritical protester who preaches peace and then throws a molotov cocktail. Or another of a man screaming “Viva Mexico,” but then cowering away from an officer who says he will take him to Mexico. These clips aren’t just delivering conservative talking points either: This one emanates from the left, featuring a young man delivering a heartfelt speech about standing with his community and fighting injustice.

Until recently, the concern with manipulated images has been related to their ability to misinform a crowd and sway public opinion. But a growing body of research proves that not much can change people’s minds — not even AI misinformation. What the technology can do, however, is reinforce preexisting beliefs, leaving people impervious to actual facts.

AI and News Sites

Many posts have dealt with media problems.

Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt at WSJ:

The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers.

Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.

Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.

Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.

The Guard

For the first time in sixty years, a president has activated the National Guard without a request from the state's governor -- in this case, over his vocal opposition.

Juliette Kayyem at The Atlantic:

Trump’s decision—to exercise his Title 10 authority to federalize the National Guard under his command—was not based on a careful assessment of the operational needs on the streets of Los Angeles. Even if the White House’s escalating rhetoric and threats of full military deployment were justified by circumstances that merited overruling a governor, the notion that the armed services will stop protests and quiet widespread outrage about Trump’s immigration-enforcement policies in California is naive and flawed. Implicated in Trump’s decision was a lot of prior controversy—immigration and deportation, ICE raids, tension between blue states and the White House, a personal beef with Newsom—but the president’s assertion that a troop presence is the answer to public unrest is particularly dubious. Historically, these deployments have proved of limited value even when the president and governor agree on goals. Sending in the military as a hostile force is a recipe for trouble.

...

Right now, the Pentagon appears not even to have arranged sleeping arrangements for its troops, let alone determined the rules of engagement on the streets; the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the deployment was so “wildly underprepared” that troops are sleeping in cramped quarters on the floor. At best, this deployment will be completely unnecessary. At worst, it will be deeply counterproductive. But Trump’s motive is transparent—and he will surely engineer an occasion to keep escalating his power plays, until they seem normal.