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Paramount's talks with Stephen Miller's wife spark mockery: 'The grift is never-ending'

May 14, 2026Far Left

Political analysts and observers mocked a giant Trump-aligned media company on Thursday after it was reported that the company is in talks to acquire a floundering conservative podcast. Axios reported that Paramount is evaluating a potential distribution deal with Katie Miller, wife of President Donald Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and her podcast "The Katie Miller Podcast." The report noted that Paramount is considering the deal as it attempts to bolster its podcast roster. The company has also had discussions with Paragon Collective, which hosts comedians Whitney Cummings and D.L. Hughley, and Jubilee Media, according to the report. Miller's podcast has just over 57,000 followers on YouTube. No episodes have reached more than 1 million views, even though they have included prominent conservative figures such as Fox News host Sean Hannity, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. "The conversations with Miller suggest Paramount is looking to bring in diverse voices, including conservatives," Axios reported. The report attracted mockery from political analysts and observers on social media. "The MAGA movement is DEI for conservative losers," Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist, posted on X. "Prove me wrong.""Paramount needs Trump for their merger to go through, so conveniently now the wife of that goblin Stephen Miller gets a sweet deal out of it. The grift is never-ending," The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political group, posted on X. "Odd business decision to go all-in with people who are just on the edge of being toxic and unemployable for the rest of their lives," writer and producer Jonathan Harris posted on Bluesky. "Her podcast isn’t very popular," Zaid Jilani, a political analyst and writer, posted on X. "This is clearly corruption, a way to pay off the family of a powerful Trump staffer.""I'm told this is The Return Of Meritocracy," Eric Boehm, a writer for Reason Magazine, posted on X.

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'Perverted little fantasy': Stephen Miller instantly buried after bizarre post

Raw Story

2 hours ago

'Perverted little fantasy': Stephen Miller instantly buried after bizarre post

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept up his attacks on birthright citizenship with a far-fetched hypothetical on Friday, and critics lined up to ridicule it.Days after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling that struck down President Donald Trump's executive order, Miller posted on X that if you believe a foreign government could sail a hospital ship to the edge of US waters, "deliver a hundred babies to foreign moms, then promptly sail back," and that each child "is American for life, you don't believe in nationhood at all." The rant echoed the birth-tourism case he made on Fox News, where he floated a "hard look" at barring pregnant women from the country.Miller's post predictably led to quick backlash. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger asked sarcastically, "What about our hospital ship that we sent to Greenland? It happened right?" Bulwark journalist Sam Stein quipped, "Well. When you put it that way." Internet personality Damin Toell pointed out that under the 1898 Wong Kim Ark precedent, and still after this week's ruling, babies born aboard foreign government ships in US waters are already exempt from birthright citizenship.Others flipped Miller's logic back on him.National security journalist Marcy Wheeler called his "perverted little fantasy" no more real "than it was for the century and a half since birthright citizenship was codified." Academic Alonso Gurmendi argued that "any citizenship rule can be made to sound absurd like this." And journalist Zaid Jilani went furthest, sarcastically asking: "What if a mom catapults over the US Mexico border and from 500 feet in the air pops a baby out, ties a parachute to it and lets it fall gently to the ground. Does that baby deserve citizenship, lib?"The administration has vowed to keep fighting, though some analysts say the ruling nearly went the other way. Independent estimates put actual birth tourism at a tiny fraction of U.S. births.

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Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Raw Story

7 hours ago

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.

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MAGA reporter declares: 'Uncool' State Fair debacle is the 'end of Trump'

Alternet.org

7 hours ago

MAGA reporter declares: 'Uncool' State Fair debacle is the 'end of Trump'

On Friday, a prominent MAGA journalist called it: “The State Fair debacle is the end of @realDonaldTrump as a cultural force.”Alex Berenson – a veteran journalist who gained MAGA fame for his vocal COVID denial and voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 – posted this declaration to social media along with a photo of an almost completely empty National State Fair, at the center of which stood a mini mockup of the Commander in Chief’s crumbling triumphal arch. “Trump has always been uncool in a cool way,” Berenson continued. “He’s so in love with himself and his own awful taste you appreciate him even if you hate him. But this is just a box-office bomb, and it makes him look so old.”His dismal assessment comes amid rampant reports of the fair’s many disappointments. The event – much touted by Trump in the weeks preceding it – has been characterized by thin to nonexistent crowds, prompting the crowd-size-obsessed president to fly into a rage and fret that no one will show up to his 4th of July rally. His own supporters have called it “really disappointing,” “unnecessarily vanilla,” and “like a silent protest.” Even Fox News ditched the affair after wasting too much airtime on “live shots of empty grass.”The National State Fair is part of the wider celebrations marking the United States’ 250th birthday, which have been plagued by controversy, scandal, and failure for months. In May, the fair concert series fell apart within hours of its lineup announcement as musicians quit, saying they’d been misled about the event’s pro-Trump connotations. Somewhere along the way, Trump decided the Reflecting Pool needed to be painted, and that debacle spun out into Algaegate. This and other projects have been riddled with accusations of no-bid contracts and shady dealings. Berenson’s assertion that the end of Trump is nigh comes as the MAGA movement descends into “civil war.” The president has lost some of his most important political and media allies, like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The ‘Relectant Right’ who played a key role in his 2024 election have soured. And even the white working-class voters who are his most loyal support base have drifted away. Overall, Trump’s approval ratings have plunged to historic lows, increasing to just 37 percent in recent days.

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Reason.com

10 hours ago

Will Trump v. Barbara End the Birthright Citizenship Debate? (UPDATED)

The Court may have ruled on birthright citizenship, but the debate over birthright citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment is likely to continue.

Center Right

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Trump team believed Israel plotted assassinations to derail Iran talks: reports

Raw Story

11 hours ago

Trump team believed Israel plotted assassinations to derail Iran talks: reports

Trump administration officials reportedly believed that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators—including the country’s foreign minister—during peace talks with the US in an effort to sabotage diplomatic progress.The New York Times reported Thursday that “American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials—Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament—spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.” In response, the US “went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials,” according to the Times, which cited unnamed current and former American officials.The US and Israel have killed dozens of top Iranian officials since launching their illegal joint war in late February. But the allied countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list in late March, opening the possibility of high-level negotiations to end the war.But Israel remained bent on targeting the negotiators, according to the Times, whose reporting was later corroborated by The Washington Post.The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April, when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Pakistan’s capital to meet with US Vice President JD Vance:Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.The Post reported that “cracks emerged” between the US and Israeli approaches to the war following Israel’s assassination of top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March.“They’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump told reporters in late March, suggesting Israel’s assassination campaign was making it difficult to find potential negotiating partners.Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the new reporting that “Israel is a state that, on paper, is a US partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine US diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the US engages with in crucial negotiations.”“I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi added.At present, the Israeli government—led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is endangering tenuous US-Iran peace talks with its continued occupation of and assault on Lebanon, which Iran has highlighted as a key factor in the negotiations.Visiting occupied southern Lebanon earlier this week, Netanyahu declared to Israeli troops that “our insistence is that we will not leave... until the threat is removed.”Parsi wrote earlier this week that “beyond his long-standing desire to use American force to subjugate Iran to Israeli domination and achieve a regional balance favorable to Israel,” Netanyahu “now also has stark political and personal reasons to restart the war” with Iran.“The [US and Iran’s memorandum of understanding] has come at a steep political cost for Netanyahu,” wrote Parsi. “His prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering President Trump, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position—undermining the very case he has made for his leadership.”“And of course,” Parsi added, “if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as prime minister and face trial over corruption charges.”The story was published in partnership with Common Dreams, read the original here.

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Israel Reportedly Planned to Assassinate Iranian Negotiators During Peace Talks

Truthout

11 hours ago

Israel Reportedly Planned to Assassinate Iranian Negotiators During Peace Talks

Israel allegedly plotted to derail talks by killing Iran's foreign minister and speaker of parliament against US wishes.

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Mike Vrabel and wife head to Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce wedding

New York Post

13 hours ago

Mike Vrabel and wife head to Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce wedding

The New York nuptials are set to take place in the heart of the city at Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks played in the NBA Finals only a few weeks ago.

Right

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NATO Allies Spar Over Pipelines, Ukraine Support in Summit Talks

Bloomberg Politics

17 hours ago

NATO Allies Spar Over Pipelines, Ukraine Support in Summit Talks

NATO members are struggling to coalesce around a joint statement for their summit next week due to disagreements over projects to extend the alliance’s fuel pipelines to eastern Europe and the duration of financial support for Ukraine.

Center

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Paramount's talks with Stephen Miller's wife spark mockery: 'The grift is never-ending'

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Paramount's talks with Stephen Miller's wife spark mockery: 'The grift is never-ending'

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