FCC chair invites bipartisan backlash as MAGA battle with press intensifies
Source: The Hill News · Bias: Center
Summary
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to crack down on broadcasters over coverage of the U.S. war in Iran is raising fresh alarm about Trump administration efforts to intimidate or influence the media. In a Saturday post that was not targeted toward a specific outlet, Carr suggested news broadcasters could have problems renewing their licenses because…
FCC chair invites bipartisan backlash as MAGA battle with press intensifies
Center
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to crack down on broadcasters over coverage of the U.S. war in Iran is raising fresh alarm about Trump administration efforts to intimidate or influence the media. In a Saturday post that was not targeted toward a specific outlet, Carr suggested news broadcasters could have problems renewing their licenses because…
Kylie Jane Kremer, the activist listed as the permit holder for the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol attack, has floated a new theory about Washington's summer heat: it's sabotage.In a post on X, Kremer claimed someone with an "extreme case" of Trump derangement syndrome "geoengineered" the weather in D.C. She pointed to the cold at Trump's inauguration as proof of the same plot."I’m telling y’all that someone with an extreme case of TDS geoengineered this weather in DC. Same way they geoengineered Trump’s inauguration to be one of the coldest in U.S. history. People with TDS hate Trump more than they love America," she wrote on X.Her post came in response to Washington Post meteorologist and reporter Ben Noll, who noted the nation's capital would be "hotter than 99 percent of the planet on Friday.""Only parts of Africa's Sahara Desert, the Middle East, China's Gobi Desert and a few spots in the Desert Southwest will be hotter," he wrote on X.Forecasters called the inauguration D.C.'s coldest in decades, and the ceremony was moved indoors. But whether progressives with weather machines were responsible is another matter. And the internet didn't spare her. Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger wrote that people pushing the theory are "not mentally well," while internet commentator Damin Toell reminded followers that Kremer was also a key figure in the 2020 "stop the steal" movement. Writer Joe Flood noted that a woman who helped host the Jan. 6 rally now believes liberals control the weather.Julian Andreone of Drop Site News leaned into the joke, sarcastically agreeing that July heat in D.C. is "very suspicious." Climate advocate Benji Backer flagged the contradiction."Climate change can’t be real but this can be. Got it. Trying to catch up," he joked.The claim echoes a pattern among MAGA figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene's flood conspiracy theory and her bill to ban "weather modification" after the deadly Texas floods. Even fellow Republicans have stepped in to debunk the weather-control claims. Meteorologists have said cloud seeding cannot produce disasters.
Racism is an act of self-destruction, warns podcaster Wajahat Ali and independent reporter Joy Ann-Reid. But that destruction extends to everything around them when they manage to grab the levers of power.“I mean there's a big hole in the White House. The lawn where they built that ugly UFC ring is now brown. They've destroyed the Jackie Kennedy garden. [President] Donald Trump is supposed to be a builder but he physically destroyed D.C.,” said Reid. “And then that the poor pathetic little fair that he had, his little world's fair with the fake arch made of plastic. And they painted it. America right now is a laughingstock. I think we created 57,000 jobs last month. That is sad. It's a sad birthday.”But this is the mess that comes of a nation that “refused to acknowledge and uproot its dark sin of white supremacy,” said Ali. “We whitewashed our history books, made heroes of racist traitors, and decided to elect the most incompetent, corrupt vulgarian after electing the first Black president.”“Refusing to learn our lesson, we re-elected Trump, even though we could have had a competent Black woman as President. Now? America is turning into a s——hole,” Ali lamented. “Just look at the Reflecting Pool as a tragic example of our downfall. Take a trip to Washington, D.C., and see the absolute mess that is the White House. Our infrastructure is collapsing, our economy is ailing, and our public health is deteriorating. Measles, death, gun violence, and suicide are on the rise. But it doesn’t matter. White supremacy will destroy everything, including itself, instead of sharing power. It will burn everything down.”“The right wing is not satisfied with just having physically destroyed the country,” said Reid. “[They] destroyed the morale of the country on our birthday where we're sad and pathetic and can't even pull off a world's fair.”The Supreme Court, meanwhile, barely protected birthright citizenship with a six-to-three vote when all the justices had to do was read the Constitution and see that if you're born here, you're a citizen, said Ali.With the war on birthright citizenship and MAGA cries to sterilize brown immigrants, Reid said MAGA and Trump are laboring for a very specific kind of America.“If they were successful at removing everyone who looks like you and me — all the Blacks, all the browns, all the Muslims all the AAPI, all the Latinos — if they got their way, you know what America would look like? It would look like Trump’s pathetic American state fair,” said Reid. “That was a place where there were no Blacks. There were no gays. There were no brown people. It was just MAGA white folks. The one’s who weren’t broken by [Trump’s] economy, who could afford to get on a plane or drive to DC with these gas prices. It was an estimate that the first day was like a 1,000 people — only tens of MAGA could even afford to go there. … [because] they are the poor. They are broke. They're bored. And they're boring.”“There was no musical entertainment,” Reid raged. “That cultural anti-phenomenon that we saw at that pathetic Trump celebration supposedly of America’s birthday and Donald Trump — that is what's left when you get rid of all of us. If you really get rid of people of color then American culture is like sad Europe.”“Like a crusty, crusty mayo sandwich that has been left in the sun for two days,” added Ali.“One-hundred percent,” confirmed Reid. “You'd get no Janet Jackson, no Michael Jackson, no Prince, no Whitney Houston, no Aretha Franklin, no jazz, no gospel, no hip-hop. What do you actually have? What is your culture? What is this white culture that you're trying to preserve at all costs, at the cost of your own economy?”Ali added that even MAGA doesn’t like MAGA America.“When they move to the Southern states where do they move to when they move to Texas? Austin! When they move to Tennessee, they move to Nashville,” said Ali. “Even MAGA influencer] Nick Fuentes was like ‘yeah, I don't want to really move to a red state. So, they know that their mayo sandwich is s——. They know their potato salad sucks. They know their chicken is dry and has no spice. They know that they're bland and pasty and that they have no culture and no rhythm.”
In the wake of financial disclosures showing that President Donald Trump has profited wildly off his presidency over the past year, the Newsweek editors have published a detailed analysis in which they assert that he is “raking in eye-watering sums of money from cryptocurrency gamblers, most of whom were losers in this trade, and also his supporters.”According to Newsweek, while his supporters theoretically set out to “drain the swamp” in corrupt Washington, “The truth is, MAGA always knew Trump was like this. In fact, it’s a big part of why they backed him in the first place.”As Newsweek details, “Trump’s 2025 disclosure lists CIC Digital LLC, described as wholly owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, receiving royalties from a license agreement with Celebration Coins and reports the amount as $635,068,835. The same filing reports $236.25 million in token-sale proceeds distributed by World Liberty Financial, plus $65.6 million from the sale of equity in its holding company. Those numbers are politically explosive… because they involve a sitting president, his family business network and an industry his administration is figuring out how to, and if it should, regulate.”Critics say crypto is “a haven for criminals and scammers,” and Newsweek suggests it’s the most “Trumpian” of Trump’s grifts yet. “The $TRUMP coin launched days before Trump returned to office and surged from under $10 to as high as $74.59 before falling back, with four-fifths of its supply held by CIC Digital and an entity called Fight Fight Fight,” explains Newsweek. “The coin described itself as ‘an expression of support,’ not an investment or a security — a distinction that should have cooled anyone foolish enough to be treating it as a retirement plan.”Ultimately, “there were losses, though not for Trump. Roughly two-thirds of investors in the memecoin are underwater, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the Reuters tally put buyers’ collective losses near the family’s $2.3 billion in gains.”As Newsweek notes, “No supporter deserves to be fleeced because a favorite leader put his name on a speculative asset,” but “the naivete defense has limits.” Experts and regulators have long warned not only about the “exceptionally volatile and speculative” nature of crypto, which poses a significant risk of total loss, but about the shady nature of Trump’s dealings. With that in mind, “a voter can call Trump’s crypto dealings unseemly all they like, but a speculator who bought a president-branded token after years of such warnings has a hard time arguing the house owed him a win.”According to Newsweek, “It is easy to see the new crypto numbers as a betrayal of Trump’s voters, many of whom are struggling middle-and-working class voters who can never hope to own even a tiny fraction, if that, of what these deals alone made for him. But this is the kind of transaction many Trump supporters were primed to admire… The problem was not his instinct for aggressive self-interest, in Trump’s telling, but stupid leaders who failed to turn pursuit of self-interest into national advantage.”Whether all the crypto corruption scandal will impact Trump depends on “how his voters parse it, especially those who bought the coin and experienced losses — as personal betrayal, or as the cost of playing near power. Will the Trump supporters among the two-thirds of memecoin buyers now sitting on losses begin to defect, or simply shrug and stay with him?”
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.
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.
President Donald Trump is drawing a great deal of criticism from a combination of Democrats and Never Trump conservatives for mixing the federal government with his private business ventures — which, detractors say, is a blatant conflict of interest. And a CNN panel went off the rails on Thursday night when Trump supporter Ben Ferguson went out of his way to defend the president.Ferguson argued, "We have a president that was really wealthy when he came in, and keeps doing business with his family. There's nothing wrong with it."But host Abby Phillip and others on the panel pushed back against Ferguson's argument.Phillip told Ferguson, "You would have been fine with the so-called Biden crime family if Biden had just been transparent — if Hunter Biden had just been transparent? If he had just been transparent and said, 'I'm using my dad's name to make money,' you would have said, 'Totally above board?'"Ferguson, however, doubled down on his defense of Trump, saying that "Burisma was massive corruption" and insisting that Hunter Biden's business activities couldn't be compared to those of President Trump or his son Donald Trump Jr. Ferguson also mentioned stock trades made by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). But when CNN's Bakari Sellers jump into, he argued that Ferguson was jumping through hoops to defend the Trumps while making a point of demonizing Democrats.Sellers told Ferguson, "You ask, what did he do that was unethical or illegal? And I wanted to answer that plain and simply. I take…. yoga, and I feel like you're doing a little yoga too for that pretzel that you got yourself into…. To utilize your phrase, the president makes $400,000 a year. This quarter, he's made over $1 billion — $1.2 to $1.4 billion — on crypto alone…. What I want to tell you that's unethical is the fact that when you make 3500 trades in one year, and you go up and you invest in a company, and then you sit in the Oval Office and you tell people, 'Wow, this company is great. This company is going to do X, Y, Z' or you ease regulations on this company and you trade and purchase stock in that company. That fundamentally is unethical. You can call it what you want."