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LitHub – Tom Zoellner on the Antebellum Precedent of Trump-Era Censorship: “In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to …
NBC News: “Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills…” See also At the Breaking Point – The State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025 – A Report by the American Foreign Service Association
Democracy Docket: “The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday [May 29, 2026] that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government. The proposed rule, which will be formally published next week, is an alarming …
Wired: “So far this year, authorities have seized or demanded ballots from elections in four states. Experts fear the trend could throw the midterms into chaos unless courts draw a line. As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago …
Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 11;12(11):eadw5578. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adw5578 – Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make autocomplete suggestions to people as they write text. Can these AI writing assistants affect people’s attitudes in this process? In two large-scale …
404 Media [no paywall]: “No one wants to live next to a noisy computer warehouse and communities across the country are successfully fighting them. Opposition to the massive data centers that power AI is bipartisan and growing across the country. From Maine to California, more states and local communities are passing moratoriums and bans on …
Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement, Federal Register, May 27, 2026 AGENCY: Office of Personnel Management. ACTION: Notice with request for comment. SUMMARY: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requests comment on a draft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for use by Federal agencies for both new and existing employees. The form is intended to document Federal employees’ …
Defiance News: “Today, a coalition of locally elected district attorneys and prosecutors from across the United States have officially put the Trump administration on notice: any federal agent who shows up at a polling place in violation of state or federal law will be investigated and prosecuted under the laws of the jurisdiction in which …
A serious claim requiring serious consideration. Christopher Armitage – “The Federalist Society spent forty years building a captured federal judiciary, and we are now living inside the result. The doctrine they built it around has a name, unitary executive theory, and the doctrine has a method. The method is to read every Democratic exercise of …
Follow up to $1.8 Billion Fund Could Funnel Money to Trump Allies, Decoding Fox News – The DOJ website now shows a blank page. Links to documents have been eliminated. I posted real time reporting throughout January 6, 2021 and identified a number of sources to access government documents specific to the event. These documents are …
Citizens for Ethics: “A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction today requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve text messages, including Signal messages, pertaining to its work, in response to a motion filed and argued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on behalf of the Freedom of the …
Government Executive: “The White House recently unveiled a new app to give the public “unfiltered” access to “key priorities,” “historic moments” and “policy breakthroughs.” Now, it’s directing agencies to help install it on the government phones of federal employees. The Trump administration launched the app, which promises to “[keep] you connected to President Donald J. …
