Gavin Kliger helped oversee mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while holding stock in companies that experts say likely stand to benefit from dismantling that agency — a potential violation of federal ethics laws.
corruption, DOGE, Trump administration, US politics
We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us.
Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Ben Protess in The New York Times.
Published . Read on .
World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.
Since taking charge of the office in January, Martin has launched controversial investigations, rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and vowed to change how his office prosecutes crime in the District of Columbia.
His actions have been met with fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and legal experts. There have been at least four disciplinary complaints filed against him with the D.C. and Missouri bars. One of the D.C. complaints has been dismissed; the other three appear to be pending. If Martin has responded to the complaints, his statements have not been made public.
Even if Wikipedia’s content was biased (it isn’t), even if every editor was actively trying to push an anti-Israel narrative (they aren’t), that would still be protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to threaten organizations over their editorial choices, no matter how much certain prosecutors or publications might dislike those choices.
"I don't like them. I wouldn't read them. I'll be honest I've read the reviews on some of them…" With these words at a public meeting, Tennessee's Rutherford County School Board member Stan Vaught admitted to banning books he hadn't read — a revelation that kicked off a federal lawsuit.
According to the complaint, board members relied primarily on BookLooks.org, a website connected to the Hitler-quoting group Moms for Liberty, instead of reading the books themselves or considering their literary merit. The board repeatedly overruled their own librarians' recommendations to keep books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and Ernest Cline' Ready Player One because it has "characters discussing beliefs that heaven and god are not
real."
books, censorship, extremism, free speech, libraries, US politics
More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.