Commentary Culture Investigations

As the seemingly heroic state attorneys general bring the putatively villainous Meta to trial in federal court in Oakland, California, our credulous media, to no one’s surprise, ask no probing questions about the allegations’ merit. So, we ask them here.
To be sure, many young people so overuse Meta’s social media platforms — Facebook and Instagram — that such excess can contribute to mental health problems or worsen existing ones. But isn’t this just another way of saying Meta has produced great products that people might enjoy compulsively? (RELATED: Circling Like Vultures: California Leads New Attack on Facebook)
Let’s look at the logic of sensible product liability enforcement. Should McDonald’s be held liable if someone eats too many Big Macs, causing weight gain and diabetes? Are licensed dispensaries responsible when consumers obtain and overuse marijuana?
What is the legal theory allowing, it seems, a potentially company-destroying jury verdict or Court Order? In the past few years, Meta officials have denied their social media platforms are addictive, mainly in response to government inquiry. This appears to be the main basis for the government’s claims. (RELATED: Don’t Sue the Mirror)
To be sure, there is no medically recognized condition known as “social media disorder.” But the Court notes that even if extended social media use is not an addiction, at least it is compulsive use, which it deems an unimportant distinction. Meta would contend that there is a clear distinction between compulsive use and medically recognized addiction, and therefore has responded truthfully to government investigation. (RELATED: Suing Social Media Won’t Save the Children — But It Could Silence Everyone)
More to the point, assuming arguendo that Meta dishonestly denied causing addiction, did these purported lies cause young people to stay on their devices for hours at a time? It does not seem so; but, that said, no such proof appears to be required under consumer protection statutes, so long as Meta can be found to have lied to the “public.”
For these so-called lies, the attorneys general are seeking “disgorgement” of all related profits or, alternatively, damages for the ad revenue gained, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, up to a possible maximum of 1.4 trillion dollars, the entire worth of the company.
So, what is wrong with these claims? If Meta knowingly drives increased usage by youth, as it seems to, isn’t it responsible when many young people use it excessively? Such a conclusion raises several troubling issues.
Isn’t the more proximate cause the parents, guardians, schoolteachers, and administrators who condone the overuse by the youth they supervise?
If no young person has ever heard Meta deny that its platforms are addictive, how could those alleged denials have caused the widespread social media overuse? More importantly, in many, if not most, cases, wouldn’t a parent or guardian have been aware of the compulsive use but failed to intervene? Why should a company with no authority over the affected users bear responsibility for their mental health, when the people closest to them — such as parents with legal responsibility for their welfare—appear to have permitted the behavior? (RELATED: Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online)
Isn’t the more proximate cause the parents, guardians, schoolteachers, and administrators who condone the overuse by the youth they supervise? And if this compulsive use was known to be harmful, what did public health officials do about it? Aren’t state and public health officials subject to oversight by the same attorneys general bringing this case? And therefore aren’t these same attorneys general responsible for this widespread mental disorder, when they are doing nothing about ordering their own houses?
Additionally, there is the issue of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s shutting of schools during COVID, even though students were not in any mortal danger from the virus. Wasn’t Dr. Fauci, far more than Meta, responsible for an epidemic of adolescent social media addiction which arose when these young people were imprisoned in their own dwellings, with no personal contact with friends? (RELATED: How COVID Created the 15 Second Generation)
And how are the states going to spend the windfall gained from this trial? Will they use it to solve the social media disorder problem, or install EV battery charging stations? Moreover, won’t any adverse judgment have the perverse result of taking pressure off the neglectful, irresponsible parents, guardians, and educators who should be disciplining youth to stay off their devices? It seems so.
Certainly, the litigation could be beneficial if the Court were to order practical safeguards to discourage underage overuse of social media platforms. Even at that, no such order will be effective without vigilance by parents and guardians. But let’s be real: a judgment of billions of dollars will not help anyone other than grandstanding attorneys general.
READ MORE:
Circling Like Vultures: California Leads New Attack on Facebook
No Social Media Without Papers?
Socializing and Longevity: Does Online Count?
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his 2005 revelation as Deep Throat. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened. O’Connor and Mark Felt also collaborated on the 2006 book, A G-Man’s Life.

Screenshot via ‘You Tube” reposted to Snapstream

The pro-Palestinian propaganda train stopped at National Public Radio Monday to publicize the no-longer-obscure documentary by Poh Si Teng, American Doctor, relaying the evils of Israel — as seen through the eyes of three virulently anti-Zionist doctors: Mark Perlmutter, Thaer Ahmad, and Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteer for medical missions in Gaza on behalf of the victims of Israel’s purported “genocide.” Almost all of whom are babies. Muslim co-host Leila Fadel began:Leila Fadel: The film documents both the horrors they see inside Gaza and their commitment to making sure the American public knows what they witnessed.Mark Perlmutter was the most outspoken and offensive guest.Mark Perlmutter: This is what my tax dollars did, what your tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.He spouted gruesome, hard-to-believe anecdotes, the same ones he used on CNN.Perlmutter: Since Gaza was 50% children, I knew that 90% of my patients would be babies. And that’s, in fact, what we saw in the emergency room. And I’ve amputated hundreds of legs in my overseas mission work over 30-plus years. I’ve never had to amputate them without the anesthesia before….The only thing they could do is sing to the baby. That’s how deprived of supplies they were.Fadel, who grew up in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, offered no pushback or challenge to her guest’s outlandishly anti-Israel rhetoric, only prodding Perlmutter into further unverifiable attacks, and the host just enabled it:Fadel: Walk me through why there is this deprivation of supplies.Perlmutter: It’s a deliberate action on the part of the Israeli government. Even when we went through the second time, I was allowed to bring in zero antibiotics. Even antibiotics that I wrote for myself in case I got traveler’s diarrhea were confiscated. My surgical instruments were confiscated.The filmmaker herself openly declared her film to be propaganda — propaganda NPR eagerly swallowed.Teng: It was very important to me and my entire team that we brought it back to the United States, because at the end of the day, if the U.S. wanted this to stop, it could. It was so important then to live in the world of these doctors, have them come home and see the pummeling that they would continue to get from members of Congress but also from the media.Fadel asserted her guests were spouting “uncomfortable truths,” though unsubstantiated “truths” would be closer.Fadel: You [Thaer Ahmad] also point out some uncomfortable truths. And one of those — that it is you talking about how you feel like maybe you can’t say the same things that Mark can say.Ahmad: Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that most Palestinians can resonate pretty strongly with, and it’s this idea that there has been decades of dehumanization in terms of Palestinians. And so you have to be very careful with what you’re saying and how it’s going to be received. And unfortunately, if you come off too strong, people will buy into the stereotypes about Palestinians…..Fadel: What blowback have you faced? And I’ll start with you, Mark, because there’s also a moment in the film, too, that kind of hints at that — both your being attacked as a self-hating Jewish person and being in spaces where there is antisemitism around the Israel-Palestine issue as you try to advocate.Perlmutter used that opening to again lie about “genocide,” a term cruelly twisted by anti-Semites to turn the Holocaust against Jews. “We should not use the fear of being labeled an antisemite as an excuse to advance the genocide.” At least Fadel ended by noting “that Israel denies it’s committing genocide in Gaza.” That last paragraph was the only hint of balance in the story. Typically, NPR flicks that statement at the end of a fiercely anti-Israel “genocide” segment.

In San Francisco, the median police officer earns $301,000 a year in compensation, and the top-earning cop took home $872,000, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In Los Angeles, 23 police employees earned more than $400,000 in 2025. Some were deputy chiefs but others were sergeants or ordinary officers who worked a lot of overtime, data from the city controller’s office indicates.
In Newton, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, 12 of the 13 highest paid city employees in 2025 were police officers, with eight of them earning more than $300,000 a year, MassLive reported. In Boston, governed by progressive Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu, 33 police officers earned more than $400,000 in 2025, the Boston Herald reported.
Some of the police officers are earning more than college professors. Harvard is hiring government professors with doctoral degrees, offering pay of between $100,000 and $145,000, or in a salary range of $170,000 – $430,000 for a tenured, top-tier, senior scholar.
Bureau of Labor Statistics national data for May 2025 put annual mean wages for Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers at $79,200, lower than the $103,470 mean wage for postsecondary teachers. The American Association of University Professors, an anti-Israel advocacy group, says that at doctorate-granting institutions, the average full-time faculty salary in 2025-2026 was $131,678.
That police and professors are approaching rough pay parity could potentially help to explain some of the support on college campuses for the movement to “defund the police.” A September 23, 2023 Harvard Kennedy School discussion titled “Abolition of Policing” focused on “ways to reduce the size, scope, and power of the police.”
“Where one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to lose their lives at the hands of the police, where a sixth leading cause of death among young Black men is police homicide, defunding the things that don’t work, funding the things that do work, with a sense of urgency, a timetable, metrics, goals, objectives, is the moral response, the public policy response to this crisis in American history,” said a 2020 Harvard Kennedy School video featuring professor Cornell Brooks.
“The radical idea to defund, dismantle, and reimagine what public safety means deserves our full attention and support,” one Harvard professor, Mary Bassett, said. “We should defund police departments and reinvest that funding to improve communities of color.”
A 2026 Gallup survey found overall public trust levels in police and higher education roughly on par, with the police trusted slightly more. There were stark partisan differences, though, with Republicans highly confident in the police but not in higher education. Democrats reported that they trusted higher education more than they trusted the police.
The partisan differences may have prevented police pay from becoming a political hot button. There’s been some criticism—the Herald article quoted the executive director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, Paul Diego Craney, saying, “Taxpayers in Boston should be outraged”—but for the most part, right-leaning politicians and interest groups like police and figure they should be well compensated for working nights and holidays and putting their lives on the line to protect people from dangerous criminals and disorder. Democrats, meanwhile, are closely tied to public-employee unions, who fund and back Democratic campaigns; they want to aim their class warfare at billionaires, not at police officers earning $300,000 or $400,000 a year in places where housing is expensive. Put it all together, and there’s not much constraint on police pay other than the willingness of city residents to pay the taxes needed to make payroll.
As for professorial pay, the public story has been more a tale of poverty—the embittered adjunct living out of his car while teaching courses at four different colleges—than wealth. The federal Department of Education requires reporting of salary data even for private institutions and says, “In fall 2024, the adjusted 9-month average salary of full-time instructional staff was $100,224. This is based on 3,868 institutions.” Maybe some of the professors should quit and become police officers. Not only might they in some cases win increased pay, they also might gain some increased appreciation of the difficulty of police work, and of its value in maintaining order.
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Fifteen New York country sheriffs filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the state’s “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act” and the newly created Office of Immigrant Trust for being unconstitutional efforts to prevent them from working with federal immigration officers to ensure public safety.The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York on behalf of the 15 sheriffs who have existing 287(g) agreements to cooperate with federal agencies that enforce the nation’s immigration laws.They also filed an emergency motion seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to stop New York from voiding existing 287(g) agreements on August 25, 2026, and from forcing the termination of federal housing agreements by November 25, 2026.The new “Local Cops, Local Laws Act,” which was promoted and signed by Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul, prohibits local law enforcement agencies and local correctional facilities from entering into, remaining in, or extending 287(g) agreements or contracts to house individuals for civil immigration violations, the lawsuit explains:“It declares existing agreements ‘not consistent with state law’ and ‘void and unenforceable,’ and it requires that 287(g) agreements be terminated by August 25, 2026. For agreements to house or detain individuals for federal immigration violations, the statute requires agencies to exercise any applicable termination provision within three months after August 25, 2026. Those housing agreements will thus become void and unenforceable on November 25, 2026.”In addition to endangering public safety by enabling dangerous criminals to run free, Gov. Hochul’s two sanctuary provisions also rob local sheriffs of authorities granted them by both New York’s constitution and the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit charges.“New York’s county sheriffs are independently elected constitutional officers under Article XIII, § 13 of the New York Constitution. They are not subordinates or agents of the Governor or the Attorney General,” the complaint notes. Additionally, the provisions void existing legal contracts.New York’s efforts to protect illegal aliens, including violent criminals, are nothing new.Last December, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that, during the year, New York had refused to honor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest detainer requests for – and then released – thousands of criminal illegal aliens that were in the state’s custody:“New York’s failure to honor ICE detainers has resulted in the release of 6,947 criminal illegal aliens since January 20. The crimes of these aliens include 29 homicides, 2,509 assaults, 199 burglaries, 305 robberies, 392 dangerous drugs offenses, 300 weapons offenses, and 207 sexual predatory offenses.“There are currently 7,113 aliens in the custody of a New York jurisdiction with an active detainer. The crimes of these aliens include 148 homicides, 717 assaults, 134 burglaries, 106 robberies, 235 dangerous drugs offenses, 152 weapons offenses, and 260 sexual predatory offenses.”“Instead of partnering with ICE, New York’s sanctuary politicians double down on irresponsible policies that make New York less safe,” ICE warned in a June 10, 2026 press release touting the success of a targeted enforcement operation to apprehend known criminal illegal aliens in the New York City metropolitan area:“ICE Fugitive Operations teams arrested criminal illegal aliens convicted of violent and repulsive crimes including murder, rape, sexual abuse of a child under 11, forcible touching of sexual or intimate parts of another person and sexual contact with a person incapable of consent.”“While sanctuary politicians continue to prioritize criminal illegal aliens over law abiding New Yorkers, our officers are on the front lines every day keeping our communities safe from murderers, rapists and pedophiles that prey on our most vulnerable citizens,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office Director Kenneth Genalo promised in a statement.

CNN This Morning 8-26-26

On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, Audie Cornish took up the cause of Zohran Mamdani’s latest socialist stunt: his plan to force Amazon to convert its delivery drivers from independent contractors into full-blown employees. “This economy is fast being built on gig workers’ backs,” Cornish declared, channeling her inner Bernie Sanders. Those poor gig workers, toiling away for the millionaires and billionaires! Surely they long to be hired as regular employees with fixed schedules and all the joys of punching a clock. Except . . . most of them don’t! According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Contingent Work Supplement, 80.3% of independent contractors preferred their current arrangement over traditional W-2 employment. Only 8.3% said they’d rather be regular employees. The BLS conclusion [emphasis added]: “As in prior surveys, independent contractors overwhelmingly preferred their work arrangement.”And just in case anyone was preparing to dismiss the study as a Trump-ordered gift to the billionaire class, the data came from 2023 and was released in 2024 — during the Biden administration.  

Cornish: Economy Built ‘On Backs’ of Gig Workers [But Great Majority Prefer It!] pic.twitter.com/68UgVBFO7t— Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) August 26, 2026

CNN’s segment never mentioned any of this. Instead, it rolled Mamdani campaign video accusing Amazon of using subcontractors to “shield them from responsibility,” followed by supportive TikTok voices. Although the Delivery Protection Act technically covers other last-mile operators, Mamdani has made Amazon the star of the show. Nothing says “fighting the oligarchy” quite like targeting the company associated with Jeff Bezos. Cornish did float one practical concern: What if Amazon simply packs up and moves its operations across the river to New Jersey? A panelist waved it away, confidently declaring, “I don’t think anyone is going to be mad at him for taking on this fight.” Actually, many people will be. Gig workers who like the flexibility to set their own hours or hold other jobs would lose the arrangement they chose. New York customers would likely see higher prices and slower deliveries. And those idling-emissions fines Cornish tut-tutted about? Reclassifying the drivers as Amazon employees does not magically stop vans from idling in Manhattan traffic. The segment treated forced employee status as pure virtue and worker preference as irrelevant. The result was a tidy morality play: Mamdani the champion of the oppressed, Amazon the villain, and the actual views of the overwhelming majority of gig workers left on the cutting-room floor. You might say that Mamdani is callously staging his stunt . . . on the backs of gig workers!The transcript is below:CNN This Morning 8/26/26 6:11 am EDT AUDIE CORNISH: Next: Zohran Mamdani, taking on Amazon. The New York City mayor is pushing the Delivery Protection Act. So, this is a proposal that would force Amazon to directly hire thousands of subcontracted delivery drivers. Mamdani’s office posted this video two weeks ago. MAMDANI VIDEO: The workers’ routes and hours are set by Amazon. So why isn’t Amazon responsible for these vans? Because Amazon and other corporations have built a vast network of subcontractors that shield them from responsibility. ZOHRAN MAMDANI: This is why I’m proud to support the Delivery Protection Act. Because if Amazon is delivering your packages, they should follow the same rules of every other delivery man. CORNISH: Oof, Group Chat is back. I need to talk about this, because this economy is fast being built on gig workers’ backs. Which means they aren’t official employees, which means the companies getting certain benefits from that. But in New York, Amazon, there’s a lot here I think that’s tough to take on. TAMARA KEITH: Yeah, well, people just driving up in their own cars and dropping packages. CORNISH: I’ve seen that. Someone pulls up and I’m like, “Wait a second, it’s not an official van, like, what are we doing?” And it’s some person just, yeah — KEITH: — just trying to get by. CORNISH: Can I just throw this out here? They have collected nine million in fines for idling violations, which, this is where I’m gonna get my, my urban, wrinkled nose on. It’s annoying! Not just in New York but everywhere: cars just idling as they’re making their [inaudible.] It’s not like a UPS or something like this. And here’s what people are saying on TikTok. I wanna play this for you, ’cause these are the people who are both using the product and, in this case, being the deliverers. TIKTOK VOICE 1: So what they’ve done, is they’ve created these LLCs, these small delivery companies, right? That basically they subcontract their deliveries to. These other entities have their own insurance and they’re also not under the umbrella of Amazon. TIKTOK VOICE 2: Once you’re an employee, now you gotta pay them benefits, now they get sick time, now they get time off. But now, if you subcontract them [other voice] like Uber, correct, now if you subcontract them out, they get a 1099. Now they don’t have the protections. ANTJUAN SEAWRIGHT: I think this is more about Zohran fighting for working class, making certain they have basic benefits, healthcare, and be able to enjoy a decent quality life. I also think — CORNISH: But if they relocate out of the city, right? If Amazon says, “You know what? Then we don’t wanna deal and we leave,” does that hurt the same people he’s trying to support? SEAWRIGHT: Could be, but I also think there’s a bigger political narrative here. He prides himself on his side of the movement, prides himself on taking on the millionaire-billionaire class. And think about who owns Amazon, and think about the broader fight and discussion we’re having with certain wings within our party, and I think it feeds into that. So I think there are many things at play, but at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone is going to be mad at him for taking on this fight.

A Democratic House candidate and Hasan Piker fanboy running for a competitive seat in Michigan called the fatal collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge a “climate activist’s dream,” citing the catastrophe’s impact on coal exports from one of the nation’s busiest ports. Six construction workers were killed in the March 2024 disaster.
William Lawrence, a former Democratic Socialist and cofounder of the activist environmental group the Sunrise Movement, made the comments during an August 2024 episode of his podcast, Hegemonicon, hosted by Convergence, a “magazine for radical insights.”
In an episode titled “Flows and Chokepoints,” Lawrence discussed what it would look like “to really shut down” a fossil fuel port for an extended period of time as an “economic protest against fossil power.”
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed after being struck by the 984-foot container ship Dali, offered an example, according to Lawrence.
“I mean, this would be a climate activist’s dream, right? To be able to block 2.5 million tons of coal exports for weeks and weeks and weeks on end,” Lawrence said, chuckling.
The collapse, however, was far more than an interruption to fossil fuel exports. Six construction workers, all immigrants from Central America and Mexico, plunged to their deaths while filling potholes on the bridge. The disaster also paralyzed the Port of Baltimore for weeks, idling thousands of dockworkers, longshoremen, and truckers. A replacement bridge is expected to cost $5 billion and will not be complete until late 2030.
Lawrence’s comments could become an issue in his campaign for Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, currently held by Republican Tom Barrett. The race is considered a toss-up, but Republicans are likely to highlight Lawrence’s ties to the Sunrise Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America as evidence that he is too radical for the district, which has voted for Trump in two out of the past three elections. The Sunrise Movement, which Lawrence cofounded in 2017, calls for an end to new drilling for fossil fuels and a complete transition away from them by 2030. The activist group has ventured beyond its initial mission in recent years, embracing the movements to defund police and abolish ICE. In 2021, the group faced allegations of antisemitism after it pulled out of a rally for Washington, D.C., statehood because of the involvement of three Jewish groups.
Lawrence has also faced criticism, or outright mockery, for fawning over Hasan Piker, a left-wing influencer who has said that America deserved 9/11, at a campaign event earlier this year. “You’re the man,” Lawrence told Piker backstage at the event. “I’d love to get on the stream sometime.”
Lawrence also founded the Lansing chapter of the DSA in his living room and remained a member of the organization until last month.
On his podcast, Lawrence appeared to lament that the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse did not have a greater impact on fossil fuel shipments. He noted that the resulting slowdown in coal exports “had little impact on global prices.”
Lawrence also appeared to express support for the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, describing the Iran-backed terrorist group’s actions as a “blockade” against what he called Israel’s “genocide in Gaza.” The Houthis have attacked nearly 200 commercial ships in the region, killed at least 7 commercial sailors, and choked off global trade in the region.
Lawrence’s guest, Johns Hopkins University climate policy expert Tim Sahay, also appeared sympathetic to the Houthis.
“They’re trying to prevent a genocide,” Sahay said. “[The Houthis] said, look, we have this choke point near us that would reduce Israel’s and Egypt’s revenue if we stop the Suez Canal. So let’s use that and let’s use that by, I don’t know, hijacking a bunch of ships that are carrying everything from, you know, diapers to food and fertilizers to all corners of the world, right?”
Lawrence’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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Barack Obama’s legacy continues to fester, wreaking havoc on future generations of American leaders.
In Richmond, Va., nearly 300 students were supposed to start classes at Barack Obama Elementary School on Monday. Instead, local officials cleared the building and announced the school would be closed indefinitely due to extensive “mold growth” on the premises. Pest control was also called in to deal with a rat infestation.
Some parents who were inside the building moments before the closure was announced described seeing mold throughout the school, including on student laptops sitting in storage. Clearing the mold is expected to take several days, with students and staff potentially able to return by the end of the month.
Frustrated parents sounded off at a town hall meeting later that day. “Let’s just be honest, we’ve known Barack Obama’s had mold issues from as far back as at least 2024, if not earlier than that,” one said as local officials complained about lack of funding and one of the wettest summers they’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water, which created “the perfect awful soup” for mold to flourish.
Mold
Obama Elementary was plagued by “significant deferred maintenance issues,” including poor ventilation, a leaky roof, and a barely functioning HVAC unit, according to a 2024 assessment. Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature recently approved a budget that included $520 million for school construction and repairs, which taxpayers can rest assured will be spent wisely.
Richmond Schools superintendent Jason Kamras, served as an education policy adviser on Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In one of his first acts as superintendent, a position he has held since 2018, Kamras recommended renaming the now-mold-infested school after the former president to reflect “the great promise of America.” The school was previously named for J.E.B. Stuart, a Confederate general best known for losing the Battle of Yellow Tavern and having a decent beard.
Kamras sought input from students regarding the name change but ultimately overrode them. Most students voted for “Northside,” after the neighborhood where the school resides. Obama came in second.
This week’s mold and rodent debacle in Richmond is merely the latest indignity to befall a school named after the 44th president. In August 2009, school board officials in Asbury Park, N.J., voted to rename a local elementary school after Obama, who had been in office for just seven months. He hadn’t even won the Nobel Peace Prize yet. Asbury Park’s Barack H. Obama Elementary School debuted its new name in 2010, then shut down permanently the following year to low enrollment.
In 2014, former Obama chief of staff and then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel (D.) announced plans for a $60 million prep school named after his former boss. Its eventual demise perfectly encapsulates the dysfunction of Democratic-run cities.
First, they had to find another location due to NIMBY opposition. Then, Emanuel agreed to pick a different name after critics complained that the school wasn’t being built on the South Side, the predominantly black and lower-income part of the city where Obama launched his political career.
City officials spent the next two years looking for a new location. In 2016, they redirected the $60 million earmarked for the school’s construction to pay off the Chicago teachers’ union and avert a strike. Emanuel said the project was merely “deferred, but not permanently.” He left office in 2019.
As of today, the school does not exist and never will.
Some political observers have suggested that Obama is uniquely predisposed to inflict misfortune on the individuals and institutions touched by his legacy.
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The owners of a trendy “halal-compliant” taco chain based in Florida gave more than $10,000 to the openly neo-Nazi campaign of Hitler–praising Dan Bilzerian, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
Mohammad Farraj, the cofounder and chief marketing officer of Talkin’ Tacos, gave $5,271.80 to Bilzerian’s failed Florida congressional campaign despite the candidate openly praising Hitler in an ad that featured a Jew with devil horns, Federal Election Commission records show.
Company CEO Omar Al-Massalkhi also kicked in another $5,000.
Aside from Bilzerian, Farraj has only ever donated to ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s official fundraising platform, records show. Bilzerian ran in the Republican primary for Florida’s Sixth Congressional District.
Founded in 2020 as a Miami food truck during the pandemic, Talkin’ Tacos now has more than 30 restaurants in Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas and even posh Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The chain recently opened a new restaurant in New York City’s fashionable Greenwich Village.
In a 2025 interview, Farraj said the company’s growth was due to its use of halal meat, which is processed in accordance with Islamic dietary law.
“Within three or four days after making it halal, some weird shift in business, we had lines stretched out down the block. It was unreal, unfathomable at the time,” Farraj said.
The chain has a substantial TikTok presence. Farraj also credited a viral TikTok video from a 13-year-old influencer for first bringing the fledgling taco company to a broader audience. In the same interview, Farraj claimed to have been the first to introduce birria tacos to South Florida.
“Social media has been critical,” Farraj said, adding that the company also made use of influencers and a full-time PR firm.
“There are a lot of moving arms to our marketing,” he said. “Any market we go to, we work with influencers.”
The influencer TikTok videos, which now proliferate, mostly feature people stuffing their faces with Talkin’ Tacos products while saying variations of “oh my God” and “wow.”
During his primary campaign against Rep. Randy Fine (R.) in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, Bilzerian, a notorious antisemite, leaned into open Nazism on the trail.
“Jewish supremacists, Satan’s creepy little minions, should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?” a Bilzerian ad asked, featuring an image of Hitler.
The spot, which took the form of a nightclub song, attacked Fine, a Jewish supporter of Israel, as a “Shylock” and featured him with horns. “The fat Jew has poison to sell,” an AI-generated nightclub singer croons. Child victims of the Gaza war, the AI animation sings, “are just goyim cattle to him.”
When asked on a recent podcast to name a problem not caused by Jews, Bilzerian—whose attacks on Jews go well beyond the Israel-Palestinian conflict—was unable to do so.
Fine ultimately trounced Bilzerian by about 40 points, after Bilzerian blew more than a million dollars of his own cash on the effort, FEC records show.
Bilzerian reported over $100 million in net worth on his financial disclosures. He is the son of the corporate raider and convicted fraudster Paul Bilzerian, who gave him a trust fund.
The younger Bilzerian reported owning over $50 million in artwork and jewelry and another $50 million in Ignite International—a high-end cannabis and lifestyle brand secretly owned by his father.
His public valuation for Ignite is suspect, however, as the government has accused the company of being a shell corporation for his criminal father to hide cash, the Justice Department said in a September 2024 indictment. The case remains ongoing as the Securities and Exchange Commission tries to recoup roughly $180 million in debts they say Paul Bilzerian owes.
The younger Bilzerian—an early fixture of the so-called manosphere who promotes his playboy, gun-toting lifestyle to his many followers—has a history of alleged violence against women and other criminal mischief. In December 2014, he was sued by Miami-based model Vanessa Castano, who accused him of kicking her in the face. Just days after that, he was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on charges of bomb-making. Porn star Janice Griffith also accused him of throwing her off a roof, resulting in a broken foot as part of a botched stunt for Hustler magazine.
He’s also known in professional poker circles—where he has been accused of cheating by fellow players.
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The Covid debacle will define Fauci’s legacy regardless of how many pronouncements of support bioethicists make.

A left-wing dark money network funded by the Democratic megadonor George Soros sent voters in Michigan unsolicited mailers resembling a newspaper that falsely identified Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a “veteran.”
The mailer, from the Michigan Independent—part of a national left-wing organization founded by the Democratic operative David Brock, the American Independent—is designed to look like a nonpartisan local newspaper. Partisan content aimed at propping up Democrats is peppered amid recipes for “Blueberry Streusel Coffee Cake” from “The Mitten Kitchen.” The partisan content includes a piece on El-Sayed’s primary win headlined, “El-Sayed — veteran, doctor, and former health official — is Democratic Senate pick.” El-Sayed has never served in the military, and while he attended medical school and has described himself as a “physician,” he has never been licensed to practice medicine, Politico reported.
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The mailer is the latest example of Brock’s outfit attempting to influence elections through misleading mailers masquerading as news. In 2021, the “Virginia Edition” of the American Independent sent unsolicited mailers to voters falsely claiming that then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin called COVID relief “unnecessary,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The following year, in 2022, the group’s state arms in Pennsylvania and Arizona ran paid Facebook ads pushing articles like “Arizona Republicans out of touch with constituents on abortion rights.”
In addition to the mailer, the Michigan Independent started running a Facebook ad on August 14 targeting El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, with a headline reading, “Rogers, Trump support bridge delay to bully Canada.”
Joe Conason, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based American Independent Foundation, which founded the Michigan Independent and received $500,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2022, confirmed that the group sent the mailer calling El-Sayed a “veteran.” He said the error was a typo rather than an attempt to deceive voters.
“The error occurred when a new headline was written for the print edition,” Conason told the Free Beacon. “It was supposed to say that he was a ‘veteran doctor and public health official,’ ie, ‘veteran’ modifying those two terms.” Asked whether it was accurate to call El-Sayed a “veteran doctor,” Conason said, “Well he’s been a physician for a long time.” When the Free Beacon noted that El-Sayed has never been a licensed physician, Conason said, “Whether he’s a physician or not, he’s a doctor.”
Conason often accuses other media outlets of spreading misinformation on X, writing in 2023 that there “has never been a media outlet with a worse record for accuracy than Fox. They get it as wrong as the dumbest supermarket tabloid. And their intentions are far worse.” Conason also claimed the New York Times was biased in favor of President Donald Trump, denouncing front-page editors at the paper as “poltroons” who “dishonor journalism nearly every day now.”
“I’m so done with journalism that laments a misinformed public rather than informing Americans of what’s true — and NOT true,” he griped in another 2023 post on X.
El-Sayed’s campaign condemned the Michigan Independent for the mistake.
“Abdul has never claimed to be a veteran, he never would out of his respect for those who served, and any outlet or group writing about our campaign should do their homework and not allow this to happen again,” said Roxie Richner, a spokeswoman for the El-Sayed campaign.
The Michigan Independent’s article on El-Sayed’s primary win was first published online under the headline, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Democratic nomination for Michigan open Senate seat.” The “reporter” with a byline on the piece is Alyssa Burr, a former New York Times news assistant who studied journalism at Michigan State University and pursued a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, according to her LinkedIn account. She also worked as a news reporter for the Michigan news outlet MLive, which covered the Michigan Independent’s launch in a May 2024 piece that labeled the group “pink slime.”
“The term, which refers to a meat filler that resembles real meat, describes partisan publications masquerading as local news,” the outlet wrote. It also reported that the Michigan Independent had delivered mailers to nearly 1 million readers as of May 2024.
The group appears to determine who receives those mailers based on their political preferences—the Michigan Independent’s website does not allow prospective readers to subscribe to the print edition, only the digital one. Asked about the Michigan Independent’s circulation, Conason told the Free Beacon, “It’s mailed to people in Michigan.” He said he did not know how recipients are chosen.
The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment. Burr directed the Free Beacon to an editors note the Michigan Independent affixed to the online version of the piece after the Free Beacon reached out for comment noting that a  “headline in The Michigan Independent’s August print edition included a misplaced comma suggesting that Abdul El-Sayed is a veteran.” Conason said Burr was not responsible for the print headline.

Brock, the liberal operative behind Media Matters for America, launched the American Independent in 2016. The group operates under two nonprofit entities, the American Independent Foundation and American Independent Media. The former is a 501(c)(3) and is not permitted to support or oppose candidates for public office. The latter is a 501(c)(4), a distinction that comes with fewer limits on lobbying and political activity.
Though the Michigan Independent says it’s “a project of American Independent Media,” there is significant overlap between the two groups.
The Michigan Independent’s donate page, for example, leads to a donation site for the American Independent Foundation rather than American Independent Media. Conason is the principal officer of both entities, and the American Independent Foundation provided American Independent Media with $11.2 million in funding in 2024, tax filings show. The American Independent Foundation is funding the Michigan Independent’s active Facebook ads, which cost between $20,000 and $26,000, according to Meta’s ad library. The two entities paid Conason a combined $231,000 in fiscal year 2024.

Conason is the former executive editor of the New York Observer. He is also the author of numerous books decrying the alleged dishonesty of conservatives, including Big Lies: Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth and The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism. He has claimed to have no affiliation with Brock and the operative’s left-wing research group, American Bridge, though the group’s cofounder, Bradley Beychok, was the American Independent Foundation’s highest-paid officer in 2022.
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