No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.
And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?
Right?
Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him
Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.
The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.
This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Powerful regulation which answers to the people is the answer.
Many a corrupt government has touted their anti-corruption activities that inexplicably seem to snare almost exclusively their political opponents.
Good governance is hard.
So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.
It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-cor...
Of course. Politically active billionaires are always famously lobbying for large government and more regulations.
Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.
For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.
These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?
The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.
However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
So if something doesn't benefit society, don't extend that grant to it.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5290171/trump-lawsuit-p...
Not a fan of Trump, Ellison, or obviously this expose being buried, but I am just trying to understand what the FTC did wrong.
> The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation.
I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
But whatever, it just seems like what you want is not more regulation (Trump is adding lots of regulation on solar and wind, that's good right?), but different regulators.
It sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then makes them governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
According to data from Thomson Reuters, 2015 is set to be the biggest year ever (once the planned deals close) in worldwide dealmaking, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions—up 42 percent from 2014, and beating the previous record of $4.4 trillion in 2007.
The year stands out, not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion. Just in the last three months, notable mega-deals include AB Inbev’s acquisition of SABMiller, creating a $104 billion beverage company; Pfizer and Allergan’s announced a $160 billion merger; and the chemical companies DuPont and Dow Chemical Company’s plans to unite as a $130 billion company. Thomson Reuters counted 137 mega-deals last year, which accounted for 52 percent of the year’s overall M&A value.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
Seems like a pretty convincing theory to me.
Hi all,
I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
Yours,
Bari
> Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
I feel sick.
If you can stomach it, propublica has been covering stories like this since the summer [1].
Meanwhile, the MS13 has been cutting sweetheart deals with Bukele [2] and we have been releasing actual gang members for the privilege of sending innocent people to the torture facilities [3, 4], even in the face of reports of USAID being diverted to the gang for a money-for-votes scheme for Bukele [5].
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-men-cecot-inte...
[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/ambassador-ronald-johnson...
[3]https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/ran...
[4]https://www.npr.org/2025/10/21/nx-s1-5580555/why-the-state-d...
[5]https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
People should not be sent to torture camps where they have no hope of every leaving for the rest of their lives for committing crimes.
If Bukele had not reached power, innocents would still be killed and dying in the streets.
They gangs were extorting business systematically, if you sold outside of your place they would kill you. You had to ask for permission to enter and leave your colonia to the gangs.
If a gang pointed at your sister and said "at 18:00 at my place" she'd better go or you do not know what would happen next, including revenge to relatives. I mean, yes, raping, and yes, killing.
None of these things I said are made up. There are lots of cases.
It is very easy to talk in the abstract but there is a reason why Bukele gets massively voted.
Nothing is perfect but before the exception state the gangs killed almost 80 people in a weekend to show Bukele who they were. Random innocent people.
No, El Salvador, unfortunately, did not have an option.
It will take one generation to make it a permanently safe place at least. In 30 years almost 80,000 people were killed in the streets.
It was a real horror. That is why Salvadoreans support Bukele. I think it os easy to complain from far but one must be there to really understand it.
He knows that he has many innocent people locked up in those jails. He knows that his deal with Trump is immoral and unnecessary for the safety of El Salvador, but does it anyway. His social media savvy relishes in his authoritarianism, rather than explains it.
Unfortunately, the dire situation you describe is how Authoritarians gain power: desperate populations struggling for multiple years with widespread societal problems that government has seemed too inept or corrupt to fix. 1930s Germany, 2020s Trump, El Salvador.
She understands that she's full of shit, and she's paid to be full of shit. The Ellisons aren't spending billions of dollars on this because they want you to be well-informed.
CECOT is a whole different beast altogether, though :(
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...
https://www.newsweek.com/accused-capitol-rioters-could-spend...
Or, does this not count for ideological reasons? There are at least some people out there that may be consistent despite tribalism, I suppose.
I think you don't understand MAGA mentality. Honestly, that's probably a good thing, but understanding MAGA would help understanding this whole situation.
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
You had a good run 60 Minutes.
Yup. I was charged with a felony of which I was materially innocent.
But this is the right's spin on things, the "well even if you weren't found guilty, there was enough of an issue to arrest you and charge you".
I was watching a Zoom meeting of one of our local Superior Court hearings - was a motion to revoke or modify bail conditions.
The Judge actually rebuked the prosecutor, who had tried to explain why the motion should go their way. "Blah blah, in addition, the defendant has shown no signs of remorse or regret for the situation..."
Judge: "I'm going to stop you there. The defendant pled not guilty and at this moment no verdict has been determined. In the eyes of the law and this court, they have zero obligation or requirement to show remorse or regret for their alleged actions."
Which is ironic, considering the actual video that Canadian broadcasters manage to send, it ends with basically "We requested a comment from US officials, but they referred us to speak with El Salvador instead", so even the finish video that got broadcast, acknowledges this basic fact that you need to carry on even if both sides don't want to be interviewed on camera.
That is not accurate. It's her excuse for spiking the story.
The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
More broadly the problem here is simply that Weiss has no legitimate authority to make calls like this. She’s never worked as a reporter. The 60 Minutes staff have decades of reporting experience. The only reason she has the job is because a billionaire who is trying to curry favor with the administration installed her there. That context hangs over every decision she makes.
According to the video itself (just finished watching it), that's not true. US officials did respond, telling them to ask El Salvador officials instead, so basically redirecting, rather than "no response". If that's worse or not I guess is left as an exercise to the reader.
It's abundantly clear why she spiked it. I know it. You know it. We all know it. She was brought in as a clearly partisan voice to put exactly this finger on exactly these levers at CBS. We all saw it when she was hired and we all warned about this. And she did.
I mean, why bother stenographising the excuse? No one is fooled. "Partisan hack does partisan hackery" is like the least surprising line in this story.
For those not familiar: there were five screenings in the prior week that journalists attended to discuss it. She was aware of those and did not attend.
When she did look at it, her feedback was minor, and they made adjustments.
Then she killed it a day after her delayed feedback, on the weekend it was to air.
That context, combined with the response above, is telling.
She is at absolute best, entirely unfit and amateur for this role combined with dangerous arrogance.
More likely, she is the malevolent puppet of a billionaire ally of the current corrupt administration.
To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.
As for the actual reason - here is what was shared by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stelter
Bari thinks the government should be able to quash any story it wants by simply refusing to "present the administration's argument."
All the MAGAs I know on Facebook are posting about how the video is great ("It's about time someone does something!"), so I would think Trump would want the piece to air.
It seems more plausible that David Ellison will bend in whatever direction the wind is blowing.
>"The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men."
>"After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to say MAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”"
Etc. And she's been very positive on Bukele personally as well. Might be multiple reasons she'd gleefully want to spike such a story even if the commands of her owners take precedent.
Edit: whew, this one sure triggered the technofeudalists and Baristans! From 3 to -3 for her own publication's and her statements.
----
Here are some parts you left out:
> The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today.
> They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody. Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).
The specific lines about Ellison and a lawnmower start at 38:28 in the linked video; the entire Oracle rant starts at about 34:00.
They do not really understand how bad Oracle used to be. This is us, old combat veterans, sitting by the fire, describing unspeakable battles to the youth...knowing full well that they think we are exaggerating. :-)
And the most disturbing part is the realization that the Frankenstein monster itself, Larry Ellison, is still out there. Still roaming free. Still very much alive... An eternal, terrifying, lawnmower wielding zombie of enterprise software and government corrupting rent extraction.
We need confiscatory taxation for a better future.
No, we can have many targets. People who hoard money for the benefit of themselves with the detriment of society and the population at large are all "destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time" to borrow the words of parent commentator. If just 10% were slightly less evil and egoistic, it would lead to huge improvements, and only a slight reduction to their own lifestyles. That they don't, is a stain on the legacy of humanity.
We need to bring the entire extraction class to heel. They are degrading, even destroying, society.
8105370ed7dba50dc7ec659fd67550569b4dd8a0
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/
What's the best torrent client nowadays?
I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.
Don’t forget your vpn!
Edited to remove being a moron.
That said protonvpn seems reputable
RTings recently updated their reviews and seems to agree:
We're not going anywhere.
—Hydra
I'm honestly speechless. But thanks for the magnet link.
Where are the independent and non-VC fueled discussion forums when you need them?
Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news? Asking for a friend.
HN?
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
(copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366656)
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. As a matter of fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
No such thing.
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2002943084322287815
Still a proud supporter of archive.org for many, many years. Their work is invaluable and I hope it stays around forever.
This is disgraceful [0], whatever your opinion on illegal immigration.
[0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
"Prison" is for people convicted of crimes.
See perhaps United States Declaration of Independence:
> "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
I suspect she was hired at least in part because she would be willing to take the heat for stuff like this,
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right...
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
It's both. That's one of the things that's difficult to suss out and therefore have a plan to engage. There's plausible deniability on both ends of that spectrum. Even in the high positions in the administration, there's a smattering of True Believers in amongst the grifters.
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions if I tried.)
Looks to me like it’s all damage control/pressure valve release stuff designed to distract from any real change. Because SURELY we will get some real change finally, right?? /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.
There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
It's about successful communication of authorial intent.
60 Minutes is not trying to say "Justice Served!" and shake pom-poms here. But, someone could read it that way, and it would be unintended.
TIL
Streisand Effect and all.
As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.
Corruption is not just the immoral acts of an elite few; it is a parasite that hollows out society from within.
When the mainstream realizes that sycophancy toward the autocrat is rewarded, some willingly sacrifice their principles for short-term benefits, burrowing into the system like worms in an apple.
Yet, parasites cannot survive without a compliant host. To kill the infestation, we must cut off the food source: our passiveness. This begins with everyday refusals—denying the petty bribe, rejecting the convenient lie, and defending the honest colleague. By maintaining high ethical standards in our own spheres of influence, we starve the corrupt hierarchy of the dead matter it needs to grow.
We must also make the terrain uninhabitable for them. These organisms thrive in the dark, protected by silence. Therefore, we must actively expose them: documenting abuses, funding media samaritans, and organizing locally to demand transparency. When integrity becomes the standard again, the host becomes hostile to the parasite, isolating the invaders rather than letting them multiply.
Without this resistance however, the society weakens until its greatest assets—its resources, minds, and institutions—are cannibalized by a regime of criminals. This is how nations collapse. We have seen this story in Africa, South America, and Russia. This plague is now upon us. But history is not destiny. We possess the power to stop it. We only need the will to use it.
America isn’t used to corruption. It hasn’t seen societal level rot that corruption can bring since at least WW2.
It’s a deeply damaging phenomenon.
How thoroughly would they unite to destroy that challenger? Would you perhaps see apocalyptic and apoplectic stories published across the media, in sync with the press conferences of the political class?
Would they try to get people like you riled up and angry, and saying exactly the kind of things you’re saying here?
- deport or jail you without due process
- ignore the law in service of its own ends
- punish its enemies, pardon its allies
- ignore the constitution
- install loyalists in centers of power, oust dissenters
- suppress media which challenges its hold on power
- commit crimes
- enrich its friends
- declare its "plenary authority" to do the above
They win when challengers become too rare because others are afraid of the consequences to oppose.
What the Trump administration did regarding the Capitol storming on January 6th tells you everything you need to know. They strive for power and nothing else.
When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian. Now that this is no longer the case, the mindset of appeasing the leader is suddenly a problem.
The whole situation was preventable, but everyone was too high on ZIRP to notice. We could've used the good times to establish good cultural values, but we didn't. Freedom of speech and other foundations of democracy were already rotting long ago but nobody cared. We could've used the good times to allow better dialogue between different political fractions, but we didn't. At some point democrats honestly believed they would simply never lose power again, making it seem pointless to talk to republicans. Now that the money dried out, people suddenly start asking questions and talking about "muh big values".
I have zero empathy.
It is a bit analogous to many of us worrying about Google and others getting so much power. The arguments were quickly dismissed with: "But these folks are responsible, don't be paranoid". The problem with this kind of thinking is, once the power balance changes, you find yourself in a situation you'd never put yourself now. You cannot make Google unlearn what they know about you. You cannot unsend the photos you privately shared on Messenger and force Meta to untrain their facial recognition models. Now all these things you considered a convenience given to you for free can be used against you, and the extend and direction of the abuse is correlated with who is in power.
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
How many just vote Republican without thought as they have always done, how many are in the fox news cult? So many people just thought they didn't want a female president or Trump would lower inflation. It's hard for me to accept that Trump represents America, but he represents enough of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
And the author's Substack has 2 videos of Trump kissing and patting Bill Clinton's groin area (through pants). They are likely AI because I couldn't find anything online about how they're real besides the original photo. And if they were real, why is no one talking about it? He claims for one of the videos that it's real. So it kind of reduced the author's trustworthiness a bit.
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
CBS defends pulling 60 Minutes segment about Trump deportations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrnv3keeneo
or
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
289 points by grahamlee 5 days ago | flag | past | 171 comments
But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There doesn't need to be an explicit effort to protect vc firms for your blind spots to shape conversation on this website away from criticizing them.
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347561
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46335424
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46300618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272934
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821460
The A16Z title issue was no great scandal. It was bog standard moderation, with attention and responsiveness to community sentiment and feedback. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Meanwhile, you post too many comments that break the guidelines and use HN against its intended purpose. HN is only a place people want participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse if you want to participate here.
Edit: interesting how after posting this, all of my most recent comments received one downvote, including the one that just straightforwardly answers someone's question.
As a noob here on HN, that's what I gathered from your previous comment:
> In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page
So, a year ago, before my time, 404 media was moderated in a way that seemed like a ban, but now it no longer appears to be shadowbanned, is that what I'm learning?
I've posted about some and they just get instaflagged or hidden.
Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 - Sept 2015 (160 comments)
It's nauseating, but this is where Republicans live these days. The midterms can't come soon enough.
More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
The submission you linked to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
This is predictable from its skeleton, btw: "person X says provocative thing Y about divisive topic Z" is usually not significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is. It's journalism well done.
Do Trumpist minions have their ways on HN?
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
It's partisan hacks who are somewhere on the spectrum between full support of this barbarity, and finding all the other shit that's being done useful enough to them to be worth compromising their values.
The latter can be identified by 'Well I don't agree with everything this administration does, but I will throw my full support behind <one of the many wedges they are using to turn this country into a corrupt single-party autocracy>.'
(They won't push you onto the tracks because they hate you, they'll push you because it means they'll see a 0.7% drop in their expected tax rate. They are in most ways, worse than the former, because they can tell the difference between right and wrong, and still carry water for the latter, because they see personal benefit in it.)
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
Or the huge cohort who insist that Joe Rogan talking to another guy about how it's not that big a deal that the very existence of gay people is yet again under attack is "Two people having a calm debate of their difference in beliefs" despite that not being true.
There are tons of people on HN that would have done better to spend more time in English class learning about persuasive writing and the pillars of rhetoric and media literacy and all that "critical thinking" they claim school didn't teach them and are currently angry when people rightly call out their poorly supported arguments, and they don't actually seem to know what an "argument" even is.
It's so frustrating their faux "debate" beliefs. It's worse than a decade ago when they thought "debate" was screaming at your ideological opponents a hundred outright false claims that can't be countered in a reasonable time frame.
Nevermind that we HAD calm debate about most of this shit decades ago. But these people only believe a "debate" happened when their beliefs are validated. Otherwise it's "canceling" that thing they still scream about despite doing it all the time.
Also the idea that we should have "calm debate" about the government sending you to another country's prison without trial is insane when that was specifically one of the exact reasons the founding fathers decided to start shooting people over. Thomas Jefferson would not be calm in his rhetoric.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
I am tempted to go over each such complaint on this page (there must be a couple dozen so far) and reply "Quiet, please! People are reading."
A distinction without a difference.
"I stabbed you in the back because I wanted to steal your watch, not because I disliked you personally."
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/
I’m excited to see what positive coverage CBS has of this great development in human rights in El Salvador.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Yuuuuuuup sure is no reason this is happening on archive.org and torrent.
Nooooooo reason the story was Epstein Filed.
No reason at all…
The lack of due process is what's at issue here.
https://x.com/thesimonetti/status/2003142908854313225
They seem reasonable. The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past, which make her concern more relevant.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.
[citation needed]
Footage of CECOT is widely available as are interviews with former inmates. They allege effectively the same thing as what was claimed here by the accused TdA member. The Salvadoran administration is proud of CECOT and gleefully shows it off, including (as was shown in the segment) the solitary confinement cells.
There were no secrets revealed, nothing particularly new, and most importantly, nothing novel about the case of the accused TdA member. HN is acting like this segment revealed particularly damaging facts and therefore will be urgently scrubbed, but I'm not seeing anything new at all. I think the sentiment that the segment will be censored and we all have to run out and seed it is a bit hyperbolic. You can't try to hide CECOT's conditions when the people who run the prison happily give tours and show off what one might think they'd hide (punishment cells, for example).
There is no smoking gun, but more importantly there's nothing new in the segment that you can't already see in segments on Youtube. In fact, 60 Minutes used other people's footage of CECOT, not their own. Seed this all you want, but I don't think there's going to be a big push to make it go away. It reveals nothing that hasn't already been widely seen.