"AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue," while "ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant" [1].
That said, there is no evidence this was done "to push propaganda favoring the corporation-friendly tax package in Trump's first term.” Simpler: they chased Fox, Newsmax et al's dollars.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-onea...
It wasn’t started by AT&T.
(1) after having been dropped form all major cable and satellite carriers, coming back since Trump came to power (picked up by Spectrum earlier this year, and given the administration openly favoring them and using licensing pressure to shape carrier decisions, that seems likely to spread) [0], and
(2) under the Trump Administration, the source of news coverage for the literal government media (Voice of America.) [1]
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/herring-networks-an...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/voice-americ...
> Hegseth also reposted a question from a follower who asked, “Is this because they can’t roam the Pentagon freely? Do they believe they deserve unrestricted access to a highly classified military installation under the First Amendment?”
> Hegseth answered, “yes.”
I know this is old man yelling at the clouds these days but good lord if we could have government officials that aren't terminally online...
I can say with some confidence that an alcoholic Fox News talk show host is not smarter than me.
But if you want to do international politics its fine because politicians don't have any formal requirements.
So next time you see EU parlament footage where people have speeches in their native language… it's not out of national pride or respect. It's simply because many of them couldn't do it otherwise.
> I mean many bars wont give you a job without passing english interview.
We have a very similar situation in India. But ministers (and their supporters) now take perverse pride in not being good at English. They use our brief British rule as a scapegoat for half the things that are wrong with India. The other half is blamed on Mughal rule.
I don't care if they are smarter than me. I need them to be smart enough to know they are not that smart. I don't expect politicians to be smart. I expect them to be good listeners and be the voice for the people.
I want both. I want them to be smart -- not necessarily domain expert smart, but reasonably smart with making life changing decisions for everyone. And base those decisions on recommendations made by domain experts.
Well he was valedictorian at his high school and graduated from Princeton University. I wonder if the Pete Hegseth from Princeton is the same Pete Hegseth today. I don't know, maybe he got messed up somehow during one of his three tours overseas serving in the military.
Without knowing the criteria (as best I know, it's not just based on academic excellence but other things like sports[0] and extracurriculars), it's not much of a claim.
[0] Hegseth was a leading basketball and football player for Princeton.
It really seems like his admission to Princeton was based on a combination of excellent academic performance combined with his athletic ability which is often a boost for applications in competitive schools like Princeton.
He might have been a genius at one point (though I doubt it), but I do not think that a Fox News host who brags about never washing his hands [1] is smart. Maybe drinking messed up his brain.
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/eQI7n_48AY4?si=V5OTOS3uo7GEH8iv
But looking at Hegseth's family history (Father was a basketball coach, Mother was a "executive business coach") maybe they were upper middle class but definitely not elite so I suspect that his academic credentials played a major role in his admission and not any monetary contribution.
>He might have been a genius at one point (though I doubt it), but I do not think that a Fox News host who brags about never washing his hands [1] is smart. Maybe drinking messed up his brain.
Hence why I wondered if he got "damaged" in some way during his military career(three tours overseas, one at Gitmo).
On a side note: I find it absurd that people are mass downvoting something that is literally just one google search.
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/26184649-hegseth
I haven't read it closely, but at a glance, it does look like someone much more capable of thought than the persona he's adopted today.
... why? Ted Cruz is almost certainly smarter than almost all of us, and I do not want Ted Cruz to be a politician. Boris Johnson is exceptionally gifted, and Never Again. Rishi Sunak's as sharp a guy as you're likely to meet, but as the Economist noted, rarely met a bad idea he didn't warm to. You're giving a weird halo effect to intelligence.
I do not agree that Ted Cruz is smarter than nearly all of us.
I guess I just want politicians who can make the most basic logical inferences and do the most rudimentary reasoning, and importantly it would be great to have politicians who don’t think that they already know everything.
One of his Harvard Law Professors called him “off-the-charts brilliant”, and he won several national level debate challenges, so I suspect we’re working off such significantly different world views here as to preclude any reasonable discussion on this point.
It's remarkable how toxic that kind of social interaction turned out to be.
The media has been too lazy for too long printing press release from the government. This government has nothing to say but propaganda - I don’t even bother reading the government quotes any more. They are content free and self aggrandizing at a level of absurdity that would put North Korea to shame.
There have been governments hostile to journalists in the past, and those are the governments with the most to lose when journalists dig into their work. I look forward to the investigative journalism of the next three years.
So, who is owning the media publishing the investigative journalism? Will they risk shaking the grass, considering the powers that be?
The most famous of such sources, deep throat, refused to talk about information in the office or on the phone. Instead he would meet in an underground car garage.
This seems imminently sensible if you are disclosing damaging information about powerful and dangerous people doing illegal or immoral things. You’re not going to chat about it in the hallways at the pentagon.
In fact by creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia through political persecution of the federal workforce they’re going to invite this sort of behavior. People are going to feel afraid and hide their beliefs but will need an outlet. The only reason to persecute people for their political beliefs and lock down transparency is to hide things that people unaligned to your ideology might disclose. They will still be there no matter what you do, they will just go underground in their behavior and take elaborate routes to tell what’s going on - and there will a lot to tell because it’s being hidden for a reason.
The more they dismantle oversight the more violation of ethics and legal requirements will happen - there’s no reason to dismantle the oversight functions unless you have things to hide. The more outrageous it comes, the more flagrant, the more those with discontent and grievance will seek out the press. (Surely there are some people in the government unhappy with how they or their (former) coworkers have been treated by this administration).
This is going to be the most spectacular case over over reach and hubris in our history and the blowout will be extraordinary as it unfolds and collapses around them, and I hope this will revitalize the independent press and investigative journalism - which frankly is not doing poorly already despite perception. There’s a lot of excellent outlets out there. And now increasingly major outlets are becoming independent of government influence once again.
I think they would be allowing access to organizations that accept the procedures. Maybe you don't agree with the procedures, but it's no different than "I agree to the terms" required on pretty much every product you use.
That said, this is entirely different – citizens have the right to know what is happening within all branches of the government, and not only via official press releases. Some level of transparency is a critical requirement for a functioning democracy (I understand the US might be a little past that point).
There's nowhere that says that a government has to give access to the grounds of a building. Did you feel as strongly when Biden gave no press conferences between November 2023 to July 2024? It's just silly to put your flag into the ground on this particular issue.
The press had been access prior and the difference now is that they will lose access unless they agree to report what they’re told.
And I'd have hoped that by now, consumers have learned that being in the ToS does not make something legal, let alone enforcable
As with anything regarding the first amendment it's very fuzzy, which the administration is taking advantage of here.
They got in hot water earlier this year because they explicitly denied the AP access to some White House event because of AP's editorial refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. That sort of singling out is definitely prohibited when it comes to restricting press access.
Now they're learning a bit, and they're treating everyone the same (everyone has to sign the same thing). They're heating the frog more slowly.
They're treating people who didn't sign the thing differently from people who did sign the thing. The thing doesn't have any legal basis; it was implemented only to create a dichotomy for discrimination.
That's not a thing. They can't require different things of different press organizations (arbitrary/capricious), or exclude orgs because of their speech (excluding the AP FOR calling it the Gulf of Mexico)
Courts may find that this specific requirement of signing the policy is lawful, or no. But if everyone has to sign it, it's not arbitrary.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. You are saying the request does not have arbitrary targets but I am saying the request itself is arbitrary. By this meaning, it would not be an arbitrary request to ask all of the reporters for their eye color but it would be arbitrary to deny access to green-eyed people.
> exclude orgs because of their speech
This is what they're planning to do to the organizations which choose not to sign it. Signing it (or not) is an act of expression. Choosing not to sign it would not be violating any law; there is no reason for them to be excluded. Perhaps there's a legal definition of "arbitrary" that I'm naive to but, by a plain English understanding, it's obviously arbitrary to deny access to the groups that didn't sign it based on their decision not to sign it, unless the requirement itself is not arbitrary.
And I myself am not a lawyer in the slightest, but this specific claim feels pretty iffy from a 1A standpoint.
The government is not prohibited from setting rules for access to their facilities. If they apply rules unevenly, that is the sense of arbitrary that applies here. Arbitrary administration of rules, not arbitrary in the sense that someone finds the rule itself to be arbitrary.
When rules are arbitrarily administered in a situation when constitutional rights are at issue, that is where the rubber the meets the road in a constitutional law sense. This goes (I believe) to the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment.
If the courts allowed the government to deny a press org access (and thus suppress their speech) according to some obscure rule, while other press orgs that are technically violating the same rule continue to enjoy access, that creates an environment where the government has carte blanche to violate constitutional rights by creating subtle inequity in their admin of the rules.
That they can make said rules is well-established - IF the rule itself is constitutional. That is a separate legal concern from the uneven admin scenario.
What I'm saying up above is: this isn't uneven admin, less likely there are grounds for a 1A claim. Whether this signature requirement passes muster is entirely different, and I'm less informed on that part of the law. I certainly don't like it, though.
Sounds like a real question from a real person.
Hegseth also reposted a question from a follower who asked, “Is this because they can’t roam the Pentagon freely? Do they believe they deserve unrestricted access to a highly classified military installation under the First Amendment?”
Hegseth answered, “yes.” Reporters say neither of those assertions is true.
Just ask anyone with a CCNP or equivalent
Makes absolutely no sense
The Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) provider is Palantir.
Tabulator Machine <- usb/serial -> UPS <- cell connection -> Internet.
Not uncommon to run SNMP on a UPS either. SNMP is an unloved pile of bugs:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/as-many-as-2-millio...
I'm not saying anything nefarious actually happened. But as soon as you connect devices to the net in any way you are in deep water, especially when one or more of your vendors may be one of your threat actors.
Complicated hacks are not common, but possible, especially when the stakes are high and competent people are on the task. Stuxnet development started 20 years ago - and the target was even airgapped, which didn't help the target in the end.
QED
For president you have a piece of paper with two boxes on. You don't even have ranked voting.
Mark an X next to one and put it in a ballot box. Works fine everywhere else.
So I think it's reasonable to say that, to paraphrase the earlier comment, putting an X in a box on a piece of paper is how it's done in most of the world.
It's true that the ballots aren't always counted by hand.
Sure with paper systems you might be able to swing upto say 1% of the vote without being detected (probably more like 0.1%), anything more will involve too many people for a conspiracy to remain.
With electronic you can swing 20% without blinking.
Scaling is bad when it comes to voting.
You're going to have to give some citations for that because all electronic votes are usually backed by a paper ballot.. I've not heard of 20%~ swing and getting away with it.
>It's true that the ballots aren't always counted by hand.
I can't speak for other jurisdictions (although I understand that this is pretty common in the US), but where I live (NY) we do exactly that. Well, instead of marking an 'X', we fill in an oval for each item on the ballot and that paper ballot is then scanned and counted.
If there are issues or the vote is very close, as with most places, a recount is done, first by machine and, if necessary, by hand.
How is this different from the rest of the world?
There's actually nothing wrong with machine counting, I believe it was found to be more accurate also overall less prone to fatigue and mistakes. [0]
The real strange thing in the US is the electoral college system for Presidential elections, surely 1 person 1 vote nationwide would make sense. Afterall the President is supposed to represent everyone equally.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/11/1128197774/research-finds-han...
One might consider that later democracies learned from some of our mistakes.
They vote for everything including the president and local school district board members and everything in between at the same time.
A foreign state isn't going to spend millions trying to subvert the vote for the head of "Wyoming School Board 45".
When I was at university our student elections were done on computer. 20 years ago. Nobody really cared about them, it was perfectly reasonable, you'd only have to bribe/threaten 3 people to make the result whatever you wanted.
If you put the national election in the hands of 3 people though, then you have a major problem.
>They vote for everything including the president and local school district board members and everything in between at the same time.
What's more, elections are managed/run at the county level, not at the state or Federal levels. As such, there isn't just one election in the US on election day. Rather, there are 3500+ elections, each with different ballots, different folks managing the elections and different sets of interested parties monitoring each of those 3500+ elections.
While many offices are up for election every two or four or six years, not all of them fall on even-numbered years like the Federal elections.
My state has state elections that happen in concert with Federal elections, but my local government does not. In fact, we're voting for mayor, City Council and every other elective city office in a few weeks, even though the federal and state elections aren't this year.
Since elections are managed and run at the county level, there is little uniformity -- and less opportunity for widespread fraud.
Are you not even 18 or have you never voted?
Depending on your state there were about 20 candidates for president [1]. The fact that there's more than 2 has caused issues in the past where famously a candidate listed second on the ballot received a significant amount of votes in a county they were widely disliked [2].
[1]: https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_candidates,_2024
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Here's an electoral paper with 20 candidates.
https://www.onlondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen...
In this case it's even more complex as you get a second vote if your primary vote doesn't finish in the top two.
Machines aren't needed
Wow.
What happens if you do 3 counts and get 3 vastly different outcomes?
I mean, they are in office right now, even though they already quite egregiously violated most laws in existence. It seems completely obvious to me there will be some kind of takeover for the next elections. Some new rules will be set in place that favor the current government.
And the current US track record seems to prove that it'll work. There will be outraged news articles and comments on the internet, some protests, but ultimately it'll pass.
Trump pardoned all of the Jan 6th putchists.
Trump ordered full military honor for Ashley Babbitt.
Trump put openly said after meeting Putin that more than ever, he believes the 2020 elections were rigged.
Trump appointed an election denier as the secretary for "Election Integrity".
Trump appointed pure servile hacks as heads of FBI, CIA and Justice (I mean, Kash write a book with Trump as a king).
Trump ordered 800 military brass to come to Quantico to be lectured about the "Enemy from within", turn American cities into military training grounds and that anyone that disappoints him will lose everything.
I mean, how many more clues do you need, to admit the next election will be cancelled as soon as they lose? He literally said what he was going to do. And there has been no pushback, neither from the military nor parliamentarians.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be done if it was possible, but I am working off the current status quoa that exists now. And I wouldn't be so sure about a lack of military pushback if something like cancelling national elections was called.
>I wouldn't be so sure about a lack of military pushback
Again, Ashley Babbitt received full military honors for trying to overrun security at the Capitol to attack congressmen and women to overturn the election. That's what happened. Nobody has said anywhere in the military "it's wrong".
The "status quo" is that the president, immune from any prosecution, is saying openly he is ready to use soldiers to shoot at American citizens when he gives the order, and anyone who disobeys will be fired.
Inconvenience and intimidation will be used to discourage voters in opposition areas. Reasons will be found to discard ballots. Results will be challenged, reasons found to delay certification of unfavorable results until it’s too late.
Imagine 2020, except done by smarter people who have had four years to think about how they’ll do it. And who have had four years to see that there are zero consequences for them even if they don’t succeed.
https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/14/politics/voting-rights-act-s...
- they have the voter rolls - they are normalizing using the military domestically - they will "secure" the polling places against "voter fraud" and take the ballots to be "counted securely"
This needs to be called out now, because the courts are slow to react and won't have time to do anything once it's happening.
Let’s start with Senate. Every state regardless of population gets 2 senators where South Dakota and North Dakota hace twice the number of Senators as California.
While the House is not as bad, since left leaning voters are mostly in big cities, it’s easy to gerrymander and dilute their vote.
Ketamine abuser even tried to buy pravda.com, but you all was spared coz its used by Ukraian Pravda. Which is (was) not very aligned with the establishent to say the least.
(I keep joking that other countries have state controlled media, but in the West we have media-controlled states)
by "The Press" we're not talking about newswriters but organizations who are large, evil, and morally bankrupt.
Anyone is free to start up a paper and write what they please
> by "The Press" we're not talking about newswriters but organizations who are large, evil, and morally bankrupt
So the logical conclusion must be that the GP meant something else than your self-serving redefinition. Yet, you still choose to attack the post as if it is completely wrong, and the attack on the press is fully justified?
Vietnam, Iraq, Covid-19, financial crises, NSA mass surviellence, afghanistan, opioid crises, not to mention the endless 'pee gate' russiagate crap. Jussie smollet, hunter bidens laptop, the crushing of occupy, coverage of gamestop, AI panic slop about destroying jobs... it never ends
narrative over truth, every time, without fail.
Interesting use of language... seems like the mask is coming off everywhere now, not just where I live (Hungary).
I've been intentionally skipping on a lot of our local political reporting, so I was really quite surprised to see recently how lowbrow the language used by politicians, specifically those in power, has gotten these days. Especially how flagrant they are about it too.
This is a very meta, and to many I'm sure trivial, thing to take issue with, yes, but if those in authority are this unashamedly drunk on power, and look down on those they rule over so openly, I'd really question how fit they are to represent people's collective best interest.
See "The Cruelty is the Point", written during Trump 1.0:
> Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
Those leakers are committing actual crimes. People here need a healthy dose of reality.
Only idiot these days really goes to bbc or whatever your acronym of choice for “the truth”.
They all push some sort of agenda down our throats and already lick ass to some authority or sponsor. What difference does it make if they got just +1 little constraint.
While it's nice to see the reaction from one side, I'd like to be able to balance that against the actual text of the document myself.
The most draconian new rule is that it bars the press from reporting any information unless they get it approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official. This would basically turn the press into a PR mouthpiece for the Dept of War.
No, I don't. The legal name of the Department headed by Pete Hegseth is the Department of Defense, and it is the only name that entity has ever had.
> Originally stemming from the War Department
This a somewhat popular myth, resurgent recently because it is expressly part of the narrative of the Trump Administration and therefore the MAGA cult, but its false. The Department of War is the predecessor of the modern Departments of the Army and Air Force which it was split into, not the Department of Defense, which was created ex nihilo to be placed over the existing military departments at the same time one of those department s was being split.
Originally, the US (following the British model, which also persisted until just after WWII) had two separate defense edtablishments, the Department of War (responsible for the Army) and Department of the Navy (responsible for the Navy and Marine Corps); after WWII a combined defense establishment was created above those, but at the same time it was created, the Air Force was split off from the Army and the War Department was split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, which is why the Department of Defense is the only cabinet level department with subordinate entities also called “departments”.
No, the rules don't pertain to reporting any information, they pertain to unauthorized reporting of two specific classifications of information, "CNSI" (Classified National Security Information) and "CUI" (Controlled Unclassified Information). And they don't bar reporting the information, they say that someone who reports the information could lose their access to the Pentagon.
CNSI is "information on the national defense and foreign relations of the United States, including information relating to defense against transnational terrorism, that has been determined pursuant to Executive Order 13526, or any predecessor order, to require protection against unauthorized disclosure and is marked to indicate its classified status when in documentary form".
CUI is "unclassified information the United States Government creates or possesses that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls limiting its distribution to those with a lawful government purpose. CUI may not be released to the public absent further review.
The DoD CUI Program, established through Executive Order 13556, standardizes the safeguarding of information across multiple categories. For example, CUI categories exist to protect Privacy Act information, attorney-client privileged information, and controlled technical information, among many others."
aka the entire point of the exercise. The innocuous components are there so that the Dept of Defense can claim that it's those minor items the press is objecting to, without having to defend the actual substantive policy change.
Just incorporate "propaganda inc" have them show up, then parrot the company line and no one else need bother show up. The other reporters can then spin that.
Pentagon and the Media are owned and controlled by the same military-industrial complex and always agree to disagree with each other in public.
lkey•3mo ago