Ralph welcomes Professor Roddey Reid to break down his book “Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond.” Then, we are joined by the original Nader’s Raider, Professor Robert Fellmeth, who enlightens us on how online anonymity and Artificial Intelligence are harming children.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego where he taught classes on modern cultures and societies in the US, France, and Japan. Since 2008 he has researched and published on trauma, daily life, and political intimidation in the US and Europe. He is a member of Indivisible.org San Francisco, and he hosts the blog UnSafe Thoughts on the fluidity of politics in dangerous times. He is also the author of Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond.
I think we still have trouble acknowledging what’s actually happening. Particularly our established institutions that are supposed to protect us and safeguard us—many of their leaders are struggling with the sheer verbal and physical violence that’s been unfurling in front of our very eyes. Many people are exhausted by it all. And it’s transformed our daily life to the point that I think one of the goals is (quite clearly) to disenfranchise people such that they don’t want to go out and participate in civic life.
Roddey Reid
What’s broken down is…a collective response, organized group response. Now, in the absence of that, this is where No King’s Day and other activities come to the fore. They’re trying to restore collective action. They’re trying to restore the public realm as a place for politics, dignity, safety, and shared purpose. And that’s been lost. And so this is where the activists and civically engaged citizens and residents come in. They’re having to supplement or even replace what these institutions traditionally have been understood to do. It’s exhilarating, but it’s also a sad moment.
Roddey Reid
Robert Fellmeth worked as a Nader’s Raider from 1968 to 1973 in the early days of the consumer movement. He went on to become the Price Professor of Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego (where he taught for 47 years until his retirement early this year) and he founded their Children’s Advocacy Institute in 1983. Since then, the Institute has sponsored 100 statutes and 35 appellate cases involving child rights, and today it has offices in Sacramento and DC. He is also the co-author of the leading law textbook Child Rights and Remedies.
I think an easy remedy—it doesn’t solve the problem totally—but simply require the AI to identify itself when it’s being used. I mean, to me, that’s something that should always be the case. You have a right to know. Again, free speech extends not only to the speaker, but also to the audience. The audience has a right to look at the information, to look at the speech, and to judge something about it, to be able to evaluate it. That’s part of free speech.
Robert Fellmeth
News 10/17/25
In Gaza, the Trump administration claims to have brokered a ceasefire. However, this peace – predicated on an exchange of prisoners – is extremely fragile. On Tuesday, Palestinians attempting to return to their homes were fired upon by Israeli soldiers. Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed those shot were “terrorists” whose attempts to “approach and cross [the Yellow Line] were thwarted.” Al Jazeera quotes Lorenzo Kamel, a professor of international history at Italy’s University of Turin, who calls the ceasefire a “facade” and that the “structural violence will remain there precisely as it was – and perhaps even worse.” We can only hope that peace prevails and the Palestinians in Gaza are able to return to their land. Whatever is left of it.
Despite this ceasefire, Trump was denied in his bid for a Nobel Peace Prize. The prize instead went to right-wing Venezuelan dissident María Corina Machado. Democracy Now! reports Machado ran against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2023, but was “barred from running after the government accused her of corruption and cited her support for U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.” If elected Machado has promised to privatize Venezuela’s state oil industry and move Venezuela’s Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and in 2020, her party, Vente Venezuela, “signed a pact formalizing strategic ties with Israel’s Likud party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” Machado has also showered praise on right-wing Latin American leaders like Javier Milei of Argentina and following her victory, praised Trump’s “decisive support,” even telling Fox News that Trump “deserves” the prize for his anti-Maduro campaign, per the Nation.
Machado’s prize comes within the context of Trump’s escalating attacks on Venezuela. In addition to a fifth deadly strike on a Venezuelan boat, which killed six, the New York Times reports Trump has ordered his envoy to the country Richard Grenell to cease all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela, including talks with President Maduro. According to this report, “Trump has grown frustrated with…Maduro’s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by Venezuelan officials that they have no part in drug trafficking.” Grenell had been trying to strike a deal with the Bolivarian Republic to “avoid a larger conflict and give American companies access to Venezuelan oil,” but these efforts were obviously undercut by the attacks on the boats – which Democrats contend are illegal under U.S. and international law – as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeling Maduro a “fugitive from American justice,” and placing a $50 million bounty on his head. With this situation escalating rapidly, many now fear direct U.S. military deployment into Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Trump has already deployed National Guard troops to terrorize immigrants in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reports Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope and a Chicago native, met with Chicago union leaders in Rome last week and urged them to take action to protect immigrants in the city. Defending poor immigrants is rapidly becoming a top priority for the Catholic Church. Pope Leo has urged American bishops to “speak with one voice” on the issue and this story related that “El Paso bishop Mark Seitz brought Leo letters from desperate immigrant families.” Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, also at the meeting with Leo and the union leaders, said that the Pope “wants us to make sure, as bishops, that we speak out on behalf of the undocumented or anybody who’s vulnerable to preserve their dignity…We all have to remember that we all share a common dignity as human beings.”
David Ellison, the newly-minted CEO of Paramount, is ploughing ahead with a planned expansion of his media empire. His next target: Warner Bros. Discovery. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ellison already pitched a deal to WB CEO David Zaslav, but the $20 per share offer was rejected. However, Ellison is likely to offer a new deal “possibly…backed by his father Larry Ellison or a third party like Apollo [Global Management].” There is also talk that he could go directly to the WBD shareholders if the corporate leadership proves unresponsive. If Ellison is intent on this acquisition, he will need to move fast. Zaslav is planning to split the company into a “studios and HBO business,” and a Discovery business, which would include CNN. Ellison is clearly interested in acquiring CNN to help shape newsroom perspectives, as his recent appointment of Bari Weiss as “editor-in-chief” of CBS News demonstrates, so this split would make an acquisition far less of an attractive prospect. We will be watching this space.
In another Ellison-related media story, Newsweek reports Barron Trump, President Trump’s 19-year-old son, is being eyed for a board seat at the newly reorganized Tik-Tok. According to this story, “Trump’s former social media manager Jack Advent proposed the role at the social media giant, as it comes into U.S. ownership, arguing that the younger Trump’s appointment could broaden TikTok’s appeal among young users.” Barron is currently enrolled in New York University’s Stern School of Business and serves as an “ambassador” for World Liberty Financial, the “Trump family’s crypto venture.” TikTok U.S., formerly owned and operated by the Chinese company ByteDance, is being taken over by a “consortium of American investors [including Larry Ellison’s] Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners,” among others.
As the government shutdown drags on, the Trump administration is taking the opportunity to further gut the federal government, seeming to specifically target the offices protecting the most vulnerable. According to NPR, “all staff in the [Department of Education] Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), with the exception of a handful of top officials and support staff, were cut,” in a reduction-in-force or RIF order issued Friday. One employee is quoted saying “This is decimating the office responsible for safeguarding the rights of infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities.” Per this report, OSERS is “responsible for roughly $15 billion in special education funding and for making sure states provide special education services to the nation’s 7.5 million children with disabilities.” Just why exactly the administration is seeking to undercut federal support for disabled children is unclear. Over at the Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS sent out an RIF to “approximately 1,760 employees last Friday — instead of the intended 982,” as a “result of data discrepancies and processing errors,” NOTUS reports. The agency admitted the error in a court filing in response to a suit brought by the employees’ unions. Even still, the cuts are staggering and include 596 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 125 at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, to name just a few. This report notes that other agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security all sent out inaccurately high RIFs as well.
The Lever reports Boeing, the troubled airline manufacturer, is fighting a new Federal Aviation Administration rule demanding additional inspections for older 737 series planes after regulators discovered cracks in their fuselages. The rule “would revise the inspection standards…through a regulatory action called an ‘airworthiness directive.’...akin to a product recall if inspectors find a defective piece of equipment on the plane…in [this case] cracks along the body of the plane’s main cabin.” The lobbying group Airlines for America is seeking to weaken the rule by arguing that the maintenance checks would be too “costly” for the airline industry, who would ultimately have to bear the financial brunt of these inspections. Boeing is fighting them too because such a rule would make airlines less likely to buy Boeing’s decaying airplanes. As this report notes, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy – who oversees the FAA – “previously worked as an airline lobbyist…[and] Airlines for America recently selected the former Republican Governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu to be their chief executive officer.”
In more consumer-related news, Consumer Reports has been conducting a series of studies on lead levels in various consumer products. Most recently, a survey of protein powders and shakes found “troubling levels of toxic heavy metals,” in many of the most popular brands. They write, “For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.” Some of these products have massively increased in heavy metal content just over the last several years. CR reports “Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer powder, the product with the highest lead levels, had nearly twice as much lead per serving as the worst product we analyzed in 2010.” The experts quoted in this piece advise against daily use of these products, instead limiting them to just once per week.
Finally, in a new piece in Rolling Stone, David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher lay out how conservatives are waging new legal campaigns to strip away the last remaining fig leaves of campaign finance regulation – and what states are doing to fight back. One angle of attack is a lawsuit targeting the restrictions on coordination between parties and individual campaigns, with House Republicans arguing that, “because parties pool money from many contributors, that ‘significantly dilutes the potential for any particular donor to exercise a corrupting influence over any particular candidate’ who ultimately benefits from their cash.” Another angle is a lawsuit brought by P.G. Sittenfeld, the former Democratic mayor of Cincinnati – who has already been pardoned by Trump for accepting bribes – but is seeking to establish that “pay-to-play culture is now so pervasive that it should no longer be considered prosecutable.” However, the authors do throw out one ray of hope from an unlikely source: Montana. The authors write, “Thirteen years after the Supreme Court gutted the state’s century-old anti-corruption law, Montana luminaries of both parties are now spearheading a ballot initiative circumventing Citizens United jurisprudence and instead focusing on changing state incorporation laws that the high court rarely meddles with.The measure’s proponents note that Citizens United is predicated on state laws giving corporations the same powers as actual human beings, including the power to spend on politics. But they point out that in past eras, state laws granted corporations more limited powers — and states never relinquished their authority to redefine what corporations can and cannot do. The Montana initiative proposes to simply use that authority to change the law — in this case, to no longer grant corporations the power to spend on elections.” Who knows if this initiative will move forward in Montana, but it does provide states a blueprint for combatting the pernicious influence of Citizens United. States should and must act on it.
This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.
