Donald Trump and his supporters have hardly been shy about his ambitions for education. They can be found laid out concisely in three documents: the Republican Party’s brief platform for his presidential campaign, known as Agenda 47; the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership publication, a sprawling, group-authored right-wing policy plan better known as Project 2025; and the […] Source link
Soon after Biden signed the bill to ban TikTok in April, the company and a consortium of its users retaliated by filing lawsuits accusing the federal government of violating their First Amendment rights. In December, a federal appeals court upheld the ban law, leaving TikTok with only one legal pathway left to save itself: an appeal to the Supreme Court. Many of these same arguments were made at Friday’s hearing. Justice Brett Kavanaugh called the government’s data security rationale “strong.” Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch called into question the government’s assertion that the app could host “covert” Chinese manipulation operations, arguing that TikTok’s algorithm was just as opaque as those belonging to other social media companies. “We all now know that China is behind it,” Kagan said. Fisher, who represents the creators involved in the case, argued that the justices did not have to answer questions related to security, which would be better resolved by broader data privacy legislation. “If Congress, in this very law, regulated data security in other ways with the data …
Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.” In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video. In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost …
(RNS) — On Nov. 5, a visibly anxious Charlie Kirk fidgeted with his red MAGA hat and T-shirt, which was emblazoned with the word “Pray.” Surrounded by fellow young conservatives, he was livestreaming an election-night edition of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” his program on the conservative media outlet Real America’s Voice. Finally, as the hour grew late and Fox News declared Donald Trump the victor, Kirk burst into tears, eventually stammering out, “I am just humbled by God’s grace” and “This is God’s mercy on our country.” But since the election, Kirk, a 31-year-old mainline-Presbyterian-turned-evangelical and founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, has done his best to show he played no small part in what he insists was God’s plan to catapult Trump back into power. Technically, TPUSA and its more overtly political arms, Turning Point Action and Turning Point PAC, were among several organizations tapped by the Trump campaign to operate as an outsourced field operation. But Kirk’s efforts have drawn particular praise as an effective driver of infrequent voters to …
“Executives are doing everything they can to create an environment conducive for actions they want to take, absent review or accountability from actors like our courts or legislators or others,” she says. Since taking over X, formerly Twitter, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important allies, backing his campaign financially and lending the full weight of his own platform to promoting Trump’s talking points during the campaign. He has since sat in on meetings with foreign leaders with the president-elect, and weighed in on staffing choices for the new administration. Other tech leaders have taken note, cozying up to Trump and donating to his inauguration fund. But even before the election, other tech companies were following X’s lead in rolling back policies and protections that had previously been in place. For his part, David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Meta and other social platforms would likely have to comply with state laws regardless of location. And relocating staff to Texas doesn’t mean all its supposed moderation problems will …
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump makes remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. Jan. 7, 2025. Carlos Barria | Reuters President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to rule out using the U.S. military to take control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, expanding on a spate of recent remarks he has made about acquiring more territory for the United States during his second term. “We need them for economic security,” Trump said of both the Central American trade route and the autonomous territory of Denmark, during a lengthy press conference at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. A reporter asked Trump if he could assure the public that he would not use military or economic coercion in pursuit of either land. “No, I can’t assure you of either of those two,” the president-elect replied. “The Panama Canal was built for our military. I’m not going to commit to that, no … It might be that you’ll have to do something,” he said. Trump also expressed concern and frustration about China’s activity in both the Panama Canal and Greenland, sending …
This week, Dr. Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, joins host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to discuss the intersection of race, religion, and politics in America, focusing on the rewriting of history regarding the January 6, 2021 attacks, and the impact of shifting demographics and the influence of polarizing figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We also pay tribute to the late Jimmy Carter. Paul shares excerpts from powerful interviews he conducted with the 39th president of the United States. Robby is the author of several influential books that explore democracy, religion, and race in America. Bringing together rigorous scholarship with in-depth research, he is one of the few experts capable of helping us understand the forces shaping our democracy, and the major political and religious movements that seek to shape it in the future. “For most of our country’s history, we have been on the wrong side of civil rights, the wrong side of slavery, the wrong side of Jim Crow. If we are this far …
(The Conversation) — The decision by President Joe Biden to pardon his son, Hunter, despite previously suggesting he would not do so, has reopened debate over the use of the presidential pardon. Hunter Biden will be spared potential jail time not simply over his convictions for gun and tax offenses, but any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period Jan. 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” During his first tenure in the White House, Donald Trump issued a total of 144 pardons. Following Biden’s move to pardon his son, Trump raised the issue of those convicted over involvement in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, raising expectations that he may use the pardon in their cases – something Trump has repeatedly promised to do. But should the pardon power be solely up to the president’s discretion? Or should there be restrictions on who can be granted a pardon? As a scholar of ethics and political philosophy, I find that much …
(RNS) — The year’s news in religion was dominated by a war already in progress on Jan. 1 between Hamas and Israel. Though not at root a religious war, as the months went by the conflict supercharged American-Jewish divisions over Israel, fractured some Jewish-Muslim alliances and made antisemitism on campus a rallying cry for the right. It also exposed, in the view of many who sympathized with the Palestinians, new depths of Islamophobia. The top religion stories also reprised familiar themes of the 2016-2020 Trump administration, as Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign returned him to the White House. We also saw the end of a three-year-long Vatican synod and the opening of a Hindu temple three decades in the making. But if several of this year’s biggest stories were holdovers from previous years, there were, as ever, surprises nobody could have predicted. Here are the developments in faith, politics and culture that defined 2024 for us at RNS: 1. Israel-Hamas war’s spiritual reckoning People organized by Halachic Left demonstrate against the Israel-Hamas war outside …
Although the details remain in flux, the transition team reviewing NASA and its activities has begun to draft potential executive orders for changes to space policy under the Trump Administration. Sources familiar with the five people on the team, who have spent the last six weeks assessing the space agency and its exploration plans, were careful to note that such teams are advisory in nature. They do not formally set policy nor is their work always indicative of the direction an incoming presidential administration will move toward. Nevertheless, in trying to set clear goals for NASA and civil space policy, the ideas under consideration reflect the Trump administration’s desire for “big changes” at NASA, both in terms of increasing the effectiveness and velocity of its programs. Not Business as Usual The transition team has been grappling with an agency that has a superfluity of field centers—ten spread across the United States, as well as a formal headquarters in Washington, DC—and large, slow-moving programs that cost a lot of money and have been slow to deliver …
