Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Appeals Court Allows Thousands of Social Media Addiction Lawsuits Against Meta, TikTok, Google to Continue

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that more than 3,000 lawsuits accusing Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap and other tech companies of deliberately designing addictive platforms for young users can proceed.

Time reports that the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the thousands of lawsuits, filed by states, municipalities, school districts and individuals, can move forward in district court. The plaintiffs allege that addictive algorithms and insufficient safeguards against harmful content have contributed to rising rates of depression, anxiety and body image issues among young people.

The cases had been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, who ruled in 2023 and 2024 that most of the litigation could proceed. Meta and TikTok appealed those orders, arguing they were shielded from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, a federal law that generally protects companies from being sued over content posted by users.

In a 24-page opinion, Judge Jacqueline Nguyen wrote that Section 230 provides a “defense to liability,” not blanket immunity from lawsuits. During oral arguments in January, Nguyen had signaled skepticism toward the companies’ position, saying, “When Congress wants to give immunity from suit, it knows how to say that.” Plaintiffs have argued that the law does not shield claims focused on how companies intentionally designed and operated their products.

The appeals court did not decide whether Section 230 bars those product-design claims, ruling instead that the appeal was premature because the trial court’s decision was not final. That question, which could shape other litigation against tech companies, remains unresolved. The lawsuits will continue in district court, where plaintiffs are seeking damages, civil penalties and restitution.

Separately, roughly 3,300 similar cases are being coordinated in California state court. In the first bellwether trial in March, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who said she developed depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia after becoming addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child. The jury found Meta and Google negligent in designing their platforms and failing to warn of the risks. TikTok and Snap had settled with the plaintiff before trial. All companies have denied the allegations and filed appeals.

Keep reading

California Orders NGO Serving As “Financial Backbone” For Singham-Linked Marxism Causes To Cease Operations

Foreign policy investigator Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon revealed on Monday that California regulators ordered Arc of Justice, a nonprofit operated by left-wing Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin, to cease charitable operations after years of missing tax filings and unanswered questions about what happened to $51 million in reported assets. 

The state attorney general revoked the foundation’s charitable registration in January 2025, barring it from distributing assets without prior approval. A June 19 warning letter went further, directing Arc of Justice to stop soliciting, holding or spending charitable funds in California and warning that board members could face personal liability for unauthorized distributions.

Kredo cited an investigation by the watchdog group Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN) that said since California first revoked the foundation’s charitable registration 18 months ago and ordered it to provide a full accounting of $51,445,599 in outstanding assets it held as of 2023, “no public document establishes what has happened to the money, where it is held, or whether any of it has moved.” 

The California Franchise Tax Board subsequently confirmed that the foundation was no longer in good standing or certified as tax-exempt. At the same time, the Secretary of State listed the organization as suspended.

“The silence from Arc of Justice raises unanswered questions about a foundation that has long served as the financial backbone for a network of radical advocacy groups tied to Benjamin and her Code Pink cofounder, Jodie Evans,” Kredo wrote in the report. 


Keep reading

Wuhan’s ‘Bat Woman’ Runs A New Lab Creating Coronaviruses That Can Infect Humans. U.S. Tax Dollars Are Still Supporting Her Work.

Shi Zhengli is recruiting researchers for “pathogen discovery/coronavirus” and “cross-species infection risk” work. NIH-backed scientists continued collaborating with her after COVID, including on research using materials she supplied from her new Chinese laboratory.

Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist whose years of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology made her one of the most scrutinized scientists in the world after COVID-19, did not disappear.

She moved on to another powerful Chinese state laboratory, where she is now helping train a new generation of coronavirus researchers.

Chinese-language records reviewed for this report show Shi is currently affiliated with Guangzhou Laboratory, a national laboratory established in 2021 that describes itself as part of China’s strategic scientific and technological apparatus for combating respiratory diseases. Her current research profile focuses on discovering new viruses in bats and other wildlife, studying their biological characteristics, and investigating the mechanisms that allow viruses to jump between species.

Even more striking is what Guangzhou Laboratory is recruiting scientists to do under Shi today.

A 2026 doctoral recruitment notice lists Shi as an adviser in pathogen biology with a research concentration explicitly described as “pathogen discovery/coronavirus.”

Another 2026 doctoral program, jointly operated by Guangzhou Laboratory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, lists Shi as an adviser for “pathogen discovery and cross-species infection risk research.” Students in the program conduct their coursework primarily through the Wuhan Institute of Virology before carrying out most of their scientific research and dissertation work at Guangzhou Laboratory.

Keep reading

Deep Capture

Woodrow Wilson holds a distinction no other American president has: he earned a Ph.D., completing his doctorate in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. That same year, he wrote an essay called “The Study of Administration,” later published in the inaugural volume of Political Science Quarterly. Historians widely credit this essay as the founding document of public administration as a formal academic field, and Wilson himself as the father of that discipline.

Wilson’s central argument was that government should be split into two separate domains: politics, where elected officials set broad goals and policy direction, and administration, a technical, expert-driven sphere that should be run with “large powers and unhampered discretion” and insulated from day-to-day political interference. 

Wilson suggested that government ought to be removed from the political process…in other words: “Democracy is too important to be left to voters.” He explicitly encouraged American reformers to study European administrative models – including Prussia’s – for lessons in efficiency, arguing that the US had fallen behind other nations in developing a science of government administration. 

Later scholars have debated how far Wilson actually intended this separation to go, and some interpret his argument as calling for administrators to be almost entirely removed from political accountability. His essay laid the intellectual groundwork for what would become the modern professional civil service – insulated from patronage and run by career administrators rather than political appointees or elected officials.

The Frankfurt School’s American Exile

Nearly 50 years later, a very different intellectual tradition found refuge in the same city that Wilson’s ideas would eventually help administer. Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany in 1930, leading a group of thinkers who developed what became known as Critical Theory. Its core members included Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Leo Löwenthal. Critical Theory is a philosophical framework that analyzes power structures and social inequalities.  

Developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, it shifted Marxism from a strict economic focus to a critique of culture, media, and modern society. Critical Theory was a different way of looking at philosophy; where philosophy was a search for truth – trying to explain phenomena and things that were not easily proven by science (ethics for example) – Critical Theory shifted to look at philosophy specifically through the lens of Marxism. It became no longer a search for truth but a means of propagandizing, which some would argue was a betrayal of philosophy.

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Horkheimer was forced to relocate the group first to Geneva and then to New York, where it formed a loose affiliation with Columbia University in 1934–35. Horkheimer’s actual scholarly project – laid out in works like Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason – described how instrumental reason, mass culture, and authoritarianism are able to take hold in modern societies. 

It was also between 1933 and 1937 that several regulatory agencies were established that would come to form the backbone of the modern Administrative State.

Port Huron and the Old/New Left Split

By the early 1960s, the American left was largely defined by an older tradition: labor unions, industrial organizing, and class-based politics rooted in the fights of the 1930s and ’40s. In June 1962, a group of Socialist Organization representatives, student activists, organized labor unions, civil rights leaders, and foreign observers gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, and produced a document that would come to mark a generational break from that tradition.

Students for a Democratic Society had grown out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of an older Socialist educational group called the League for Industrial Democracy, which itself traced back to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society founded in 1905. In early 1960, that student branch renamed itself Students for a Democratic Society. 

The manifesto produced at Port Huron was drafted primarily by Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student and former editor of the Michigan Daily, working from ideas that blended the sociology of Columbia’s C. Wright Mills and Walter Reuther with the direct-action tactics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The week-long meeting brought together groups who wrote, debated, and voted on a 60-page document. Notably, it took place at a United Auto Workers retreat, with the UAW under Reuther’s leadership covering a range of the convention’s costs. Inside circles among Reuther’s contemporaries referred to it as “The Long Journey.” 

Keep reading

No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.  

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it.  That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it.  And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal.  He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy.  Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code?  Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country.  It was England specifically.  

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land.  They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now.  You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts.  Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone.  Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now.  And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone.  I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick’s situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings.  They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent?  What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular.  That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc.  We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.”  According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand.  They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

Keep reading

More Democrat Election Tricks: Milwaukee Election Officials Blame “Human Error” After 5 of 9 USB Drives Arrive to Central HQ WITHOUT Election Results

Milwaukee is at it again.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, as Wisconsin primary results were still coming in, Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez admitted that five of the nine USB flash drives delivered from the city’s central count facility to the county contained audit logs instead of the actual election results.

“It’s a human error,” Gutierrez said. When asked by WISN 12 if it was as simple as somebody pressing the wrong button, she replied, “Correct.”

Officials were forced to return to the operations center at Central Count to re-download the correct results from five machines. Those results then had to be transported back to the Milwaukee County Courthouse for re-uploading. Gutierrez said nearly 15,000 ballots were still outstanding at the time of the admission.

Read that again: on five of the nine USB drives used in a critical election-night transfer, officials copied the wrong files.

Keep reading

Is America Headed for a Special Skills Draft?

A YouTuber with a million followers, Ryan McBeth, devotes his latest video and Substack column today to a denunciation of an article I wrote last month for Responsible Statecraft, “Why is the Selective Service war gaming a ‘special skills’ draft?”

Mr. McBeth also attacks the Quincy Institute (the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that publishes Responsible Statecraft) and an Instagrammer I don’t know but who posted a short video calling attention to my article.

I’d never heard of Mr. McBeth before he contacted me this week, but it’s apparent from his videos and articles that he has no expertise about the Selective Service System (SSS), its history since 1980, or its current plans, and didn’t do his homework before posting his latest video or an equally errror-filled one a few months ago about automatic draft registration and the possibility of a military draft.

To his credit, Mr. McBeth contacted me before he posted his new video, shared a draft of the script, and included some of my comments in his video and article — none of which was he required to do. He even made some changes to his script in response to my comments, although at the same time he introduced some entirely new factual errors in the final published version of the video.

In his new video, Mr. McBeth claims that “there is no provision” for any type of special-skills draft, but that’s just wrong. In the past, the SSS operated both a general “cannon fodder” draft of young men and a “Doctor Draft” with different criteria and age limits. Since the 1980s, the SSS has been required by law to maintain readiness to activate either a general draft or a draft of “persons qualified for practice or employment in a health care occupation” (the Health Care Personnel Delivery System, HCPDS) — a form of special-skills draft.

The HCPDS contingency plans have some differences from the pre-1973 Doctor Draft (as the current contingency plans for a general draft differ from the pre-1973 operation of the general draft), but the HCPDS is quite explicitly an updated plan based on the prior experience of the Doctor Draft. The SSS has said explicitly (and, I think, truthfully) that its plans for a broader special-skills draft grew out of the HCPDS, which in turn grew out of the Doctor Draft. The issue isn’t whether the SSS is planning for and prioritizing a special-skills draft, but whether it would include draftees with skills in other fields in addition to health care.

Mr. McBeth also claims that that people who, though lack of awareness, didn’t register with the SSS, are being denied student loans and government jobs.

In fact, the requirement to register with the SSS to get student loans was rescinded by Congress in 2020. This change was identified explicitly by the SSS — again I think accurately, although the war in Ukraine was another factor — as one of the reasons for the sharp drop in registration since that change in the law and the FAFSA student aid form took effect. This decline in compliance was, in turn, the major reason that staff of the SSS, fearing that the failed registration program, the SSS, and their jobs might be abolished, came up with the proposal to Congress to give the SSS a second chance to try to register young men “automatically”.

As for government jobs, failure to register is only a bar to Federal employment if it is (provably) knowing and willful. By the explicit terms of the law, someone who unwittingly failed to register can’t be denied a Federal job. In practice, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which makes decisions about eligibility for Federal employment, reported in 2024 that in 99% of cases in which employment is initially denied for failure to register with the SSS, but the applicant appeals the denial to OPM, OPM overrules the initial denial and finds the applicant eligible — presumably, in most if not all cases, because of the absence of any evidence of knowledge and willfulness.

Unwitting failure to register with the SSS is not a bar to Federal student aid or Federal employment.

These factual errors are typical of the myths and misinformation spread by commentators who haven’t been paying attention to anything the SSS has done in the last fifty years. There’s an irony in this factual carelessness, in that Mr. McBeth presents himself as an expert on “disinformation”. But what’s more interesting than the fact that ignorant people make mistaken claims are Mr. McBeth’s motives for attacking me.

Mr. McBeth’s fundamental complaint against me and against the Instagrammer who amplified some of my research findings is that Mr. McBeth wants to shape the discussion about the related issues of U.S. policy toward China and the possibility of a draft, in a way that is different from the way he thinks that my reporting is likely to lead it. Again ironic, since his complaint is against exactly the sort of effort to shape debate and frame public discourse that he’s trying to engage in himself.

Mr. McBeth thinks that my work to expose the details of ongoing planning and preparation for a draft and their role in enabling more belligerent policies, even when activation of a draft is unlikely, might be used by Chinese or other foreign government information warriors to promote fear of a draft, which fear might, in Mr. McBeth’s words, “weaken our resolve to defend our allies”.

I hate to break the news to Mr. McBeth, but Americans don’t need me to tell them to oppose or fear activation of a draft. I’ve never tried — or needed — to persuade anyone not to want to be drafted. My goal has been to make potential draftees — including young people, health care workers, and people with other special skills — aware of safe ways that they can act on their desire not to be drafted, whatever the reasons they already have for opposing a draft, and to empower and facilitate (“aid and abet”, the government might say) those actions.

The goal of my work against the draft is to end planning and preparation for a draft, which (among other outcomes) would remove the possibility of fear of a draft being used to persuade people not to support actions that are premised on the assumption that a draft is available as a “fallback”.

Mr. McBeth and those who share his views can’t have it both ways:

Keep reading

SHOCKER: DSA Co-Chair Says She Began Her Journey to Socialism by Getting All of Her News From Jon Stewart

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer, who was recently in the news for not being able to articulate the DSA’s stance on open borders, is back in the spotlight tonight for another set of comments she made during the same interview.

When asked to describe what brought her to the DSA, Romer said that she began her journey to the radical left by getting all of her news from Jon Stewart. What huge non-surprise.

Jon Stewart has been working to discredit and vilify conservatives on TV since George W. Bush was still the president.

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer describes her political journey to the DSA:

She was first a “Jon Stewart liberal.”

“Got most of my news from Jon Stewart. That was my primary news source.”

After Hillary lost, she was “horrified and baffled.”

She then got invited by a folk singer to a DSA meeting.

And now speaks in bumper sticker slogans for the DSA and can’t answer basic questions about the organization’s positions and platform.

All of this explains so much.

Keep reading

The Bomb in Monaco and a Torture Room Near Kyiv

They took her trainers. That is the detail that survives, once the rest is stripped away – the belongings removed from the corpse, the shoes pulled from her feet, the shallow hole in woods sixty kilometers west of Kyiv. Anastasiia Berezovska had been shot in the back of the head, then shot again as she lay on the ground, four rounds in all. She was thirty-nine. Six days earlier she had walked out of a stairwell in Monaco having left a backpack in the lobby of an apartment building, and the backpack had torn three people apart. The distance between those two moments – the placing of the bomb and the emptying of a pistol into the woman who placed it – is the whole of this story, and almost everything inside it has been arranged so that the distance cannot be measured.

The device was packed with buckshot and bolts, a charge built for a confined space and for flesh. Monaco’s Minister of State, Christophe Mirmand, said it contained bolts and pellets – a thing made, in plain terms, for the maximum killing of its target. It was detonated by remote control at the moment Vadym Iermolaiev and his family returned from dinner at a seaside restaurant on the evening of 29 June. The man survived with burns and shrapnel. His partner’s legs were amputated in hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son was hurt less badly. The figure who left the bag was seen on the building’s cameras and then seen fleeing on foot toward the French commune of Beausoleil, a few metres and one border away. It was the first attack of its kind in the principality’s history, and the chief prosecutor, Stéphane Thibault, moved quickly to rule out terrorism. A targeted killing, then, in the one place in Europe designed to guarantee that the origins of a wealthy man’s fortune are never examined too closely.

The person who placed it had prepared to disappear. Berezovska disguised herself as a man and fled in a car with German registration plates, across the French border, then into Italy. She had been living in Frankfurt, where German police would later search her apartment and prepare to hand what they found to the Monegasque authorities. On 1 July, the day after the bombing, she crossed into Ukraine and caught a bus to her home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. The state border service would afterwards insist she entered lawfully, through a regular crossing point, with no database alert – including from Interpol – flagging her as wanted. That is technically true and quietly damning: Interpol did not issue its Red Notice until 4 July, three days after she was already home. The one suspect in an atrocity on European soil walked back into Ukraine unimpeded, and by the time the world’s police apparatus formally wanted her, she was already among the people who would kill her. Her body was recovered on 6 July.

The two men arrested for her murder had both been sending her money — cryptocurrency and transfers into her bank accounts, which is how, the Security Service of Ukraine says, they were identified at all. One of them, Vladyslav Reut, thirty-three, appeared in a Kyiv court on 10 July and described how it was done. His accomplice, a former Kyiv-region police officer named Vitalii Zhykovych, took her at gunpoint to a forest near the village of Yuriv. “Zhykovych fired the first shot at her in the back of the head. She fell down. He came up and fired another shot. I was standing a few meters away at that moment.” Reut said he was then made to dig the hole, while Zhykovych stripped the body of its possessions and took the dead woman’s trainers. He told the judge he would insist on a polygraph to prove his innocence. Zhykovych, through his lawyer, denies the allegations.

Reut is not a criminal picked off the street. He studied law at Kyiv’s national university and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, in unit A2772 – a training center for special-operations forces. That was established not by Moscow’s propagandists but by the investigative journalists of Radio Liberty’s Schemy project, and reported by Luke Harding in the Guardian from Kyiv. So the plain shape of it is this: a serving officer of a state intelligence service financed and helped carry out the execution of the only witness to a bombing in a European city. This is not the allegation of Ukraine’s enemies. It is the account produced by Ukraine’s own security service, in its own statement, within days of the killing.

Keep reading

James O’Keefe Releases ANOTHER Shocking Undercover Video From Michigan Showing Him Asking “Voters” About Duplicate Absentee Envelopes For Same Person

On Election Day, James O’Keefe was on the ground in Michigan, preparing to expose voter fraud, which is commonly found in a state where Jocelyn Benson, the nation’s most dishonest Secretary of State, is administering elections.  On the day before the election, our Detroit 2020 Election Inspection leadership team (Phani Mantravadi, Yehuda Miller, and Patty McMurray) spoke with James O’Keefe to help him identify some of the hot spots in Detroit as well as surrounding areas that are also ripe for fraud.

O’Keefe’s first bombshell video that went viral on Saturday afternoon was based on my exclusive report, published on the Gateway Pundit on May 19, 2026, featuring six non-citizens on Michigan’s voter rolls who are also on the DHS Worst of the Worst Criminals list, including Dearborn resident Afshin Masheli, a convicted rapist who’s voted several times in Michigan’s election.

According to our research, the U.S. has been unable to deport the convicted rapist, Afshin Masheli, back to Iran. In his latest bombshell video, O’Keefe mentions the Gateway Pundit’s reporting on the Worst of the Worst non-citizens voting in Michigan as he features Masheli, who, according to Check My Vote (an online service that’s tied to Michigan’s voter rolls, created by Phani Mantravadi), voted in 3 of Michigan’s federal and state elections. In O’Keefe’s undercover video, Masheli can be seen speaking with an undercover journalist at his front door, as he arrogantly admits that he was getting ready to vote in Michigan’s primary election later that day.

On Sunday afternoon, James O’Keefe dropped a teaser on X that seemed to imply he was about to drop something even bigger than Saturday’s bombshell:

“Time to raise the stakes,” he wrote, adding, “Tomorrow.”

Keep reading