‘Every Taxpayer… Should Be Outraged’: Anger Spreads Over ‘Illegal’ US-Funded Pro-Trump Ad

Outrage mounted Friday over a taxpayer-funded television advertisement glorifying President Donald Trump, with critics describing the 30-second spot as self-aggrandizing propaganda and questioning whether the administration violated federal law restricting the use of public money for partisan communications.

The ad—which aired this week on outlets including Fox News, Newsmax, and CBS—features a dizzying montage of Trump at rallies, White House events, sporting events, and alongside military personnel, captioned, “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY.”

The refrain of R&B singer JMSN’s “Love Me” plays over the rapid-fire images. The spot concludes with a voiceover from Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.”

At the bottom of the screen, an alarming disclosure appears, reading, “Paid for by the US government.”

The White House dismissed criticism of the ad—which aired ahead of November’s midterm elections—by calling the spot a “public service announcement” intended to remind Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending.”

However, on Friday, US Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Jack Reed (D-RI), along with Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), excoriated the clip.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” the four senior congressional appropriators said in a joint statement.

“The law is not complicated,” the lawmakers added. “You cannot use taxpayer dollars for political advertisements.”

Federal appropriations law—including the funding bill Trump signed earlier this year—prohibits the use of government funds for unauthorized “publicity or propaganda purposes,” while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has interpreted the prohibition to encompass communications whose obvious purpose is “self-aggrandizement” or “puffery,” as well as “purely partisan” communications.

The consumer advocacy watchdog group Public Citizen on Friday filed a complaint with the GAO alleging the ad “violates laws prohibiting the use of government resources for propaganda, the Hatch Act, and other related laws.”

“Whether or not President Trump was personally involved in the ad, it was conceived, produced, and distributed by Trump’s White House staff,” Public Citizen said.

US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Friday on social media that “every taxpayer, no matter your party, should be outraged by this.”

“Your money is being used to fund campaign ads for Trump,” the senator added. “It’s totally, completely [illegal]. He’s stealing your money for his campaign.”

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DISTURBING: Woke Stanford University Caught Using AI to Race-Swap Male Student with Black Female in Ad — Student Left Feeling ‘Silenced and Erased’

Stanford University, an institution that receives hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding, was caught red-handed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitally erase a student and replace him with an AI-generated Black woman in university promotional materials.

The conservative campus paper The Stanford Review reported Monday that Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises took a photograph shot by a university photographer, ran it through AI, and published the doctored result as advertising.

Sophomore Billy Ramirez recognized the original shot. In the banner that went out, he was gone. In his place: an AI-generated Black woman. Two students to his right were also digitally slimmed down and had their faces altered.

“I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled,” Ramirez told The Stanford Review.

“At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender. But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”

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Florida’s Attorney General Sues Netflix For Allegedly Harvesting, Selling Children’s Data

Attorney General James Uthmeier is seeking billions in damages from the company and asked the judge to order Netflix to stop its alleged deceptive practices.

“Parents were told kids’ profiles were a child’s own space – safe, separate, great for kids,” Uthmeier said in a news conference Wednesday.

“Families believed them. But behind the brand, Netflix built something different.”

In the lawsuit, Jill McLaughlin reporets for The Epoch Times,that Uthmeier claims Netflix offered an ad-free service that promised not to collect or sell data but began to track children and their profiles when it launched an advertising business in 2022.

The streaming service offers an under-12 profile option for children which promotes a non-advertising space, according to the state.

Uthmeier alleges Netflix violated the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state’s Digital Bill of Rights, including by selling sensitive personal data collected from known children without prior consent.

He seeks a permanent injunction, an order requiring Netflix to purge any deceptively collected data from Floridians, and an end to addictive designs that keep children watching on the platform, in addition to billions of dollars in civil and other monetary relief, he said.

“Parents, not streaming corporations, need to direct the upbringing of children,” Uthmeier said.

In the complaint, Uthmeier stated Netflix’s executive officer Reed Hastings told investors during a Jan. 22, 2020, earnings call the company’s model was not based on using customer data.

“We don’t collect anything, we’re really focused on just making our members happy and we’re not tied up on all that controversy around advertising,” Hastings said.

Hastings also said Netflix wasn’t interested in tracking customers’ locations or other things they were doing. “We want to be the safer spy where you can explore, you can get stimulated, have fun, enjoy, relax, and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising,” Hastings said during the call.

The Netflix executive compared the company to Google, Facebook, and Amazon’s advertising models that used consumer data collection and targeting information, saying Netflix was “not controversial that way.”

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Ads Featuring Real Children’s Faces in Sexual AI Videos Persist on Meta’s Platforms

Researchers say more than 250 ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have appeared on Meta’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram since early August, weeks after the company removed dozens of similar ads following reporting from Wired.

Wired reports that the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project says that in early August, Meta deleted roughly 53 ads across Facebook, Instagram and Threads that contained child sexual abuse material, telling the outlet at the time that most of the abusive ads predated the rollout of new AI tools designed to “better detect and block” harmful content. Now, the same watchdog group says ads containing sexual imagery of children are back, some of which are identical to those previously removed.

The problem didn’t stop there. Researchers say Meta has published more than 350 abusive video ads since the end of last year. Many link to so-called “nudification” apps tied to Chinese developers. Unlike the initial batch of 53 ads, the new ones used images of real children, not stock or generic photos.

One ad used an official photograph of a minor from a European royal family, transformed into a video depicting a graphic sex act. Researchers declined to name the royal in order to protect the victim.

“Researchers identified the real-world identities of four minors used in the ads,” according to TTP, whose director is Katie Paul. Three of the four are from the United States. One is a teenager who runs a social media influencer account on a Meta platform. Another is a teen influencer with a public account. The third is a stock photo model, a real person, labeled as “pre-teen” on stock photo websites.

The ads typically open with an innocuous photo of a preteen or teen girl (only one involved a boy), paired with text claiming the image is “not just a photo” and that “there are no restriction” on how it can be used. The videos morph the children’s faces into explicit sexual content, often depicting sex acts. Clicking the ads sends users to download AI face-swapping or video apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Many carry the tagline: “This is the AI that men actually use.”

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Another Google Court Loss: Federal Judge Orders Tech Giant to Change Its Ad Practices After Ruling It Ran Illegal Monopoly

Google received another public flogging in federal court on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered Google to stop the conduct that has been strangling revenue from web publishers for years — the latest blow in the government’s antitrust case against the tech giant’s advertising empire.

This follows Brinkema’s ruling last year that Google violated US antitrust laws by unlawfully maintaining monopoly power in open web display advertising. It was the SECOND time a federal judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in part of its business, after Judge Amit Mehta found the same thing in online search.

Google is a monopolist. The courts confirmed this again.

The Department of Justice announced its victory in their case in April 2025:

“This is a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater went even further in the same DOJ statement:

“The Court’s ruling is clear: Google is a monopolist and has abused its monopoly power. Google’s unlawful dominance allows them to censor and even deplatform American voices. And at the same time, Google destroyed and hid information that exposed its illegal conduct. Today’s opinion confirms Google’s controlling hand over online advertising and, increasingly, the internet itself.”

Google censors and deplatforms American voices. The DOJ said it clear and out loud.

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Amazon Shares Tumble Amid News Of FTC ‘Advertiser Deception’ Lawsuit

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJ reports, citing agency officials. 

According to the report:

The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.

The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ

Amazon’s digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet’s Google and Meta – earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report – which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back. 

Shares shot sharply lower on the news.

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REPORT: New York Liberty Run Pro-Trans Scoreboard Message, Deny Paid Message from Group Supporting Women’s Sports

New York City’s WNBA team refused to take a paid scoreboard message from a woman who wanted to support the XX-XY movement to protect women’s sports from men identifying as women. Naturally, the team had no problem displaying pro-trans scoreboard messages.

Julie Potter, a lesbian hip-hop performer, says the New York Liberty tried to alter her message, which she paid to display at Barclays Center during the Liberty’s game against the Indiana Fever.

Potter says she has a receipt showing she paid $100 for the scoreboard message to be shown during the August 22 game, OutKick reports.

The singer adds that she asked the team to display the following message: “Thank you Jennifer Sey! XX-XY Athletics will Save the Day!”

The payment and message were accepted, Potter said, but the day before the game, she was contacted by the team and told that they would not display the message she had requested. Instead, the sales dept. told her the message they would agree to display would read, “Thank you Jennifer Sey, thank you for all you do for XX-XY Athletics.”

Potter said she told them that if they did not display the message she had paid for, she wanted to cancel it and get a refund.

Despite balking at Potter’s message, the Liberty had no problem displaying pro-transgender messages during the game.

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Maryland Court Strikes Down Nation’s First State Tax On Digital Advertising

A state tax court in Maryland invalidated the nation’s first state tax on digital advertising and directed state officials to refund tax payments already collected from major tech companies.

The legal dispute had been closely watched by other states that are considering taxing online advertisements.

The Annapolis-based Maryland Tax Court ruled on Aug. 14 that the digital advertising gross revenues tax was unconstitutional after it was challenged in three separate lawsuits by Google, Apple, and Peacock TV. Refunds are expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The state imposes the levies based on the businesses’ global revenue. Lawmakers previously said the tax could raise $250 million per year. The money raised from the tax was earmarked for a state education program.

The 2021 tax statute specifically targets the revenue large companies earn from digital advertisements shown in Maryland. Companies that take in more than $100 million in annual global gross revenue were taxed at 2.5 percent.

A sliding scale applies to companies with larger revenues, maxing out at 10 percent for those earning more than $15 billion in global gross annual revenues.

The law’s backers argued that Maryland needed to overhaul its tax system to deal with major changes in how businesses advertise. Lawyers representing the affected companies said their clients were targeted unfairly.

The state court said the tax runs afoul of the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, the First Amendment, and the due process and commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The court held that regulating interstate commerce was the business of Congress – not the Maryland General Assembly – and that it was inappropriate that the tax law was premised on global revenue rather than revenue that comes from in-state advertising.

The Internet Tax Freedom Act forbids taxation of electronic commerce if similar services are not taxed. The court held that there is no meaningful distinction between digital advertising and print or billboard ads, meaning the federal bar applies.

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Vaccine Amnesia: 75 Forgotten News Segments That Could Never Air Today

Before the press was captured, vaccine injuries were openly covered on national TV. Now the dam of censorship is breaking, and we can finally confront the tragic history that keeps repeating.

A key theme I’ve tried to highlight in this publication is that the same medical catastrophes keep repeating (because those responsible are never held accountable), so by understanding what happened in the past, you can see and understand what is happening now and what will likely happen in the future.

For example, because vaccines are “risky but necessary,” the medical profession and government, again and again, concluded that they needed to tell the public all vaccines were “safe and effective” as the potential injuries a mass vaccination campaign would cause were outweighed by “necessary” benefit the vaccines could offer. As such, examples can be found again and again of severe injuries being systematically covered up for the “greater good” (e.g., the earliest documented example I know of this happened in 1874 with the smallpox vaccine) and health authorities concocting the same set of excuses we’ve seen since smallpox as to why those vaccines failed to prevent the diseases they were supposed to.

Since the risks of most vaccines (detailed here) far outweigh their benefits, a mass-vaccination paradigm can only be sustained by censoring the evidence of harm — and then citing that manufactured silence as proof of safety. Over the decades, more and more has been done to conceal those harms. For almost a century, severe neurological injuries after vaccination were routinely reported in the medical literature. Now vaccine injuries are censored, and it is nearly impossible to publish anything critical of vaccines in a “reputable” journal.

Likewise, despite the “science” that says vaccines are safe, it is nearly impossible to obtain the raw datasets that could actually answer the question — as Steve Kirsch showed the public throughout COVID-19 with his relentless, endlessly stonewalled quest to get that data. Likewise, VAERS, a public injury-reporting database only exists because the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act required a way for patients to bypass doctors refusing to report their injuries, and as such, ever since a law mandated its creation, everything possible has been done to undermine and discredit VAERS (except when the industry uses it as “proof” to prove vaccines are safe).

This is the inescapable problem at the heart of mass vaccination. When you take a product that is not completely safe and give it to an entire population, tens of millions of healthy people, most of whom were never at meaningful risk from the disease, even a small rate of serious harm guarantees that enormous numbers are injured or killed. Since there is no way around that arithmetic the authorities have chosen concealment every time, suppressing the data, reclassifying the injuries, and dismissing each casualty as a coincidence, because the alternative is admitting the paradigm itself produces the ever-increasing wave of chronic illness sweeping our society.

For a long time, the injuries were too numerous to fully hide, so the public kept reawakening to them and the mainstream media kept covering them. The industry’s solution came after it won liability protection in the 1986 vaccine law: spend whatever it took to censor the coverage and bury the injuries. But removing that check, the public finding out and objecting, removed the only real constraint on toxic vaccines reaching the market, and progressively more dangerous ones followed, until the COVID-19 catastrophe injured so many people that even a robust censorship apparatus couldn’t contain it. Numerous polls I’ve summarized in detail here demonstrate the scale of the vaccine injuries: depending on the survey, 7% to 13% of recipients reported a serious side effect, 24% to 28% say they know someone they believe died from the shot, and 46% to 55% believe the COVID vaccines have killed a significant number of people. Propaganda has its limits, and once numbers like those take hold, a new awareness of vaccine injury surfaces across the media ecosystem, occasionally on conservative networks, but mostly in the independent press.

Because we keep forgetting the past, the cycle repeats. My goal here is to show that what we are seeing now is nothing new, that it has happened countless times before, on a smaller scale that was easier to sweep under the rug, by collecting dozens of clips that were once routinely aired on television and are almost inconceivable today, given how brutal the censorship has become.

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France bans unsolicited telemarketing calls, threatening large fines for those who don’t comply

France has implemented a law banning unsolicited telemarketing calls, shifting the country from an “opt-out” registry system to an obligatory prior consent (“opt-in”) framework.

The law reportedly took effect Tuesday after it was adopted by the National Assembly and the Senate — France’s two chambers of Parliament — on June 30, 2025, and formally promulgated by French President Emmanuel Macron.

France has replaced its former opt-out system, a national registry called “Bloctel,” which operated similarly to the U.S. National “Do Not Call” Registry, with a prior consent “opt-in” framework. The change was made after years of consumer complaints regarding non-compliant call centers that routinely ignored the opt-out list.

Under the new law, companies are prohibited from making unsolicited marketing calls to consumers who have not explicitly given prior consent to be contacted.

However, this restriction does not apply across the board: companies remain permitted to call existing customers with whom they have an active contractual relationship, provided the call relates directly to their existing contract or related services and the customer has not previously requested to opt out.

“Peace and quiet is a right,” stated Marie-Amandine Stévenin. President of leading consumer advocacy group, Que Choisir Ensemble. “This observation holds true both online and on the street, where we are inundated with calls to consume.”

Frédéric Billon, head of the trade association Fédération de la Vente Directe, claims that the law will strain local businesses accustomed to casually calling their customers. He added that this could put French companies at a disadvantage against foreign competitors operating outside the law’s reach.

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