I’m honestly not sure which part of North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s freshly filed defamation lawsuit to focus on here.

The obvious lede is that Robinson — currently the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor — sued CNN for defamation yesterday. The suit targets the network for publishing meticulously documented allegations that Robinson made a series of bizarre and frequently bigoted comments on a porn forum called Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012, including referring to himself as “a black NAZI” (capitalization in original).

Robinson’s lawsuit claims someone likely impersonated him using information from data breaches, which is certainly possible — but based on the evidence would require a remarkably complex level of deception targeting a man who wouldn’t enter politics until many years later in 2018. The statements arguably aren’t even much worse than things Robinson has unquestionably said. It seems just as plausible that Robinson is the latest public figure to weaponize the law against his critics in bad faith, following the pro-censorship lead of more powerful conservatives like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Speech law is serious! But the lawsuit also happens to include a very funny encapsulation of the current feedback loop between politics and viral entertainment. Because, in addition to naming CNN, Robinson is suing a North Carolina punk singer and former adult video store clerk named Louis Love Money over an obscure YouTube music video that accuses Robinson of not paying $25 for a bootleg porn tape more than 20 years ago.

Money (not his birth name, according to the lawsuit) is part of a band called Trailer Park Orchestra, which, in August 2024, released a song and associated music video called “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money.” Its core allegation — as outlined above — is not high on the political scandal barometer. But in a handy bit of publicity for Money, North Carolina publication The Assembly picked up and bolstered his claim that the avowedly conservative Christian gubernatorial candidate had been a regular at the store in the 1990s and 2000s. CNN cited The Assembly when detailing the Nude Africa claims, raising the report’s profile.

Robinson’s counter: he was just bringing over pizza.

In the 1990s, Mark Robinson was a young father, struggling to provide for his family. During this period, he worked at Papa John’s pizza, eventually being promoted to manager, where he sometimes managed the closing shift. Nearby was an adult video store where Defendant Money worked. Lt. Gov. Robinson, who has always been a gregarious, outgoing person, made friends with Defendant Money, who also worked the night shift. He would occasionally bring over free pizza and socialize. More often, however, Defendant Money would come over to the Papa John’s, looking for free or discounted pizza.

Contrary to the portrayal by Defendant Money, Lt. Gov. Robinson was not spending hours at the video store, five nights a week.

Robinson also implies there are sinister motives at work because the music video and CNN report came out while he was running for governor. (Maybe there’s mileage in pretending not to understand some pretty basic concepts of publicity.)

This may turn out to be the most straightforward Streisand effect of the 2024 election cycle. Robinson’s alleged porn store visits were far from the focus of CNN’s report. Trailer Park Orchestra’s music video was posted two months ago and had a mere 13,000 views on YouTube yesterday; it’s gained about 2,000 since the suit was filed. (“I had no idea this existed until reading his lawsuit,” one commenter notes.) While the CNN report damaged Robinson’s standing in the Republican party, we’re talking about a man who won his primary after minimizing the Holocaust on Facebook. The long-term reputational damage he’s facing is unclear, and ignoring Money’s claims in particular would be the simplest way to make them disappear.

Regardless of whether Robinson wins his suit, legal complaints have become a valuable political rallying point — they’re a great way to justify raising money and position yourself as a fighter while putting a grievance in the public record. Despite the fact that the most successful recent defamation claims have been against conservative media juggernauts like Alex Jones and Fox News, there’s an ongoing Republican attempt to dismantle the speech protections that have long let journalists (and average citizens) freely criticize public figures. Every new defamation suit is a shot at getting the Supreme Court to finally make that call. At least this one has a soundtrack.

A reliable leaker has shared details and an image of an unannounced car charger from Anker that would be the first from the company to feature a retractable USB-C cable. As the proud owner of an eight-year-old minivan lacking modern amenities like built-in USB ports, this would be a welcome alternative to a glove box stuffed full of unraveled charging cables.

The new Anker Nano car charger, which plugs into a vehicle’s auxiliary power outlet, will reportedly deliver up to 75W of power shared between a 30W USB-C port, and a 45W retractable cable with a USB-C connector on the end that’s almost 30 inches long, according to Reddit user joshuadwx.

Pricing is expected to be somewhere between $30 an $40, while availability could be either later this year, or some time in the spring of 2025. The retractable cable is a convenience feature that should help keep your vehicle a little neater and keep the charger in place — since it’s permanently tethered to a car-specific adapter, no one is going to be able to borrow it and use it elsewhere.

A charger with a retractable cable is only as useful as the retracting mechanism is reliable. If it breaks, you’re back to manually wrangling cables again. A quick Amazon search reveals many existing car charging solutions with similar functionality, but from relatively unknown and unproven brands. Anker has developed a reputation for good hardware and also seems to be increasingly invested in charging solutions with retractable cables.

At a recent media event in Japan, Anker revealed a 10,000mAh power bank with a 27-inch retractable USB-C cable, while last month the same Reddit leaker shared details of an unannounced 25,000mAh Anker power bank that also included a retractable charging cable. If the company is incorporating this new feature into several new products, hopefully that means Anker’s developed a retractable cable mechanism it’s confident will be reliable.

Google has asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt the imminent changes required from Judge James Donato’s recent ruling in Epic v. Google. The company already asked Judge Donato to do the same, but it’s not waiting till Friday to find out if the judge who vowed to “tear the barriers down” will let Google press pause on his ruling.

The ruling, which Google has appealed, would force Google to distribute third-party app stores within Google Play, no longer require Google Play Billing for apps distributed via Google Play, and more, with many of those changes ordered to begin on November 1st — just over two weeks from today.

But echoing many of Google’s arguments during the district court case, which Judge Donato rejected as insufficient, the company now argues that the order “threatens Google Play’s ability to provide a safe and trusted user experience.”

“This wouldn’t just hurt Google – this would have negative consequences for Android users, developers and device manufacturers who have built thriving businesses on Android, writes Google’s Lee-Anne Mulholland, VP of regulatory affairs, in a fact sheet distributed to journalists.

The fact sheet is bulleted into five different sections, and the section headers give you an idea of Google’s objections:

To get a sense of Google’s actual filing with the court, here’s how it begins:

At the request of a single competitor, Epic Games, the District Court ordered extensive redesigns to Play that will expose 100-million-plus U.S. users of Android devices to substantial new security risks and force fundamental changes to Google’s contractual and business relationships with hundreds of thousands of Google partners. The court gave Google just three weeks to make many of these sweeping changes—a Herculean task creating an unacceptable risk of safety and security failures within the Android ecosystem.

Epic, in a statement, is pushing back on Google’s arguments. “The jury’s verdict and the court’s injunction were clear: Google’s anticompetitive Play Store practices are illegal,” says Epic spokesperson Natalie Muñoz. “Google is merely fear mongering and falsely using security as a pretext to delay the changes mandated by the court. This is Google’s last ditch effort to protect their control over Android and continue extracting exorbitant fees. The court’s injunction must go into effect swiftly so developers and consumers can benefit from competition in the mobile ecosystem.” 

You can read the whole fact sheet, and Google’s whole emergency motion, below.

Update, October 17th: Added statement from Epic.