A new video surfacing from a Tesla demonstration in Miami this weekend shows the Optimus humanoid robot taking a nasty fall. But it’s not the fall itself that is raising eyebrows, it’s the specific hand movements the robot made on its way down, which strongly suggest it was mimicking a remote operator frantically removing a VR headset.

You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they’re doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust & safety, fact checking, content moderation, or mis- or disinformation research. The government is now punishing people for speech—specifically, punishing them for the false belief that their work constitutes censorship.

The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants – and family members who would be traveling with them – to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” under a specific article of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the cable said.

It’s like JD Vance’s “the rules were you weren’t going to fact check me” taken to a new level.

This policy censors non-censors for not doing the thing that the White House and MAGA folks are actively doing every day. MAGA knows content moderation is necessary—they’re super eager to have it applied when it’s speech they don’t like. As we’ve recently discussed, they’ve suddenly been demanding social media companies stop foreign influence campaigns and remove anything mean about Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the White House itself is engaged in a twisted version of what it claims is fact checking and demanding that media orgs hire MAGA-friendly censors.

The hypocrisy is the point. But it’s also blatantly unconstitutional. As Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to this news:

People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren’t engaged in ‘censorship’— they’re engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional.

Incoherent and unconstitutional is being too kind.

The real work that trust & safety professionals do makes this policy even more perverse. As trust & safety expert (and occasional Ctrl-Alt-Speech guest host) Alice Hunsberger told (the recently defunded) NPR:

“Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it,” she said. “Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it’s so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer.”

So the administration is now barring entry to people whose work includes stopping child sexual abuse material and protecting Americans from foreign bad actors—all while claiming to oppose censorship and demanding platforms remove content about Charlie Kirk. The only way this makes sense is if you understand what the actual principle at work is: we get to control all speech, and anyone who might interfere with that control must be punished.

There are no fundamental values at work here beyond “we have power, and we’re going to abuse it to silence anyone who stands in our way.”

The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.

The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses. 

“A lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines. If we don’t challenge this conduct in court, it will become a playbook for future censorship,” Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, told 404 Media. The lawsuit also targets Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Tom Homan, the White House’s Border Czar. 

Ultimately, the lawsuit aims to obtain a “judicial declaration” that the actions of Bondi and others violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights. “But more broadly, the purpose is to hold government officials accountable for using their authority to silence lawful expression and intimidate creators of technology they disfavor,” Aaron said. “This case is about ensuring that public officials cannot circumvent the Constitution by coercing private companies or threatening individuals simply because they disagree with the message or the tool being created.”

ICEBlock lets people anonymously report sightings of ICE officials. Nearby users then receive a push alert about ICE activity in their local area, and sightings are automatically removed after four hours. Aaron compares the app to those that map the locations of speed cameras. Recording the police is also protected speech under the First Amendment.

The app garnered media coverage as authorities performed indiscriminate immigration raids in the parking lots of places like Home Depot. It went on to become the number one app in the Apple App Store for a time before its removal in October.

“Attorney General Bondi’s self-congratulatory claim that she succeeded in pushing Apple to remove ICEBlock is an admission that she violated our client’s constitutional rights. In America, government officials cannot suppress free speech by pressuring private companies to do it for them,” lead counsel Noam Biale said in a statement shared with 404 Media before the filing of the lawsuit.

Deirdre von Dornum, also lead counsel, said in a statement “If we allow community sharing of information to be silenced, our democracy will fail. The United States will be no different than China or Russia. We cannot stand by and allow that to happen. Every person has a right to share information under the First Amendment.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

The lawsuit provides some more alleged details about how the app was approved by Apple for inclusion on its App Store in the first place. It says Aaron had several video calls with Apple about the app, with multiple conversations including members of Apple’s legal department. Apple eventually approved the app.

ICEBlock grew to prominence after CNN covered the app in June. In response, DHS head Noem said “we’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute [CNN] for that.” 

Then in September a shooter, alleged to be Joshua Jahn, fired at an ICE facility, killing two detainees and wounding another. Authorities claimed Jahn searched his phone for various tracking apps, including ICEBlock, before his attack.

The Department of Justice then directly pressured Apple to remove ICEBlock from its App Store. “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi said at the time. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”

That series of events started a broader crackdown on ICE-spotting and other related apps. Apple and Google also removed Red Dot, which essentially tried to do the same thing as ICEBlock. As part of that removal, Google described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Google told 404 Media at the time that it didn’t receive any demands from the government to remove the app, and instead did so itself. Apple also removed Eyes Up, an app that had a maps style interface that catalogued videos of ICE abuses and didn’t report any officials’ real-time location (Google kept the Android version of the app online).

While it removed some ICE-spotting apps, Google has hosted a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of ICE. That app was removed recently.

After the removal of ICEBlock earlier this year, Aaron told 404 Media “We are determined to fight this with everything we have. Our mission has always been to protect our neighbors from the terror this administration continues to reign down on the people of this nation. We will not be deterred. We will not stop. #resist.”

Update: this piece has been updated to include a response from the Department of Justice.

In a more serious presidential administration, the decision to spend $11 billion bailing out American farmers might inspire a moment of introspection.

Why is such a bailout necessary? It could be that President Donald Trump's tariffs are creating higher prices for farmers and making American agricultural products less competitive on the global market—as the Farm Bureau, an industry group, has been saying for months.

There was no such introspection on Monday afternoon, as Trump announced an $11 billion bailout—or a "bridge payment," as the White House termed it—for farmers facing economic hardship. Trump said he was "delighted" to spend what he called "a small portion" of the tax dollars collected via tariffs to fund the bailout.

"We're taking in so much money from the tariffs now," Trump said. "Without it, we wouldn't be able to help you."

Again, that ought to inspire some second-guessing. If the government wasn't "taking in" all that revenue from the pockets of American consumers—including farmers who have to buy equipment, fertilizer, and other things—maybe there would be no need for a bailout? Maybe the help wouldn't be needed if the harm weren't occurring in the first place.

Alas, the president and some of the administration's top officials took a very different approach to Monday's announcement. There was much blame heaped on the Biden administration for overseeing a surge in inflation, and much praise for Trump's ability to get inflation down to lower levels. But if inflation has been fixed (or has it?), then why the need for a bailout?

Such contradictions don't worry the Trump administration. Take Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for example. She spent months cheering for Trump's tariffs and reassuring farmers that the president's trade policies would be good for them. More recently, she's been the architect of the administration's bailout plan.

On Monday, she sat two chairs down from Trump and delivered the most spectacular assessment of the administration's plan.

"Instead of farming for government checks, they can farm to feed their family, sell their products, and pass it on to the next generation," Rollins said, at an event where the administration was literally announcing $11 billion in government checks for farmers.

But, of course, a more serious presidential administration would have learned this lesson already. When Trump hiked tariffs during his first term in office, much of the pain was felt by American farmers, who faced higher prices for equipment and fertilizer while also losing access to some key export markets. In response, the Trump administration spent $28 billion on a bailout that—like pretty much all bailouts—mostly helped the biggest and most politically connected farmers.

Yet here we are, several years later, and the same president has engaged in the same stupid trade policies with the same predictable results. Farmers are once again being hurt by higher costs and the loss of key export markets. In response, the Trump administration is once again throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at the problem and acting like that's a solution.

The post Trump's $11 Billion Farm Bailout Is Further Proof That Tariffs Aren't Working appeared first on Reason.com.