TRUMP REGIME

Roll Call -   Last week, President-elect Donald Trump promised to elevate Brendan Carr from
 commissioner to chair of the Federal Communications Commission, calling
 Carr a “warrior for free speech.” Nothing could be further from the 
truth.

In a cringeworthy campaign to appeal to Trump, Carr has seized on Trump’s threats to penalize broadcasters for fact-checking him or giving airtime to his political opponents. Following through on these threats would almost certainly violate the First Amendment. Yet even the threat alone is chilling — a government official vowing to punish the president’s opponents for exercising their fundamental rights...

During a September hearing in the House of Representatives, Carr declined to speak out against Trump’s suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because two of its journalists fact-checked him during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In October, Carr attacked NBC after Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” wrongly calling it “a clear and blatant effort to evade the equal time rule” — all while NBC did indeed give Trump equal time that same weekend. Carr suggested on a subsequent Fox News appearance that the FCC should “keep every remedy on the table,” including revocation of NBC’s broadcast licenses. 

That same month, he blasted CBS for airing an edited interview with Harris during “60 Minutes,” suggesting that CBS stations may be in violation of the FCC’s seldom-invoked news-distortion policy. Carr says he will look into the “news distortion” angle as part of the FCC’s review of the Skydance-Paramount merger (Paramount is CBS’s parent company).

Carr hasn’t just flirted with violating the First Amendment rights of companies the FCC has clear authority to regulate — he plans to extend his crusade to entities the agency has no mandate to oversee.

In a chapter he wrote for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian roadmap for a conservative administration, Carr argued for a dramatic expansion of the FCC’s authority so it can regulate the speech of social-media platforms. In addition to banning TikTok, Carr wants to strip social-media companies of their rights to moderate content, which would force them to host toxic racism, misogyny and other forms of hatred that are unpopular with advertisers and the public alike. So much for small-government conservatism.

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Guardian  - When Donald Trump nominated David Weldon, a 71-year-old doctor from Florida who has long questioned the safety of vaccines, to lead the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), anti-vaccine activists celebrated.The move comes as the US faces increased threats from bird flu and mpox as well as resurgences of whooping cough, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases.“He is one of us!!” the co-director of the anti-vax group Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on Facebook. “Since before our movement had momentum. Dream Come True.”