While other media companies are abandoning discriminatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, Disney appears to be continuing practices that could result in severe penalties, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr says. Chairman Carr issued the warning in a Pod Force One interview with Host Mirada Devine, discussing how, during the Biden Administration, the FCC pumped “millions and millions” into promoting DEI ideology in an effort that distracted the FCC from its true mission. “That had real, practical consequences. So, Day One, we came in and we ended the FCC’s promotion of DEI,” Carr said, noting how the policies enacted under the previous administration were unjustifiably punitive, redundant and counterproductive. They even inhibited efforts to bring high-speed internet to the public, he explained. Companies, like Disney, that continue to cling to DEI ideology could face a range of penalties, including loss of their licenses, if they discriminate against employees based on race and gender, Chairman Carr said: “Disney, which owns ABC: there’s been some really concerning evidence that has come to light that Disney DEI practices, that they were effectively discriminating against people, based on race and gender. “We’re still looking at that, we’ll allow them to make their case, we have an open mind on it. But, we do have an investigation going on right now into Disney’s DEI practices.” “And it could get bad for Disney, depending on what the facts show,” Chairman Carr said. Currently, the evidence appears to suggest racial discrimination, Carr explained: “There is evidence that they were creating internal promotions, internal work groups – again, siloing and dividing people based on race and gender. “And, again, the evidence indicates, and there may be counter-evidence out there, that you had promotion opportunities, or you were judged, on how much you were promoting people based on skin color.” “That is something that is really invidious that I thought that, as a country, we had stopped doing 60, 70, 80 years ago,” Carr said. “And, I’m glad we’re getting back to treating everyone, regardless of skin color, regardless of any other protected characteristics, based on their merits. That’s how it should be.” “And, to be honest, it looks like they’re taking a pretty big hit at the box office; you see them pushing some of that stuff. It’s just not resonating with people,” Carr said. Meanwhile, family-friendly and pro-America content has proven to be extremely popular with the public, he said. “Again, it’s sort of a symptom of what I view the broader media ecosystem being out of place,” Carr said. “New York and Hollywood have never really been known for having the pulse of the cross-section of the country, but it got worse in the late twenty-teens and the early 2020’s, where we saw this significant explosion of DEI and woke ideology. And it was just fully embraced – hook, line and sinker – by New York and Hollywood.” Still, there appears to be a “course correction” taking place with other businesses regulated by the FCC and in the country, as a whole, Chairman Carr said.

Professor Lucas Engelhardt examines how mainstream economics has deliberately abandoned the history of economic thought, and why Austrian economists must keep teaching and re-teaching the great debates of the past.

It's not the story that Politico really wanted but unfortunately for them, it is the story they ended up with due to cold hard reality. The story in question by Erica Orden appeared on Sunday, "The Epstein files’ cottage industry." What is interesting is that none of the clients that the lawyers are representing is named Donald Trump despite the desperate Politico attempt in the summer of 2025 to link the President to Jeffrey Epstein culminating in SIX Epstein-Trump stories in a 24 hour period in July of that year. As you read the story about the new "cottage industry" for lawyers, the main takeaway is the absence of Trump as a client despite the previous red hot Politico hopium last year that this would not be the case. Scores of people named in the files — including high-profile figures as well as people whose names may have simply been mentioned in an email — have turned to criminal defense lawyers to help them navigate public scrutiny or professional blowback from their relationship with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Major organizations and academic institutions have also enlisted some of the biggest white-shoe law firms to conduct internal investigations into their ties to Epstein and Maxwell.  Imagine if all those Politico writers last year forced to write Trump-Epstein tales could have traveled in a time machine to the current period and had seen such a story sans any suggestion that Trump had been implicated. Would they experience a sense of anger or frustration that all their work dig dig digging for that elusive Trump-Epstein connection had been for naught? Among the prominent clients of lawyers needing legal defense help  concerning the Epstein files was also someone who is easily much better known that most of  the others: Bill Gates. And the difference between Bill Gates and Donald Trump upon whom Politico was so focused on last year is that Gates actually does have a very strong connection to Jeffrey Epstein even beyond the fact it was a major cause for his divorce. Politico obviously isn't unaware of such a connection since last December it published this story, "Bill Gates appears in newly released photos from Epstein estate." Gates' absence from the current Politico story is even more mysterious since a few days ago, his Gates foundation popped up in the news with nefarious revelations about the strong ties that Epstein had to it as illustrated by this Vanity Fair article last Thursday, "Jeffrey Epstein's Lasting Grip on the Gates Foundation." Buried among the massive tranche of documents released by the DOJ in January and the roughly 4,000 pages of grants on the Gates Foundation website is yet another complicated Epstein story: ghost-written emails, Middle Eastern intelligence, a personal loan to the former head of a prestigious think tank who allegedly helped afford visas to young Eastern European women. Between 2013 and 2019, the Gates Foundation provided $8 million in grants to the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank that works closely with the United Nations and is focused on multilateral approaches to global peace and security. According to emails released by the DOJ, Epstein appeared to help facilitate a large portion of those funds. The most prominent of Epstein's clients and now his entire foundation has come under scrutiny due to the release of the Epstein files and yet Erica Orden somehow avoids mentioning him despite the fact this is something that would supercharge the Epstein files "cottage industry?" Last summer we saw the frenzy that Politico went into over someone it obviously detests so is the opposite effect now happening in which Politico provides cover to one it favors despite the revelations in the Epstein Files?

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a promising sign that the weeks-long conflict in the Middle East could soon be over, President Donald Trump postponed strikes against Iran until all of its leaders assembled in one place again for a meeting.

It's not every day that I wish more U.S. tech platforms could be like 4chan. But the message board certainly has the right idea when it comes to the U.K. speech police.

Ofcom, the U.K.'s communications regulator, has fined 4chan £520,000 for failing to implement age verification procedures and other measures required by the U.K.'s Online Safety Act. The penalty includes "£450,000 for not having age checks in place to prevent children seeing porn on its site," per Ofcom.

Ofcom also cited 4chan for failing to provide Ofcom with an "illegal content risk assessment" and for not including a section in its terms of service "specifying how individuals are to be protected from illegal content."

4chan responded to Ofcom with an AI-generated picture of a giant hamster eating a peanut.

This was attached to a truly excellent email response to Ofcom from 4chan lawyer Preston Byrne (who also explains the hamster joke backstory here). "Thanks. As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War," the email starts. "We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further, and have not been in the mood for 250 years."

After the hamster image—Nigel J. Whiskerford "dressed up as Godzilla and holding an equally giant peanut"—the email goes on to state that 4chan "reserves all rights and waives none," including "the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot."

This is exactly the attitude U.S. companies should be taking with foreign authorities intent on forcing their online speech regulations on the rest of us.

American companies like 4chan—which has no headquarters or assets in the U.K.—are not required to follow U.K. internet laws.

4chan's "only content regulator is the First Amendment," wrote Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. "The Brits don't get to colonize American companies operating out of America."

Those U.S. free speech protections include "the right to speak anonymously, as every 4chan user does, and the right to refuse foreign age verification mandates," as Byrne posted on X. The U.K.'s "2023 law doesn't override 250 years of American independence."

Ofcom director of enforcement Suzanne Cater told the BBC: "The UK is setting new standards for online safety" and will "take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short." She said that "companies—wherever they're based—are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking, and gambling."

The U.K. has the legal right to try to shield children from whatever it likes, however it likes, within its own borders. If it thinks 4chan is dangerous, it can block U.K. residents from accessing 4chan by requiring internet service providers to block access and so on.

But it cannot punish "an American publisher with no assets in the country" for failing to comply with U.K. regulations, as Perrino points out. It cannot decide that its way of barring children from certain online speech must be the way of the whole world.

Alas, 4chan is far from alone in facing such attempts at global speech policing from Ofcom. "U.K. regulators have quietly been pressuring U.S. companies to comply with their orders, sparking outrage among a small but tenacious coalition of American legislators and free speech lawyers," Reason's Meagan O'Rourke reported in January.

O'Rourke noted how Byrne—who also represents Gab.com, Kiwi Farms, and Personal Autonomy LLC—was drafting model legislation to "allow U.S. companies and individuals to sue foreign governments that attempt to censor Americans."

Lately, Byrne has been helping to draft a "UK Free Speech Act 2026" as a model bill that a member of Parliament could pick up.

We are giving it to the world, anyone can pick it up.

I will happily speak with any MP in any party who is interested in expanding free speech in the UK. The bill is a menu of options. Any one of them would move the needle closer to the US 1A position.https://t.co/lAi5k0TAxY

— Preston Byrne (@prestonjbyrne) March 22, 2026

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In the News 

A California police officer has been criminally charged for allegedly taking bribes of money and sex from a sex business. Officer Benjamin Yarbrough of the Hayward Police Department faces one count of accepting a bribe, a felony. The Alameda County District Attorney's Office handled the investigation after the Hayward Police Department passed it off owing to the police chief's "familial relationship" with Yarbrough.

The matter is largely being framed as an issue of police corruption. But it also showcases the way that the criminalization of prostitution can make it easier for cops to exploit and abuse sex workers. If a police officer can throw you in jail if you won't sleep with him, is that really a free exchange of sex for protection?

The Mercury News reports:

On April 2, 2025, Yarbrough received a sexual service and took $1,000 as a bribe in response to extorting Yangiong Xiong "with the implied threat of arrest, or as payment to influence his present or prospective official duties as a police officer in ways such as providing protection, investigating competitors or providing intelligence about law enforcement activity," according to a declaration of probable cause.

The district attorney's office opened an investigation after San Jose police arrested Xiong in a separate case and discovered Yarbrough allegedly had frequent contact with her.

The declaration stated that Yarbrough used his work and personal cellphones "to arrange personal sexual appointments, receive free sexual services and further receive $1,000 after identifying himself as a friendly police officer who wanted to keep the operation safe."

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On Substack 

'Links between social media use and mental wellness in youth are an artifact of other factors.' Chris Ferguson, lead author of a new paper published in Current Psychology, explains the results in a new post to his substack, Grimoire Manor:

In a recent peer-reviewed paper I confirm what many people have been saying: that any weak correlations between time spent on social media and youth mental health are due to "third" variables. In other words, youth who are stressed by their real lives may turn to social media a bit more a compensatory mechanism rather than social media causing those mental health problems.

I analyzed a sample of thousands of youth in the UK in the BrainWaves dataset (and a heartfelt thank you to the BrainWaves folks for giving me access). This included data on hours per day spent on social media as well as several outcomes related to mental health (depression and anxiety, mental wellbeing, quality of life, self-esteem, social phobia1 as well as friendships and other activities).

More here.

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More Sex & Tech 

• What's in Trump's new "National AI Legislative Framework"? Reason's Jack Nicastro takes a look.

• Data on Australia's ban on under-16-year-olds using social media show the law "has barely moved the needle," notes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "The usage drop was only marginally larger than the normal seasonal dip that happens every year. In other words, the 'world-first' ban achieved roughly the same effect as summer ending." Masnick suggests this is worse than just being useless, since "the ban selected for vulnerability and filtered against resourcefulness."

• J.D. Tuccille reports on last week's U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Section 230.

• Halter's AI-powered collars for cows "create a virtual fence for cattle and enable farmers to monitor the animals' locations and health indicators through an app," reports Bloomberg. "Its collars, which are solar-powered, connect to farmers' phones to allow them to manage pastures remotely—for example, a rancher can herd their cows using vibrations and audio cues from the collars."

• According to Spotify's self-reported data, 2025 saw "more than 13,800 artists who generated at least $100,000" from the site.

• Meet the Alabama gubernatorial candidate who wants to "legalize sex stores," "make Montgomery a strip club city," and "bring prayer back in schools."

The post 4chan Sends Hilarious, Hamster-Filled Reminder That U.S. Companies Need Not Follow British Speech Regulations appeared first on Reason.com.

Like its larger and more famous namesake, Central Park in Mishawaka, Indiana, has a greenspace, walking path, nearby river, cold and snowy winters, and a statue dedicated to the renowned explorer Cristoforo Colombo.

The Maria SS. DiLoreto Italian Mutual Benefit Society donated the statue to the City of Mishawaka in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Colombo’s arrival in The Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Central Park in New York City has a Columbus statue commemorating the 400^th anniversary of his arrival in 1892.

More commonly known as Christopher Columbus, the statue and its accompanying information identify him as Cristoforo Colombo, which is the modern Italian version of his name. Columbus believed he had sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean and had arrived in Asia. It is believed he landed on present-day San Salvador Island in The Bahamas. The island was known to the Indigenous people as Guanahani. Columbus called the Indigenous people “Indians.” When he died in 1506, he still believed he had found a western route to Asia.

Central Park features fishing, pickleball courts, a playground and splash pad, and picnic tables.