Supreme Court Agrees to Hear TikTok Case—Setting Up Final Showdown

The Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it will hear arguments regarding a law that could ban TikTok.

The high court, granting certiorari in the case TikTok v. Garland Wednesday, will soon decide on the constitutionality of the bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or PAFACA, which President Joe Biden signed into law in April.

PAFACA, intended “to protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications,” would require the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, to sell the application to an American-owned company by January 19 or else be effectively banned in the U.S.

ByteDance alleges that the law is a violation of the First Amendment, denying its users a popular forum for expressive activity. Thirty-three percent of American adults use the app, per a January report from the Pew Research Center.

Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have come out against the law, on the grounds that “it would violate the First Amendment rights of Americans … who rely on TikTok for information, communication, advocacy, and entertainment” and “would grant the President broad new powers to ban other social media platforms based on their country of origin.”

A federal appeals court upheld the ban earlier this month. Now, SCOTUS says it will hear arguments in the case on January 10: nine days before the app is set to be sold or banned per PAFACA, and 10 days before President Trump—who has has vaguely promised to “save TikTok” while his incoming administration is “deeply divided” on the ban—takes office. The Supreme Court did not block the law upon agreeing to hear the case, suggesting it could issue a ruling before the January 19 deadline, which could possibly help Trump take credit if the law is in fact overturned.

Either way, the decision is guaranteed to have significant implications for social media regulation and how freedom of expression is balanced with national security concerns.

Disney, which owns ABC News, agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump to avoid a messy lawsuit that the company believed would have potentially damaged the Disney brand, ABC News, and potentially undermined First Amendment rights, The New York Times reported Wednesday. 

Earlier this year, Trump launched a defamation lawsuit against ABC News over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict, which technically found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. 

It’s worth noting that even the presiding judge in the case thought the distinction between the two terms was semantic and wrote that the decision did not mean Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Looking down the barrel of a major lawsuit, Disney decided to settle, and did so for three main reasons, according to the Times.

The first is that Disney had already engaged in culture-war lawsuits against Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over Disney World, which resulted in criticism from Republican lawmakers and activists and boycotts from Trump supporters—undermining the family-friendly ubiquity of the $205 billion Disney brand name.  

Disney was also concerned that as president, Trump would go after ABC News’s license. In September, Trump said that the network ought to lose its license after he was brutally fact-checked during a presidential debate. The Federal Communications Commission chair rejected this request, but Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, doesn’t have quite the same hang-ups.

There was also some concern at Disney that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which has a tendency to side with Trump, a move that could place one important precedent in jeopardy: 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan. 

That ruling determined that when a public figure hopes to prove a member of the press committed libel against them, it’s not enough to show that the press made a false statement. They must also prove that the defendant did so with knowledge of or reckless disregard for the statement’s falsity. 

Had Trump’s defamation case been tossed to the highest court in the land, it could have seen this essential protection for journalists undone. On the other hand, the settlement showed the president-elect exactly how he can silence the press during his second administration.

After CNN reported Wednesday that the House Ethics Committee has secretly voted to release its report on its multiyear investigation into former Representative Matt Gaetz after all, the former Florida representative immediately lost it.

“House Ethics will reportedly post a report online that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body,” Gaetz fulminated in a lengthy post on X emphasizing that he has not faced criminal charges for his conduct.

“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated—even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

According to CNN, the Ethics Committee secretly voted earlier this month to release the report after the House’s final votes this year—though “it is unclear if the committee will once again change course now that it has voted.”

According to the committee, the report contains its findings regarding allegations that Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.”

It previously appeared that Gaetz would successfully dodge the likely embarrassing revelation. In November, two days before the Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing the report, the former Florida lawmaker resigned from the House of Representatives, following the announcement of his since-thwarted nomination to be President-elect Trump’s attorney general.

Then, in a party-line vote last month, Republicans blocked the report’s release. The reversal reported Wednesday means some Republicans on the panel defected from party lines, siding with the Democrats in voting to let the report see the light of day.

After meeting with Department of Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville suddenly believes that babies are the recipients of too many vaccinations.

“Well, what I was excited to hear him about is get away from guessing and do facts, do science. Get behind the science and stay with it. Don’t be guessing, and that’s what a lot of these vaccines have done,” Tuberville told reporters, seemingly missing the part where Kennedy is overtly questioning hundreds of thoroughly researched and well-vetted vaccine studies.

“If you look at the number of vaccines these young babies get over a short period of time, it’s dozens and dozens of ’em, and he’s totally against that,” Tuberville said.

Those “dozens” of early-age shots include vaccines for devastating illnesses that the United States, through immunization and its end goal of herd immunity, has largely nixed out of everyday life, such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, rubella, and chicken pox.

Kennedy is currently courting lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of what will likely be a difficult Senate confirmation process, given his raucous lifestyle that included dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park; unscientific beliefs, such as theories that AIDS is not caused by HIV; a vaccine misinformation campaign sparked by his nonprofit that sent Samoa’s vaccination rate plummeting amid a measles outbreak; and claims that he allegedly groped his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s.

He’ll also have to convince lawmakers that his agenda—which opposes vaccine mandates for school-age children and includes appointing someone who has filed a petition with the FDA to end the approval and “pause distribution” of 13 vaccines—isn’t at odds with the future of America’s health.

Last week, Donald Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

The researcher that sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and the jab, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

The virulent conspiracy theorist reportedly only has 18 lawmakers clearly favoring his nomination, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. That’s the same as the number of lawmakers who oppose him, leaving 64 lawmakers still undecided on Kennedy’s future in Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.

Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that these viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Tucker Carlson has officially started defending Syrian ex-President Bashar Al Assad because of course he has.

During an interview with economist Jeffrey Sachs on Tuesday, Carlson said he didn’t understand why he was supposed to hate Assad, the Syrian dictator who fled to Russia earlier this month after opposition forces overtook Damascus.

“I’m speaking for myself. I don’t have strong feelings about Assad one way or the other,” Carlson said. “Apparently he’s protected the Christians, so I’m grateful for that as a Christian. But, I don’t—why am I required to hate Assad?”

“Tulsi Gabbard went and met with Assad. She’s been attacked ever since. Has anyone ever explained why Americans should hate Assad?” Carlson asked.

“Because every regime change operation we ever do, we have to make sure that the opponent is the worst villain since Hitler or Hitler reincarnate,” Sachs replied, building on his argument that the United States had played a major role in the Syrian regime’s demise earlier this month.

Russian state media outlet RT, which paints the Syrian regime as merely the target of U.S. imperialist forces and not its own engine of mass imprisonment and murder, shared a video of the interview on X.

Carlson, supposedly a journalist, might know that Assad oversaw a brutal 14-year civil war reportedly, sparked in response to peaceful civilian protests, that killed more than 500,000 people, including upward of 164,000 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. If the death toll isn’t enough to turn Carlson’s stomach, perhaps he could read up on the series of the regime’s many torture prisons, used to stamp out rebellion and dissent.

Carlson’s blissful “ignorance” of these facts can be explained by his deferential treatment of the Russian state, which has backed the Assad regime’s military activities for years. Carlson is a known fanboy of the Russian state and its autocratic leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, earning him some fans in Moscow.

Russian state media recently floated the theory that Carlson might act as a back channel between Donald Trump and Putin, after he performed an interview so blatantly sycophantic and weak that even Putin mocked him for it afterward.

As Carlson mentioned, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to lead national intelligence, has recently come under renewed fire for defending Assad.

Moscow is planning to wrap Donald Trump around its finger, with state propagandists spilling the details even before the president-elect’s second administration begins.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT,  believes that personal meetings between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will bring about positive outcomes for the foreign nation, so long as they’re able to meet face-to-face, according to The Daily Beast.

During an interview on the program The Right to Know, Simonyan—a Kremlin insider—claimed that a second Trump presidency would see multiple sanctions on Russia lifted, as well as RT’s return to U.S. cable sets.

Simonyan also advocated for Russia to follow in the footsteps of China, supporting a totalitarian level of government censorship that would allow the country to control digital platforms of information, including Google and YouTube.

The propagandist also shrugged off Trump’s promises to quickly end the war in Ukraine, while likening the intelligence of U.S. politicians to that of Soviet children. During a spontaneous press conference on Monday, Trump said that he believed the Ukraine-Russia conflict could be more difficult to solve than the Israel-Palestine war in the Middle East and suggested that he might hobble Ukraine’s weapons capabilities by reversing the country’s long-range strike authorization that allows Ukraine to use the Army Tactical Missile System against Russian positions.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he would be open to temporarily ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia if it meant entering the country into NATO, the strategic Western military and trade alliance. That is, however, unlikely to get very far with Russian negotiators. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s Cabinet picks are “thrilling” Russian mouthpieces, according to the Beast, which reported that Simonyan views some of Trump’s most unqualified choices—such as DOGE co-chair nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard—as familiar faces on the Russian network.

“I would endorse most of what [Vivek] Ramaswamy says,” Simonyan said. “These people who are being announced as potential members of his team certainly bring us lots of joy.

“Most of these people are constant guests of RT’s broadcasts,” she continued. “Until RT was shut down, they were our constant guests. For example, Tulsi Gabbard, who keeps being hounded about this right now, ‘Ah, you love RT, you constantly shared their clips, you constantly went there.’ Well, she did come to us all the time, it’s true. It’s not something you can conceal—and she is not the only one.”

Thirty-three days out from Trump’s inauguration, the president-elect’s comments show he intends to make good on his vows for revenge against his political opponents. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump issued yet another warning to former Representative Liz Cheney for her role in the congressional probe into the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.

Soon after 3 a.m. Wednesday, Trump set his sights on the former Republican representative, writing, “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’ Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.”

On Tuesday, Republican Representative Barry Loudermilk, who chairs the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, released a 128-page “interim report” by House Republicans on the January 6 committee. Specifically, the report called for Cheney to be criminally investigated, accusing the former January 6 committee vice chair of witness tampering and colluding with former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified before the committee on the events surrounding that day, including Trump’s behavior during the riot.

Loudermilk’s report shows House Republicans in lockstep with Trump’s plans for retribution against his political foes. Recently, Trump has said of everyone on the January 6 committee, but namely Cheney and its former chair, Bennie Thompson: “Yea, honestly, they should go to jail.”

Both Loudermilk’s report and Trump’s continued threats toward Cheney come as the president-elect assembles an administration that shares his ardor for vengeance against MAGA’s enemies, including his pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, who has promised to go after the president-elect’s opponents in the government and media.

Cheney responded to Loudermilk’s interim report Tuesday with a statement on BlueSky.

“The January 6th Committee’s hearings and report featured scores of republican witnesses, including many of the most senior officials from Trump’s own White House, campaign and Administration,” Cheney wrote. “All of this testimony was painstakingly set out in thousands of pages of transcripts, made public along with a highly detailed and meticulously sourced 800 page report. The Department of Justice conducted its own independent investigation and reached the same fundamental conclusions.”

Cheney’s statement said Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence,” instead spinning up “lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did.”

“No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.”

Luigi Mangione has been accused of terrorism in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.  

The indictment, released Tuesday evening, lists 10 charges and 11 counts, including one for first-degree murder “in furtherance of an act of terrorism” and “murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism.”

Mangione is also charged with possession of forged instruments, several counts of weapons possession, committing murder “with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping,” and simply with “murder in the second degree.”

In a press release, District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that Mangione faces “a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole.”

Separately, Bragg told a press conference that murder in the second degree carried a mandated sentence of life without parole with “no discretion for the judge at all.”

“One charges that the killing was done as an act of terrorism, and the second [pertains] to the fact that the killing was intentional,” Bragg said. “In its most basic terms, this was a killing that intended to evoke terror.”

Mangione’s lawyer, former Manhattan Chief Assistant District Attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment on the charges.

It’s unclear how exactly Mangione’s alleged crime was intended to “influence the policy of a unit of government,” which companies such as UnitedHealthcare are not, or “intimidate” the civilian population. Rather, Mangione’s alleged act appeared to have been planned to target a specific class of individuals who profit exorbitantly off the suffering of the civilian population. 

“The ruling class is treating killing one of their own, with the motive being related to the evils of our health care system, as a fundamentally different act than if you or I were to be murdered,” wrote journalist J.P. Hill on X Tuesday.

Mangione was reportedly discovered with a manifesto admitting to having worked alone and explaining why he allegedly committed the violent act.

“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done,” Mangione wrote. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing the fury of his Republican colleagues over yet another delayed and outsize spending bill.

Conservative lawmakers took to social media to publicly vent their dismay with the 1,500-page continuing resolution, torching the massive omnibus for failing to meet their party goals. At least one member of the upper chamber—Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—took that critique to the next level, outright questioning Johnson’s strength as a party leader.

“I had hoped to see @SpeakerJohnson grow a spine, but this bill full of pork shows he is a weak, weak man,” Paul posted on X early Wednesday. “The debt will continue to grow. Ultimately the dollar will fail. Democrats are clueless and Big Gov Republicans are complicit.

“A sad day for America,” Paul added.

The stopgap spending measure will fund the government through March 14, giving conservatives a chance to organize and reassess their spending priorities once their Republican trifecta takes effect.

The resolution was intended to be a “very skinny, very simple” stopgap solution, but what was ultimately presented to House lawmakers late Tuesday was a thick 84-day measure riddled with unrelated policies, including disaster relief needs related to the devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, an extension on the farm bill, health care policy, and, naturally, a raise for members of Congress.

Lawmakers have only until Friday to iron out their disagreements with the package and pass a version of the bill, or the government will enter a shutdown that will last through the holiday season.

Before the text of the continuing resolution was released on Tuesday, several other lawmakers hurled their own fire at the bipartisan effort, arguing that the three-month spending solution will only add to the federal deficit.

“Since we’ve been given the majority again, we’re adding $30 billion in literally totally unpaid-for additional deficit spending, just since November 5—in 45 days,” Texas Representative Chip Roy told C-SPAN. “I don’t see how that’s doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

“The conference itself owns this. The conference needs to decide whether we’re actually serious about spending.… We’re just fundamentally unserious about spending,” Roy continued, highlighting the fact that his party intends to shift cash away from Social Security, shrinking the time before the program goes bankrupt. “As long as you got a blank check, you can’t shrink government. If you can’t shrink government, you can’t live free.”

Elon Musk’s shady behavior has gotten him and SpaceX flagged for federal review three times, according to reporting from The New York Times. Musk has reportedly failed to cooperate with security clearance reporting rules, hiding info on things like meetings with foreign leaders.

According to disclosure stipulations, Musk is required to report details of his international meetings and travels as well as any drug use. He has apparently shirked that responsibility since at least 2021, according to four people with knowledge of SpaceX, putting his ability to handle highly classified information into question.

Musk, who currently has top secret clearance, gets access to classified information on the U.S. military. But in 2023, the Air Force rejected his request for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program. A Pentagon official told the Times that Musk was rejected due to a “lack of explanation” for some of his meetings with foreign leaders.

Without access to the clearance, Musk should theoretically be blocked from joining certain meetings between SpaceX and the Air Force on extremely sensitive classified information. But the Times reported Pentagon officials are concerned Musk is still joining many of those conversations anyway. 

No formal accusations have yet been leveled at Musk, and it is unclear how the reviews will impact the SpaceX CEO, if at all. Donald Trump could unilaterally grant Musk security clearance after his inauguration.

“To have someone who has major contracts with the government who would be in a position to pass along—whether deliberately or inadvertently—secrets is concerning,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen told The New York Times. The New Hampshire Democrat requested that the Air Force and the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General investigate Musk for having inappropriate talks with foreign leaders, like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The world’s richest man and incoming Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, co-chair has continuously blurred the lines between civilian and elected official—especially as he cements himself further into Trump’s inner circle after stumping for the president-elect all election season.