Islamist Terrorism Has Taken on a New, Insidious Form | How Civil Litigation Can Hold Hate Groups Accountable | Growing Dollar Doubts | American Panopticon, and more

4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere  (Ryan Broderick, Wired)
It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.

THE LONG VIEW

American Panopticon  (Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic)
The Trump administration is pooling data on Americans. Experts fear what comes next.

Dollar Doubts Dominate Gathering of Global Economic Leaders  (Colby Smith, New York Times)
Participants at the I.M.F and World Bank meetings this week reckoned with the prospect that the U.S. safe haven could lose its luster.

Trump Is Repeating All the Mistakes of Appeasement, Except It’s Worse This Time  (Charles Moore, The Telegraph)
The US president is openly on Putin’s side, refusing to condemn the invasion and instead shifting all the blame onto Ukraine.

Vance’s Junk History  (Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books)
J. D. Vance has cited Andrew Jackson to justify the idea that a president can disobey the federal judiciary’s rulings. The historical record says no such thing.

Trump Is a Revolutionary. Will He Succeed?  (Economist)
As with any revolution, MAGA has a method and a theory. If this revolution is unchecked it could lead towards authoritarianism.
Even on the most optimistic reading of the MAGA revolution, Mr. Trump has already done lasting harm to America’s institutions, alliances and moral standing. And if he is thwarted by investors, voters or the courts, he is liable to lash out against institutions with even greater ferocity. Using the newly politicized Department of Justice, he may persecute his opponents and stir up the fear and conflict that give him license to operate. Abroad, he could cause alliance-wrecking provocations in, say, Greenland or Panama. There is no going back to the way America was 100 days ago. Only 1,361 days left.

‘Energy Security’ Is Being Used to Justify More Fossil Fuels – but This Will Only Make Us Less Secure  (Freddie Daley and Peter Newell, The Conversation)
Common understandings of energy security have focused on making supplies reliable and affordable, with less attention paid to ensuring sources of energy are sustainable and less volatile over the medium- and long-term. This neglect compromises our collective security.
The IEA’s 31 member countries and 13 associates include most of the world’s most powerful states. Its influence means that this new definition of energy security will be used to inform government policies and investment decisions around the world. Given the cost of energy infrastructure, and the lengthy time it takes to build these projects, this definition is set to shape our future, economically and climatically.
But there is a very real risk that this definition will open the door to further investments into fossil fuel production under the guise of energy security.

DEMOCRACY WATCH

The Good Tsar  (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch)
Trump’s sycophants are chosen because of their weaknesses, not in spite of them.

Who Will Stop Donald Trump’s Drive for Unchecked Power?  (Economist)
Congress is inert, but a deft Supreme Court might contain him.

Trump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, Prompting ‘Exodus’  (Devlin Barrett, New York Times)
Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are fleeing the arm of the agency that defends constitutional rights, which appointees intend to reshape to enact President Trump’s agenda.

A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency, According to 35 Legal Scholars  (New York Times Opinion)
In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.
You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration’s revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.
Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.

On DOGE, Directives, and DOJ  (Anna Bower, Lawfare)
A new court filing reveals the most compelling evidence yet that the government has been spinning a fiction about DOGE in federal court.

Americans Don’t Do This  (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic)
On Mahmoud Khalil and the right to free expression

Justice Department Lawyers Work for Justice and the Constitution – Not the White House  (Cassandra Burke Robertson, The Conversation)
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
Since then, the DOJ has generally been run as an impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics.
Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump administration.

Trump’s Aggressive Actions Against Free Speech Speak a Lot Louder Than His Words Defending It  (Daniel Hall, The Conversation)
But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand?
The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump’s White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.
On March 4, 2025, Trump declared in a speech before a joint session of Congress that he “stopped all government censorship and brought free speech back to America.”
The record doesn’t support this claim.

The Nightmarish Problem with Trying to Make Trump Obey Court Orders  (Ian Millhiser, Vox)
How can you punish Trump officials for violating the law, when federal law enforcement is controlled by Trump?

2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects  (Alan Feuer, New York Times)
A federal judge in Louisiana said the deportation of the child to Honduras with her mother, even though her father had filed an emergency petition, appeared to be “illegal and unconstitutional.”

A Reporter’s Notes of the April 23 Perkins Coie Hearing  (Roger Parloff, Lawfare)
Judge Howell appeared likely to permanently enjoin implementation of President Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm.

The Last Bulwark  (Noah Feldman, New York Review of Books)
The fate of our democracy today depends on the judiciary’s commitments to liberty, constitutionalism, and legality.

MORE PICKS

Trump Considers Sending Migrants to Rwanda  (Charles Hymas, The Telegraph)
US has already sent some deportees to African nation that agreed to take in UK migrants under Tories.

How Drug Cartels Took Over Social Media (Antón Barba-Kay, The Atlantic)
Mexico’s gangs are influencers now.

The US Has Spent Over $500,000 on YouTube Ads to Discourage Irregular Migration  (Anna Lagos, Wired)
A WIRED investigation reveals that the US Department of Homeland Security has deployed at least 30 YouTube ads since April 1 to threaten irregular migrants with deportation and a ban on reentry.

Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System  (Umair Irfan, Wired)
This energy storage technology is harnessing the potential of solar and wind power—and its deployment is growing exponentially.

US Judge Orders Return of Second Migrant Deported to El Salvador  (Daniel Wiessner, Reuters)
A federal judge has ordered the administration of President Donald Trump to facilitate the return of a second man sent to a prison in El Salvador back to the United States, saying his deportation violated a court settlement.
Late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Baltimore said the settlement agreement that she approved in November on behalf of thousands of migrants required immigration authorities to process the asylum application by the 20-year-old Venezuelan man, identified only as Cristian, before deporting him.
The ruling could set up another showdown between the Trump administration and federal courts over immigration enforcement. The administration has also been ordered to facilitate the return of a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who it acknowledged was deported in error, but a judge has said that the government is doing little to comply.

The Counterproductive Legal Precedent That Strikes on Cartels Would Set  (J. Luis Rodriguez, Lawfare)
Mexico rejects the “unwilling or unable” doctrine of self-defense. The United States should, too.

Controlled Burns Reduce Wildfire Risk, but They Require Trained Staff and Funding − This Could Be a Rough Year  (Laura Dee, The Conversation)
As an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, I know that fires are part of the natural processes that forests need to stay healthy. But the combined effects of a warmer and drier climate, more people living in fire-prone areas and vegetation and debris built up over years of fire suppression are leading to more severe fires that spread faster. And that’s putting humans, ecosystems and economies at risk.

How Hegseth’s Software Memo Can Start a Revolution (Lauren Dailey and David Rothzeid, War on the Rocks)
Reform isn’t just about tools — it’s about culture, risk, and who the Department of Defense chooses to trust.

Inside the Fiasco at the National Security Council  (Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Atlantic)
Firings and leadership challenges have destabilized an institution that has little margin for error.

DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants  (Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.