Amanda Carpenter: Let the Media Dinosaurs Die

What It Covers

Tim Miller and Amanda Carpenter cover DHS enforcement abuses including warrantless arrests and domestic surveillance of protesters, the Zohran Mamdani-Trump meeting, the Paramount-CNN merger deal, Anthropic's standoff with the Pentagon over AI red lines, and Republican complicity psychology drawn from Carpenter's book research.

Key Questions Answered

• •DHS Surveillance Accountability: Project Democracy filed a lawsuit in Maine after federal agents used facial recognition and license plate readers to track protesters to their homes. An officer explicitly threatened a protester with domestic terror designation. Recording federal agents in public spaces remains the most effective tool citizens have to document and counter unconstitutional enforcement behavior.
• •State-Level Legal Remedy: Approximately 15 states are advancing legislation called the Universal Constitutional Remedies Act, which creates a cause of action allowing residents to sue federal officers who violate constitutional rights — closing an accountability gap that currently prevents civil suits against ICE agents, unlike suits against state or local police officers.
• •ICE Training Whistleblower: A Georgia-based ICE training officer, Ryan Schwenk, testified before Congress that he received orders to teach new cadets to conduct warrantless searches in violation of the Constitution. This testimony establishes unconstitutional conduct as deliberate policy rather than isolated officer error, which is the legal threshold needed to pursue systemic accountability.
• •Media Consolidation Strategy: Legacy cable outlets like CNN and CBS face regulatory leverage because FCC oversight applies only to old-format broadcast media. Subscription-based independent outlets are structurally protected from both advertiser pressure and government regulatory threats. Outlets with subscriber-majority revenue can sustain operations even if advertising revenue drops to zero, unlike ad-dependent legacy platforms.
• •Election Infrastructure Defense: The Trump administration's push for the SAVE Act contains a provision granting DHS access to state voter rolls, framed as voter ID enforcement. Democratic-run states should treat voter data as a primary defensive asset, prioritize fast and transparent election-day processing to build public trust, and resist any federal data-sharing requests that lack clear constitutional grounding.