Today's Liberal News

“Empire of AI”: Karen Hao on How AI Is Threatening Democracy & Creating a New Colonial World

In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of the new book Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment.

“What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?”: James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’s Historic Speech

We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.

This Summer’s Most Pointless Sequel Is Here

The strangest thing has happened to the Jurassic Park films over the past 32 years. In the original movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, the characters were mesmerized by dinosaurs. They saw these amazing beings, resurrected from DNA that was hundreds of millions of years old, and either stared in wonder or shrieked with fear. (Spielberg is known to be pretty good at capturing that whole “awe” thing.) But since then, each successive sequel has chipped away at that sense of discovery.

Five Feel-Good TV Shows

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A hard day is helped along by a few creature comforts: a good meal, a few friends, the right show to unwind with.

Trump Targets Google After Meta and X Payouts

Of all the titans of social media, Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried to keep the groveling to a minimum after Donald Trump won last year. He did not, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, go on podcasts to praise the benefits of “masculine energy” or hire the new president’s close friend, the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White, to his board of directors. He did not, like the X owner Elon Musk, go to work in the White House or publicly declare his straight-man “love” for Trump.

No One Loves the Bill (Almost) Every Republican Voted For

The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.
But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday.

The Most Perverse Part of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

Of all the elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, perhaps none is as obviously self-defeating as getting rid of tax credits for clean energy. That decision will not simply set back the fight against climate change. Congressional Republicans could also be setting America up for the worst energy-affordability crisis since the 1970s. Unlike then, this time we’ll have imposed it on ourselves.
Electricity demand in the United States is rising faster than it has in at least two decades.

Trump World’s Wizard of Oz Problem

To hear Tucker Carlson tell it, an American attack on Iran wasn’t just likely to precipitate World War III. It would do something worse: destroy Donald Trump’s presidency. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars,” the conservative commentator wrote on X on March 17. “Trump ran for president as a peace candidate,” Carlson added on June 4.

GOP Budget Bill Slashes Medicaid for Millions, Cuts Taxes for the Rich, Funds ICE at Historic Levels

As we broadcast, the House was soon set to vote on the so-called big, beautiful bill before the July 4 deadline imposed by President Trump. Should the House pass the legislation, the bill would be sent to Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The bill massively increases funding for ICE, cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade and adds $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.