#will chamberlain

Jeremy Barr at The Guardian:

A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party. The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.

While Carr has said the early license renewal process stems from an FCC investigation into ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, petitioners are free to include a variety of grievances against the network and concerns about whether ABC is operating in the public interest. [...] “ABC ignores long-standing Commission precedents and principles protecting the integrity of the news,” the group wrote. “ABC engages in explicit racial and gender discrimination. ABC cozies up to the Communist Chinese Party and airbrushes over religious and ethnic cleansing. ABC fails to respect this Commission’s rules.”

The organization lobbied the FCC to deny ABC’s renewal requests and to call the matter for a hearing, “because the Petition and accompanying materials raise sufficient questions [about] whether ABC is operating in the public interest or remains worthy of the public trust”.

The Media Research Center, a non-profit conservative media watchdog group, filed a petition to deny the network’s license renewal requests “because of ABC’s continued and sustained abuse of the licenses subject to the current review, its notorious efforts to improperly influence national elections, and its willful engagement in misinformation and the promotion of violence”. The group claimed that ABC-owned and -operated television stations, in markets such as New York City and Los Angeles, “have used public spectrum to suppress news coverage of the most critical stories of our day; to engage in electioneering and relentless political bias; to excuse, minimize, and even justify the epidemic of political violence; and to peddle misinformation and defamation”. The Article III Project, a legal group started by the conservative, Trump-aligned activist Mike Davis, focused its petition to deny on ABC parent company Disney’s employment practices and efforts to hire a more diverse workforce.

“The Commission should deny renewal of ABC’s television licenses,” wrote William Chamberlain, senior counsel for the organization. “The record demonstrates consistent and serious violations of federal [Equal Employment Opportunity] law. In the alternative, any renewal must include sweeping terms and conditions sufficient to eliminate all discriminatory practices and ensure future compliance.” Another petition was filed by the Trump-affiliated conservative advocacy organization America First Legal, which was co-founded by the longtime Trump aide Stephen Miller. The group claimed that ABC’s stations “demonstrated a lack of the character qualifications necessary to hold broadcast licenses”.

Various right-wing groups, including the Media Research Center (MRC) and Article III Project (A3P), have petitioned the FCC to deny license renewals from the 8 ABC owned-and-operated stations for partisan political reasons, and the reasons for the petitions: content on The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “support” for the CCP, and engages in “explicit racial and gender discrimination”.

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Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

In his opinion in Callais v. Louisiana, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito claimed the majority was merely modernizing the Voting Rights Act (VRA), not killing the landmark civil rights law outright.

“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text,” Alito wrote about the VRA’s Section 2, which Congress enacted to ban racially discriminatory voting laws.

But legal experts, voting rights advocates, and even the VRA’s loudest foes all agree with Justice Elena Kagan: “[I]n fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.” “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systemically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”  Harvard University law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos went further, writing on X: “Sure, Section 2 wasn’t officially struck down. But it might as well have been. It’s now useless to minority voters under virtually all circumstances.”

Some of the loudest backers of the redistricting war launched by President Donald Trump last year seemed to agree. 

“While not overturning section 2 of the VRA, [Callais] construes it into near-irrelevance. All minority voters are entitled to is that the map drawers NOT use race as a metric in drawing their maps,” wrote Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the far-right Article III Project. “No more majority-minority districts.” “You have to understand how brilliant Alito is,” Chamberlain added. “This is actually *better* than getting rid of section 2 outright, because it means section 2 can be used to CHALLENGE majority-minority districts (for impermissibly using race).”

“This is huge,” Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascale, wrote on X. “If states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually.” Election law experts and civil rights leaders said the exact same thing, only in mournful notes. 

“Today’s decision is a bullet in the heart of the voting rights movement,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has not just weakened a law, it has humiliated and dismantled the life’s work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and every man and woman who marched, bled, and died for Black Americans to have an equal voice at the ballot box.” In the decades before Congress enacted the VRA in 1965, lawmakers would draw maps that split or “cracked” minority — mostly Black — voters across multiple districts, all but ensuring that they would be unable to elect someone who would represent their interests. Congress sought to ban that practice with Section 2 of the VRA. And when the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that plaintiffs suing under Section 2 had to show discriminatory intent, Congress amended the law two years later to ban any voting “standard, practice, or procedure… which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” 

[...]

Now those gains are at risk. Following Callais, Republican lawmakers in Alabama and Louisiana are now sprinting to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate all of the two states’ majority-minority districts, which are currently held by four Black Democrats.  “This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation,” Hasen wrote. “It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation.”

Hasen wondered why Alito obscured the real impact of his ruling behind reams of legal sophistry, calling him a “coward.”  “[H]e’s either lying to himself or to the rest of us about the future of the Voting Rights Act,” he wrote in a separate piece for Slate.   Kagan noted that Alito turned the link between race and party preference — what used to be “practically an element of a vote-dilution claim” — into an excuse. And relying on the Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that even though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it’s a nonjusticiable political question beyond the courts’ abilities to resolve, Alito said VRA plaintiffs need to “disentangle race from politics” by proving that race inspired the line drawing, not partisanship. 

Good luck with that, said Kagan.  “But under the majority’s new test, when those two facts coexist — which is almost everywhere Section 2 has purchase — a plaintiff will have to show — contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design — that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” Kagan wrote. “And that, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.” 

Under the new standards —which Alito cast as minor tweaks to the 40 years of jurisprudence built on the court’s 1982 decision, Thornburg v. Gingles — minority voters challenging a racially gerrymandered map will need to provide an alternate version that still accomplishes the mapdrawers’ original partisan goals. In other words, plaintiffs lose unless they can come up with another map that maintains the status quo, i.e. a new map that still favors Republicans.

SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais contained loads of Orwellian lies, such as falsely claiming that the ruling merely updates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

John Knefel at MMFA:

Two recent clips from high-profile MAGA media podcasters suggest that a new effort by President Donald Trump to ramp up denaturalizations is driven largely by anti-Muslim bigotry.  According to The New York Times, the Trump administration is setting a goal of bringing 100-200 denaturalization cases per month in fiscal year 2026, up from just over 120 cases in total brought between 2017 and the present.   In segments on War Room, hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Human Events Daily, hosted by Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, guests with close ties to the White House made it clear that they would want Trump’s denaturalization ramp-up to target Muslims specifically. 

On December 15, Posobiec interviewed the Article III Project’s Will Chamberlain about immigration in general. Article III is headed by Mike Davis, a close ally of Trump’s who presents himself as the administration’s outside enforcer.  

“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, and mass Muslim migration is not compatible with Western societies, and it’s time to say this experiment has run its course and it needs to stop,” Chamberlain said.  Chamberlain added that “we're not going to, you know, denaturalize unless we have legal reason to do so” but that “we want there to be net-negative Muslim migration to the United States.”  Chamberlain’s legalistic caveat aside, achieving “net-negative Muslim migration” would likely require finding a “legal reason” to bring many more denaturalization cases. Chamberlain, for example, called for journalist Mehdi Hasan to be denaturalized and deported in response to Hasan posting “Abolish ICE” on social media.

Days earlier, Bannon interviewed Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-affiliated think tank. CRA was founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist currently reprising his role as the head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. “I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a nice and decent Muslim — those exist in our country,” Miller said. “But nowhere in the world do those people manifest themselves in majorities. And there's a reason for that, and at the center of it is radical Islam.”

Reed McMaster and Ben Van Bloem at MMFA:

Right-wing media figures called for Don Lemon's arrest, claiming he needed to be “next to fall” and made an “example out of” after he and fellow independent journalist Georgia Fort covered a January 18 protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a Minnesota church. After they were arrested on January 30, right-wing media figures celebrated, calling it “a wonderful thing to happen” and stating that it was time for Lemon to “feel some trauma.”

Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents after reporting on a protest at a Minnesota church

Lemon and Fort documented protesters in Minnesota who disrupted a church service on January 18 after hearing reports that a pastor at the church was an ICE official. Lemon and Fort have now been indicted by a grand jury and were arrested by FBI and Homeland Security agents on January 30. The BBC reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi accused them of participating in a “coordinated attack” with the protesters against the church. [BBC, 1/30/26]

Lemon and Fort have both stated that they attended the protest as journalists there to document the event, not as protesters themselves. In a video recorded at the scene on January 18, Lemon stated, “I’m just here photographing, I’m not part of the group. … I’m a journalist.” CNN reported that Fort “made the same points in a Facebook Live stream when federal agents arrived at her home early Friday morning. ‘This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media,’ Fort said before she surrendered to agents” [CNN, 1/30/26]

Before the arrests, right-wing figures accused Lemon of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and floated charging him under an 1871 law against the Ku Klux Klan. Conservative media personalities Benny Johnson and Will Chamberlain accused Lemon of violating the FACE Act, which criminalizes impeding a person's access to abortion clinics and places of worship. In an interview with Johnson, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon “floated the possibility of invoking the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act,” to charge Lemon. [The Independent, 1/19/26; U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, accessed 1/30/26; HuffPost, 1/20/26]

Multiple press freedom groups and Lemon's former employer CNN condemned the arrest, accusing the administration of violating his First Amendment rights. CNN wrote, “The FBl’s arrest of our former CNN colleague Don Lemon raises profoundly concerning questions about press freedom and the First Amendment.” The network further stated, “The First Amendment in the United States protects journalists who bear witness to news and events as they unfold, ensuring they can report freely in the public interest, and the DOJ’s attempts to violate those rights is unacceptable.” [CNN, 1/30/26]

Gideon Taaffe at MMFA:

In the week before the New York City mayoral election, some in right-wing media have increasingly advocated for frontrunner Zohran Mamdani to be “denaturalized” and “deported.” Following House Republicans' lead, several right-wing media personalities have claimed Mamdani, who moved to the United States at 8 years old, is not a legal citizen and should have his citizenship revoked.  This latest line of attack follows right-wing media’s delegitimization of foreign-born U.S. citizens and immigrants. Right-wing media have specifically targeted Muslim Americans and have deployed a variety of Islamophobic attacks to suggest they are anti-American or are “pro-terror.”

Right-wing politicians are attempting to revoke Mamdani’s citizenship and questioning his naturalization

The Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, was born in Uganda and became a naturalized citizen in 2018. [Politico, 7/1/25]

Some House Republicans, led by Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), have pushed for Mamdani’s citizenship to be investigated in order to have him denaturalized and deported. Ogles contends that Mamdani lied on his citizenship application by joining the Democratic Socialists of America, which he called a “communist” organization. Ogles also claims that Mamdani supported terrorists when Mamdani called to free the “Holy Land Five,” a group of pro-Palestine activists who were accused of funding Hamas. Fine called for the federal government to “review every naturalization of the past 30 years — starting with Mamdani.” He added, “I just think we need to take a hard look at how these folks became citizens, and if there is any fraud or any violation of the rules we need to denaturalize and deport.” [The New York Post, 10/25/25]

In July, President Donald Trump questioned if Mamdani was in the country “illegally.” Trump said, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. … We’re going to look at everything. And ideally, he’s going to turn out to be much less than a communist, but right now, he’s a communist.” [Politico, 7/1/25]

While Zohran Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he does not identify as a communist and has a different platform than the DSA’s. As the co-chair of the New York City DSA chapter told The New York Times, “Zohran’s been really clear that his platform and D.S.A.’s platform are distinct.” Additionally, democratic socialism is different from communism — as Time magazine points out, “democratic socialists believe in a democracy, while communist forms of government are not democracies.” [The New York Times, 8/28/25, 6/29/25; Time magazine, 10/24/18] 

Right-wing media have been ramping up deportation rhetoric and weaponizing Islamophobic attacks on Muslim leaders

Right-wing media have repeatedly spread the idea that foreign-born American citizens should be “denaturalized.” Recently, conservatives have called for the deportation of progressive Muslim media personalities and politicians like Mehdi Hasan and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). [Media Matters, 3/26/25, 8/27/25; The Times of India, 10/19/25; Twitter/X, 10/22/25, 10/22/25]

Since Mamdani won the primary, right-wing media have used Islamophobic attacks to attempt to delegitimize the Democratic nominee. Conservative personalities have claimed Mamdani is a “pro-terror” candidate, a “sharia” supremacist, and a “social justice suicide” bomber. [Media Matters, 7/3/25, 10/23/25]

Gideon Taaffe and Reed McMaster at MMFA:

As federal prosecutors in Minnesota are resigning over pressure to investigate Renee Good’s widow, who was present when an ICE agent killed Good last week, some in right-wing media have been calling for Good’s wife to be arrested, saying she committed a “felony” and that Good’s death “was more the fault of the wife than the fault of the cop.” 

Senior Justice Department officials are pushing for an investigation into Good’s widow, who was present at the shooting, and six prosecutors have resigned in response

Renee Good’s wife, Becca Good, was present when she was shot, and both engaged with some of the ICE agents before the shooting. The Associated Press described a “series of exchanges” shown in one video of the shooting: “‘That’s fine, I’m not mad at you,’ Good says as the officer passes by her door. She has one hand on the steering wheel and the other outside the open driver side window. ‘U.S. citizen, former f---ing veteran,’ says her wife, standing outside the passenger side of the SUV holding up her phone. ‘You wanna come at us, you wanna come at us, I say go get yourself some lunch big boy.’” Right before the shots are fired, Becca Good appears to say, “Drive, baby, drive. Drive.” [The Associated Press, 1/9/26]

Becca Good wrote in a later statement that they had “stopped to support our neighbors” when they got into a confrontation with ICE agents. “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Good wrote, and Minnesota Public Radio reported that “those were the values that brought the Goods to stop during an ICE operation in south Minneapolis.” [MPRNews, 1/9/26]

Six Minnesota federal prosecutors have resigned over a push by the Justice Department to investigate Becca Good. The New York Times reported that the Justice Department is looking to “examine ties between Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, and several groups that have been monitoring and protesting the conduct of immigration agents in recent weeks.” Per the Times, one Minnesota prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, “objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.” Five other prosecutors also resigned. [The New York Times, 1/13/26]

Gideon Taaffe and Noah Dowe at MMFA:

The Trump administration deported two women along with their U.S. citizen children to Honduras last week, including a 4-year-old who was “receiving treatment for metastatic cancer.” While the Trump administration claims the mothers took the children with them willingly, lawyers for the families noted that the mothers were not given meaningful access to lawyers or family members to make alternate arrangements.  Right-wing media have defended the administration’s actions by claiming migrants are using children as “anchor babies,” blaming the parents for their children being removed from the country, and calling it “a nonstory.” 

The Trump administration deported two women alongside their U.S. citizen children, reportedly without giving them access to their lawyers

Three U.S. citizen children were deported to Honduras along with their mothers, including a 4-year-old “with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication.” As the BBC reported, “Three young children who are US citizens — including one with cancer — were deported to Honduras alongside their mothers last week, according to advocacy groups and the families' lawyers.” [BBC, 4/28/25]

The Trump administration has claimed that the kids weren’t technically deported, but were allowed to leave as the mothers wanted to take them. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan added, “This is parenting 101. You can decide to take that child with you, or you can decide to leave a child here with a relative or another spouse.” [CBS News, 4/27/25]

The lawyers for the families have said they were given no real opportunity to make alternate arrangements for the children. According to NBC News, “One mother who was about to be deported was allowed less than two minutes on the phone with her husband to figure out what would become of her 2-year-old U.S. citizen child. Another mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her U.S.-born children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer.” [NBC News, 4/28/25]

A federal judge in Louisiana stated his “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” even as the father was trying to keep her in the country. According to Politico, lawyers had filed an emergency petition trying to get the child released from ICE custody. [Politico, 4/25/25]

The ACLU of Louisiana issued a statement condemning the “deeply troubling circumstances” of the case, which they say “raise serious due process concerns” and “stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives.” The statement is co-signed by seven human rights and immigration figures. Ware Immigration’s Erin Hebert said that “deporting U.S. citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral,” and Teresa Reyes-Flores of the Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition argued, “ICE’s actions show a blatant violation of due process and basic human rights.” [ACLU, 4/25/25]