Donald Trump has successfully used xenophobia and fake concerns about propaganda and national security to get what he’s long wanted: TikTok (and its fat ad revenues) are poised to be sold off to his right wing billionaire buddies and, inevitably, slowly converted into a right wing propaganda safe space.
Andreessen and Ellison are, to be clear, technofascists who don’t believe in democracy, regulatory oversight, or basic privacy protections for consumers. The remaining 20 percent would remain in the hands of Chinese ownership and the Chinese government, which still has to finalize the deal. This is not, contrary to what you’ll read in the pages of WAPO or CNN, a net improvement.
Oh, and Donald Trump will get to appoint a board member. Remember when Republicans were against government interference in private businesses?
Trump still didn’t truly get what he really wanted: reporting in the Financial Times suggests that China will still technically own and control the algorithm used to power TikTok, something Trump had previously said was essential to any deal. Early reporting by the Wall Street Journal also indicates that existing TikTok users will have to migrate to a new app.
“Come join an app majority owned by Donald Trump’s unhinged right wing billionaire friends where there’s no competent hate speech and right wing propaganda safeguards” is going to be a tricky selling point that could ultimately throw sand in the gears, and create the potential for another (hopefully better?) company to disrupt their plans.
Now is the time for Silicon Valley to engage in that boundless innovation we’ve all heard so much about.
It WasNever About Privacy And National Security
I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.
It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.
TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the MAGA folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always about ego, money, and information control.
American authoritarians are following the same playbook we’ve seen in countries like Hungary, where new and old media and journalism is either destroyed or hijacked in service to authoritarian leadership. It’s happening here, now, and the very least ethical people can do is recognize it and put up a fight.
The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.
This week the paper fired its last black opinion columnist for directly quoting Charlie Kirk, a man paid by right wing billionaires to create short-form video internet propaganda where he tricks dull children into believing that minorities are inferior human beings.
Karen Attiah, WAPO’s founding Global Opinions editor, took to Bluesky to say that WAPO management fired her for “gross misconduct.” Her offense? Standing up for her own civil rights in the age of U.S. authoritarianism:
Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah…
Attiah explains what happened here. Her offense, according to a letter sent by Post leadership obtained by Oliver Darcy, was “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men,” including this one that simply quoted Kirk’s own words:
The Washington Post has always had a backward and ignorant policy that tries to prevent its employees from expressing human opinions. But its worth noting that this dated relic has never applied to opinion columnists specifically hired to express their opinions. That’s before you even get to the fact that “I should be allowed to exist without being threatened by hateful bigots” isn’t an opinion.
It’s clear Attiah, who hired murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WAPO’s opinion pages, was fired for the modern cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and rich white authoritarian-earlobe-nibbling billionaires.
Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.
The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes. So all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times) are desperately trying to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors.
The collapse of major U.S. media institutions and repurposing of many of them as propaganda (see: CBS) very closely follows the authoritarian playbook in countries like Hungary. A functional press, healthy education system, and an informed electorate is an existential threat to rich right-wing zealots with terrible, unpopular ideas, who want to strip the country for parts in peace.
But however rich Jeff Bezos may be, the market for billionaire ass kissing and authoritarian earlobe nibbling is minimal and already extremely saturated. The paper has not only been suffering a brain drain of decent journalists and columnists, it’s been heavily bleeding subscribers since election season. And the more Bezos tries to reshape reality and informed consensus, the bigger the backlash seems to get.
The death of mainstream corporate journalism at the hands of weird rich assholes does, one would hope, open the door to more independent journalism, worker-owned journalism outfits, and direct-to-consumer newsletters (though it’s ironic Attiah’s article on her firing is being hosted at Substack, a company run by people who openly courted white supremacists to goose engagement).
If it’s not yet clear, there’s a violent information war going on. And the folks who care about things like foundational ethics, informed consensus, and the public good are losing. Badly. Not giving our money, time, or attention to companies and billionaires keen on crushing democratic norms and basic human rights seems like the very least we can do.
WYANDOTTE COUNTY, KS – Charles L. Adair was a 50-year-old Black man. He was arrested on July 4 on misdemeanor traffic warrants. By the night of July 5, he was bloodied and dead inside the Wyandotte County jail.
The autopsy details how a jail cop violently dug his knee into Adair’s back and killed him. Adair suffocated, his ribs were broken, and his chest was fractured. There was bleeding in his back and shoulders. His eyes showed the telltale hemorrhages of suffocation.
The coroner ruled his death a homicide caused by “mechanical asphyxia.”
But you would know none of this if you relied on the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
The KBI’s “official press release” following their “official investigation” was a deliberate act of deception. It made no mention of deputies kneeling on Adair’s back. It made no mention of the broken bones, the bleeding, or the suffocation marks. Instead, the KBI — the very agency charged with investigating every in-custody death in Kansas — told the public their agents “did not observe any obvious signs of physical injury.” That is not an oversight but a brazen lie. It is a fraudulent press release crafted to erase the role of Wyandotte County jail cops in Adair’s horrifying murder, to obscure the violence, and to absolve the killers under the cover of official language.
But the deception didn’t stop there. In its final update, the KBI went even further, attempting to shift blame onto Adair himself. They listed “hypertensive cardiovascular disease” and “hepatic cirrhosis due to chronic alcoholism” as “contributory factors” in his death.
To be clear: there is no evidence that Charles was an alcoholic, nor does it matter if he was. He did not suffocate because of liver disease. He suffocated because a deputy forced a knee into his back and crushed the breath out of him.
This tactic is as familiar as it is despicable. The state has a long record of lying to the public after killing Black people. When Eric Garner was strangled to death by NYPD, the medical report initially noted “no damage to the windpipe,” a bureaucratic way of minimizing what everyone saw on camera as he cried out, “I can’t breathe.” When George Floyd was strangled to death for over 8 minutes on camera in front of the world in Minneapolis, the first police statement described his death as a “medical incident during police interaction.”
Time and again, “official” police stories erase the violence, blame the victim’s body, and sanitize murder into paperwork.
The Timeline They Tried to Bury
On July 5, around 8:30 p.m., Adair was treated in the jail’s infirmary for a leg wound. Deputies say he “caused a disturbance” on the way back. They handcuffed him, forced him into a chair, and forced him into his cell. There, they shoved him onto a bunk. One officer drove a knee into his back. At 8:37 p.m., staff called medical personnel. At 9:19 p.m., Charles was pronounced dead.
The KBI claimed their agents “did not observe any obvious signs of physical injury.” That statement collapses under even the most basic scrutiny. The autopsy makes the reality undeniable: broken ribs, a fractured chest, internal bleeding, and suffocation hemorrhages in his eyes. These are not subtle and certainly not invisible.
There is virtually no other way to interpret this than that KBI explicitly lied, engaged in an official cover-up, then produced a fraudulent press release designed to hide what jail cops did to brother Adair.
The Bigger Truth
Charles Adair’s death is unfortunately not an isolated event. It is part of the everyday fascism we see in the United States, a country that cages more people than any other in the history of the human species, and where Missouri/Kansas jails and prisons are quite literally concentration camps. In Vernon County, it is routine. In Wyandotte County, it is routine. The conditions are not aberrations but instead are at the very root of the incarceration system itself.
And when officials lie in press releases, it is because they know the truth: the system cannot survive if people see it clearly. Under a fascist presidential regime and a Department of Justice that launders murder into paperwork, justice will never be delivered by the state. It will only be won by The People.
Refuse the Cover-Up
Charles should be alive. He should be with his family, laughing, eating, living. Instead, he was choked, brutalized, and killed over traffic warrants. The state killed him, then lied about how it happened. We will not repeat their script and we will certainly not bury the truth with him.
Wyandotte County jail cops killed a Black man named Charles L. Adair. Then they lied to our faces about it.
Remembering Charles L. Adair
Charles’s family and loved ones offered a picture of a man whose life was defined by love, humor, and connection. In his obituary, they described him as “a man whose laughter and warmth were as boundless as his love for family and friends.”
He was a devoted fan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, and he carried a deep appreciation for music. Family members called him a “proud and doting uncle” to his nieces and nephews, a dedicated father to his three children, and a brother with an unshakable bond to his siblings.
“To know Charles was to laugh,” the obituary reads. “His sense of humor was magnetic, and his natural ability to connect with others made him unforgettable. Whether he was cracking a joke or offering a word of encouragement, his spirit lifted those around him.”
"Buddies," which premiered on Sept. 17, 1985, cost just $27,000 to make. (Vinegar Syndrome/Roe Bressan/Frameline Distribution)
First it was referred to as a “mysterious illness.” Later it was called “gay cancer,” “gay plague” and “GRID,” an acronym for gay-related immune deficiency. Most egregiously, some called it “4H disease” — shorthand for “homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs and Haitians,” the populations most afflicted in the early days.
While these names were ultimately replaced by AIDS — and later, after the virus was identified, by HIV — they reflected two key realities about AIDS at the time: a lack of understanding about the disease and its strong association with gay men.
When the feature film “Buddies” and the television film “An Early Frost” premiered 40 years ago, in the fall of 1985, AIDS had belatedly been breaking into the public consciousness.
Earlier that year, the first off-Broadway plays about AIDS opened: “As Is” by William Hoffman and “The Normal Heart” by writer and activist Larry Kramer. That summer, actor Rock Hudson disclosed that he had AIDS, becoming the first major celebrity to do so. Hudson, who died in October 1985, was a friend of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Reagan, who had been noticeably silent on the subject of the disease, would go on to make his first — albeit brief — public remarks about AIDS in September 1985.
Five days before Reagan’s speech, “Buddies,” an independent film made for US$27,000 and shot in nine days, premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on Sept. 12, 1985.
A film on the front lines
If you haven’t heard of “Buddies,” that’s not surprising; the film mostly played art houses and festivals before disappearing.
Its filmmaker, Arthur J. Bressan Jr., was best known for his gay pornographic films, although he’d also made documentaries such as “Gay USA.” “Buddies” would go on to reach a wider audience thanks to a 2018 video release by Vinegar Syndrome, a distribution company that focuses on restoring cult cinema, exploitation films and other obscure titles.
It was inspired by the real-life buddies program at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization Kramer co-founded. At the time, many people dying of the disease had been rejected by family and friends, so a buddy might be the only person who visited a terminal AIDS patient.
The film feels like a play, in that most of the movie takes place in a single room and features just two characters: a naive young gay man named David and a young AIDS patient named Robert. Over the course of the film, the characters open up about their lives and their fears about the growing epidemic. It also includes a sex scene — something other early AIDS films completely avoided — in which David and Robert engage in safer sex.
AIDS packaged for the masses
The remarkably frank and intimate approach to the epidemic in “Buddies” contrasts sharply to the television film “An Early Frost,” which premiered on NBC on Nov. 11, 1985.
The film’s protagonist is a successful Chicago lawyer named Michael who hasn’t come out to his family, much to the distress of his long-term partner, Peter. When Michael finds out he has AIDS, he’s forced to come out to his parents, both as gay and as having AIDS.
Much of the film deals with Michael’s self-acceptance and his attempts to mend his relationships. Yet the production of “An Early Frost” was fraught with concerns about depicting both homosexuality and AIDS. Unlike David and Robert, Michael and Peter show no physical affection — they barely touch each other.
Knowledge of AIDS was still evolving — a test for HIV was approved in March 1985 — so screenwriters and life partners Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen went through 13 revisions of the script. The real-life fears and misconceptions about how AIDS could and could not be transmitted were central to the storyline, adding extra pressure to be accurate in the face of evolving understanding of the virus.
Despite losing NBC $500,000 in advertisers, “An Early Frost” drew 34 million viewers and was showered with Emmy nominations the following year.
A quilt of stories emerges
“Buddies” and “An Early Frost” opened up AIDS and HIV as subject matters for film and television.
They begat two lanes of HIV storytelling that continue to this day.
The first is an approach geared to mainstream audiences that tends to avoid controversial issues such as sex or religion and instead focuses on characters who grapple with both the illness and the stigma of the virus.
The second is an indie approach that’s often more confrontational, irreverent and angry at the injustice and indifference AIDS patients faced.
The former approach is seen in 1993’s “Philadelphia,” which earned Tom Hanks his first Oscar. The critically and commercially successful film shares a number of story points with “An Early Frost”: Hanks’ character, a big-city lawyer, finds out he is HIV positive and must confront bias head-on. HIV also features prominently in later films such as “Precious” (2009) and “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013), both of which, like “Philadelphia,” became awards darlings.
The edgier, more critical approach can be seen in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, a film movement that developed as a response to the epidemic. Gregg Araki’s “The Living End” (1992) is a key film in the movement: It tells the story of two HIV-positive men who become pseudo-vigilantes in the wake of their diagnoses.
Somewhere in between is “Longtime Companion” (1990), which was the first film about AIDS to receive a wide release and tracks the impact of the epidemic on a fictional group of gay men throughout the 1980s. The film was written by gay playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas and directed by Norman Rene, who died of AIDS six years after the film’s release.
Studios still leery
In many ways, television is where the real breakthroughs have happened and continue to happen.
The first television episode to deal with AIDS appeared on the medical drama “St. Elsewhere” in 1983; AIDS was also the subject of episodes in the sitcoms “Mr. Belvedere,” “The Golden Girls” and “Designing Women.” “Killing All the Right People” was the title of the latter’s special episode — a phrase the show’s writer and co-creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason heard while her mother was being treated for AIDS.
More recently, producer Ryan Murphy has made a cottage industry of representations of queer people, particularly those with HIV. His stage revivals of “The Normal Heart” and Mart Crowley’s 1968 play “The Boys in the Band” were later adapted into films for television and streaming. He also produced “Pose,” a three-season series about drag ball culture in the 1980s that stars queer characters of color, several of whom are HIV positive.
Yet for all of these strides, representations of HIV in film are still hard to come by. In fact, out of the 256 films released by major distributors in 2024, the number of HIV-positive characters amounted to … zero.
If you think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that people might not want to be seen going to the theater to watch a film about characters with HIV, the results of a 2021 GLAAD survey may surprise you.
It found that the stigma around HIV is still very high, particularly for HIV-positive people working in schools and hospitals. One-third of respondents were unaware that medication is available to prevent the transmission of HIV. More than half didn’t know that HIV-positive people can reach undetectable status and not transmit the virus to others.
Another important finding from the survey: Only about half of the nonqueer respondents had seen a TV show or film about someone with HIV.
This reflects both the progress made since “Buddies” and “An Early Frost” and also why these films still matter today. They were released at a time when there was almost no cultural representation of HIV, and misinformation and disinformation were rampant. There have been so many advances, in both the treatment of HIV and its visibility in popular culture. That visibility still matters, because there’s still much more than can be done to end the stigma.
Scott Malia is an associate professor of theater and chair of the Theatre & Dance Department at College of the Holy Cross. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Through the lens of Tim Flach, exotic bird species, farm animals, and our canine companions brim with personality. Through books like Dogs, Endangered, and Birds, he highlights familiar animals alongside wildlife we don’t often get the chance to meet face-to-face (thankfully, in some cases). Flach’s vibrant bird portraits and projects centered around the human relationship with animals give us the chance to admire feathered and furry creatures up-close in striking compositions.
Forthcoming from Abrams later next month, Flach’s new book, Feline, celebrates our unending love for cats of all varieties. From domestic shorthairs to sleek purebreds to regal big cats, these beloved animals are captured in vibrant detail to illustrate their expansive range of textures, colors, sizes, and behaviors—and don’t forget the toe beans.
Feline contains more than 170 photographs, including information about different breeds, their evolution, and why they’ve captured our hearts and imaginations for millennia. “Flach explores this deep, sometimes one-sided but always enduring bond, revealing the many identities of cats—from their sacred status in ancient cultures to their viral superstardom in the digital age,” the publisher says.
Slated for release on October 21, you can pre-order Feline on Bookshop. See more of Flach’s work on his website, and follow updates on Instagram.
In the fall of 2022, The Kansas City Defender published a short, urgent video: a serial killer was targeting Black women along the Prospect Avenue Corridor.
We had spent weeks speaking with community members and local leaders who were searching for missing women in the area. To them, and to anyone on the ground, it was clear something was deeply wrong. A crisis was unfolding, and no one in power was helping.
So we amplified what the community already knew: more and more Black women were disappearing in Kansas City, and there was growing fear that a predator was involved.
The video went viral within hours, generating millions of views and garnering national attention.
But instead of investigating these concerns, local white media turned to the Kansas City Police Department to verify the story.
KCPD dismissed the claims as “completely unfounded.”
White news outlets echoed the police response, labeling our reporting baseless rumors that lacked “evidence” and effectively silencing the urgency of what Black residents were trying to raise the alarm about.
Then everything changed.
Less than a month later, 22-year-old TJ broke free from Timothy Haslett Jr.’s home in Excelsior Springs, a small city about 30 miles northeast of Kansas City. A heavy metal collar was locked around her neck. She said she had been abducted from Prospect Avenue, held for over a month, and that she wasn’t the only one.
What TJ endured was horrific. But her story wasn’t an isolated horror. It was the product of overlapping failures by police, courts, media, and the public that too often looks the other way when Black women go missing.
The numbers make this clear.
Haslett abducted TJ from Prospect Avenue and held her captive at his home in Clay County, a suburban community in Liberty, Missouri. His trial will be held at the Clay County Circuit Court in December. (Vaughan Harrison/The KC Defender)
On September 11, 44 people were actively missing in Kansas City. The weight of that tragedy falls disproportionately on Black residents, who make up only about 27% of the city’s population, yet account for 55% of open cases and 57% of the 778 people reported missing since February. That’s over double Black people’s share of the population.
In this one snapshot, Black residents are almost four times more likely to be reported missing than white residents, and just over three times more likely to remain actively missing.
Black women, who make up just 14% of Kansas City’s population, represent 32% of reported cases and 22% of active cases. Since February, Black women have been 3.5 times more likely to be reported missing than white women. Black women are also more than twice as likely to be missing today.
TJ’s story is part of a larger pattern. And like too many other cases involving Black women, it faded quickly from the headlines.
But we never stopped following the story.
Our Investigation Continues
For nearly three years, we’ve been sitting in courtrooms, combing through public records, walking neighborhoods, and talking with the people most impacted by an epidemic that rarely makes headlines: Black women disappearing in plain sight.
Vaughan Harrison, creator of the Fountain City Files podcast, began investigating Haslett’s case in 2022, building timelines, tracking court proceedings, and archiving the slow movement of the legal system.
Mili Mansaray, senior editor at The Defender, was reporting on missing Black people for The Beacon KC—compiling data and speaking with families, survivors, and community members who’ve been ignored for years.
So while national attention faded, we stayed with the story. And what we found was deeper, darker, and more widespread than we imagined.
Now, we’re joining forces with The Excelsior Citizen, local organizers, and those most directly impacted to build a project that exposes the systems allowing this violence to go unacknowledged, unpunished, and often unspoken.
This work will culminate in the launch of Fountain City Files: Vanishing Point, a long-form investigative series and podcast that explores the crisis of missing Black women in Kansas City and the Midwest. This series will center the voices of survivors, families, and communities pushing back against systemic neglect.
We’ll also publish articles, host listening sessions, and launch a campaign to support victims and their families.
To begin, we’re releasing an interactive timeline that maps the key events surrounding the Haslett case, local disappearances, and the institutional failures that connect them. It will grow as our investigation unfolds.
Where We Go From Here
As Haslett’s trial begins on December 1, TJ—the woman who survived him—is still trying to rebuild her life. And she’s not alone.
This is not just the story of one man. It’s the story of a system that allowed him to exist.
And it is not about one woman, but instead a culture that devalues Black women. A legal process that delays or prevents justice. A public safety model that waits until harm is irreversible.
But this story is also about community, resistance, and the people fighting every day to bring their loved ones home and keep their neighborhoods safe.
This is just our first installment in an ongoing series. There’s more to come in the lead-up to Haslett’s trial.
If you’ve lost someone, know something, or want to share your story—we’re listening.
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