Sonali Kolhatkar, Independent Media Institute

Facebook's former employee Frances Haugen, in an interview on "60 Minutes," explained to host Scott Pelley that the social media giant has conducted internal experiments that demonstrate just how quickly and efficiently its users are driven down rabbit holes of white supremacist beliefs.

The 37-year-old data scientist who resigned from Facebook earlier this year and became a whistleblower explained how the company knows its algorithms lead users down extremist paths. Facebook, according to Haugen, created new test accounts that followed former President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump, Fox News and a local news outlet. After simply clicking on the first suggested links that Facebook's algorithm offered up, those accounts were then automatically shown white supremacist content. "Within a week you see QAnon; in two weeks you see things about 'white genocide,'" said Haugen.

Haugen's testimony and the documents she shared confirm what critics have known for a long time. "We've already known that hate speech, bigotry, lies about COVID, about the pandemic, about the election, about a number of other issues, are prolific across Facebook's platforms," said Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, in an interview. However, "what we didn't know is the extent of what Facebook knew," she added....

After many months of anticipation and nearly three years of investigation, the Manhattan district attorney's office has charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 offenses related to tax fraud. According to the lengthy indictment, former President Donald Trump's namesake corporation engaged in a 15-year scheme to "compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was 'off the books.'" While many are disappointed that Trump himself was not directly indicted, the sweeping charges offer some vindication for those who have watched wealthy elites like Trump hoodwink authorities for decades. Recall his response to his rival Hillary Clinton during a 2016 presidential debate when she accused him of evading taxes: "that makes me smart." But when put into the broader context of how the wealthiest Americans manage to avoid paying taxes without breaking any laws, the Trump Organization charges seem like a minor affair.

A much bigger story than the Trump Organization's alleged tax fraud was a ProPublica story in June of how fabulously wealthy individuals like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have paid little to nothing in federal income taxes for years. Reporters obtained confidential tax records for thousands of wealthy Americans from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and concluded that, "the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year." The heart of the story is that the form of wealth owned by the richest Americans—stocks, real estate, and other assets—is simply not taxed until it is sold.

Based on tax information published by the New York Times last fall, Trump, like Bezos and other billionaires, has paid little to nothing in taxes for years. The scheme that the former president relied on in order to do this was somewhat different. "His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes," explained the New York Times....

The GOP's latest culture war is focused squarely on the nation's transgender community, specifically transgender youth. It isn't a new war, simply a new front in an old war that can be traced back to the famed "bathroom bills" from some years ago that spread across dozens of states. Those bills were introduced in tandem with former President Donald Trump's targeted federal government-led attacks that included the overturning of anti-discrimination statutes protecting trans people and an outright transgender ban in the U.S. military.

Now, in the wake of Trump's humiliating electoral loss, Republicans have accelerated the state-level attacks to a breathtaking level. In just the first three months of 2021, GOP-led state legislatures introduced more bills aimed at transgender people, especially youth, than they did over the entire previous year. There are now more than 80 bills introduced this year alone that, according to Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, "are not addressing any real problem, and they're not being requested by constituents. Rather, this effort is being driven by national far-right organizations attempting to score political points by sowing fear and hate."

I recently spoke with Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of the award-winning book Histories of the Transgender Child, in an interview, and she echoed this claim, saying, "A lot of authoritarian political movements are using trans people as their scapegoats." She called the latest wave of anti-trans legislation "an unprecedented assault in terms of just the magnitude of the bills and the severity of what they propose to do in terms of criminalizing basic access to health care and equal access to education."...

In her farewell address to the House of Representatives, New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland said to her colleagues about her new role as interior secretary, "I have the opportunity to make a real difference for communities everywhere by addressing climate change, protecting voting rights, [and] fighting for racial, environmental, and economic justice." It was a far cry from the oil and gas lobbyists who have long occupied the position she now assumes.

The 60-year-old Haaland is an activist-turned-lawmaker who was among the crop of progressive women of color who won a slew of races in the 2018 midterm races. She became one of the two first Indigenous women ever to win a congressional seat. Now, in a 51-40 Senate vote, Haaland broke barriers once more in winning confirmation as the nation's first Indigenous interior secretary and first Indigenous Cabinet secretary.

I had the chance to speak with Haaland in 2018 before she won her congressional seat representing New Mexico. Six months before she was elected, she told me that "creating a renewable energy revolution in our state and in our country" was a central issue for her as a candidate and that she was working "to get big corporate money out of politics because I don't believe that our elected officials should be working for the lobbyists—they should be working for the people."...

As Texas battles a severe snowstorm and mass power outages this winter, Tim Boyd, the now-former Republican mayor of Colorado City, revealed his party's plan for the deadly extreme temperatures linked to climate change. In a lengthy Facebook post that was deleted soon after it went viral, then-Mayor Boyd told his residents that they were entirely on their own as the brutal winter weather caused mayhem and deaths across the Lone Star state.

His honesty was like catching a glimpse of a rare animal in the wild. "Sink or swim[,] it's your choice!" he wrote, without bothering to couch his words in euphemisms. Boyd added, "The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!" For such an exhortation to come from the elected leader of a city—a man literally chosen by his people to ensure that local government works for them—was shocking.

Just as they pay their mayor, Colorado City's residents also pay authorities to provide them with basic necessities like electricity and water. But apparently, Boyd thought an expectation of services was out of line. He conjectured, "If you don't have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe." Many Texans have tried to do just that, running their car engine in their garage to warm their homes. So far in Harris County, there have been at least 50 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and several people have died....