Happy Friday! A hearty congratulations to Chicago, Illinois, which placed a better-than-expected #123 in the just-released U.S. News & World Report 150 “Best Places to Live in the United States,” an analysis that compares metro areas across the country. One factor that may have prevented an even more impressive showing? The abysmal performance of Chicago’s sports teams. None of Chicago’s professional teams currently have (MLB) or had this past season (NBA, NHL, NFL) a winning record. (The Blackhawks finished with more losses than any other team in the NHL and the Bears were, once again, the NFL’s worst team.) 

The U.S. News analysis doesn’t directly cite Chicago’s embarrassing sports futility as a factor, but context clues elsewhere in the survey support such an inference. Take, for example, the write-up of the best place to live in the U.S.: Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“Home to one of the most storied football franchises in the NFL, the Green Bay Packers, Green Bay has the perfect mix of big-city amenities complemented with a Midwestern, small-town feel.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Walt Disney Company announced Thursday it is scrapping a planned $1 billion corporate office expansion in Florida, an apparent escalation of the battle between the Magic Kingdom and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. According to a Florida Department of Economic Opportunity estimate, the project would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the state—with an average salary of $120,000—but a DeSantis spokeswoman claimed it was “unsurprising” a company in dire “financial straits” would cancel an “unsuccessful” venture. The project’s cancellation comes after hints earlier this month from Disney CEO Bob Iger that the company was reconsidering its investments in Florida.
• An FDA advisory panel voted Thursday to recommend approving Pfizer’s Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine for use in pregnant mothers to protect infants. While the panel unanimously agreed the vaccine was effective, some members raised concerns over the slightly elevated rate of premature births among mothers who received the vaccine in the clinical trial compared to the placebo group. If approved by the FDA—a decision is expected to come in August—the vaccine would be the first to provide RSV protection for infants.
• The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request to block two gun laws in Illinois prohibiting the sale of high-capacity magazines and 26 kinds of firearms—including the AR-15 and the AK-47—while challenges to the laws play out in lower court. The National Association for Gun Rights and an Illinois gun store owner are contesting the constitutionality of the laws, and had asked the court for emergency relief while they appeal a federal district court decision.
• Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Bureau apprehended the chief justice of the country’s supreme court this week and formally arrested him on Thursday. Vsevolod Knyazev is alleged to have accepted a nearly $2 million bribe to rule in favor of a Ukrainian oligarch, and has been charged with graft.
• The New York Times reported Thursday that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s recent bout with shingles—which kept her out of Washington for nearly three months—was more serious than her office let on. Feinstein developed complications from the infection, including Ramsay Hunt syndrome—which causes facial paralysis and vision impairments—and encephalitis, or brain inflammation. A spokesperson for the senator said the encephalitis had “resolved itself” in March, but the 89-year-old lawmaker appeared visibly weakened and at times disoriented during her first days back on Capitol Hill.
• The National Association of Realtors reported Thursday the median sale price for existing homes in the U.S. was $388,800 in April—down 1.7 percent from April 2022, the largest annual price drop since January 2012. Sales of previously owned homes decreased 3.4 percent from March and were down 23.2 percent year-over-year.
• The Department of Labor reported Thursday that initial jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—decreased by 22,000 week-over-week to a seasonally-adjusted 242,000 claims last week. The decline reversed the uptick in claims from the previous week—exaggerated by fraudulent claims in Massachusetts—and defied expectations of a cooling labor market.

‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’

Four years and one day after he was first appointed to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation—Operation Crossfire Hurricane—special counsel John Durham’s final report was made available to the public. Did it uncover “the crime of the century?” Was it a “sinister flop” that “ended with a whimper”? Or did it identify numerous instances of unprofessional, incompetent, and prejudiced conduct by federal law enforcement officials that’s incredibly damning for those involved while not necessarily rising to the level of criminality?

If you can’t tell already, we’re leaning towards Door #3.

Within minutes of the 306-page report being released on Monday, a number of progressive commentators had taken to the airwaves to proudly declare there was “no there there” and that Durham had turned in a dud. After all, the special counsel didn’t recommend any additional charges beyond the three he’d already brought, and proposed no “wholesale changes” to FBI or Department of Justice (DOJ) policies or guidelines. But to focus solely on those aspects of the investigation, Durham argued, would be a grave mistake. 

Supreme Court Leaves Section 230 Alone

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday on cases involving ISIS videos on YouTube and Twitter, and the decision hinged partly on what happened after a gun-toting man named Bernard Welch walked up to a secretary named Linda Sue Hamilton in October 1975 and asked her on a date.

Hamilton moved in with Welch and said she never asked why he disappeared for a few hours every day, or where he got the gold and silver he smelted into ingots in the garage, or what he kept in some 50 boxes in the basement—which turned out to be stolen furs, jewelry, silverware, and antiques. She just did the secretarial work and tracked the sales. But when Welch murdered physician Michael Halberstam during a burglary gone wrong in 1980, a judge found Hamilton liable—she should’ve known, and she helped him even though she didn’t commit the crimes.

Using concepts laid out in the Halberstam case, the Court ruled unanimously Wednesday in two cases—Taamneh v. Twitter and Gonzalez v. Google—that a law allowing lawsuits against parties assisting terrorists didn’t apply to tech companies that failed to remove ISIS accounts from their platforms. By remanding Gonzalez to a lower court with a note that plaintiffs had failed to establish a claim under Section 230, the justices left in place that statute’s liability protection for tech companies—punting what could have been an internet-shaking change.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act stipulates that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Under this statute, tech platforms can moderate content in good faith without becoming a “publisher” and being held liable for what any individual user posts. Gutting this protection, opponents have argued, would either turn social media into (even more of) a cesspool or incentivize or incentivize companies to keep an overly tight rein on what users can post.

The 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act allows Americans to sue anyone who “aids and abets” international terrorism “by knowingly providing substantial assistance.” In Taamneh, the family of a victim killed in a 2017 attack on a Turkish nightclub sued Twitter, arguing the tech company knew it was hosting ISIS accounts and didn’t do enough to scrub content encouraging terrorism—making it liable for the attack. 

But if you think insufficiently rigorous content moderation is a far cry from, say, keeping the books for your burglar lover, you’re in good company—the entire Supreme Court agrees. “Rather than dealing with a serial burglar and his live-in partner-in-crime, we are faced with international terrorist networks and world-spanning internet platforms,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Plaintiffs make no allegations that defendants’ relationship with ISIS was significantly different from their arm’s length, passive, and largely indifferent relationship with most users.” Indeed, he noted, plaintiffs didn’t even allege that the attacks were planned using Twitter, making the connection still more tenuous.

Given this distant relationship, Thomas argued holding Twitter responsible for how ISIS used its platform would be more like blaming a postman for the contents of the letter he delivers than the “knowing and substantial” help Hamilton provided Welch. Even the algorithms that boost content to interested users are part of the platform’s “infrastructure,” more a highway Twitter users take to get where they want to go than a friend offering a ride. “Defendants’ mere creation of their media platforms is no more culpable than the creation of email, cell phones, or the internet generally,” Thomas wrote.

The second case decided yesterday—Gonzalez v. Google—had potential to shake up internet norms by undermining Section 230 protections. The plaintiffs were similarly arguing Google had culpability for an ISIS attack because it let the terrorist group post—and even monetize—videos on YouTube, which Google owns. But they took their argument a step further, claiming YouTube’s recommendation algorithm made it a co-content creator alongside the makers of the radicalizing videos it pushed. This threatened the status quo interpretation of Section 230. 

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to reform Section 230—though they disagree on how. And Thomas has previously urged his colleagues to take up a Section 230 case, arguing lower courts may have interpreted the statute too broadly and suggesting in some cases it provides cover for censorship—though narrowing Section 230 in this case could have caused much broader content restrictions. But the Supreme Court justices seemed reluctant to tackle Section 230 during oral arguments in these cases. As Justice Elena Kagan put it: “These are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet.”

Sure enough, the justices punted on the question, issuing a three-page order declaring they wouldn’t even touch Section 230 and sending the case back for lower court review with the suggestion it wouldn’t survive the terrorism claim standard. Points to Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, who predicted this in February when we covered oral arguments. “What they may choose to do is rule in favor of Google and Twitter, but on the grounds that, even if Section 230 doesn’t apply, they’re just not liable under the terrorism statutes,” he said then. “That would allow them to avoid the 230 issue altogether.”

The decisions don’t necessarily slam the door on any future reworking of Section 230 protections, though, as details of these specific cases—such as terrorists not using Twitter or YouTube to plan the relevant attacks—rendered the plaintiffs’ arguments weaker than future claims might be. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested as much in a concurring opinion. “Today’s decisions are narrow in important respects,” she wrote. “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions.”

But for a Supreme Court that’s recently been upending abortion law and regulatory regimes, the decision is a bit anticlimactic—and you won’t hear tech company supporters complaining. “This is a huge win for free speech on the internet,” said Chris Marchese, litigation center head for NetChoice, a tech trade group which represents Twitter and Google. “The Court was asked to undermine Section 230—and declined.”

Worth Your Time

• Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a survivor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, dedicated his life to preserving the music of the Nazi camps. In an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Makana Eyre documents Kulisiewicz’s extraordinary efforts. “By the time the surviving prisoners of Sachsenhausen were liberated in early May 1945, he had committed hundreds of pages of camp music to memory, including 54 of his own compositions and [Rosebery] d’Arguto’s elegy for Europe’s Jews, ‘The Jewish Deathsong,’” she writes. After the war, Kulisiewicz expanded his work, interviewing survivors throughout Europe about the music in the other camps. “The more people he interviewed, the clearer it became that deportees across the Nazi camp system had turned to music to cope and survive, just as he and d’Arguto had done at Sachsenhausen,” Eyre explains. “At camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Majdanek and Dachau, inmates had gathered to share music and poetry. Some prisoners composed original scores, from popular songs to classical or modern music, many of true artistic quality. Others wrote new lyrics to melodies they knew by heart.” By the end of his life, Kulisiewicz had amassed “one of the most complete archives of music and music-making in the Nazi camps anywhere in the world.”

Presented Without Comment  

Reuters: Pentagon Accounting Error Overvalued Ukraine Weapons Aid by $3 Billion

Also Presented Without Comment  

San Francisco Chronicle: Celebrity Chef’s New Bay Area Restaurant Exempt From Local Gas [Stove] Ban

Also Also Presented Without Comment  

Politico: Pence Lifts Words Directly From Old Trump Speech

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick argues the 2024 Republican presidential primary will not be a repeat of the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
• On the podcasts: Sarah, Steve, and Mike discuss the Durham report, the debt ceiling, and AI.
• On the site: Drucker takes an exclusive first look at New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s prospective presidential run and Charlotte examines how the embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut became the center of Russian infighting.

Let Us Know

Did Durham’s report change your mind about anything? What do you think the FBI should do—if anything—to win back the trust it’s lost among Republicans?