Electronics, avocados, vegetables, cars, tractors, crude oil â these are some of the things that could soon get more expensive for US consumers. Under President Donald Trumpâs proposed plan, goods coming in from Mexico and Canada will be subject to a 25 percent tariff beginning on February 1st. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said Trump was âvery much still consideringâ tariffs on China on the same day. As of late Thursday, the specifics of these plans were still up in the air.
Sweeping tariffs were one of Trumpâs marquee campaign promises leading up to the election in November. Heâs previously threatened up to a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, a 100 percent tariff on goods from Mexico, and even a 200 percent tariff on John Deere products imported into the US. Despite this, Trump failed to levy any tariffs on day one of his presidency, with Bloomberg reporting on Thursday that his administration lacked even concepts of a plan. His first round is now supposed to hit goods from Mexico and Canada, the two largest trade partners for the US.
In 2022, around $1.8 trillion of goods and services moved between countries under the current United St …
The DeepSeek story contains multitudes. Itâs a story about the stock market, whether thereâs an AI bubble, and how important Nvidia has become to so many peopleâs financial future. Itâs also a story about China, export controls, and American AI dominance. And then, somewhere in there, thereâs a story about technology: about how a startup managed to build cheaper, more efficient AI models with few of the capital and technological advantages its competitors have.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about all these angles and a few more, because DeepSeek is the story of the moment on so many levels. Nilay and David discuss whether companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should be nervous, why reasoning models are such a big deal, and whether all this extra training and advancement actually adds up to much of anything at all. (Nilay has a long comparison to Bluetooth, in case that helps you guess where we land.)
After that, we go through our email inbox ([email protected]) and the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), and talk about some of your responses to last weekâs question about how people use AI. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in and called! There a …
Behance co-creator Scott Belsky has announced he’s leaving his position as Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer to become a partner at independent film production company A24. Belsky initially joined Adobe when it acquired the Behance artist portfolio platform for $150 million in 2012.
Following a brief departure in 2016, he rejoined Adobe in 2017 to lead its product development across Creative Cloud and has since become one of the design software giant’s most respected and recognizable figures. Belsky played a key role in launching Adobe’s lineup of Firefly generative AI products, which debuted its first AI video model in October last year.
“After 7 years since returning to Adobe… i’ll be shifting gears over the coming months + jumping into the fast-evolving world of filmmaking and storytelling (a longtime passion),” Belsky said in his farewell message. “It’s hard to leave a team, mission, and customer base I care for deeply, but the Adobe team, strategy, and pipeline has never been stronger.”
Belsky says he will be relocating to New York City and will remain in the “extended family of Adobe” as a “future tech partner.” According to Adobe chief marketing officer Lara Balazs, Belsky’s A24 partner role will see him building “tools and resources” to help support filmmakers’ creative visions.
“I’m excited to see how his experience developing technology will translate to the entertainment industry,” Balazs said on Adobe’s blog. “We have always partnered with studios around the world, and we have already begun conversations with Scott and A24 on how the two companies can partner to progress the art of storytelling.”
The robovac / mop hybrid makes cleaning almost effortless, with enough smarts that it can automatically remove its own mop pads.
Looking for a way to speed up your weekly cleaning? It might be worth investing in a robot vacuum that can also mop up your floors, like the Dreame L20 Ultra. The hybrid robot vacuum / mop is one of our favorites, and has currently dropped to an all-time low price of $614.99 ($785 off) at Amazon when you clip the on-page coupon.
The L20 Ultra’s packed with all kinds of features that make it easy to clean up quickly. It’s got 7,000Pa suction for sucking up dirt deep in your carpets, while its mop is capable of extending itself to reach areas that are usually hard for robovacs to clean. Once it’s finished with your floors, the bot is capable of automatically removing its own mop pads to keep your carpets dry. It’s also smart enough that it can automatically empty its own dustbin and refill its water tanks, so you don’t need to spend a lot of time cleaning the bot itself up.
The hybrid bot also boasts AI-powered obstacle avoidance so it can move around stuff on the floor like shoes. Plus, it’s compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri Shortcuts so you can control it with just your voice for an almost hands-free cleaning experience.
Picture this, but with more desks and a breakout area.
Disney’s extraordinarily expensive Star Wars hotel isn’t coming back. The building that housed the Galactic Starcruiser is being converted into office space, scuppering hopes that it could be reborn or repurposed into a new interactive attraction.
The Wrap reports that the hotel will be converted into an office for Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative arm of the company responsible for its theme parks, retail, and cruise ships. The team located there will reportedly work on upcoming expansions for Florida’s Walt Disney World resort, including a Latin American section of the Animal Kingdom and a Monsters Inc. area within Hollywood Studios.
Galactic Starcruiser was an immersive hotel experience set in the Star Wars universe, where the minimum stay cost $4,800 for two people over two nights. It opened in March 2022 but ran for just a year and a half, shutting in September 2023. It returned to headlines in May 2024 when YouTuber and theme park superfan Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour video on its “spectacular failure” went viral, amassing 11 million views.
Disney park fans had hoped that the Starcruiser might be repurposed for a new attraction or interactive experience, with reports that Disney was playtesting a multi-hour theatrical dinner set in the hotel’s former lobby. The fact that it requires shuttles to shepherd guests to the hotel site from the rest of the park is one reason that idea might have been deemed unfeasible.
Within hours of the closure, YouTube, which also took action against Beahm in June by demonetizing his account, decided to reinstate the streamer’s ability to make money on Google’s video platform. The decision was made after “careful review of the channel’s recent activity,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told The Verge. “If there are further violations, we’ll take appropriate action.”
Midnight Society was co-founded in 2021 by Beahm, former Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling, and former 343 Industries lead sandbox designer Quinn Delhoyo.
“We are actively seeking other game studios that would be interested in offering employment opportunities to our talented team members,” Midnight Society said in its shutdown announcement on X. “We express our sincere gratitude to each and every one of our community members and deeply sorry we were unable to reach our ultimate goal.”
The “ultimate goal” mentioned in Midnight Society’s departing message was Deadrop — a free-to-play vertical extraction shooter that was initially funded by selling NFTs at the height of the blockchain gaming frenzy. Deadrop was expected to release in 2024, and was the only game being developed by Midnight Society.
When the Minimal Phone was first announced this time last year, you might have been forgiven for thinking it was vaporware. But one year — and many delays — later, the world’s first Android phone with both an E Ink display and a physical QWERTY keyboard has begun shipping to backers.
In broad strokes, the Minimal Phone looks a bit like a BlackBerry, with a wide body and a squat screen perched above its streamlined QWERTY keyboard. We’ve seen phones like this before. What makes it stand out is the screen itself, which is a monochrome E Ink panel at a whopping 600 x 800 resolution.
Despite using E Ink tech, the Minimal Phone runs Android 14, so the only apps you’re giving up are those that really can’t run on the sluggish display and basic hardware — you won’t be popping many headshots in CoD: Mobile, I fear. Access to all your Android apps might put the lie to Minimal Company’s promise of a “distraction-free” phone, but the company suggests that the E Ink panel still “encourages you to use them more mindfully.” On the smartphone-sized Boox Palma e-reader we found most Android apps “just awful to use,” which proved a neat way of removing their temptation to distract, so the company might be right after all.
While the phone is basic in a few other ways — its 16 megapixel camera looks unlikely to impress, and it’s limited to 4G LTE connections — it packs a few unexpected perks too. NFC payments, a fingerprint sensor, and Qi wireless charging are all supported, and the inclusion of dual-SIM support, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and expandable storage ticks off most of the old-school smartphone nerd wishlist.
Originally set to ship to Indiegogo backers in August 2024, the Minimal Phone slipped to September, then December, and finally started heading out last week. The company says it’s shipping phones in the order they were purchased, running “from now until March.” You can also order the phone now for delivery in March, starting at $399, a $100 discount on the official retail price.
Its chief competition comes from TCL, whose Nxtpaper phones deliver a regular Android phone experience with the option to flip a switch and enable an E Ink-like monochrome mode. There’s no physical keyboard though, so unless Clicks keyboard cases expand to fit more phones, the Minimal Phone is the only game in town for those who demand QWERTY and E Ink in the same handset.
Nvidia warned of stock shortages earlier this week, and now its launch of the $1,999 RTX 5090 yesterday is being branded a “paper launch” after people camped outside retailers only to find a handful of cards available, if any at all.
Reddit users have been tracking inventory for RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 cards at Micro Center locations across the US, with some stores opening on Thursday with no RTX 5090 cards at all. The Tustin, California Micro Center store seems to have received the most stock, but other stores reportedly had 10 or less RTX 5090 cards. While Nvidia’s RTX 5080 was a little easier to purchase on launch day, cards rapidly went out of stock at retailers like Best Buy and Amazon.
One Reddit poster claims to have secured an RTX 5090 after three days waiting in line, and others have posted purchase vouchers that were handed out to people in line at a Miami Micro Center. The overwhelming amount of posts are from people complaining about the launch and lack of stock, though.
Gamers Nexus claims that one of the biggest system integrators in the US only received a single RTX 5090 on launch day, before a smaller shipment arrived later in the day. Another big system builder reportedly received no units and third one received 20 RTX 5090s that it sold in pre-built machines in a matter of minutes.
Many retailers are now simply listing preorders for RTX 5090 cards, with Scan in the UK warning that some cards aren’t due in stock until the end of May — four months after the launch date. Naturally, such low stock levels in the face of high demand means there are scalpers selling RTX 5090 cards on eBay for $5,000 or more. YouTuber JayzTwoCents even found an RTX 5090 on sale for $5,800 on Facebook, after he signed the card at the Tustin Micro Center store earlier in the day.
We reached out to Nvidia to comment on the RTX 5090 launch issues, but the company refused to comment beyond its previous warning about stock shortages.
Dr Disrespect — aka Herschel “Guy” Beahm — was one of Twitch’s top streamers until he was suddenly banned in June 2020. Now, we know what happened. As confirmed in a lengthy statement from Beahm himself, he sent private messages on Twitch to a minor that he says “sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate”:
Were there twitch whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017? The answer is yes. Were there real intentions behind these messages, the answer is absolutely not. These were casual, mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more. Nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed, I never even met the individual.
The statement followed former Twitch employees explaining in social media posts and speaking to The Verge about why Twitch suddenly broke things off with Beahm, which was based on the messages he sent using its now-removed Whispers feature.
Google announced Thursday that the Gemini app is getting its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model. The upgraded model “delivers fast responses and stronger performance across a number of key benchmarks, providing everyday help with tasks like brainstorming, learning or writing,” the company said in a post.
The change is rolling out to Gemini’s web and mobile apps and will be available to all users. Google also says that you’ll still be able to use Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro for “the next few weeks.”
The company first introduced Gemini 2.0 in December and promised that it was “working quickly” to get it in its products. At the time, it launched an experimental version of Gemini Flash 2.0 to Gemini users.
On Thursday, Google also said that Gemini’s image generation capabilities now use the newest version of the company’s Imagen 3 AI text-to-image generator. According to Google, the model “delivers richer details and textures” and “follows your instructions with greater accuracy.”
Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbergâs all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired.
âWe take leaks seriously and will take action,â Metaâs chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, said in an internal memo Iâve seen. âWhen information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact. Our teams become demoralized and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and mission.â
Rosen goes on to say that Meta âwill take appropriate action, including terminationâ if it identifies leakers and that âwe recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information inappropriately and exfiltrated sensitive documents.â
During todayâs all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg told employees he would no longer be as transparent due to leaks. âWe try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,â he said. âIt sucks.â
Tensions were high inside Meta ahead of Mark Zuckerbergâs first all-hands meeting of the year.
Employee-submitted questions for the CEO touched on a couple of big themes: concerns about his announcement that âlow-performersâ would be let go on February 10th, his MAGA-fueled changes to Metaâs content moderation policies and DEI programs, and his comment to Joe Rogan about wanting more âmasculine energyâ in the workplace. âAre the changes we’re seeing (in any way) influenced by the new U.S. president?â asked one employee ahead of the internal meeting. âIf so, why are we making changes based on these factors?â
With a lot of the rank and file clearly on edge, Zuckerberg made sure there would be fewer opportunities for drama during todayâs Q&A. Before it started, HR notified employees that âwe will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak.â For the first time, the most upvoted employee questions were no longer ranked for everyone to see and comments were disabled during the livestream.
Before jumping into the Q&A, Zuckerberg addressed the changes head on: âWe try to be really open and then everything I say leaks. It sucks.â
Polestar is building one-of-a-kind versions of its EVs that are ready for whatever the winter brings. The company took the long-range, dual motor versions of its newest vehicles, the Polestar 3 SUV and Polestar 4 coupe (with performance packs), and turned them into rally-style vehicles that can rip through snowy terrain. The company is also resurrecting its Polestar 2 Arctic Circle one-off, which it showed off in 2022, to complete the family.
The specially tuned Polestar 3 and 4 come with newly-released 20-inch white OZ Racing Rally Legend wheels sitting on Pirelli Scorpion Winter 2 tires for cold on-road driving. But when taken onto the snowscape, Pirelli’s Scorpion All Terrian Plus with 300 4-mm studs are used. They also get custom 3-way adjustable dampers with external gas reservoirs.
Although these vehicles are lifted for the snow, it’s not by much. The Polestar 3 is given just 40mm to its ride height, and the Polestar 4 is lifted by just 20mm. But the vehicles do get Rally-style mud flaps, Swedish gold tow hooks, Recaro Pole Position bucket seats, Stedi Quad Pro LED front spotlights, and front strut braces. Polestar also gave the three EVs a coat of yellow paint that, along with the wheels, makes them look like the Mustang Mach-E Rally.
After announcing some new experimental features for YouTube Premium subscribers earlier this month — and that multiple experiments can be tested at once — the company has added one it promised was on the way: the ability to watch videos at 4x speed, as reported by Android Police. I’m personally a 1.5x to 2x sicko when it comes to YouTube videos and podcasts, but 4x is an absolutely blistering speed that’s more apt for skipping past the cruft than consuming info at a faster clip.
4x playback speed (iOS and Android only, until February 26th)
Shorts Smart Downloads (iOS only, until February 19th)
Shorts Picture-in-Picture (iOS only, until February 19th)
High Quality Audio for 256kbps sound (iOS and Android only, until February 22nd)
Jump Ahead Web (for web browsers, until February 5th)
In similar just-get-to-the-point-already fashion, Jump Ahead gives web users a button to automatically skip to “the content they care about faster” instead of carefully scrubbing through a video. But let’s be honest, this will probably be a button to jump past all the intros and other bloat.
The faster playback speed and Jump Ahead features seem the most useful — if you’re already a YouTube Premium subscriber who doesn’t have to sit through ads, the next frontier is skipping through all the cruft. Though higher quality audio is always welcome. And a picture-in-picture mode for Shorts could be convenient, but as was mentioned on a recent Vergecast, why would you want YouTube to automatically fill your phone’s storage with tons of Shorts videos?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed sales figures for the companyâs Ray-Ban smart glasses for the first time, telling employees that over 1 million units were sold in 2024. In remarks during an all-hands meeting seen by The Verge, Zuckerberg posed a question to staff about whether sales would go from 1 million to as much as 5 million units in 2025.
âWe basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet,â Zuckerberg said during the meeting. âI think we’ll probably start seeing some of that maybe a little later this year, maybe next year, but we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity.â
As has become an annual tradition, Apple just reported blockbuster earnings for the company’s most recent holiday quarter. “Today Apple is reporting our best quarter ever, with revenue of $124.3 billion, up four percent from a year ago,” CEO Tim Cook said in a press release. Revenue was up nearly across the board for the company’s Mac, iPad, and services divisions.
But the numbers show a slight dip in year-over-year iPhone revenue, seemingly confirming that Apple Intelligence isn’t doing much to drive iPhone sales. The same goes for that new Camera Control button, I suppose. Cook tried to dismiss the notion that Apple Intelligence isn’t compelling people to upgrade in an interview with CNBC. “During the December quarter, we saw that in markets where we had rolled out Apple intelligence, that the year-over-year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those markets where we had not rolled out Apple intelligence,” he said.
The standard iPhone 16 models are a particularly excellent value this year, which isn’t always the case. So that could also factor into the slightly lower revenue if fewer people are opting for the Pro variants.
This tends to be Apple’s most crucial quarter of the year for two reasons. It includes the all-important holiday shopping season, and since the iPhone 16 lineup was on sale for the entire three-month duration, this is our best indication yet of demand for Apple’s latest phones. The company also released several new Macs near the end of last year including a redesigned, much smaller Mac Mini and refreshed MacBook Pros. Revenue for Apple’s wearables business, which includes the Apple Watch and AirPods, was also slightly down compared to the year-ago quarter.
The company isn’t in great shape despite the staunched bleeding, as its primary businesses were all down this quarter and barely up over the full year (see table below). And if you thought its chipmaking foundries were spending too much back when they lost $7 billion in 2023, well, Intel just revealed the foundries lost nearly double that — $13.4 billion — across 2024.
Today on the earnings call, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus didn’t commit to either keeping or spinning out the foundries, but hinted that “Intel Foundry will need to earn my business every day, just as I need to earn the business of my customers.” Either way, she seems to see them as a pair: “A stronger Intel Products combined with a more competitive Intel Foundry is a recipe for success overall.” Interim co-CEO David Zinsner says building that competitive foundry is still the goal.
Intel says its foundry business is doing better anyhow, with reduced losses of $2.3 billion last quarter, expected “financial improvements” coming next year as it ramps production of its extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) chips, and a plan to hit “op inc break-even” by the end of 2027. Intel was also the largest recipient of the CHIPS Act, though that amounted to single-digit billions worth of government funding for its foundries: $7.68 billion, of which it’s received $2.2 billion so far.
Intel says its all-important 18A process, which uses EUV, will produce chips in volume in the second half of next year. (That’s when Panther Lake, the successor to its Lunar Lake laptop chips, will arrive.) But a follow-on chip, Nova Lake, sounds like it’ll be a mix of Intel and non-Intel manufacturing. “You’ll actually see compute tiles inside and outside again, it’s about optimizing to what allows us to win in the market,” says Holthaus on the call.
Intel is also hurting in the great race for AI chips, with its Gaudi far behind Gelsinger’s goals, and Holthaus admits the company’s not doing well in the AI data center. “I am not happy with where we are today,” she said on the call, admitted that “we’re not yet participating in the cloud-based AI data center market in a meaningful way.”
To help speed things up, she says Intel is canceling its next big AI chip, codename Falcon Shores, and keeping it “as an internal test chip only without bringing it to market.” She says the plan is to “simplify our roadmap and concentrate our resources.” The company will focus on Jaguar Shores, a “system-level solution at rack scale,” instead, with the goal of building that entire solution rather than just the chips.
She also hinted that Intel might aim to be less pricy than the Nvidia AI competition, with the “most compelling total cost of ownership,” similar to what we’d heard from AMD.
Overall, Holthaus says she thinks about Intel’s future products in “three buckets”: client and edge, traditional data center, and AI data center, and she plans to simplify Intel’s business as a result. “We cannot be all things to all people,” she says. “We are prioritizing areas where we can drive differentiated value.” Within its core businesses, though, Holthaus says the company will “fight for every socket” where an Intel chip can go.
“We need to be aggressive, we need to win share, and we need to show our customers they can win with us,” says Holthaus.
Over the full year, Intel lost $18.76 billion on $53.1 billion in revenue. Intel says it has nothing new to share about the search for a permanent CEO, save that the search is progressing. Meanwhile, the company seems to be laying off just as many employees as promised: by the end of 2024, it had 15,000 fewer employees than it did the previous quarter, the company confirmed today.
Amazon has raised the price of its Music Unlimited service in the US, Canada, and the UK, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. In an update on its website, Amazon says it’s raising the price for Prime members from $9.99 to $10.99 per month (or $99 to $109 / year), while the plan for non-Prime members is going from $10.99 to $11.99 per month.
The Unlimited Family Plan, which lets up to six people listen to music at the same time, is also increasing from $16.99 to $19.99 per month (or $169 to $199 / year). The price change went into effect for new subscribers on January 29th, 2025, while existing customers will have to pay the updated pricing when their subscription renews, or on or after March 5th, 2025.
There’s more good stuff to watch than ever — if you can afford it. | Image: Amazon
Death. Taxes. All your streaming services getting a little more expensive all the time. These are the new certainties in life, it seems.
In recent years, as the streaming TV and movie business has gotten more competitive and companies around Hollywood have thrown billions into building their own platforms and libraries in order to compete with Netflix, participating in the streaming era has gotten steadily more expensive. Netflix has raised the cost of its subscription multiple times since its launch. Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus have all gotten more expensive as Disney has invested more in streaming. Paramount Plus, Peacock, Shudder, Starz — practically any service you can name — charges more per month than it did a few years ago. Even as many of these services add ads to their platforms, they’re still charging more.
What’s behind all this wallet-raiding? A confluence of things. As more customers cancel cable, more quickly than anyone expected, the studios and distributors are looking for a way to make up the lost revenue. Good shows and movies are more in demand — and thus more expensive — than ever. And after a decade of spending money like it was going out of style because all investors cared about were subscriber numbers, Hollywood players of all sizes have found themselves needing to actually make money to stay in business.
Companies are looking for any way they can to improve their bottom line. They’re cracking down on password sharing, canceling shows for the tax breaks, and even selling their prized content to other platforms. But the most common strategy is simply to charge you, the viewer, more. A dollar here, two dollars there. Add it all up, and the golden era of TV suddenly has a pretty startling ticket price.
We’re tracking all the price increases and other changes from streaming services so you can make sure you’re only paying for what you want. (We’ll also include discounts and deals, though those seem to happen less and less.) Here’s the latest:
Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr has ordered investigations into NPR and PBS with the goal of slashing the money given to the government-funded organizations, TheNew York Times reports.
The investigations are ostensibly about PBS and NPR’s member stations’ sponsorships, according to a letter from Carr obtained by the Times. “I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” the letter reads. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.” Both PBS and NPR’s chief executives told the Times that their advertising complies with the FCC’s underwriting regulations.
“To the extent that taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” the letter continues, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”
Carr is already facing pushback. In an emailed statement to The Verge, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the investigation is “yet another Administration effort to weaponize the power of the FCC. The FCC has no business intimidating and silencing broadcast media.”
Carr’s move is in line with other Trump administration efforts to cut funding for public goods and services. Carr — who Trump appointed to the commission in 2017 — wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. While Carr’s chapter largely focused on using the commission to rein in big tech, a separate chapter on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called for cutting off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded nonprofit that supports PBS and NPR. The document, written by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, called out public media’s “demonstrated pattern of bias” against conservatives.
The Heritage Foundation is by no means the only conservative organization to target with NPR. The public radio station and its local affiliates have long been targets of the right. Most recently, in 2024, on the heels of his successful ouster of Harvard president Claudine Gay, right-wing strategist Chris Rufo launched a “campaign to expose” NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s “anti-speech, anti-truth philosophy.” As writer Renee DiResta pointed out, Rufo’s beef with Maher began with an essay by now-former NPR editor Uri Berliner published in the Free Press about how his employer had gone woke. Rufo then accused Maher of “following the Claudine Gay playbook,” and published two posts about Maher in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s in-house magazine — including one in which he implied Maher was a CIA asset.
Update, January 30th: Added comment from FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez.
