Ever Josue Figueroa, Ph.D.

L.A. TACO Investigative Journalism Fund By L.A. TACO

We're at 55% of our $25,000 goal to help me launch @lataco.bsky.social investigative news desk. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed or shared our fundraiser! We're already putting the money we've raised to use 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Donate here - givebutter.com/la-taco-inve...

My name is Marisa Kabas, and I'm an independent journalist who publishes The Handbasket. I'm reaching out about a matter that involves your team and that continues to trouble me. In June of last year, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan Police Department to compel them to release body camera footage from the March 17, 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace. What followed was months of back and forth with their lawyers, arguing why it was in the public interest to release the un-redacted footage in its entirety. Though tiny segments were handed over, that wasn't enough: We wanted all of it.  On February 18, 2026, a DC judge ruled in our favor, and your reporter Mark Segraves sent a kind note of congratulations that day. Then on Monday, March 2nd, the footage was handed over to me and excitedly announced I'd received it and would be reviewing it in the coming days and sharing what I learned. When Segraves emailed me this past Thursday asking for my phone number, I didn't think much of it. But when he called me just before 2pm on Friday to let me know NBC4 Washington would be airing a segment at 5pm, I grew concerned.  Segraves said he'd obtained some of the footage via a FOIA request that week after he heard the footage had been released to me. He said he'd credit the work of RCFP and me, but it was little comfort. I asked if he'd known the day before when he emailed me for my number, why didn't he tell me then? He didn't have a good answer for that. He acknowledged all the hard work I'd done getting this footage released. I asked him if he could hold the story until Monday, to which he replied that he's "not just a blogger" (implying that that's all I am, presumably) and that he'd have to check with his editor. I said fine. Nearly an hour later he called back to say his editor refused to hold the story, but that they were happy to interview me via Zoom to add to the package, and I said I would.

What followed was two hours of furiously writing and posting clips of the footage to Youtube so I could get something published before the 5pm broadcast, and in the midst of that, recording a quick Zoom interview with a person who was about to take credit for my work. At 4:59pm ET, The Handbasket published a piece titled "Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid." Then I tuned into NBC4 Washington via your website to catch the broadcast, and my instinct to rush to get something out first was proven right.  "It's a story you're seeing first on News4," your newscast began. "For the first time we're getting an inside look at what happened the day the Trump administration took over the US Institute of Peace. News4 obtained more than four hours of police body camera video from that day." What followed was more than six minutes of clips and commentary from Segraves, but it's not until six minutes and 21 seconds into the piece that he mentions my name (mispronounced though he asked for the correct pronunciation on Zoom), "The Handbasket blog," and the RCFP's foundational role in bringing this footage to light. I was angry, but didn't feel there was much I could do. Then I saw the version NBC4 posted to Instagram and TikTok—the video itself made ZERO mention of the RCFP or my work, only briefly acknowledging it in the written caption on Instagram, and not even bothering to do that on TikTok. An average viewer with no background on the case is lead to believe that this footage was released because of your efforts. When I saw that, I decided I couldn't let this go. It's difficult to explain what it's like to spend nearly a year working on a story only to have another reporter and outlet surreptitiously take credit for it; months of work and personal risk only to have another reporter lying in wait to swoop in. What NBC4 did was immoral, unethical, and to be frank, just truly sucked.

I just sent this email to the news director at NBC4 Washington about the unprofessional and disrespectful way they handled publishing the body camera footage of the DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace that was obtained via my FOIA lawsuit:

It’s not disingenuous to point out that the NYT did not run a single front page story of the Minab bombing. You don’t dispute this claim because it’s true. And the story that you reference on your webpage does not attribute blame to US/Israel and frames it as an allegation by “Iranian state media”

I think one of the things that bothers me the most about the way Polymarket presents itself to the world is that it's adopted the language of journalism to make itself sound more legitimate. Like look at this post from yesterday morning incorrectly "projecting" the winner.

She has said exactly one line of dialogue on screen, what the fuck are we doing here

I know many of you already know this because it’s obvious but you can absolutely take a survey of an opinion desk’s output over time and pretty accurately surmise the views—or at least the intentions—of the people who are in charge of deciding what gets published. I thought we were all adults here

Thomas L. Friedman, columnist at The New York Times "D-Day" by Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, March 19, 2003: But here we are, going to war, basically alone, in the face of opposition, not so much from "the Arab Street,' but from "the World Street." Everyone wishes it were different, but it's too late -- which is why this column will henceforth focus on how to turn these lemons into lemonade. Our children's future hinges on doing this right, even if we got here wrong. The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become "self-legitimating" when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out.

Thomas L. Friedman on The Charlie Rose Show, May 29, 2003: What they [Islamic extremists] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house-from Basra to Baghdad-and basically saying: Which part of this sentence don't you understand?: You don't think we care about our open society? You think this [terrorism] fantasy [you have]-we're just gonna let it grow? Well, suck. on. this. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia....We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Again, I wrote about this three years ago. Here's what Thomas Friedman had to say about Iraq in 2003. Now he's writing a piece for NYT saying this new war might be a good thing. www.readtpa.com/p/where-are-...

The secretive company filling video game sites with gambling and AI
aftermath.site/gameshub-click...

News outlets do not only publish op-eds like this. They frequently publish op-eds that are outside the mainstream set of opinions in an attempt to shift the Overton window of acceptable policy in one direction or another. Easy to demonstrate on e.g. NYT push for anti-trans stuff

Remember what I said about how, when Trump is flailing, they start inserting a fake, fictional Trump into their stories, who is acting rationally and sanely?

Media Matters analyzed a year of NYT coverage of anti-trans bills and found that 66% of the time the paper didn't quote a trans person. Further, it found that the paper often quoted right wing sources without mentioning their histories of anti-trans rhetoric.
So "right-wing rag" is pretty accurate.

The type of enshittification I'm actually on board for.

I found that this is wrong. Democracy actually is a powerful motivating force for a critical slice of the population *if they perceive a real threat*.

I call this the "legibility" theory of democratic backsliding: the more legible the threat, the more likely it is to prompt effective pushback.

How to stop a dictator I spent months studying how authoritarians like Trump lose. The answer is shockingly simple.

I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders.

I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward

THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...

Going to the White House isn't political, says the guy who let the FBIs very own Make A Wish kid chug a beer with them in the locker room while the President called on speakerphone to shit on the Women's Team

The only way you can think AI does lit reviews better is if you’re not interested in making an intellectual argument or building theory … which uh, is pretty key to the advancement of knowledge

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is again flooding the airwaves and social media with snappy videos of himself in a custom Carhartt jacket, warning New Yorkers to stay safe. He is again holding news conferences at the city’s emergency operations headquarters, surrounded by top aides in outerwear bearing agency emblems. And he is again at the helm of a government operation that, by virtue of its complexity and general unwieldiness, can lend itself to people falling through the cracks.

The tone of contempt here, in a news update, is disgraceful. "How dare Mamdani and his team...uh...wear those clothes and use social media to try to prevent bad things from happening when...um...bad things could still happen in a situation like this!" GTFO.

the journalistic instinct to not let someone talk shit about capital lmao

Please shoot me.

One of my least favorite things around AI in video games is when these LLM idiots try to say that "AI has been in video games for decades," as if the routines that tell ghosts to chase Pac-Man are exactly the same as the chat bot claiming there are nine Rs in strawberry.

Now that the tariffs are gone the DOW Jones is definitely going to go over 50,000.

SC could have enjoined the obviously unconstitutional tariff policy a year ago.

Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance.

And you know why?

Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.

So it turns out we didn’t need to comply in advance.

But Roski wasn’t the only NBA stakeholder warehouse linked to eventual migrant detention centers. eyeblack identified four NBA teams — the Atlanta Hawks, Sacramento Kings, Charlotte Hornets, and Minnesota Timberwolves — with minority ownership directly linked to profiting from the federal government’s ICE-run mega jail shopping spree.

Minority owners of FOUR NBA teams are profiting directly from business deals with the DHS concentration camp industrial complex.

Those teams are Atlanta, Sacramento, Charlotte, and Minnesota.

www.readeyeblack.com/p/an-nba-inv...

Can't "move past the blank page" on your research?

Maybe you shouldn't be a researcher.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.