The Brief

The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech.

The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, is focused on applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, which are frequently used by tech companies, among other sectors. The memo was first reported by Reuters; NPR also obtained a copy.

"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" for a visa, the memo says. It refers to a policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May restricting visas from being issued to "foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans."

The Trump administration has been highly critical of tech companies' efforts to police what people are allowed to post on their platforms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech industry's term for teams that focus on preventing abuse, fraud, illegal content, and other harmful behavior online.

President Trump was banned from multiple social media platforms in the aftermath of his supporters' attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the president and members of his administration frequently cite that experience as evidence for their claims that tech companies unfairly target conservatives — even as many tech leaders have eased their policies in the face of that backlash.

Tuesday's memo calls out H-1B visa applicants in particular "as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression."

It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

"I'm alarmed that trust and safety work is being conflated with 'censorship'," said Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at tech companies including OpenAI and Grindr.

"Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it," she said. "Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it's so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer."

In a statement, a State Department spokesperson who declined to give their name said the department does not comment on "allegedly leaked documents," but added: "the Administration has made clear that it defends Americans' freedom of expression against foreigners who wish to censor them. We do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans."

The statement continued: "In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people."

First Amendment experts criticized the memo's guidance as itself a potential violation of free speech rights.

"People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren't engaged in 'censorship'— they're engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional," said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement.

Even as the administration has targeted those it claims are engaged in censoring Americans, it has also tightened its own scrutiny of visa applicants' online speech.

On Wednesday, the State Department announced it would require H-1B visa applicants and their dependents to set their social media profiles to "public" so they can be reviewed by U.S. officials.

NPR's Bobby Allyn and Michele Kelemen contributed reporting.
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The Los Angeles Unified School District, among other districts, has called on the state to help mitigate financial challenges for projects. And despite some help, they’re still anticipating deficits beginning in the 2027-28 academic year.

For its June general, unrestricted budget, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $1.351 billion for the 2027-28 academic year, according to a presentation Tuesday at the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting. That’s taking the updated cost-of-living adjustment from the governor’s May revision into account. But with possible additional May revision revenue, that deficit could drop to $514 million.

For the 2028-29 academic year, LAUSD is projecting a deficit of $3.581 billion compared with $2.534 billion after accounting for additional revenue from the May revision.

“I want to kind of take us back to a couple of weeks ago when some of us were in Sacramento marshaling some advocacy to various elected officials, the governor’s office themselves,” said acting LAUSD Superintendent Andrés Chait on Tuesday. “I want to mark that I do think that some of the movement that we saw in the May revise can be attributed to the advocacy that folks that are sitting here and that we partnered with vis-a-vis labor really did move the needle, as it were.”

The district’s budget also takes into account agreements reached last month with three unions that will cost $1.2 billion annually.

“We’re not in a place necessarily where we’d like to be. I continue to be concerned about the almost $4 billion that is being withheld in terms of Prop 98,” Chait said. “Those are dollars that are for today’s kids, and therefore should be allocated today, so that they can go out and serve our schools as needed. So, there is still a significant amount of advocacy to come.”

To Spencer Pratt and his supporters, becoming mayor of Los Angeles first means winning the internet.

Pratt has amplified outlandish artificial intelligence videos, including one depicting lightsaber duels between him and the city's current mayor, Karen Bass, and another where he's portrayed as Batman descending on a burning Los Angeles to save the day; his campaign has tapped an army of freelance "clippers" to edit short social media snippets of him bashing the city's leaders; and he talks about nonexistent "super meth" plaguing the city's streets and pushed false narratives about California lawmakers' response to the Palisades Fire.

A screenshot of a artificial intelligence video created by a supporter of Spencer Pratt.

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Charlie Curran via Twitter

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It's perhaps no surprise that the 42-year-old former villain of the reality television show "The Hills" knows how to work the attention economy, but he's doing so by borrowing the combative and mocking style of politics popular in fringe online forums and celebrated by allies of President Trump.

"He's probably the most Trumpian candidate we've ever seen in terms of house style," said Steve Bannon, Trump's former top adviser. "Trump's superpower was bringing in people into politics who hate politics, and that's what he's doing online right now."

Pratt's internet antics are up against long odds.

On June 2, Angelenos will go to the polls for the city's "jungle primary," a nonpartisan contest where Pratt, a Republican, will face off against Democratic incumbent Bass and progressive council member Nithya Raman.

If any candidate surpasses 50% of the vote, that person becomes mayor. If nobody does, the top two vote getters compete in a November runoff. Polls show Pratt and Raman neck and neck, with Bass commanding a comfortable lead.

Yet Pratt is harnessing the web to shake things up.

He has leapt into the usually more mundane world of municipal politics with brash and extreme rhetoric, taking to TikTok, with direct-to-camera videos condemning Bass' response to the devastating Pacific Palisades wildfires that claimed his family's home. He describes Bass as "the mayor who let the town burn down."

Pratt has also blamed city leaders with enabling the deterioration of city residents' quality of life, or, as he puts it on TikTok, "a city battered by fires, homelessness and crime," a framing that would sound familiar to anyone watching right-wing influencers and streamers.

Pratt says, without evidence, that "socialists in LA city government are stealing your money." He denigrates the city's homeless as fentanyl-addled "zombies." And he has promised to clear out encampments by mass-arresting people living on the streets.

He's accused Bass and Raman of "running a grift with the Homeless Industrial Complex," a vague and unsubstantiated claim aimed at whipping up his fans online, according to Dan Cassino, a professor of government at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies masculinity and politics.

"These are the sorts of things that play very well in red-pilled forums where there's this idea that everyone is in control of their lives and 'we need to embrace hard truths out there that they won't teach you in school,'" he said.

Pratt's endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, Cassino said, is proof of Pratt's credibility in the manosphere, the bro-friendly world of male influencers who wage war against polite society.

"Focusing on this audience is a way to target young men," Cassino said. "Just as Trump did in 2024, and now we see Spencer Pratt doing the same thing."

Former LA councilmember: 'Winning the internet' doesn't equal an election win

Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin has been watching Pratt's campaign morph from unserious long-shot to top three contender.

Pratt had a megaphone of millions of social media followers before he ran for public office. That has helped supercharge the spread of the AI slop videos his fans have made. So has Elon Musk's repeated re-sharing and replies to Pratt's content on X, the platform the tech mogul owns, to his 240 million followers.

When Pratt wants his incendiary campaign messages and AI content to spread even farther, conservative influencers like Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Benny Johnson are at the ready, commenting and reposting to juice Pratt's reach.

"Winning the internet is not the same thing as winning the election, but it can help," said Bonin, who now directs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.

Spencer Pratt often turns to TikTok to promote his candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles.

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TikTok

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He points to how the kinetic digital campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani inundated Instagram Reels and TikTok with videos showing how natural and conversant he was with the format.

More close to home, Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia won his 2022 election using his two corgis on billboards and in social media videos as a way of appealing to those terminally online.

The difference with Pratt, Bonin said, is that he's using the leverage of the well-oiled right-wing online media machine.

"Unlike left-leaning candidates, right-leaning candidates come into an internet ecosystem that is well-practiced in promoting itself through its various networks," he said.

Also giving a signal boost, Bonin said, was the launch of California Post, a West Coast edition of conservative New York Post owned by Rupert Murdoch, around the same time Pratt launched his campaign. The outlet has "been reinforcing the supposed dystopian crisis Los Angeles has been living through, and that is a big part of Pratt's narrative," Bonin said.

Pratt and his campaign did not return requests for an interview. Bass did not offer any comment.

Raman, through a spokesman, dismissed Pratt's online tactics, saying the AI slop videos show how out of touch he is with something that's an existential concern to the city's entertainment industry.

"Hollywood jobs are being devastated by AI, meanwhile Spencer Pratt is using his platform to promote AI-generated content amplifying the very technology replacing the workers he claims to care about," Raman said in a statement. "Our videos are made by working film and television professionals who believe Los Angeles can be better."

The MAGA tightrope walk

There are two ways to respond to this: Try to meet Pratt on his level, or don't participate at all.

Cassino, the government professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said Raman and Bass are taking "the Rose Garden strategy" by not trying to match the intensity and absurdity of Pratt's online campaign, which he said is probably politically wise.

"He's more chronically online than they are. He has fans who generate this stuff for him in a way that they don't, so any attempt for them to do this will make them look inauthentic," he said.

It is difficult to gauge how much of Pratt's content and rage-baiting is coming across the social media feeds of Los Angeles voters, but, at least on X, he's been praised as the candidate who is the most "anti-woke" and "based," internet slang for being unapologetically one's self and unafraid of offending others.

His favorite pejorative for Bass is "Karen Basura," which is Spanish for trash. And he calls the mayor's supporters "Bassholes" — cruel, bully-like language that Cassino said is catering to young men online.

"If people are voting for Spencer Pratt because they think it's funny versus because they seriously want him to be mayor, the vote still counts," Cassino said.

However it is resonating or not with voters, Pratt is not slowing his inflammatory language and pugnacious tone.

It's a posture being lapped up by the online MAGA sphere. It also represents the new template for right-wing political candidates, both national and local, Bannon added.

"Pratt knows it's not politics, it's drama," said Bannon, who was a Hollywood financier before he got into politics. "He's got a warrior mentality."

If Bannon found any criticism of Pratt's campaign, it would be Pratt's shameless promotion of AI slop.

A fierce critic of Silicon Valley, Bannon said the videos are entertaining, but they risk turning off voters who can see them as trivializing the race, not to mention how the internet is already glutted with AI junk and fakes.

"On the AI slop, he's one inch away from jumping the shark," Bannon said. "It can be effective, but it's starting to get tiresome, and it could backfire if you promote it too much."

Internet notoriety, though, cannot dislodge one fact about Los Angeles: Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, presenting Pratt with a serious challenge if he advances to the November runoff.

Trump on Wednesday signaled support for Pratt. The mayoral hopeful did not immediately blast this out to his social media followers.

And that's because, while Pratt is a registered Republican, he has tried to separate himself from the MAGA movement and has repeatedly highlighted how the mayor's race in Los Angeles is nonpartisan.

It's a tightrope walk that Bannon, one of the chief architects of the MAGA movement, is keenly attuned to as he offers conditional praise for Pratt.

"Tell him I would endorse him," Bannon said. "But I don't want to hurt his chances of winning in LA."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from a violent mob on Jan. 6, 2021, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Trump administration, arguing that the newly-announced $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" is both illegal and dangerous. At the same time, former Jan. 6 defendants are already preparing their applications to the fund and anticipating major payouts.

The Justice Department has indicated that the fund will be used to compensate an unspecified group of people "who suffered weaponization and lawfare" under previous presidential administrations. It is widely expected that at least some of the money will go to Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, and later received presidential pardons.

Facing questions from members of Congress and reporters, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Vice President JD Vance did not rule out payments to Jan. 6 rioters convicted of violent crimes against police officers.

"We're not making commitments to give anybody money," Vance said Tuesday at the White House. "We're just making commitments to look at things case by case."

A screenshot of a video showing D.C. Metropolitan police officer Daniel Hodges being attacked at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia

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Daniel Hodges, a Washington, D.C., police officer who was repeatedly assaulted and crushed in a door frame by Jan. 6 rioters, is one of the plaintiffs seeking to block the fund.

"Why would you pay people who attacked the police at the Capitol of the United States who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power?" Hodges told NPR. "Why would you pay people who wanted to assassinate the vice president? You know, the list goes on and on. It doesn't make any sense."

Hodges said he and other officers who defended the Capitol continue to receive death threats, and that giving money to the people convicted of assaulting police could feed further harassment and violence.

"If they get this payout, then they'll have significant financial resources," Hodges said, "and they have no ethical qualms about it, so what would stop them from carrying out any more violence?"

Hodges continues to serve on Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department and spoke to NPR in his personal capacity.

Former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn joined the lawsuit, which names acting Attorney General Blanche, as well as President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as defendants.

Dunn and Hodges are represented by Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases and now leads the anti-corruption group Public Integrity Project.

Former Department of Justice Special Counsel Brendan Ballou speaks during a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Capitol Hill on Jan. 7.

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"The Trump slush fund is potentially the most corrupt act of presidential power in American history," Ballou told NPR.

The lawsuit targets the unusual way in which the fund was created. Trump sued the federal government — of which he is the head — for $10 billion over the IRS leak of his private tax records, and then created this fund as part of a settlement over the claim.

"Donald Trump was functionally on both sides of the case," Ballou said.

The lawsuit also notes that Trump's mass pardons restored gun rights for many Jan. 6 defendants. The "Anti-Weaponization Fund," Ballou argues, could also provide them with a major financial windfall.

"They can get money, they can get guns," Ballou said. "And right now they have the endorsement of the president showing that they will be financially rewarded for their violence."

Rioters expect to be 'rewarded'

Jake Lang used a bat to attack police protecting the Capitol on Jan. 6. His trial for assault and other charges was pending when Trump ordered the case dismissed and released him from jail.

Lang does not dispute that he used the bat against police, but argues that his actions were justified as self-defense, because he believed that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Since his release from jail, he has become a white power, anti-immigrant, antisemitic and anti-Muslim activist and provocateur. He has been recorded on video using racist slurs, including the n-word, and giving a Nazi salute.

When contacted by NPR for comment on Wednesday, Lang answered the phone by saying, "Jake Lang's office, America's newest billionaire."

Lang said he was joking about becoming a billionaire, but confirmed that he plans to apply for compensation through the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" and expects other Jan. 6 defendants to do the same.

"The misdemeanor cases should be looking to receive several hundred thousand dollars," Lang said, "and some of the cases like mine may be looking at upwards of a million dollars."

Lang said Trump's message in establishing the fund was clear.

"If you sacrifice for your country, if you do the right thing in the face of evil, you will be rewarded for your bravery, for your patriotism, for the love of your country," Lang said. "That's the message President Trump is sending."

Jake Lang (right), who was charged with eight counts of assaulting officers before his pardon, threatens D.C. Metropolitan Police officer, including Commander Jason Bagshaw (left), during a Jan. 6 rally and memorial march marking five years since the attack on Jan. 6, 2026 in Washington, D.C.

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If Lang receives compensation from the Trump administration, the money could go towards his legal expenses. He is currently facing criminal charges in Minnesota, where he was recorded knocking down an ice sculpture protesting federal immigration enforcement, and in Washington, D.C., where he was charged with threatening a police officer. Lang has denied all wrongdoing in both cases.

Using 'Trump bucks' as hush money

Lang is one of dozens of former Jan. 6 defendants who have been charged or convicted of additional crimes since Trump issued mass pardons to the rioters.

In Florida, defendant Andrew Paul Johnson is currently serving a life sentence in prison for sexually abusing two young children. According to a police affidavit filed last year, Johnson told his victims that he would share a portion of restitution money that he expected to receive from the Trump Administration. "This tactic was believed to be used to keep [the victim] from exposing what Andrew had done to him," the affidavit said.

Andrew Paul Johnson was sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing children. He received a full pardon from President Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot.

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Hernando County Sheriff's Office

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The mother of one of the victims, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her child's privacy, told NPR that Johnson told the children he would buy them things with "my Trump bucks."

Johnson made those comments well before the announcement of the "Anti-Weaponization Fund," but at a time when some Trump Justice Department officials, including U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, were publicly discussing restitution for Jan. 6 defendants.

"He said not to tell anybody," one of Johnson's victims testified at his trial.

"We were scared," Johnson's other victim testified. "Like, we didn't realize that this stuff was not okay because we were 12 years old."

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., pressed Blanche about Johnson's case at a congressional committee hearing.

Blanche said the facts of the case were "disgusting" and "it's horrible that that happened."

But he did not state whether Johnson would be eligible to apply for compensation through the "Anti-Weaponization Fund."

Speaking at the White House, Vance said that law schools and the media are biased against Jan. 6 rioters and Trump supporters compared with other criminal defendants.

"There are people who objectively committed heinous crimes, but the American media and the American legal academy has decided that even though they committed bad crimes, their sentence was disproportionate — they were mistreated in some way," Vance said. "You know who never ever gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to that disproportionate sentencing is people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the Jan. 6 protest."

According to NPR's database of the nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 criminal cases, the median prison sentence for Capitol riot defendants was 30 days. About a third of the rioters who went through sentencing received no jail time.
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