He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.; The Washington Post, February 20, 2026

Drew Harwell , The Washington Post; He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.

A Nashville comedian’s deportation hotline, set up as a joke, has gone viral among viewers who say it shows the “banality of evil personified.”

"Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.

Then in January of last year, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.

Instead, his tip line has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

"I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”...

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said it was “aware of a fraudulent YouTube page falsely representing ICE” and that the agency “strongly [condemns] any actions intended to mislead the public or impersonate official government entities.

But neither Palmer nor the websites claim to represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)"

Elon Musk’s 2025 recap: how the world’s richest person became its most chaotic; The Guardian, December 31, 3025

Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr, The Guardian; Elon Musk’s 2025 recap: how the world’s richest person became its most chaotic

"One of Musk’s final feuds of the year came from a more unusual source – famed 87-year-old author Joyce Carol Oates, whose cutting observation about him on X received more than 5.6m views.

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,” Oates posted in November.

A day later, after Musk made a show of enthusiastically replying to several clips of movies on X, he responded to Oates’s critique.

“Oates is a liar and delights in being mean,” Musk posted. “Not a good human.”"

A Reality Show Where Immigrants Compete for U.S. Citizenship? D.H.S. Is Considering It.; The New York Times, May 16, 2025

Hamed Aleaziz , The New York Times; A Reality Show Where Immigrants Compete for U.S. Citizenship? D.H.S. Is Considering It.

[Kip Currier: The idea of dangling the possibility of becoming a U.S. citizen by putting fellow human beings through a competition like this is beyond appalling. Shame on all those who even considered and are talking about this as a way to normalize depravity and exploitative spectacle.

We need government officials -- and fellow citizens -- who uphold human dignity and live by the core values of empathy, decency, and care for the well-being of every person, especially those at the margins of society.]

[Excerpt]

"The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television show that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges to get American citizenship, officials said on Friday.

The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said the department was still reviewing the idea, which was pitched by a producer named Rob Worsoff.

“The pitch generally was a celebration of being an American and what a privilege it is to be able to be a citizen of the United States of America,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “It’s important to revive civic duty.”"

How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?; Guardian, 4/22/16

Katharine Viner, Guardian; How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation? :

"Last year, a few weeks before I started as the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I read a review in the New York Times of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The book looks at the emergence of public humiliations on social media, and the review ended by saying that “the actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats”. Since I was about to become the first woman to run the Guardian (not, sad to say, a bazillion-dollar internet company), I decided that I had a responsibility to try to do something about it.

That’s why, over the past two weeks, the Guardian has published a series of articles looking at online abuse, with more to follow in the coming months. You might have read our interview with Monica Lewinsky in which she described the trauma of being subjected to what could be called the first great internet shaming, and how she still has to think of the consequences of talking about her past – whether by misspeaking, she could trigger a whole new round of abuse.

Lewinsky’s experience has prompted her to tackle online harassment head on: she is now a respected anti-bullying advocate. But as we’ve considered online abuse in all its forms – the rape and death threats, the sexist, racist and ad hominem attacks, the widespread lack of empathy – it has become clear that some of the institutions that most need to follow Lewinsky’s lead are not; that police and tech companies are failing to keep on top of the problem, and victims are being abandoned to their abusers.

We’ve called our series the Web We Want. It’s an attempt to imagine what the digital world could and should be: a public space that reflects our humanity, our civility and who we want to be. It asks big questions of all of us: as platform providers, as users and readers, as people who write things online that they would never say in real life."