Choked-up Trump Voter Regrets His Vote After ICE Locks up His Fiancée

The FCC blesses more media consolidation and AI just designed a virus from scratch

Good afternoon. I’m John Byrne, and this is AlterNet America.

A 75-year-old Texas Republican who owns more than 1,000 billboards now compares ICE to the Gestapo after agents seized his fiancée at a Houston airport. The FCC voted 2-1 to scrap a 22-year-old cap on how much of the country a single broadcaster can reach. Stanford researchers used AI to design 16 functioning viruses from scratch. And Vice President JD Vance responded to a critic’s Iran column by calling him fat and telling him to lay off the burritos.

Before we get to the news, we’d like to sincerely thank our paying subscribers. Because of you, we’re able to prove that it’s possible to build a people-powered media outlet where no billionaire owner or corporate parent can silence accountability reporting. Because of you, we’re able to bring you more on-the-ground reporting and live interviews with experts giving you the inside perspectives you’ll never get from David Ellison’s CBS or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. Democracy needs independent journalism to survive, and independent journalism’s survival depends on ordinary people collectively deciding that it’s important enough to fund. Thank you again.

If you’re reading us on a free subscription, we’re glad to have you here. And we hope this newsletter will be what convinces you to upgrade to a paying membership. The billionaires snuffing out local newspapers one by one are counting on you to do nothing. Raw America is aiming to prove them all wrong. Subscribe, chip in, and help us keep building the people-powered news outlet required in times like these.

A Lifelong Republican Voted for Trump. Then ICE Took His Fiancée.

It turns out the fastest way to change a 75-year-old Republican’s mind about immigration is to point eight ICE agents at the woman he loves.

John Gannon owns more than 1,000 U.S. billboards and spent a lifetime voting for the GOP. On July 24, he and his 45-year-old fiancée, Yasmin Suarez Reyes, were headed to a Las Vegas convention when eight plainclothes agents surrounded her at Houston’s international airport and took her away without explanation.

Weeks later, she is still held at a Texas processing center.

By her attorney’s account, Suarez Reyes did everything the law asked. A Venezuelan-born Spanish citizen, she entered legally under the Visa Waiver Program in 2023, filed for asylum before her stay lapsed, and holds a work permit and a Texas driver’s license with no criminal record. Her case is still pending. ICE moved to deport her anyway because her original entry permission expired.

Her lawyer, Anne Kennedy, is also a lifelong Republican.

Gannon told CBS News he feels “totally betrayed.” His disillusionment lands as ICE pushes arrests at airports, a tactic that drove detentions to a second-term monthly high in July.

Asked what he’d say to Trump, he wondered aloud what the president was doing. Then his voice broke. “Yasmin’s good as gold,” he protested.

He said it would be the last time he ever voted for the man. He called it a fiasco. He called it the Gestapo.

The FCC Just Deleted the Rule That Kept One Company From Owning Your TV

No one would dream of limiting the reach of YouTube or Amazon, and now, thanks to the FCC, no one will limit the reach of the conglomerate that owns your local news either.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 to eliminate the cap holding that a single company cannot own stations reaching more than 39% of the U.S. television audience. The 22-year-old rule is now replaced by a friendly “case-by-case approach.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, appointed by Trump, made his case in an op-ed for Breitbart, calling the ownership limit “outdated” and a barrier to a “level playing field.”

There is one small problem. The 39% cap was codified in federal law by Congress, and critics say Carr does not get to erase an act of Congress because he feels like it. Free Press, a progressive consumer group, said it planned to sue over the “unlawful power grab.”

Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner, called the vote “unlawful on its face” and noted that the “local broadcasters” being freed here are in fact national companies that dictate what airs on your local stations.

The move delivers a tidy win to Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s largest owner of local TV stations, which is trying to swallow rival Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal. A federal judge already put that transaction on hold after eight state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit.

The combined company would reach at least 60% of American households. The old cap was 39%. Carr had already exempted the merger from the cap back in March, which was one way to solve a math problem.

They can consolidate every station until one company decides what forty states get to watch on the evening news. They cannot consolidate what we publish here. We don’t have a license anyone can pull, and no broadcaster owns a word of it. Become a paid subscriber today.

AI Just Designed 16 Working Viruses From Scratch

The good news is the viruses only eat bacteria. The less good news is that a machine designed them.

US researchers say artificial intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory. It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were built to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people. The team used AI models called Evo1 and Evo2, trained on genetic codes from viruses, bacteria, plants and people.

The tools work like ChatGPT, except they predict the language of life instead of words. “This is a next step in the complexity that’s designable by generative AI,” Brian Hie of Stanford told the BBC. “This was new territory for us.”

The breakthrough has been called a “very significant turning point” that could unlock a new era for treating disease. Experts also warn it raises “urgent” safety and security concerns.

A machine can now write a genome that replicates and functions inside living cells. Everyone agrees this is a very significant turning point, which is the reassuring way of saying nobody is sure toward what.

JD Vance Answers an Iran Column by Calling the Author Fat

There are many ways for a sitting vice president to rebut a policy critic. JD Vance picked the one about burritos.

Peeved at conservative columnist Marc Thiessen for criticizing his position on Iran, Vance jabbed at the man’s weight instead. “If you’ve ever met him in person,” he wrote on social media, “it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

Vance, the first millennial vice president, has dispensed with the decorum of his predecessors to go after the “idiots” and “scumbags” who anger him, from “limousine socialists” on the left to “disgraceful” conservatives on the right. He calls journalists “the dumbest journalist in Washington” and tells senators they are “full of shit.”

His allies say the personal attacks demonstrate accessibility and authenticity. A scholar of the vice presidency called it a departure from the norms of the office that “undermines the goal of promoting rational public discourse.”

Dick Cheney’s former communications director was blunter. “It’s childish behavior that is unbecoming of the office,” he said. “He’s behaving like a high school jock trying to win over the temporary young fun friends.”

Vance himself lost 30 pounds between 2022 and 2024, which some commenters helpfully recalled. The second-highest official in the country responded to a foreign policy critique by suggesting a man went back for seconds. He is reportedly auditioning to be president.

Invest in People-Powered Journalism

This is exactly the kind of reporting outlets compromised by billionaire owners won’t touch, because they refuse to cover anything that could jeopardize their proximity to power and their federal contracts. Raw America doesn’t answer to any oligarch or corporation. We take no billionaire money, and we don’t run ads from corporate sponsors. We are funded entirely by readers who believe the news should serve the public instead of the powerful. If you believe in keeping that kind of journalism alive, become a paying subscriber right now.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.